this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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[–] hotspur@hexbear.net 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

It’s a bit meandering honestly—I watched it because I like Postol, but as he said he didn’t have his stuff organized well. He basically points out that missile interception has always been basically a mirage, that it’s fairly easy to jam/decoy and they only did t use that stuff much because they didn’t need to, now they do so they just add it in and all of a sudden your fancy interception system is back to random noise levels of probability for interception. He goes through Russian Soviet tech, and stuff about the Iranian maneuverable hypersonic vehicle and decoy/flare systems in a more technical way.

One think I hadn’t realized before was that they hypersonic warheads get approx a 2x power increase due to the kinetic energy of their impact, so they not only are harder to interdict, but they hit harder than conventional warheads. Makes sense I guess just haven't thought about it. I’m still confused about how something going that fast properly uses its explosive effect—I don’t really know these things but I assume they’re proximity fused mostly?

[–] oliveoil@hexbear.net 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

If you listen to one Ted Postal lecture, you've listened to all of them. Maybe he'll have new insights a year from now.

[–] hotspur@hexbear.net 5 points 10 hours ago

True. But I guess that’s sorta what you get from an academic instead of a professional analysis giver—he had a line in there about how he had run aerodynamic calculations on the fins of the Iranian rockets and confirmed for himself that they were very maneuverable. Hard to be doing stuff like that and generating fresh takes all the time haha.