In comics, sci-fi books, and in movies, a pilot is usually ordered to shoot a missile at an unlikely or fantastic target like a flying person, sea monster, spaceship, etc. Can modern (say since 1975) fighter jet targeting systems be this flexible? For instance if Superman was real could a modern jet hit him with a missile, assuming he flies no faster than a typical jet? What are the limits of these targeting systems? Does the target need to reflect radar or give heat to be hittable?
The radar cross section of a modern stealthy fighter is about that of a large bird or less. Superman, being a large person, likely has a bigger radar cross section. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult for an airborne radar to pick him up and guide a missile in.
Without a radar signature or some heat emissions, it would be hard for an air-to-air missile to track. But we have all kinds of air-to-ground weapons that are TV or GPS or laser guided. So your sea monster or Godzilla would be an easy target.
For a standard AMRAAM or Sidewinder, I would imagine it would be harder to hit a really big target, like the motherships in Independence Day - I’m not sure they would fuse right. But we have other munitions which would work for that. (Leading to the question of “Why not use Durandals or something similar on the mothership instead of puny air to air missiles?”)
Probably because a bomb’s guidance system would be all kinds of confused if you tried to drop it on something that was 30,000 feet above sea level.
Yeah, but when the mothership is miles across, accuracy isn’t a big deal. Durandals are unguided anyway, just a radar transponder to determine altitude. 2000lb iron bombs would probably do pretty good too.
I think the sea monster would be the hardest. No jet fighter I know has the ability to carry torpedoes as a payload anymore (as opposed to WW2), and then there’s the matter of the torp homing in on it - sea monsters don’t make a steady and loud chug-chug-chug as they move about, and assuming the Kraken or a humongous jelly fish kind of monster, I’m not even sure a sonar ping would get a strong echo…
And then there’s the matter of finding it from the sky - no metal so no magnetic anomaly detector, a squid isn’t hot blooded AFAIK so no IR either… sea monsters would be tricky, no doubt about it.
Superman is a cakewalk in comparison - of course for him the trick is to hit him with something than *can *hurt him. As the Saint of Killers would disdainfully say after being hit by an atomic strike : “Not enough gun.”
Apparently they can’t shoot down a high-altitude research balloon:
The balloon’s termination system failed, and it drifted out of Canada, across the ocean, and into Russia before turning westward again and settling down in Finland.
But they hit the balloon:
No worries, that’s what nuclear depth charges are for. Well, alright, they were really intended for use against deep-diving nuclear submarines, but I imagine they would work pretty good against Godzilla too. The blast radius is approximately six kilometres because of the low compressability of water, so they don’t even need to be very accurate.
True, but we run into the same basic problem as regular torps : fighter planes can’t carry those.
Bombers, sure… but then again a deep sea nuclear detonation would probably wake up Chtulhu and he’s definitely not a morning monster, f’taghn.
Can the missile guidance system from a vehicle located in the water (submarine or ship) be synced up with the fighter’s missile guidance for the purpose of guiding the missile to exactly hit a target that wouldn’t otherwise be detectable from the fighter?
If the target was hidden under water, that is.
At that point it would seem simpler and more straightforward just to have the ship or submarine attack the sea monster with their own weapons systems.
Right, but the fighter in my mind is carrying the super-duper nuke that happens to be the only device in that hemisphere that can take out the monster.
I don’t think nukes would work against Godzilla – isn’t that what created him in the first place?
Sure they can. You might not be able to just bolt them onto an F-16 and call it a day, I’ll grant, but the WE177 was designed so that it could be deployed from Harrier Jump Jets and the Panavia Tornado, among other strike crafts.
Well, you know what they say, fight radioactive fire with radioactive fire.
I remember that story, at the time it reminded me in turn of my old manual for Overlord on the PC, with the note that one WWII air ace was credited with 10 kills, 8 of which turned out to be barrage balloons.
Barrage balloons were the sh*ts to attack, since they were ringed with AA guns.
All the more so, given that he’s probably considerably more radar-opaque than terrestrial organic matter.
What if he uses… SUPER STEALTH?