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Comment by ge96 | Hacker News Reader

tangent conspiracy thought

was watching a video about ICBM detection/taking them out in boost phase, and needing a lot for coverage if you had these LEO satellites ready to go but need a lot of delta v (fuel), star link... plenty of em but nah it's for internet/basic navigation/not much fuel

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This is exactly what Golden Dome proposes to do for missile defense. It improves the math of missile defense a lot compared to past proposals and it’s not completely crazy but it’s still not certain if the technical capabilities would be there even with a fully operational Starship.

these videos are saying Golden Dome (or at least missile defense) is currently not good enough

the one above and this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdPTpRfhdWM

which you know credibility who knows

edit: the "not good enough" part I mean kill vehicle trying to lock onto the right target not decoys

but I've only started looking into this, not that I really have a say in it as a civilian just along for the ride

Yeah it’s a long and complex topic. Perun takes the same view as those people you linked but I think there’s several interlinked developments driving this, one of which is the pace of advancement in space access. Even if it won’t work today this is realistically a 20 year project regardless of Trump’s desire to have it by 2028, and if launch costs fall another order of magnitude between now and then and you can make really small interceptors it changes the math a lot. There’s also the broader game-theoretic and strategic stability (or really strategic metastability but this is a whole long and complicated digression) issues which tldr means that if you think such a thing could be possible it would allow any actor who could accomplish it to alter the fundamental MAD equilibrium we have lived under for 80 years and this would come with immense first mover advantages.

The others would also build their own I imagine but yeah, the tech is cool despite the purpose

Checking out Perun

My first thought about that is you'd need a lot of satellites already nearly co-planar with the ICBM's inclination and there probably aren't enough Starlinks in any given inclination to make that realistic (granting secret dV and a sporty enough TWR). Boost phase is pretty short.

yeah the guy I was watching was talking about needing 3Gs of acceleration to intercept if it's not too far away

This is the context I was thinking about https://youtu.be/XDXKRQCkvms?si=1P8eLrZcPiP_ZSHw&t=353

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