ICBM thread

Missile is fine.

I think there's a whole Wikipedia page on solid vs liquid fuel

I don't remember what's good about liquid fuel but what I do know is that it takes several hours to fuel up a missile, so if the russkis wanted to launch those at us, we would know from satellite imaging several hours in advance, and I think that's the main disadvantage

you also might need to drain them if you want to reposition them

It depends. For simple short range rocket yes they are simple but once you need get enough energy density for ballistic missiles or even harder being able to throttle the rocket or have it shut off and restart it is way more difficult with solid fuels for instance the V-2 was a hyperglolic rocket.

You can't throttle or easily shut off solid fuel. Once it's on, it's on until it burns out. When the Challenger exploded, the solid rocket boosters kept going until they were destroyed by a command from mission control. Liquid can be shut off, restarted, and throttled (like the Space Shuttle's main engines).

Solid fuel is more easily stored for long periods and perfectly suited to residing in ICBMs that will likely spend their entire service life in a silo.

You do not have to fuel up most liquid fueled missiles right before launch. The fuels used while dangerous and unstable are liquid at room temperature. The US had one of it's last liquid fueled ballistic missiles almost blow up in a silo because someone dropped a socket that punctured a fuel tank. Titan-2 if you want to look it up.

big yikes

From what I understand, big solid fueled rockets need some serious R&D behind the propellant burn chemistry. Problem is the shape of your flame front and combustion chamber changes as the fuel is consumed, affecting temperatures, burn rates and such. A liquid fueled rocket can have a much steadier flame/combustion chamber.

I've always really liked the R36 launch sequence:

youtu.be/XwvNuZLASdE

>Almost blow up
>Almost
It did blow up, it also blew up the entire silo as well and sent the warhead 100 feet from the launch complex gate.
>The initial explosion catapulted the 740-ton silo door away from the silo and ejected the second stage and warhead.
>The former launch complex was never repaired. Pieces of debris were taken away from the 400 acres surrounding the facility, and the site was buried under a mound of gravel, soil, and small concrete debris. It now stands on private land, under a small hill.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion

It's using a gas ejection system to get the missile upward and out of the silo before the main engines start, because if the engines start inside it they will damage the silo and possible the missile itself. Ours have a similar system. I don't know if this is true or not, but I swear I read something about being able to launch ours 'hot' with main engines starting right inside the silo, maybe it's a false memory... not sure what the reason for being able to do so would be (perhaps if there was a fault with the ejection system and you had to override it during a real launch).

Holy fuck. Could you imagine how tight their assholes must have been

After the initial "holy fuck" I'm sure it dawned on everyone that they knew their military career was over

youtu.be/VUdIUdouLv0
Tovarisch kontroler KGB proizveden start balisticheskih raket zamechaniy neyt

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That feel when China's space program literally drops expended boosters on their own people
youtu.be/DJRZ-eyncVk

You're partially correct. The Minutemans can launch straight out of the silo, but the MX Peacekeeper used the same Minuteman silos and required a similar system to the R-36 to blow it clear of the silo using a simple gas generator before the main engine fired once in the air.

How do the minutemans mitigate the acoustic problems, associated with firing the engine inside a silo?

Implessive

No clue, other than that it's a pretty loose fit in the silos.

>That feel when China's space program literally drops expended boosters on their own people
in the name of gory

youtu.be/4gwj3hWO9HA

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Those exhaust plumes look to be that of solid fuel. If they have the technololgy, it bewilders me, why even the next generation of land based russian ICBMs are liquid fueled. Literally superior for an ICBM in every way

youtu.be/PFUUU7QCbnw

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The R-36 series are BIG fuckers, closer in size to a Titan than anything else the US has fielded. At that scale, liquid hypergolic fuels start to make a lot more sense than solid fuels.

Iirc all smaller Soviet ICBMs and SLBMs like Topol and Bulava (which are roughly analogous to MX and Trident) are solid fueled.

Topol is more equivalent to Minuteman III then MX.

Based and (communist)redpilled

Just the government returning the People's Rocket Canisters to the rightful owners. American capitalist slaves will never understand. D

All of the US Minuteman III's have a single warhead on them now, right?

Yep.

Its better to have single warhead ICBM warhead sinks and pack all your warheads onto heavily MIRVed SLBMs. The Russians planned to adopt the single warhead Topol-M as their sole ICBM in the late 90s/early 2000s but that was abandoned due to the failure of START II and budgetary concerns.

I still like the idea of triple-tipped ICBMs but we signed on to the fucking treaty so I guess we have to live with it.

I'm not sure how missile squadrons are commanded in the US. How many LCC's are assigned to x missiles? One video said there were 5 LCCs for a flight of 150 missiles, with only 2 LCCs needed to actually command a launch (in case others were knocked out). Is that true?

Also not sure on the terminology, if it's a squadron of missiles, a wing, a flight, or whatever

>TFW when no more Operation Begemot

youtube.com/watch?v=icsVIJAwit0

What about Chinese super missiles? I heard it uses Plasma fuel where solid fuel becomes gas before launch and then is converted to plasma once the engine is started. This gives it an impressive throw weight while having a very low weight. This gives it extra boost to throw an HGV over a great amount of range.

Mods, can we just range ban Chinese posters? They shit up good threads...

A rocket is a type of propulsion that carries all the components it needs for combustion (jets use oxygen from the air, rockets carry oxidizer)

A missile is a guided projectile.

A lot of rockets are missiles and a lot of missiles are rockets but they are not one and the same.

>Is there any advantage in Russia using hypergolic fuel in their ICBMs as opposed to solid fuel, like the US?
No lol, vatniks just can't into solid fuel rockets worth a shit. Hypergols are extremely nasty stuff and the only reason you'd use them is if you have to.

>Chinese posters
It's retarded redditors beating a dead horse joke.

Very Racist. You can just post in F16.net where they listen to each other like echo chambered circle jerked. Being anonymouse lets you say what in your mind without thinking of getting racist upon from other people especially Americans that cannot appreciate other culture.

>Its better to have single warhead ICBM warhead sinks
Why?

Speak English degenerate.

Working missile that uses hypergolic fuel is a good alternative if they can't develop decent solid fuel missiles.

Russia in Woodward book : "had privately warned Mattis that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO .

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Solids are almost impossible to throttle, cut-off, re-ignite - unless you really overengineer them to the point of staged solids where it no longer makes any sense compared to...

...Liquid bipropellant rockets. There are many combinations of different fuel/oxidizer options and they all have tradeoffs. Oxygen/hydrogen is the most powerful but try storing it somewhere on submarine... or try storing it in rockets for longer times without making everything around freeze or blow up due to unavoidable leaks (you do not want hydrogen in submarine, nono). Or just to begin with, find a container that will not leak that pesky hydrogen. So then you have second best option, that has been proven to work in big rockets ever since Sputnik 1 - hypergolics.

Its an extra failsafe to prevent unintended launch. Hypergolic fuels typically have to be stored outside of a missile for extended periods

Sputnik launch vehicle used kerosene and LOX. Fueling R-7 took 20 hours. For that reason R-7 was awful as missile, Tu-95 would have flown back from US at the point when R-7 gets ready to be launched.

Whole point of hypergolic fuels is that those can be stored in missile for long time.

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>throttle, cut-off, re-ignite
Incidentally something that isn't needed in the boost stage of a ballistic missile. Having to deal with hypergols is a shitty tradeoff compared to just having a solid rocket that is reasonably safe and can be stored with minimal maintenance for decades.

MUCH better specific impulse, and having a massive throw weight compared to a solid-fuel based ICBM. They also reduce the amount of stages needed, giving a better mass ratio and reducing complexity. This is especially useful when you want to launch a dozen MIRVs and four dozen penetration aids.
Do note that the Russians use solid fuel ICBMs, the Topol & Topol M, and newer Yars are all solid fueled rockets.
There's also some cultural reasons, the Soviets put a lot of R&D into liquid rocket engines, and as a result they ended up making some very impressive liquid rocket engines.

Anti-ballistic missiles really get me going
> Sprint accelerated at 100 g, reaching a speed of Mach 10 in 5 seconds. Such a high velocity at relatively low altitudes created skin temperatures up to 6,200 °F (3,430 °C), requiring an ablative shield to dissipate the heat. The high temperature caused a plasma to form around the missile, requiring extremely powerful radio signals to reach it for guidance. The missile glowed bright white as it flew.

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Mirv

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Could you imagine the noise from a mach 10 projectile at sea level

kill yourself

It's kind of in the middle, bigger than the Minuteman and smaller than the MX, though it's a newer-generation weapon that's closer to what the MX was in overall capabilities than the creaking ancient Minuteman.

Dunno much about them but you can see them incredibly far away.

Was innadesert and saw something like a cone moving across the sky. Made me nervous, actually went and grabbed someone to look at it.

We made comments about how shitty it would be to die next to each other and how much we'd rather be talking to anyone else and laughing. Anyway, it blew up in the sky and made ayuuuuge ring.

Dunno if it had a payload or anything but the other dude actually spent some time looking into it later and determined Russia had a test that night.

Treaty limits and a lack of survivability.

Say you are planning to start a nuclear war and thus are thinking about attacking a nations ICBM force and assume that each attacking warhead has a roughly 85% chance of destroying a missile in its silo after all factors are considered. This means that in order to ensure destruction of the missile two warheads should be targeted at each ICBM. If the enemy ICBM has more then two warheads on it you come out ahead from the attack, trading two warheads for three in the case of a MIRVed Minuteman III or two for ten in the case of MX. If it only has a single warhead you are now down a warhead for every missile. As the US force is deployed now it has 300 single warhead IBCMs, which would require 600 warheads - almost half the Russian deployed strategic force - to destroy.

ICBM survivability is a problem that is best answered by downloading them to one warhead. The MX basing debate clearly showed the problem with heavily MIRVed ICBMs as the Air Force tried to find some way to base a missile that was not worth using 10 warheads to destroy. Failed options included the Mississippi river, rejected because it was worth it for the Russians to simply nuke the entire thing, a massive underground train network, rejected for being incredibly expensive, and SSBNs, rejected for being Navy. In the end they were traded away in arms control talks to make the problem go away.

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Technically a missile is any projectile, like a fired bullet or a thrown rocket, but it is generally to refer to guided projectiles with their own propulsion system, as opposed to a guided artillery shell.

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nukes are no laughing matter
youtube.com/watch?v=_mkAuAGqIKE
youtube.com/watch?v=dVR4dQ0E_vU

Command and Control Documentary
youtube.com/watch?v=JXxIV4RlJLY

Liquid fuel can be stored in a can and shot into pipes.

Solid fuel is cast into place and doing so homogenously, without getting cracks etc for an even burn is more complicated than it appears. Easy today with computers, and easy to check with xrays, and some errors are acceptable if it's Grad rocket spam...but for ICBMs during the cold war it was a big deal.

Do ICCMs count?
If so, here is the best looking one

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Thats some Kerbal space program shit right there

I was just in the Badlands and while I got to see the Delta-09 silo part of the Minuteman National Historic Site, we were on a tight schedule to pack Wall Drug, Mt Rushmore, and the Black Hills into one day while making it to Cheyenne by dinnertime, and I didn't get a chance to check out the visitor's center or the Delta-01 command block.

I'm still kicking myself for not trying harder to squeeze it in to our itinerary.

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There's no word for missile in Russian, we call it all rockets. But as I understand it, missile is a weaponised rocket.

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they do have projectile as well, i think

Missile development in the 1950s and 60s was basically Kerbal Space Program in real life.

t. Someone with over 500 KSP hours logged.

>here is the best looking one
A challenger appears.
youtube.com/watch?v=po2BPfbfKCc

Pic very related

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This is probably the most KSP one ever cooked up
>has multiple launch tubes to bomb multiple cities
>runs by literally pumping air straight through an active nuclear reactor
>can fly around for months at a time
>goes so fast it can destroy light targets with it’s shockwaves alone
>nuclear fallout wherever it goes

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If you think that's KSP, try Chelomei's UR-700.

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Dumbass.

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Do ICBM warheads ever achieve true orbit to reach a target, or is their flight always sub orbital?

>You can't throttle or easily shut off solid fuel. Once it's on, it's on until it burns out.
This. Solid fuel space rockets is like sending people to space on a powder keg.

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They are always suborbital, since they fly without power once the booster is burnt out.
Also putting weapons of mass destruction into orbit is forbidden, only sub-orbital is fine.

They do if they are designed to. Soviet R-36ORB was the only operational one ever before orbital ICBMs were prohibited.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_System

Attached: 8k69 r-36orb.jpg (458x662, 33K)

>Just add more boosters, bro.

I remember reading about some American(?) rocket project that was basically like five dozens small boosters strapped together. Forgot the name tho, maybe someone here knows what I'm talking about.

That's actually exactly the reason. The silos are way too big for the missiles, which makes silo starts a non issue.

>Strategic Missile Troops
>Motto(s) "After us - silence"

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>imagine
I can show you what Mach 17 one sounds like.
youtube.com/watch?v=mewR_PbB4jw

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>If they have the technololgy
Dude, like read a book.
>it bewilders me, why even the next generation of land based russian ICBMs are liquid fueled
Because liquid fuel is superiour in every way except for complexity and price. If you want a high-performing heavy missile, liquid is a way to go.

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I'd say MX was closer to UR-100N.

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imagine some warhead mechanic detonating one of those fuckers by touching two wrong wires

There was an actual case of some dumbass detonating an ICBM, I think it was Titan, by dropping a spanner in a silo or something like that.

>liquid fuel is superior in every way
No, SRBs can provide a lot more thrust in a much smaller and lighter package. If you want to get it up to speed quickly, solid rocket motors provide better performance.

Muh dick!

209 tonne R-39M's first stage only "is a 460,000 kgf (4.5 MN) thrust motor with four combustion chambers and nozzles".
An entire 590 tonne SRB provides 12 MN of thrust.
Even if you really, REALLY generously count in the entire mass of R-36M, it's 2.82 times lighter than SRB, meaning that at equivalent mass (I repeat, we are being super generously to SRB counting the entire mass of the ICBM, not just the first stage and its engine), it will provide 12.69 MN of thrust. It's a very simplified calculation, but you get the idea. On top of that, solid fuel is completely uncontrollable.

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It's amazing that so many modern rockets are still using refurbished Russian engine designs.

As far as segments of engineering go, none come closer to being pure applications of the relevant mathematical formulae than rocketry. There's only one way to skin this cat most efficiently.

Uh, I can't think of examples other than USA and South Korea. But yeah, Russian rocket engines are outstanding. Look up RD-170, shit's insane.

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All the original orbital rockets were just ICBMs. But the projectiles don't go into orbit because treaties ban it
But ICBMs aren't sending people into orbit.