Slitherine

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As work begins on Britain's next generation of nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the first in the class has been given an historic name. The Queen today gave the royal assent for the largest-ever Royal Navy submarine to be christened HMS Dreadnought – the ninth vessel to carry the name in over 450 years. The date of the naming was chosen to mark Trafalgar Day and the 56th anniversary of the launching of the first British nuclear submarine, also named Dreadnought.

The new Dreadnought is the first of four boats in the Successor class intended to replace the aging Vanguard ballistic missile submarines, which carry Britain's Independent Nuclear Deterrent (IND) that sees at least one nuclear-armed boat at sea at all times. After Parliament approved construction in July, the first steel was cut by BAE Systems at Barrow-in-Furness on October 5, though preliminary work has been underway for over two years on various components to avoid production delays.

Dreadnought's design is based on the Astute attack submarine as a way to keep down cost and avoid any relearning processes. When completed, it will be 152.9 m (502 ft) long, displace 17,200 tonnes (19,000 tons), and will include a number of RN submarine firsts, including a full-time doctor, gym, day/night lighting, and women's accommodations.

Dreadnought will carry US-built Trident D5 missiles in the US/UK Common Missile Compartment consisting of 12 missile compartments, with 8 missiles and 40 British designed and built nuclear warheads on MIRV vehicles. What the spare four tubes will carry is classified. Power will come courtesy of a Rolls-Royce PWR3 nuclear reactor and though Dreadnought will be in service from 2028 until the 2050s, it will never need refueling during that time. In fact, the boat isn't even designed for such a thing.

When commissioned, Dreadnought will be the ninth to carry the name since the days of Queen Elizabeth. The first was captained by Sir Francis Drake and saw action against the Spanish Armada, and a later one fought at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, where Admiral Lord Nelson defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets.

The most famous Dreadnought was the sixth, which entered service in 1906. The brainchild of Admiral "Jacky" Fisher, this Dreadnought was the first modern battleship and gave her name to an enter type of ship. Her heavy armor, 12-in guns, and 21 knots (24 mph, 39 km/h) of speed made all other warships at the time obsolete and sparked a frenzied arms race among the great powers.

The eighth Dreadnought was Britain's first nuclear submarine and served until 1980 as an experimental and trials boat. Construction stirred tremendous controversy at the time when the US Admiral Hyman Rickover angrily opposed providing the British with the American submarine reactor that was installed in Dreadnought.

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Russia has moved to update its nuclear arsenal with an extreme-range, massive payload ICBM designed specifically to defeat anti-missile systems. Capable of traversing the planet's poles and blowing up Texas in one hit, meet the RS-28 Sarmat, or Satan 2.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been very clear about how he sees his country's situation. Circled by NATO forces and "oh no that's just for defending Europe from Iran" nuclear missile silos, he believes Russia's nuclear capabilities are threatened by a belligerent US foreign policy. "How can you not understand," he admonished a group of journalists recently, "that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction?"

"Major global conflicts have been avoided in the past few decades, due to the geostrategic balance of power which used to exist … I don't know how this is all going to end. What I do know is that we will need to defend ourselves and I even know how they will package this as 'Russian aggression' again. But this is simply our response to your actions. Is it not obvious that I must guarantee the safety of our people?"

Just a little sobering background, then, for today's announcement: Russia has released the first photos of its new intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-28 Sarmat, which has some truly extraordinary capabilities that are well worthy of its NATO nickname: Satan 2.

Weighing in at over 100 tons, the RS-28 will be a silo-launchable missile with extreme range capability. It's designed to be able to fly around the North or South poles, to attack targets from unexpected directions, with a maximum range around 10,000 kilometers (6214 miles). It's not slow, either, maxing out at more than Mach 20, or some 15,220 mph (24,500 km/h). That's about seven times faster than the SR-71 Blackbird ever went.

Its payload capacity is an enormous 10 tons, allowing it to carry up to 10 heavy warheads at a time, or massive amounts of missile defense countermeasures to help stop it getting shot down by anti-missile systems. In theory, according to Russia's Sputnik magazine, it could pack enough of a nuclear punch to destroy a land mass the size of Texas, or France, in one hit.

Satan 2 has been specifically designed to penetrate North American missile defense systems, and according to Russian officials it has been developed as a direct response to the USA's Prompt Global Strike system, which gives America the ability to deploy non-nuclear missile strikes anywhere on the planet within one hour.

The RS-28 project has been in the pipeline since contracts between the Russian government and the Makeyev Rocket Design bureau were signed in 2011. Originally expected to debut in 2020, timelines have been moved up to a 2018 deployment, and some sources are saying Russia expects the Satan 2 to constitute nearly all of Russia's land-based nuclear arsenal as soon as 2021.

Many of us are too young to remember what it was like living in the Cold War era, where nuclear tensions between the Soviet Union and the USA were at boiling point and the world seemed to be on the brink of apocalypse.

But behind the bizarro-world dog and pony show of the 2016 US elections there seems to be a very real sense that the world's two largest nuclear superpowers are getting ready to butt heads in a big way over a number of geopolitical hotspots - Syria being the biggest of the bunch.

Here's hoping common sense prevails, and this new era of nuclear brinksmanship ends the way the last one did – with a whimper, not a bang. And certainly not a bang the size of Texas.

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ORIGINAL: thewood1

An old idea renewed.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/10/26/irans-navy-unveils-suicide-drone/92761598/

Something looks really odd about that shape. It just doesn't look like the wings or engines are to scale.

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Something looks really odd about that shape. It just doesn't look like the wings or engines are to scale.

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ORIGINAL: Gneckes

What might be the reason for integrating the booster on the export version? Easier maintenance for foreign customers maybe?

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ORIGINAL: Broncepulido

What's in the images the test-launching ship launching suppossed HQ-8?

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ORIGINAL: mikmyk

We've gotten a flood of new things to add to the db as of late but will need to sort out the details.

Mike

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WASHINGTON — The Strategic Capabilities Office believes it can upgrade the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) weapon to allow it to strike moving targets on both land and water, Pentagon officials announced Friday.

The program is under the purview of the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), which has also apparently advanced swarming drone technologies for both the air and sea domains, although details on just what that advancement is remains unclear.

Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ forum on the third offset, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter was the first to mention the ATACMS upgrade.

“By integrating an existing seeker onto the front of the missile, they’re enabling it to hit moving targets, both on land and at sea,” Carter said. “With this capability, what was previously an Army surface-to-surface missile system can project power from coastal locations up to 300 kilometers into the maritime domain.”

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He added that the program has been underway for more than a year and is probably still a year away from testing. How much that testing costs will depend on how many live shots the Army desires, Roper noted. He also acknowledged that the idea for the program was partly related to concerns about using weapons in GPS-denied locations.

“Right now, GPS is a singular option for many of our weapons. In the future I want to try and make every weapon have multiple options to get to the end game, and having a seeker is a secondary way to do that aside from GPS,” he said.

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“You just don’t talk about your best capabilities, plain and simple. So one of the things we have to remember, which we did well in the Cold War, is having a good balance about the capabilities we show to the world for deterrence” versus what is kept hidden, he said. “We are keeping our best ideas behind the door, and probably always will, because what we owe to our future operators is an unfair fight.”

That is in comparison for why Carter decided to bring the ATACMS program, still in a fairly early stage, to light. With the Army program, Roper noted that several top officials, including Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and US Pacific Command head Adm. Harry Harris had expressed the belief that the Army need to be able to provide cross-domain fires in the future. "