From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Mon Jul 03 2000 - 19:48:52 MDT
On Mon, 03 Jul 2000, Spike Jones wrote:
>
> ...which was quite insufficient at that time and now. To stop
> aa nuke missile after MIRV, you really need body to body contact,
> which requires the very fastest computers available today, plus a
> whole bunch of other support stuff that the bad guys dont have yet,
> wont have for some time to come, and is a hell of a challenge
> even for the good guys today.
Yes and no. The seeker uses a wicked cool cocktail of algorithms to
discriminate and home in on RVs; of the half dozen or so different
algorithms used in parallel, a couple are classified and give extended
discrimination capabilities outside those algorithms in the public domain.
But a supercomputer it is not. As I recall, the slick product your shop
puts out runs primarily on a MIPS 3k embedded core with a boring mid-range
DSP for number crunching. Which makes sense because these types of
algorithms operating in such a limited window don't require that much
crunch to work.
The real high-tech features that seperate it from what the bad guys can
do are the extended discrimination capabilities, and the bleeding edge
materials science that was required to make a homing device that could
withstand the extreme environment. The window that the sensor looks
through alone is more sophisticated than the materials manufacturing
capabilities of most countries (possibly all countries, save the US, but I
am not sure what the current materials capabilities of other countries
currently are).
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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