Al-Qaeda May Have Just Gained The Ultimate Feared Weapon - The Grail

[JumpinJackFlash]

[QUOTE=GunFox;41011830]Can't engage above roughly seven thousand feet. Commercial airliners are unlikely to drop below 10 thousand for anything other than landing and takeoff. During which they could be engaged by any number of objects. A simple 60mm mortar could fuck up an airliner on the runway.[/QUOTE]Not to mention that if a Strela-2 warhead even did make contact, it would be very, very unlikely to achieve a kill. It uses a high-explosive fragmentation warhead, not a continuous rod like all the really effective SAM systems. It's essentially a grenade on the tip of a guided missile.

As you stated, it's flight altitude severely limits it. Of all the aircraft downed by the Strela-2, a vast majority have been helicopters. Two (modern) airliners have been downed, or claimed to have been downed, but both types of aircraft have a pretty lengthy list of hull losses to accidents. One of them, the Boeing 727, is well-known for it's piss-poor handling, dangerous stall characteristics, and is just a fucking flying hazard. In 2002, an Israeli Boeing 757 was attacked outside of Mombasa by two missiles, both failing to achieve a lock as it took off. All in all, the Strela-2 was designed for and has mostly been used to swat helicopters out of the sky. If high or medium altitude air defense was required, it was intended for the SA-4 and SA-6 were supposed to do the job. All the SA-7 had to do was to keep Cobras and Hueys from fucking up Russian infantry, not kill everything in the air that didn't have a little red star on it.

[GarrettFox]

[QUOTE=archangel125;41014499]I don't think you get how radio frequency missiles work. Radio frequency missiles are radar-guided missiles - They lock onto an aircraft's radar signature. They can be spoofed by chaff - That's essentially a cloud of small radar-reflective filaments that appears as a large aircraft to the tracking missile. There is no such thing as a missile defense system comprised of a machine gun, especially not one that's manned by a human being :P[/QUOTE]

Technically one that homes in on radio signals, as he suggested, wouldn't be RADAR guided, it would be an anti radiation missile like the AGM-88 HARM. Those track radio signals and target them in order to defeat ground based radar installations and blind SAM sites. Those are basically air to surface only however.

Radar guided missiles do as you say and track the radar signature. They read the signal that bounces.

[QUOTE=JoeSkylynx;41014725]Dirty bombs are much worse. With your standard nuke you can return to the area in which was bombed after a few weeks to a few months and just suffer a little bit of increased cancer rates. Dirty bombs though? Entire areas need to be scrubbed, and even then the area can be contaminated and locked for at most two decades. Not to mention if anything gets picked up in say something like a hurricane, your in for a very fun time regarding decontamination and aftershock casualties.[/QUOTE]

Dirty bombs are incredibly ineffective as weapons. The primary fear a government would have with a dirty bomb would be the panic they cause. Ultimately all accounts suggest that the necessary explosives for dispersing the radioactive material would cause more fatalities than any radioactive material they spread regardless of deployment method.

[Joey Skylynx]

Interesting... So what chemical would be the biggest issue for something like using tropical storms as means for mass dispersion?

[uzikus]

This calls for a Holy Crusade!

Rally up, men!