Approaching the Asian Region.
During the passage over Antarctica, the altitude began to decrease. The ill-fated positional area located in South America was left behind and even AMANDA, which, as it turned out from the AI messages, was capable of scanning space up to the lunar orbit, was now not dangerous - the curvature of the earth's surface was, understandably, impossible for its radiation to overcome.
However, another butthurt was ahead, much more frightening than overcoming the positional area. It was necessary to use the ion plant for its main military purpose. The ship was heading towards the Asian region, which, however, was still more than ten thousand kilometers away.
Zavirdyaev had already managed to send a video message of a rather vague, but also threatening nature, which did not promise anything good to the ground forces attacking him. This message was supposed to be interpreted as a threat to strike London. A repeated and truly destructive one. The masters of such interpretations were probably already doing their job, sitting in the studios of leading television companies. The threatening image of the current Zavirdyaev was quite facilitated by his red, swollen face after the overloads.
The altitude was dropping quite vigorously. If everything had continued like this, the ship would not have reached the Asian region and would have entered the atmosphere in a very unusual way, which was no better than being hit by a successful missile defense attack.
In general, the shuttle with its angular protrusions was capable of hypersonic flight and maneuvers at altitudes in the vicinity of the Karman line, but entering such a flight mode had to be preceded by braking and choosing the appropriate angle of attack.
Now it was necessary to perform a completely different maneuver. AI smoothly turned the ship slightly and briefly turned on the small engines - these were not even the ones that lifted the ship at launch, but even smaller ones, located in the same protrusions.
Once again, the ion plant turned on. The picture on the shield was now somewhat different. Judging by the schematic diagram, the ion jets really did interact with the atmosphere, like a stream of smoke released into the wind. Only the speeds and distances of the ion gas were completely different. Turning on the magnetic field quickly formed a yellowish transparent cocoon around the ship.
Now the shield cloud shrank into a deformed elongated and, in strict scientific language, toroidal cocoon, although it did not look like a donut at all. The diameter of the cocoon was about one and a half kilometers and was slowly decreasing. The flight altitude was one hundred and fifty-five kilometers and was also slowly dropping. Not as vigorously as before the maneuver, but it was decreasing.
Thirty kilometers below was the level at which the old P-shuttles were enveloped in aggressive plasma, its high-speed flow, from which the shuttles were protected only by a layer of fragile silicate-polymer material. Now the ship was steadily moving towards that mark. Zavirdyaev was now experiencing the same range of emotions that a person who was afraid of flying would probably experience when sitting in a liner that had encountered turbulence.
Zavirdyaev had seen this before, more than once, and it had been quite funny. Now he consoled himself with the thought that those flights had also been on board cars that were not able to provide the same guarantees as a wreck of a bus, driving exclusively on country roads where it shook just like during turbulence, but you could only fall off the side of the road.
Beautiful liners are not able to compete with a bus in terms of safety only because they fly, and do not drive. Nevertheless, you can sit calmly and drink something in the cabin shaking from passing through turbulent areas. Why is a shuttle worse?
The consolation was weak. The altitude dropped to one hundred twenty-two kilometers and the propulsion system gave an impulse that compensated for the loss of speed and corrected the vector - the drop in altitude came to nothing.
The ion shield now took on some difficult-to-describe shape with a flattened bottom - it was not visible visually, there was only a diagram on the display. The veins of ion flows, held by magnetic lines, took the blows of atoms and molecules freely moving in their Brownian motion, carried them into their flow and reliably protected the ship. The high-speed oncoming flow was washed away and did not reach the ship's skin.
The rarefied near-space atmosphere at such speeds was something difficult to imagine for a person accustomed to observing processes occurring in a more familiar atmosphere, even for a pilot.
The ion cocoon also had characteristics that were difficult to imagine - despite the spectacular glow and the enormous size of the cloud, the consumption of liquid molten sodium was laughable - no more than the flow of gasoline into a scooter engine. It was a world of earthly machines and mechanisms that looked familiar, but with completely different physical parameters of the surrounding atmosphere and work processes. On the one hand, the atmosphere was so rarefied that it was a collection of fairly independent particles that rarely collided with each other. No aerodynamics worked in such conditions.
For example, simply taking the known lifting force of an airplane wing and dividing it by several thousand was not the right solution. Such failure of classical aerodynamics was already evident at speeds and altitudes much more modest than orbital ones - that is why hypersonic vehicles, from the point of view of slower aerodynamics, looked like clumsy irons with angular wings, devoid of smooth sections.
The second feature of this non-standard aerodynamics and physics was that the high-speed flow of rarefied gas showed its destructive effect in a rather unexpected way. A metal part like a plate or an antenna, exposed to such a flow, did not break or fly away - the flow was not able to deform the obstacle, but it affected it in a completely unexpected way - the metal seemed to be exposed to some invisible radiation and melted before their eyes. Or rather, it evaporated.
This is how the effect of some very fierce chemical looked in the fantasies of filmmakers and even animators, although here there was only an invisible flow of atomic-molecular fraction.
Whether this happened by chance, or the subconscious reached some levers in the head, but a couple of months later Zavirdyaev watched a film about shuttles. And all this would inevitably meet the "tin can, insulated with silicon padding polyester", that is, the ship, if something went wrong with the magnetic system. However, the thermonuclear power of the engine was also held and directed by magnetic fields and without them it would have torn off. Much stronger than the flying police cars in the wildest fantasies of their haters.
Be that as it may, Zavirdyaev still managed to suppress his anxiety. There were five thousand kilometers left to the conventional border of the Asian Bloc. The ship maneuvered once again - the plasma cocoon, interacting with the atmosphere instead of the shuttle, gradually wasted the energy of the flight, converting it into its heating, glow and a thousand-kilometer ionized trail - a real comet was racing across the sky.
At some point, the flight altitude dropped so much that it became several hundred meters less than the one hundred and ten thousand meter mark. Passing at such a low altitude and at orbital speed was, in theory, a reliable defense against an attack by enemy missile defense.
Anti-missiles intercepting ballistics were powerless against a ship rushing at such low altitudes as if it were in orbit and maneuvering at the same time. The P-shuttles also relied on a similar principle, but they carried out their ultra-low-orbit maneuvers at a speed that was more than thirty percent lower than the usual orbital speed - this is how they turned into hypersonic aircraft. Passing over the enemy in orbit in the usual sense of the word, they moved like an ordinary satellite, albeit slightly maneuvering - a rather ordinary target. Now a ship was flying that could vigorously maneuver in ultra-low orbit, while maintaining speed and had ion protection. In addition, if necessary, a powerful engine could at any moment pull the ship from the intended trajectory and take it to a high orbit. Progress and superiority over their own machines of 2113 were obvious.
There were also long-range precision anti-missiles that corrected their flight with tiny impulses. It goes without saying that they were useless at low near-atmospheric altitudes. Such systems could catch up with previous-generation shuttles, even if they were in orbits close to geostationary. The shuttles evaded, but the pursuers had other engines in addition to micro-powerful correction engines. Success could be achieved by either side - both the attacking anti-missile and the evading shuttle. This is what orbital combat looked like. The unprecedented power-to-weight ratio in the case of the new ship served as the most reliable defense. A certain threat was posed by medium-range anti-missiles like the GBA sys.520. This missile was often described as an ideal killer, capable of maneuvering with both hypersonic rudders and precision vector engines. With the desire and the availability of precise radar data, it could have hit not only a warhead, but also a hypersonic drone a thousand kilometers from the launch terminal. Theoretically, it is even possible to take a sys.520 with a nuclear warhead and bomb something lower-flying in the vicinity, for example, an arsenal, but the spread would have been many kilometers - the second stage, which served for interception, had fundamental differences in its design from a ballistic warhead, so instead of a precise aimed strike, God knows what would have happened. The option of shelling a low-flying arsenal, although voiced on TV, was delusional. In the case of the drone, everything was within the specifications, it was just too wasteful to spend the sys.520.
Nevertheless, catching a shuttle that was flying at orbital speed and at the same time constantly changing speed and falling out of the high-precision orbital schedule was problematic even for such a legendary missile. There was also sys.580, but the only differences there were in the optimized production process and a more developed modular approach. From time to time, there were publications that a block capable of knocking out an arsenal flying close to the ground would appear for that missile. In the case of an attack on the shuttle, both anti-missiles could be considered the same.
The anti-missile weapons of "@enemy" were adequate to the Western ones, so in the estimates it was possible to rely on the parameters of their anti-missiles.
Theoretically, in desperation, the enemy could send several missiles with thermonuclear warheads to preempt. The same desperate step as shelling a low-flying arsenal with ordinary sys.520 in the unintended converging ballistics mode. Yes, any AI could easily quickly calculate the parameters of a preemptive screen attack, but a number of conditions still had to be met, in particular, for the shuttle to pass fairly close, almost over the terminal. And the terminal's ammunition supply would have to be replenished in advance with rather rare megaton-class anti-missiles.