SCRAM, Baby !.... X51A flies over 3 minutes at Mach 6+

[cbelt3]

ABC news says.. Whoosh !
"The X-51A Waverider was released from a B-52 Stratofortress off the southern California coast Wednesday morning, the Air Force reported on its website. Its scramjet engine accelerated the vehicle to Mach 6, and it flew autonomously for 200 seconds before losing acceleration. At that point the test was terminated."

Go baby, go ! I want one ! Wooooo !

[freeradical]

It's funny that we still have carrier battle groups.

Well, not funny in a humorous sense.

An attack with mach 6+ cruise missiles would ruin the battle group commanders day.

[raz]

freeradical wrote:
It's funny that we still have carrier battle groups.

Well, not funny in a humorous sense.

An attack with mach 6+ cruise missiles would ruin the battle group commanders day.

Possibly. However, I'd expect the Phalanx to have a pretty good shot at terminating the missile.

[steve...]

Looks futuristic...




Those B-52s sure have held their value.

[Paul F.]

Yup... I'd say the B-52's were an exceptional value...
The GRANDCHILDREN of their first crews are at the yoke of todays B-52 squadrons.

The X-51 hypersonic technology, when it's more advanced, is going to make "two-stage to orbit" craft a possibility.

[Article Accelerator]

According to...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet

...scramjet motors don't even begin to function until about MACH 4.5.

- conventional jet: MACH 3.4
- ramjet: MACH 5
- scramjet: MACH 12 to 24

[Racer X]

raz wrote:
[quote=freeradical]
It's funny that we still have carrier battle groups.

Well, not funny in a humorous sense.

An attack with mach 6+ cruise missiles would ruin the battle group commanders day.

Possibly. However, I'd expect the Phalanx to have a pretty good shot at terminating the missile. Reaction time, target lock delay and cyclic rate of the CIWS are pretty small for a target that fast.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

Something going that fast does not need explosive, 50 pound bar of tungsten moving at 7,000 feet per second could punch a hole in just about anything.

[cbelt3]

raz wrote:
[quote=freeradical]
It's funny that we still have carrier battle groups.

Well, not funny in a humorous sense.

An attack with mach 6+ cruise missiles would ruin the battle group commanders day.

Possibly. However, I'd expect the Phalanx to have a pretty good shot at terminating the missile.
I don't if the missile has any kind of guidance flexibility. CIWS response time against a 2,000 m/sec maneuvering target means that the weapons system has perhaps 0.5 seconds to identify and take down the target. While the 'wall of lead' solution is a known high velocity target solution, and the Aegis radar system should be capable of guiding intercept solutions, the probability of success when multiple hypersonic weapons are fired at the same target increases rapidly.

The tactical goal is to saturate the defenses and then overcome them. Keep in mind that at Mach 6, the resultant impact is referred to as a 'kinetic kill', and thus the missile really becomes a control system on an airframe with no need for a warhead. So it's a cheaper kaboom, and you can fire a whole bunch of them when compared to the cost of a naval vessel. Mate them with a UCAV carrier vehicle, or even a standoff BUFF, and you have a coastline denial weapon that makes surface navies obsolete.

[SDGuy]

Racer X wrote:
[quote=raz]
[quote=freeradical]
It's funny that we still have carrier battle groups.

Well, not funny in a humorous sense.

An attack with mach 6+ cruise missiles would ruin the battle group commanders day.

Possibly. However, I'd expect the Phalanx to have a pretty good shot at terminating the missile. Reaction time, target lock delay and cyclic rate of the CIWS are pretty small for a target that fast.
CIWS is a last-ditch line of defense. The Navy has other things they go to when there are incoming missiles...