It's just utterly beautiful how Western™ solutions are utterly powerless against people with barely any resources who are just determined
Something something, the Soviets beat the Nazis because Soviet tanks were cheaper to produce and maintain though not necessarily better than the Nazi tanks, which were expensive and difficult to maintain because profits were more important than winning an actual war to the capitalist Nazis than to the communist Soviets. That’s one reason anyway.
Some cope I hear out of some old zionist supporter I know in regards to the tin foil dome getting domed is how the Israelis somehow perfected laser beams and can shoot down missiles with flashlights powered by their unlimited power supply, and I'm sitting there listening like
lol I've seen this bs too, maybe Israel secretly cracked fusion to power these lasers 😂
Iron Beam? So they're going to throw girders at the rockets, like Donkey Kong.
You remember back in WWII when Nazi Germany was making goofy ahh weapons
Frantic, delusional, desperate. As good a sign as one's knees buckling.
Honestly laser defenses against rockets are not the craziest idea in the world, you definitely reduce the amount of debris. However, they just started deploying that system like this week I believe, so it is basically untested in real world scenarios. I doubt it was ready to be used yet.
It could be a surprise success but I doubt it. Might work a bit better against slower moving targets that are easier to track, like drones. I also would wonder how often it can be fired. It's pulling a lot of power per firing, I doubt it can be rapid-fired in the volume they'd need to intercept the volume of Hamas rockets being fired.
Even if it worked perfectly, it would still cost several times the cost of a hamas rocket per firing.
The main issues tend to be that lasers need clear weather conditions, which likely isn't a problem there, the power consumption, and heat dissipation. The other two problems are kinda hard to solve. If you're intercepting one or two missiles, it works fine, but if you have thousands coming in then the system either overheats or it needs more electricity than you can produce.
Even extremely hot lasers, you have to keep trained on a single spot to have them burn through anything. The idea that you could reliably do this on a spinning, flying rocket in realtime seems pretty incredible.
Laser beams are also generally easily defeated by fog or smoke or clouds, which is already abundant in any warzone but which could surely be easily added as a countermeasure.
If these things work at all, there are likely many caveats.
To add to this, the alternative to trying to slow burn through a rocket like you mentioned is to use pulse lasers, but not only do they still suffer from blooming, they're also a massive power drain by comparison and unlikely to be viable for long because of that
I remember when Ukraine was pissed off that Israel wouldn't give them an Iron Dome system.
To me, it was always obvious the much ballyhooed Iron Dome wasn't that effective, because it even let the puny Palestinian rockets through pretty frequently. Now imagine if someone fired at them with an actual military-grade rocket battery.
Exactly, the thing can barely shoot down home made pop rockets, it has no chance against actual missiles a professional military uses. Giving Iron Dome to Ukraine would've exposed it for the sham that it is, and would also be costly as fuck. Israel decided to avoid the obvious PR disaster. It would've basically been the repeat of the Patriot debacle. My fav part about it was how it fires like 30 missiles each costing a few million in a space of a couple of minutes, and still failed to intercept the kinzhal. It was immediately shown to be equal parts ineffective and unsustainable as a means of air defence.
Let's just leave it to the free market to solve this by fostering a spirit of innovation and competition. I can wait.
I've mentioned this was going to happen, the same thing happenes in 2012 and since then they've amassed a bigger stockpile but at the same time never Hamas has attacked as this time so the stockpile lasted longer but still not enough.
According to Ronen Bergman, in 2012, during Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel agreed to an early cease-fire "for a reason that has remained a closely guarded secret: The Iron Dome anti-missile defense system... had run out of ammunition." Bergman says that as a result of the experience, Israel had tried to prepare larger stocks of interceptors for future rounds of fighting.
80k for a missile
This can mean only one thing... Israel's national security depends on the US dollar collapsing :inshallah:
How so? What do you mean by collapsing? Where can I read more about it?
I was kind of teasing in suggesting that the only way Israel would be able to afford enough missiles is if the US dollar wasn’t worth anything
Isn't that cheap actually? Patriot SAM is 4 mil a shot
Yeah I don't mean to say it's cheap in the absolute sense, just relative to other anti air missiles. Even non-western missiles like S300 are 1 mil a missile
I might be misremembering, but doesn't the iron dome rely pretty heavily on volume of missiles being shot as a defensive response rather than precision accuracy? Meaning each missile might "only" be 80k but they are launching like a dozen of them?
80k is still hundreds of times more than the rockets Hamas is using anyway.
That’s extremely cheap, most modern munitions are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.
Even a 70’s rinky dink Soviet Strela-2 MANPAD is $120,000 per unit.
For reference, you can buy a decent > 300hp tractor for 80k. Isnt it absurd that these expendable missiles are on the same price range as a whole damn tractor 😂
Even putting aside the obvious grift/profit factor of these being made by capitalist companies, the raw materials and engineering that goes into making something that can maneuver at Mach 10 while trying to hit a moving target also moving at Mach 10 aren't cheap.
A massive amount of the cost comes from the computers, miniaturized guidance and targeting systems, the immense engineering and comp-sci R&D behind those devices, and the sheer difficulty of designing good explosives.
Even dumb bombs are expensive if you don't want them to dud, explode randomly, not be aerodynamic, and so on.
Just like how capitalism will lead us, unlimited money does not mean unlimited resources.
The iron dome is a joke compared to the S-300, never mind the S-400.
Once the global south finds a remedy for this and air power, like they have tanks... It's over.
Nearly a century of Katyushas killing Nazis. May all fascists fear Stalin's organ.
