Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgilias | Hacker News Reader

Time for more stories then.

I have a family friend who’s old enough to have served in the Soviet military. The guy is a sharp dude who had really good grades in math. So when he was drafted he was directly enlisted into the ‘rocket force’ as a guy who does the trajectory calculations. He served in Kaliningrad.

He tells that they’d get drills where they are woken up at night, and then need to calculate trajectories for hitting Oslo, Paris, London, etc.

View on HN

When I was studying in MIPT, we had a course on mathematical support of military operations. Basically, there was an intro to the navigation systems of ICBMs and calculations of trajectories. We even had some parts of an old ICBM in the room. I dropped out of it, once I learned that after I‘d get an officer rank at graduation there will be higher chances to be drafted to some location in Siberia and serve one year more than a private.

I'd expect nothing less from Russian side. But my country has and always had a lot of sympathy for the US. Always awaiting their eventual win as our saviors. So it feels just wrong. It's like learning that their main plan to end the standoff was to shoot the hostages in the first volley.

In an all out nuclear exchange nobody was going to win

The plan was the results of unavoidable logic: you have to strike where the capabilities had been placed, and it was the logic of the Moscow empire to place capabilities away from places it favoured.

Capability targetted in my case is small single runway. Probably hundreds killometers from the closest stationed bomber. I won't argue that it's completely worthless, but wasn't Soviet Union mostly relying on ballistic missile launchers not strategic bombers?

Than again if you have enough missiles to glass Earth many times over, you gotta point them somewhere. Why not on every runway you can find on satellite images?

Do the trajectories between fixed locations change very often?

Yes and no. The basic flight path would not change, but it does get affected by weather conditions and such. So the drill would be that they get the weather data and other inputs, and would need to provide the guidance set up parameters.

He also told that they’d also do drills where they need to hit an actual target on the other side of the Soviet Union with an actual ICBM. Some kind of a polygon made for such drills. If I recall correctly, getting it within a kilometer was considered acing it.

Kola Peninsula, IMMSMV. 1km is an OK circular error for the strategic weapons, they use the air burst anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com