• keepcarrot [she/her]
    ·
    3 months ago

    Yeah, "cruise" in cruise missile refers to flying like a plane, which modern ones tend to fly low to evade RADAR. Typically cruise missiles are much much slower than ballistic missiles, but everyone is throwing money at hypersonic descent cruise missiles (basically, the last dozen miles the missile accelerates and jinks to make it hard for defenders to shoot down). Anti-ship missiles I think are just cruise missiles that can track a target (traditionally, buildings and ammo dumps don't move to evade fire)

    (also, idk why I wound up being the missile nerd in the war nerd thread. I think people have lost interest in it since the first year of the Ukraine war as Ukraine has run out of missiles to shoot with or shoot down with)

      • keepcarrot [she/her]
        ·
        3 months ago

        At some stage, but either they burned through them, they never arrived, or didn't do very much. Whatever else is going on, people aren't talking about big missiles as regularly