M. Adam Davis wrote:
>
> I'm curious.  With Chinese military officials speculating they are going
> to be at war with tiawan within 5 years, and the US indicating that their
> missile defense shield may be deployed on tiawan...  (and let's leave the
> political discussion out of this, please :-)
>
> Are there other methods of knocking out or disabling a missile in flight
> without being close to it?

Pulse laser, once the missile is accurately tracked the laser
gets there instantly and punches a hole in the fuel tank,
the fuel "wake" behind missile is ignited and the fuel tank
bleves. Big bang. I believe the US used pulse laser on
some scud missiles in the gulf war.



> Do any modern missiles use GPS, and if so does the US have the capability
> of performing real-time modification to the GPS signal?  (I'm thinking -
> determine the trajectory and most likely target, then change the GPS
> signal incrementally so that the target is now located in the ocean - this
> would work well for multiple missiles on multiple targets (sure, we moved
> New York to Michigan which knocked california's missiles into the ocean,
> but is that *really* an improvement?  MI may not think so... ;-))

I doubt anyone would consider that, especially countries
with the tech advantage (like US) get the most benefit
from GPS. We would lose more than the enemy. I think most
missiles have GPS, but not as their only system. And military
GPS has a lot of tamperproofing on the signal too, so
it can't be hacked.


>
> What are typical guidance systems used for missiles?
>
> I'm assuming there are accelerometer/gyro guidance, but can that be very
> accurate?  Are ground based radio systems in wide use?  Is Russia's GPS
> equivilant system in use at all?

I saw a documentary on cruise missiles, they can use fully
internal means like gyro, internal landscape maps, etc, to
get within a couple of miles of their target from 1000 miles
away. No GPS or signal jamming will matter, and thats why
they do it that way! With GPS added they can get within
2 meters of the target! There is a web page that shows the
results, I saw it a couple of months back.



> Anyway.  Just some musings I've been having recently...  I suppose this
> has a lot to do with robot guidance, as well....

Some nasty intercontinental robots you're building there! ;o)
-Roman

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