tomo,
Yes, definitely a fearsome weapon and I only have my default scepticism to back-up my questions on accuracy. I might be applying Heisenberg's trade-off between speed and location at rather too large a scale!

Thought Planning Engineer's latest at Judith Curry's was a good read. He goes into some detail explaining how dire was the failure of renewables in the recent blackout at Broken Hill. They had a massive surplus of available wind, solar and battery, but it took days to restore power to the town.

I'm a bit vague on what the problem is with no inertia. My feeling is that it *could* be solved if every inverter had (1) a known time-locked phase that it must honour and (2) a shared reference time source (atomic clock or whatever). The way things are though, inverters simply look at the AC line and do their best to synchronise with whatever's on it already. That can obviously go awry with positive feedbacks if there isn't some serious inertia.

And of course my (1),(2) scenario would be pretty much impossible for a traditional alternator to comply with. It *will* slow down with load, etc.

Feels akin to the autonomous vehicle problem — the problem is simpler when only autonomous vehicles are on the road, but the much harder problem is what we have now, needing to allow for human drivers, traffic lights, pedestrians, etc.

tomo,
Air density surely means these missiles do most of their travel as high as possible, then finish with a steep angle of descent. Perhaps they slow down for the last part to allow for some guidance control in the denser air. Can something going so fast be steered at all? Slowing down is pretty easy though. Is it stitched together with alternating hypersonic phases and much slower (but brief) retargeting phases.

At the moment I feel it's more like a successor to the V2 than any awesome super-weapon: we don't have it, but what exactly can they do with theirs?

tomo,
Beyond depressingly common, it seems to be part of the standard curriculum. Rosanne D'Arrigo didn't blush at all when she said that you have to pick cherries if you want to make cherry pie. Has that gone further with her students? And with theirs?

Hadn't thought of the effect of the missiles on the air around them, perpetually driving into a blob of plasma. It would be very interesting to know what guidance they have.

Crossed my mind that this is mostly an extremely high-speed version of the underwater speed contest. Googling around, it's impressive that the Russkies built a submarine capable of over 50mph underwater. More impressive is the Shkval torpedo that managed over 200 knots underwater (were working on a 300 kn version). Some very interesting ideas there.

AFAIK, the air equivalents of those torpedo mechanisms are science fiction, but that might well be a limitation in the IK part of that abbreviation.

But in my ignorance I'll stick to thinking that what guidance there is is necessarily pretty vague. I'll review that if Mr Putin draws his target first, then launches and hits it. Till then, I agree that it's already a psychological win.

Did read that tweet of the silly thesis. Couldn't read the replies I'm afraid. Probably a limitation of being a non-subscriber to Twitter.

.,
Might well be something fomented by the West to open up another front and stretch Putin thinner.

What about the 2008 Georgian war? I can't say I was deeply invested in it, but that looked to me more of a Russian invasion than a rescue.

Maidan Square and the Colour is Orange MkII?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/02/georgian-police-fire-teargas-at-pro-eu-protesters-as-political-crisis-deepens

Mailman,
Yes, they're all hypersonic and very hard to hit with counter-missiles or whatever. What I was driving at was that it's also very hard for *anybody* to know where they're going to hit. I remember hearing a funny talk by an Apollo era astronaut (I think it was John Young) describing the simulation tests for re-entering the atmosphere. It was along the lines: It was very hard to control the trajectory, but after some practice we found we could hit the Pacific Ocean. That was good enough for government work. Think of the turbulence in an airliner. The faster you're going, the worse that's going to be. At these hypersonic speeds in the low atmosphere it's going to be like bouncing off rocks.

I've read people saying that the deep crater means goodbye to bunkers, but that won't work if the crater is half a mile from the bunker they were aiming at. Reminds me of Steve McIntyre's "Texas sharpshooter" who shot first, then drew a bullseye around the bullet hole.

tomo,
There's no question that the Ukraine war is a shambles, and lamentable loss of lives and money, but I've seen nothing that even slightly inclines me to change my mind that it's baddies vs. baddies.

I wish Mr Trump luck in ending it in one day. There'll be quite a few people on both sides keen for him to be wrong on that one.

Australia's misinformation and disinformation bill failed to get parliament's nod. The other bill setting a minimum age of 16 for "social media" has been passed. Once again we have the winning argument of think of the children. A bit like the COVID vaccines, the benefits of any measures they put in place will be very doubtful, but the harms will be up-front and clear for all to see.

That said, I anticipate it petering out unless some other country goes with it too.