Anti-Missile Firing.
AMALGAMA FFX75 Terminal.
Beaverdale brought up the Antarctic sector on his main monitor, commanded the AI to select the shuttle's trajectory, and was amazed, as was Jennifer.
"It's breaking its orbit, bending it like a wire," he said.
"Maybe it's virtual too," Ramhurst said skeptically.
"No, I wish we had a real one," Beaverdale replied.
"It's almost orbital speed," Jennifer clarified. "At first I thought it was a new P-shuttle. But P-shuttles didn't maneuver in the atmosphere at their orbital speed. At least the pre-war ones didn't fly like that.
" I think when it passes here we will get a video picture - Beaverdale concluded, - but I haven't told Lebedev's troops yet, about how I went to the city for the weekend. Not to the Superfederant, of course, but to the neighboring district, to Novosibirsk. There really are a lot of soldiers there now from the units... OMSDON, - Beaverdale had some difficulty pronouncing the Russian abbreviation, but he did it.
- So how is it? - asked Jennifer, - Judging by everything, they are not such cutthroats as they are said to be here.
- They say here? In the Superfederant? - Beaverdale grinned. - You're talking! I haven't seen such disciplined and socially-friendly fighters on this continent since the beginning of the War, - he continued. - Not to mention what is happening now in the West, in Europe.
- This is the ceremonial side of the coin, - answered Ramhurst. - Their command, to their credit, made sure that they behaved decently in public for a while. It is not known how long this educational charge will last, but it seems to be running out. Have you heard what these wonderful fighters have already managed to do? I mean the reprisals.
- You heard this from the locals, of course? In the Superfederant? An excellent source. In general, they really did beat up some people a little. The police, I mean the national, Russian one, as usually happens, turned a blind eye to some things like illegal drug trafficking and other such things. Is it bad that fresh military units demonstratively restored order? Unlike the police, they are not tied to local relationships. Do you understand what I mean? The civilians of the Novosibirsk district are delighted. I saw it myself.
- A shuttle over the territories of "@enemy", - Jennifer interrupted the argument.
Now the object was tracked by radars in orbit - shuttles pulled such. Sometimes ordinary satellites were used for this purpose, but their life was short - such radars were desirable targets in orbital warfare. Satellite radars almost never detected ballistics with their small EPR, but they were able to support air battles, so they were sometimes used quite effectively. The shuttle, which was an object larger than any fighter, could also be detected by such radars, both vulnerable satellite ones and temporary ones, working from boards of other shuttles. In addition, there were also orbital means of optical and infrared reconnaissance. Now there was one oddity - the shuttle flying at the very edge of the atmosphere, several tens of kilometers above the Karman line, was quite tolerably localized in the infrared spectrum, but rather approximately in the radio range. Everything looked like it was a matter of the plasma effect, but it was still quite high for the formation of a plasma cocoon. The shuttle was also maneuvering, which indicated that it had already entered the atmosphere, but again, this did not agree with the instrument data on altitude.
- Probably, this is still some new P-shuttle, - Jennifer suggested. - I wonder what it looks like then? And also, this ship must be much more advanced than the pre-war ones, since it flies so boldly over the "@enemy".
A sharp signal sounded again, after which a command was given to prepare for firing not only the virtual weapon, but also two sys.520 conventional anti-missiles, which, like the real prototypes of the virtual sys.580, were medium-range anti-ballistic weapons.
- Holy shit! - Ramhurst was surprised. - They've started some big exercises!
- Beaverdale was already selecting a row of three dozen positions on the diagram-map of the arsenal at his disposal, into which those same sys.520 conventionals were loaded. There were exactly twice as many such positions on the terminal, sixty-four to be precise. Of these, eighteen had been fired over the past two months.
The procedure for checking and bringing them into readiness was, in general, extremely simple - it was the so-called peripheral scanning. The rocket's electronics were nothing extraordinary - what was extraordinary was the mechanical part, which reliably performed its functions under crazy overloads. The rudder drives of the empennage and engines were supposed to control not a light rocket, but a heavy fifty-six-foot tower, flying sometimes at hypersonic speed and sometimes at suborbital speed. The electronics, with the exception of the super-sensitive infrared sensors, were ordinary. The same FPGA boards that had not changed in half a century and UHF SDR modules that had been slowly modified over the years, providing communication between the flying missile and the control center and the interlink. At the same time, these blocks scattered in niches in the missile body provided ECM and radio reconnaissance, but this was ordinary electronics. The verification procedure took five seconds at most. As expected, all the lines on the list received green marks.
The GBA AMALGAMA terminal itself was a small piece of America, lost in the gloomy expanses of distant Siberia. Of course, the site did not have any extraterritorial status - the piece of America was represented by personnel. However, the auxiliary contingent could be staffed from national units of any Bloc states. The auxiliary contingent could even be Russian, despite their complicated relationship with the SSSF - it was not appropriate for the Bloc command to coordinate its personnel decisions with the districts or whatever they were called that were squabbling with each other... They, in turn, were also perfectly aware of this.
The central structure of the terminal was a concrete colossus the size of a football stadium and over thirty meters high. The concrete structure was located below ground level and from the air looked like a flat concrete platform with rows of armored hatches painted to match the gray surface.
There were several letter modifications of the terminals, distinguished by different shares of anti-missiles of all three echelons - near, medium and far. The quantitative discrepancies were insignificant - no more than twenty percent. GBA AMALGAMA-mod.B had in its arsenal sixty-four medium-range anti-missiles, twenty long-range anti-missiles, that is, high anti-orbital class, and ninety-six short-range anti-missiles, intercepting ballistics at altitudes from 300 km to much more critical approaches with altitudes "down to" 60 km.
Of the ninety-six short-range anti-missiles, twenty were nuclear selectors, which have recently been actively replaced by lasers. The radius of the dome of the short-range anti-missiles was only 700 km.
For medium-range anti-missiles, the nominal radius was 2000 km, but sys.520, according to good tradition, had some excess of the nominal radius, which in the most favorable firing configuration was fifteen percent. The distant echelon was represented by AEX sys.770, which, in addition to ballistics, were capable of hitting satellites in orbits comparable to geostationary and were capable of developing the second cosmic velocity.
In general, with normal functionality of the external location component, two or three such terminals were capable of parrying a ballistic attack, which before the War any politician or ordinary person would have regarded as nothing less than apocalyptic.
The previous experience of the War left no doubt that a single shuttle, even capable of long-term maneuvering in the atmosphere, is incomparably inferior in its reduced potential to a mass ballistic attack. It is inferior both in reduced potential and in the "penetrating ability of a dynamic object" - this abstract term was used by the staff to describe the chances of one or another flying device entering the enemy's rear space.
The anti-missiles, regardless of their echelon affiliation, were placed in individual containers connected to a centralized air conditioning system.
The containers were placed in their cell positions, arranged in reinforced concrete belts.
A steel frame that received part of the launch loads was placed in the side and lower parts of such a belt. When loading the next container, it was fed from the side and slightly upwards through openings in this frame with the help of a special crane-conductor, moving in a very high corridor arranged in the central part of the belt. To put it simply, two rows of containers were located symmetrically and at an angle of twenty degrees to the vertical. The lower parts of the containers were closer to each other than the upper ones. Between these rows there was a corridor with rail tracks for the transport platform below and the crane-conductor above.
A transport vehicle moving along rails drove into the corridor, on which several containers were previously installed in a vertical position. Turntables were installed on the transport rail tracks.
It was also possible to load one container at a time directly from the transport that had arrived at the facility - these were driven along the SSSF roads mainly at night.
All these tricks with loading inside the fortification served one purpose - to hide the process of replenishing the terminal's ammunition from orbital observation. None of this applied to the long-range missiles - they were loaded the old way, from above, otherwise the dimensions of the underground part would have increased critically.
All the belts, their rows, were connected into a structure of rectangular outlines, and which was the same concrete structure, buried to the very roof in the ground. In this structure itself there were a number of technical rooms, but during combat readiness the personnel were evacuated from there.
The command post was located half a kilometer from the launch complex and it was also located within the fenced area of 1,100 acres. The command post was also hidden - it was located at a depth of twenty meters and was connected to the launch complex by a tunnel.
One of the command post exits led directly to an underground parking lot, from which you could drive away from the site to a residential town located five kilometers from the launch site.
The town housed both the terminal officers' quarters and barracks for the units responsible for protecting the facility. On FFX-75, this was a platoon of US Marines.
If anyone decided to drive along the road to the terminal for another three miles, that is, the same five kilometers, they could end up in a typical Russian settlement, a so-called state farm, living the usual life of an LBSF settlement.
The area allocated for the terminal was not just a fenced-in area. An entire network of power cables and data transmission lines, mainly fiber optics, was laid underground. On specially equipped sites it was possible to place air defense launchers, even the same "Persevals" and connect them to the power supply and data ports equipped at the sites.
Thus, air defense installations could receive target designation from arbitrarily distant and different types of radars, even from the "Persevals" radar itself, which was connected to the interlink and deployed behind the neighboring forest, or from AEX AMANDA, which was theoretically capable of tracking air targets. In addition, in recent years, terminals have been equipped with mast-mounted air defense radars - this significantly reduced the threat level from an attack by cruise missiles.
The expected trajectory of the object, which passed to the south of the SSSF, two hundred kilometers from the southern "Amanda", was displayed as a translucent yellow stripe about three hundred kilometers wide - the exact trajectory of the maneuvering object could not be determined.
The stripe was slowly but surely narrowing. Finally, when the shuttle emerged from the radio horizon, the strip narrowed to a width of seventy kilometers. The center line of the strip drifted to the south and now its distance from the superradar was not two hundred but two hundred and fifty kilometers. Beaverdale meanwhile selected the configuration parameters of the two physical launches, ordering the AI to determine two different points of approach, one counter-predictive, the other catch-up-predictive.
The interval between the two expected hits was chosen to be one hundred and fifteen seconds, and the ranges were seven hundred and seventy and one thousand one hundred and eighty-five kilometers - for sys.520 this was the "green zone" in which the missile's energy could be realized most optimally.
In simple terms, the meeting points were located not on the border of the maximum range, but also not in the close radius, where the interception occurs "in a hurry" and the target flies right by the nose of the missile just gaining maximum speed, which is why it is forced to maneuver especially furiously. As they sometimes especially colorfully put it, to drift, although, of course, such scattering of the flight vector and the axis of the missile was nowhere near there.
At the same time, fundamentally different scenarios of approach were chosen quite deliberately, and the missile that was supposed to catch up had to be launched before the one flying towards it.
The corridor had meanwhile widened slightly - this was not typical for a regular wartime shuttle, even if it was maneuvering, but it was typical for a P-shuttle. The terminal's AI, as well as the AI of the "Amanda's" operations center, identified it that way. The decision was somewhat surprising, since there were also the recently commissioned AEX mod.118, capable of maneuvering quite daringly. They had hypersonic aerodynamic surfaces, but in their usual routine, these shuttles, resembling a sophisticated spearhead, spent the resource of their "glider" sparingly, using aerodynamics only when descending from orbit and approaching the landing trajectory - after all, the protective materials were susceptible to hypersonic "super-aerodynamic" stress. Ramhurst meanwhile scattered six dozen interception points related to virtual launches. Of course, he did not place all sixty-four points - the AI did that. Ramhurst merely adjusted the range at his own discretion. This was called stochasticization of parameters - in simple terms, it was necessary to introduce a living human, and most importantly, random decision into the machine plans.
Finally, a picture appeared from the optical station, located, like one of the Amanda lasers, in the mountains with the atypically easy-to-pronounce name of Altai.
The sight surprised all three of them in the least - dimly visible behind the atmospheric blur even for a forty-five-inch telescope, the object was also enveloped in a dense glowing plasma formation, clearly structured by some kind of magnetic field. The lines of force of the latter, being outlined by the inhomogeneities of the plasma, were clearly visible.
There was still some formation ahead, glowing strongly in the infrared and somewhat weaker in the optical range - this was what mainly made it difficult to observe the device itself.
A warning signal sounded, then a slight push was felt - the first rocket left the terminal. Beaverdale glanced at the screen responsible for the system parameters of the launch complex. The rocket left smoothly - the impact on the launch systems was within the nominal limits. The hatch was already in the process of closing, the condition of the container was satisfactory. Somewhere, inaudible to the operators, turbofans roared, blowing through the labyrinths of the concrete casemate.
- I don't even know what's better: if we hit or if we miss, - Jennifer muttered.
- Our task is to hit, - Ramhurst answered with bated breath, - but this thing looks too cool for a primitive simulator.
- So far, I don't see anything unambiguous except the cloud, - Beaverdale answered, although I am inclined to think that they used a full-fledged V-shuttle as such a simulator.
More changes occurred on the system screen. Somewhere there, on the surface, another multi-ton hatch folded back, after which quarters of the inner cover flew out from under the ground - the cover of the container itself. Then a fifty-six-foot white conical rocket emerged vigorously from the inclined well, and began to slowly trace an intricate curve. It looked as if there was something wrong with the rocket's engine. In fact, that's how it worked. On the side of one of the screens, a vector diagram window was displayed, the movements of which repeated the dance of the tower that had burst from the ground. At some point, the picture with the vectors was supplemented with a red circle, and at the same time, the picture from several cameras at once turned into one solid, impenetrable background. Having turned in its maneuver to the desired direction, the rocket turned on its main booster engines and rushed forward, gaining speed of one and a half machs every second. If such a switch had occurred in the container, it would have withstood it, but only to the extent that it would have ensured the mechanical safety of the neighboring anti-missiles. The containers of these neighboring missiles themselves would have participated in ensuring this. The container would have been partially destroyed if it had been launched prematurely. It would not have been possible to avoid serious repair work with heavy equipment and temporary loss of combat readiness of the entire terminal.
If the low-power pre-booster had simply pushed the rocket out of the container and the booster unit had been activated at a distance comparable to the planned one, then the gas flow could well have damaged the reusable container.
The system circumvented these problems quite gracefully - a low-power engine with a vector controlled by interceptors pushed the rocket out and began to guide it along a trajectory calculated in advance by the on-board computer, which at some very specific moment had to coincide with the direction in which the rocket should have rushed. The exhaust vector did not end up in the vicinity of the open hatch. The rocket that was carried away did not leave anything behind - the pre-booster was an integral part of the first stage assembly, in which, after the pre-booster burned out, only an unloaded cavity was formed, which did not create any additional resistance.
GBA created this beautiful and extremely functional machine even before the Pre-War, in that forgotten past. Then, during the Pre-War years, the sys.580 appeared, differing from the sys.520 mainly in its improved production technology and a range of modifications that allowed changing the mass ratio of the first to second stage. Neutron charges, on the golden lens shells of which celebrities handed in their trinkets, were mainly placed on those sys.580.
Beaverdale silently watched the flight of two anti-missiles, displayed only as marks on the map and parameter lines. Having pushed the warhead beyond the mesosphere, the boosters separated.
It was impossible to count how many of these conical columns landed during the War years where they should not have landed. The situation was corrected to a certain extent by the descent systems - inflatable balloons and parachutes, which, due to their secondary nature, often broke off. There were also transponders, reporting to the interlink and warning systems at the final stage of descent. In any case, the landing of such a barrel, even if its braking systems worked as expected, did not bode well for any structure. However, there were also hunters for valuable scrap metal.
Ramhurst was busy with virtual launches. A virtual launch was more of a process that involved not so much the terminal as the radar installations, configuring their target designations in various variations and maintaining a kind of feedback with the radar operational centers.
If the target was standard, then the only factor introducing uncertainty into the interception process would be false targets, and a virtual launch would most likely be designed to check a particular radar, comparing its target designation with a full-fledged target designation from a group, which the checked location station could also be part of.
In particular, AEX AMANDA was recently tested, which invariably amazed with its results.
Now all radars were thrown into confusion. The reason for this was a plasma, or rather ion cloud, which turned out to be a sodium ion cloud held by a magnetic field - AI managed to report this.
Fortunately, the optical systems still managed to localize the object - the area of strong radiation was only ahead of the ion cloud, which interacted with the atmosphere and heated up.
Apparently, the ion cloud somehow protected the device itself from the effects of the atmosphere. Also, the accuracy of radar positioning was several hundred meters, which was no good - the shuttle should also thank this cocoon for this.
Nevertheless, the blurring of the localization still allowed the missiles to be directed to the vicinity of the approach point with subsequent correction by optical guidance.
The strip of the extrapolation trajectory did not narrow into a linear track, and at some point it began to expand again - the shuttle was obviously making another maneuver. The first missile arrived at the constantly moving grid rendezvous point with an error of three thousand five hundred meters - this was not good enough even for a nuclear warhead. Or rather, such a sweepingly under-approaching nuclear warhead might have damaged the shuttle, but certainly not the attacking ballistic warhead. The miss was caused not so much by the ion cloud as by the shuttle's constant maneuvering. At such speeds, a change in vector by a few degrees quickly converted into kilometers and tens of kilometers.
The missile itself was programmed before launch so that its warhead, a conventional warhead, would not go off at the moment of interception and would self-destruct the anti-missile a hundred kilometers after passing close to the target. And so it happened.
The second missile showed an even more "impressive" result - five thousand six hundred meters. However, considering that the shuttle was a new system being tested, everything, on the contrary, was very good.
Virtual launches showed a spread from two hundred and fifty meters to eight and a half kilometers. At the same time, the missile that detonated its warhead at two hundred and fifty meters exploded extremely unsuccessfully - off the track, and in this case, reducing the distance to fifty meters did not change anything - the fragments of the conventional charge flew much slower than the target and they had to be dispersed, being quite precisely on the trajectory, albeit at a range slightly exceeding a quarter of a kilometer. However, such nitpicking was not applicable to nuclear charges.
The two "physical" rockets turned out to be much weaker than the overall average virtual one. It could be assumed that the shuttle had already been physically fired upon more than once, otherwise where would the reference data for the models have come from.
Accordingly, the two launched rockets were not wasted and now also provided their clarification for the new reference data.
- That was cool, gentlemen, - Ramhurst said slowly, - Oppenheimer will now have a great toy.
- Well, you were against Oppenheimer, - Beaverdale replied contentedly.
- And I am still against him, - Ramhurst replied, - but this thing flies just fine. I think no one will argue with that.