| You know there is a pretty direct calculation to determine the theoretical best outcome. How close you can come to a maneuver-capable rocket, is the answer to a conic section that takes distance, and maximum speed of both rockets into account. The purpose of a rocket is really only for distance to drop to something like 10 meters for conventional munitions and something like 300 meters or so for nuclear, in practice this is a constant. So what matters is the maximum speed of both rockets. Make that large enough and you can get the attacking rocket to make maneuvers that (assuming they cannot be predicted), make it mathematically impossible to intercept the attacking rocket. In practice this difference is only something like 130 km/h (for nuclear). Lasers won't work until we're talking gigawatt lasers, and even then only at "medium range" (in other words, for stopping nuclear weapons, an optimal outcome can only be achieved at single-digit kilometers, in other words, it may be able to protect individual points like the president, but it will never protect a city against a fusion device). Oh and whether a laser weapon works or not will not be known until seconds before impact. I hope you have strong nerves. Note that the attacking rocket does not need tracking, it needs a good random number generator. TLDR: no, we cannot currently intercept a hypersonic controlled rocket ... and that won't change without an overwhelming technological advantage, which basically means better rocket motors. At a sufficiently high equivalent level of technology, attacking rockets cannot be stopped. That level is only slightly higher than the level the US is currently at (and we don't know. Both US and Russia may already be past that point) |