A common theme in anime, cartoons, and even some sci-fi series is that when one missile in a volley explodes, it triggers the rest to explode.
Does this happen in reality? Are missiles ever actually fired in dense volleys like that anymore? Are there even any theoretical situations where a modern military would fire that dense a volley (i.e. doctrine is to use a volley in situation xyz)?
Patriots: http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA435837.pdf
If you get any good ones on nukes I don’t want to know you. But my Internet data (or simply comparison of my isp’s metadata with SD’s, for the long way around) shows now that I’ve been in communication with you, so I’m fucked.
Generally, volleys of unguided rockets are common. I can’t recall seeing guided/homing weapons used in large volleys, presumably because a precision-guided munition will has a very good chance of hitting, and ought to be able to destroy whatever it’s been chosen to be used on, so it would be a waste to use more than one, at least until you see whether the first one hits.
The exception would be radar-guided Sparrow missiles in the Vietnam war era. Sparrows were notoriously unreliable in actual wartime conditions (as opposed to testing back in the States), and pilots often “ripple-fired” two or more to increase the chances of a kill. Ripple fire is almost a volley (the missiles would not be side-by-side), but Sparrows had small warheads and it’s not very likely fratricide was possible (also, they moved very fast, Mach 3, and were small targets, so it would be challenging to hit them with something).
Wouldn’t this defeat the whole purpose of firing the missiles in the first place? If they all blow up when one blows up even if you hit the target with the first one all the others have now missed. I guess maybe if your goal is to just spray shrapnel around maybe, but there are easier ways to do it.
In anime I think it’s done for purely visual effect. A bunch of missiles impacting on the same point isn’t nearly as impressive as all of those missiles exploding over a huge area. Didn’t Macross start this? Yup.
I’m not really sure of the OP, but when firing at a target that can retreat to cover, it is preferable for all of the ordnance to arrive at the target as close to simultaneously as possible. If everything blows up at once, the target doesn’t have time to retreat to cover, and the indirect fire is much more effective. See generally, the concept of Time On Target for indirect fire. This memoir of a U.S. Army artilleryman in WW 2 explains it further:
Even guided weapons utilized the idea of multiple warheads striking the same target at the same time, usually in order to saturate anti-air defenses. Volleys of guided anti-ship weapons are the reason the AN/SPY-1 radar on the USN’s Aegis-equipped vessels was specified to be able to track over 100 targets at once. Famously, in Desert Storm, F-117s on occasion used multiple precision guided bombs on the same structure; the first to rip a hole in the overhead cover, the second a few minutes later to zip through the hole and detonate within the structure. Due to the relative inaccuracy of Soviet ICBMs, unclassified analysis of U.S. nuclear war planning anticipated two warheads to be used against each U.S. ICBM silo. And probably more would have been used if possible (see fratricide, below) due to uncertainty about warhead accuracy over a transpolar flight path.
More than two warheads for each silo ran a very high risk of what I think the OP is talking about, ‘warhead fratricide’: the concept of one warhead explosion causing the sympathetic detonation of other ordnance fired at the target. A discussion of this in the context of nuclear weapons’ targeting may be found in the 1978 Congressional Budget Office white paper, Counterforce Issues for the U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces, here at page 11 of the document, page 31 of the pdf.
Warhead fratricide is usually frowned upon. If the warhead is being detonated by an outside source, it therefore isn’t detonating by its own fuzing, and therefore runs the risk of expending itself away from the target and in a less efficient manner, as hotflungwok notes in the post above. The extreme case is with nuclear weapons, where the chemical explosives surrounding the primary must be detonated with great precision or otherwise the bomb will fail to provide the vast majority of its explosive yield. Now, how fragile is a nuclear ICBM warhead, and how susceptible is it to receiving neutralizing damage from its traversal of a debris cloud, is going to be a function of the specifics of its construction, and therefore classified like everything else in that field.
Models to predict the incidence of warhead fratricide can be quite complex. A discussion of the mathematics of modelling fratricide for nuclear warheads may be found in the Rand Corporation study, How to Assess the Survivability of U.S. ICBMs: Appendices, found here. The specific discussion begins at page 34 of the document, page 52 of the pdf.
Yeah, the scene that made me think of this was a bunch of missiles fired at a single target, which struck me as particularly stupid and inefficient.
However, my question was more about the scenes where a superhero destroys one missile/rocket (comics aren’t always careful about differentiating the two), making it explode. That explosion then causes the other objects in the volley to detonate as well. COuld that really happen, or would the explosion simply damage the other missiles/rockets in a way that keeps them from hitting the target (messing up guidance systems, damaging electronics, making the casing aerodynamically unstable, etc.)
It’d probably be helpful to take a specific scene in particular, and nitpick based on what weapons are apparently used, and how they’re destroyed.
American animation and older comics might be hard, admittedly, as they tend to show just “generic weapons”; but we might have some look with movies, or anime, which tend to be a bit better. (Hollywood just out of laziness, but anime at least because of geekier sticklers for weapons. 
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Slightly O.T. but it happened with minefields in ww2 where the mines had been placed too close together.