how is bomby formed?
When two countries/atoms hate each other very very much…
On the topic of quality control requirements:
How feasible would it be to make up for loose tolerances with overengineering? Say, instead of having a rocket with a propulsion and guidance systems where everything has to be just so, you could have 4 or 5 stage rockets with a canister shot of nukes in the last stage?
ICBMs tend to have a very steep trajectory to minimize atmospheric variations, correct? At what angle do they come down?
Does it imply that SLBMs are less accurate because of their much faster, flatter trajectory?
That is comparing modern consumer navigation hardware to modern military grade navigation hardware. But a developing world country trying to make an ICBM now is not trying beat the latest US made guidance HW. The Atlas missile was a perfectly functional nuclear deterrent. While the navigation system in the Atlas was technical marvel at the time, a modern cheap smart phone would make it look incredibly primitive.
Are you talking about inertial navigation here, or something else? The presentation that I linked shows, for example, that mechanical gyros are a factor of ~10^7 in bias stability better than consumer MEMS gyros. So you’re saying that mechanical gyros back in the 1950s were no better than those consumer MEMS gyros now? What is it about mechanical gyros–which are basically just really good spinning masses with really good bearings–that you believe was a factor of 10^7 worse back then? The usual theory of operation of a MEMS gyro (vibrating fork) is cheap and tiny, but fundamentally much worse than a big spinning mass.
And what’s the point of your link? It discusses the radio connection between the missile and ground systems, not the IMU.
It seems like you’ve decided that since some areas of technology have shown improvement by orders of magnitude in their basic figures of merit over the last few decades, all the others must have too. That’s not the case. The density of logic gates in an integrated circuit (i.e., the thing that means we all have computers now) is an incredible outlier. In almost every other area–the mileage of our most fuel-efficient gasoline-powered cars, the yield strength of our best alloys of steel, the friction of our best air bearings, the tolerances of machined parts–the state of the art has improved steadily, but at a tiny fraction of that rate.
And just to be slightly quantitative:
Analog Devices published a survey of MEMS gyros in 2011. Of the accelerometers in their Table 1, VTI’s SCR1100-D04 has the best bias stability, at 2.1 degrees per hour. That part costs $68.82 in quantity 100.
In a transcript of a discussion with the Apollo 11 astronauts, one of them says “Our biggest drift on the gyro’s is 0.03 degrees per hour”. That’s surprisingly high to me, for a precision mechanical gyro, even then; perhaps it just didn’t need to be any better (since they had star trackers and stuff to cancel the drift), so they traded performance against power and weight. It’s still a factor of ~70 better than a modern MEMS gyro that’s already better than anything you could afford to put in a phone.