Thread by @nktpnd

Interceptors don’t travel in straight lines.

Sorry if the above tweet was cryptic: it’s just a good illustration of how interceptor trajectories can be wildly varied and non-linear! (Iron Dome on the left here, obviously.)

Since there’s interest in this: two more high res shots from Reuters of Iron Dome interceptors over Ashkelon (yesterday, IIRC).

Lots of interceptors (endo- and exoatmospheric) do this: the battle management system calculates when to launch the interceptor to create the greatest probability that it’ll be in a place where it can maneuver toward the target at the *appropriate speed* (velocity window).

So even though it’s intuitive that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, it is *not* how interceptors are designed—because the physics of making this happen are tricky enough that relative closing velocities (between the interceptor & target) matter a lot.

And that’s also why BMD/air defense is about much more than just the interceptors: software & sensors are just as important.

Yep: important to understand that these Hamas rockets (low-altitude, relatively slow, and unguided) are pretty much the ideal-type targets for a system like Iron Dome.

https://twitter.com/mgerrydoyle/status/1393026859835613187