I feel the need to point out, in light of you calling this actually existing prototype weapon "comical sci-fi", that when one googles ablative armor, one gets nothing but literal sci-fi.
Don't these hypothetical countermeasures have to assume the weapon would be effective in the first place?
Ablation damage might not be a concern if everything is vaporized, i.e. turned into gas. Also, if you're getting bombarded with high-energy oxygen atoms, that's just called rusting! Anyway, it's all SF.
BTW, new crazy idea: a weapon that propels high-energy oxygen atoms toward the enemy, instantly oxidizing the enemy's rifles. Enemy combatants might also get killed as a side effect. :)
Sounds like a good way to counter this sort of weapon would be to have human shields. I'm not sure if that's an improvement on the situation if they start to adopt those sort of tactics.
Enemies will simply adapt to new weapons they face. Much like a bucket of paint would be quite effective against and remote control mini tank.
Whilst the engineering feat is impressive, it is still important to note that at the receiving end of such ingenuity is a writhing half dead corpse so it is with hesitation I would ever celebrate such innovation.
Additionally smaller craft present a smaller target. You could tip them with a few inches of depleted uranium, which would make a reasonable ablative shield. Maybe. Either way it's an engineering problem, rather than a physical impossibility as others here are saying.
Most hypersonic weapons already require ablative materials to transit the atmosphere without disintegrating. Ablative shielding is the norm. Even then, a lot of engineering goes into ensuring that ablative loading is carefully controlled during flight -- any significant deviation from the designed ablative loading will cause catastrophic failure. It took decades of research to get to the point where a (non-ballistic) hypersonic missile under normal flight conditions could reliably manage the ablative loading long enough to reach its target. They are literally testing the theoretical limits of material physics.
Massively increasing the external thermal loading of those materials during flight is a great way to kill a hypersonic vehicle. It directly attacks one of their most vulnerable design constraints.
For this to be “equally plausible” you’d first have to offer a plausible hypothesis of how such a weapon could operate. Last time this came up nothing even remotely plausible was offered.
The article's rather nebulous on how the thing actually works; it almost sounds like an emf burst that detonates the incoming warhead early.
Either way, visions of nanotech-supercap-coated clothing are dancing in my head; I'll need to go give my kinetic barriers a workout in Mass Effect 2 to simmer down.
It totally did not make sense. Anyone would be able to generate a massive explosion from readily available components. And there's no explanation where that energy would come from.
A small edit that would make this work: energy beam weapons could not penetrate a shield, and just reveals the location of the shooting weapon.
That's great for tanks or whatever it is you have in mind but I'm not sure why you imagine this being deployed against hardened military targets. Obviously we have very different conceptions of how a weapon like this could be deployed.
I guess I shouldn't have mentioned my idea of artillery shells carrying pumped x-ray lasers as payload, fired straight up for some nice over-the-horizon frying of enemy materiel...
Come on, I'm just ignorant, not a fear monger, it really gave me the creeps in my ignorance.
I was not aware of any of the marvellous feats you mention. Thanks for the information.
I was merely wondering if a propelled launcher would be a harder safety problem than a non propelled one, but it seems that has already been solved also.
That technology already exists and is being tested in a military setting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAk5gRD-t0. Not sure if those ones have explosive on it but I'm sure it isn't harder to implement it.
It's definitely possible for the value of "can it actually be done regardless of obstructions," super thick steel plating and such will get it done. But the officer will be basically immobile.
Kinetic weapons are tough to defeat using countermeasures, perhaps obviously so.
I like your line of thinking though. Too many people just complain about the status quo and relying on government action rather than potentially solving it another way. It's just that in this case, physics is a real bitch.
Directed energy weapons are still in their early days, they're not powerful enough to just shrug off all sorts of potential countermeasures the way a solid chunk of metal hitting the target does.
Directed energy is about the only thing that's going to scale as a tactical countermeasure. Pulsed laser/EMF in the joules per shot range would seemingly work with most smaller vehicles.
That's a total joke. We can't even make large railguns work reliably, let alone small railguns. Poisoned projectiles have long been banned by international treaty, and there's no evidence of any major military power even considering violating that ban. Nuclear batteries are far too heavy for use in any aircraft.
Stop watching so much SciFi and come back to the real world.
Don't these hypothetical countermeasures have to assume the weapon would be effective in the first place?
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