KillingtonZone.com

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/07/07/D8IN81O80.html wrote:He said he wanted to make clear to Kim "with more than one voice" that the world condemned the test firing this week of seven missiles, including a long-range missile that failed.

When the United States led the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it did so without obtaining Security Council approval in advance.

Bush said that the United States had "a reasonable chance" of shooting down the long-range missile, if it had not failed.

But he also said, "Our anti-ballistic systems are modest, they are new."

You agree ... the US's chances were merely reasonable?

If they engage it with the Navy's BMD system, then they will succeed in shooting it down.

Unfortunately while the system works, it is not yet deployed. Test assets afloat do in fact provide a residual defensive capability for the state of Hawaii, and a few very limited trajectories into CONUS given some advance warning (in the dozens of hours).

I wouldn't be so confident in the long range interceptors based in California and Alaska (known as the Ground Based Midcourse interceptor). They are pretty accurate... when they work. But in many tests the thing just sat on the pad spitting out Failure To Launch messages (as if the launch crew couldn't figure that out by glancing out the window). However they seem to have had several consecutive sucesses, so it is looking like they are well along the path of ironing out the problems.

http://www.mda.mil/mdalink/html/midcrse.html

Edit: I would say "reasonable". Regardless of what some in the gov't say, the system is not really ready. It is very very close to being so. So close that we could actually mount a response with what we have available.

yeti wrote:If they engage it with the Navy's BMD system, then they will succeed in shooting it down.

Unfortunately while the system works, it is not yet deployed. Test assets afloat do in fact provide a residual defensive capability for the state of Hawaii, and a few very limited trajectories into CONUS given some advance warning (in the dozens of hours).

I wouldn't be so confident in the long range interceptors based in California and Alaska (known as the Ground Based Midcourse interceptor). They are pretty accurate... when they work. But in many tests the thing just sat on the pad spitting out Failure To Launch messages (as if the launch crew couldn't figure that out by glancing out the window). However they seem to have had several consecutive sucesses, so it is looking like they are well along the path of ironing out the problems.

http://www.mda.mil/mdalink/html/midcrse.html

Edit: I would say "reasonable". Regardless of what some in the gov't say, the system is not really ready. It is very very close to being so. So close that we could actually mount a response with what we have available.

Interesting and thanks for the link!

Here is some more of today's ... at least this is some good news

http://www.lcsun-news.com/news/ci_4044160

Ah yes... THAAD. The ugly duckling of the missile defense world. THAAD testing is going to move from White Sands to Kauai next year - most of the infrastructure is already there along with several of the high powered X Band radars.

I am glad to see that they succeeded - I was unaware that there was going to be a shot - a buunch of the folks who support White Sands are out of the office however. Hmm.

THAAD has been somewhat of a colossal flop thus far. Starting back in the 90's, they failed several times to intercept. They completely redesigned the missile and have just recently started flight testing it again. However the rest of the system is first rate (radars, battle management, comms).

I wrote a huge chunk of middleware that takes track data from the THAAD battle management system and shunts it off to Navy tracking assets. That was really interesting.

I am looking forward to the THAAD flight testing out there - the THAAD interceptor executes this bizarre looking corkscrew manuever immediately after launch (TEMS - THAAD Energy Management System to bleed of kinetic energy). I am told it is a sight to behold.

Interesting stuff!

Middleware ... ah that stuff is crazy!

yeti wrote: I wrote a huge chunk of middleware that takes track data from the THAAD battle management system and shunts it off to Navy tracking assets. That was really interesting.

I write middleware. Only mine moves billions of dollars around. Somehow your middleware sounds like more fun though.

Interesting? Middleware is the great unseen.... no one sees it. A demo of my system looks something like this:

thaad> runTest -o testfile.dat

Test running........................

...suceeded!

Results logged in testFile.dat.

thaad>

Well I tell you Kahuna the stuff I write is in many ways much less robust than a transaction based financial system. I just blast off a command, making sure that it meets certain timing constraints - and that is it. If I am responding to a request it is the same deal - get it on the wire in under some quantum... and that is it. Dropped a packet of data? No matter... another will be along in a few hundred microseconds. All I am really concerned about is speed, and to some extent, size. It is best to fit it all in a MTU if at all possible (required if uni- or multicasting).