The EMF noise created by brushlessmotors used by drones can probably be triangulated by some NRO satellite constellation.
Just 155 airburst the coordinates, if no other agency claims the drones as property.
teledyne flir is holding the global monopoly on the most advanced image sensors across the spectrum.
Ever say anything in thermal? Thats them. Allways.
At a certain point just build a nuke big enough to take the whole planet and u dont need a launch system, but remember to tell ur opponent about it....
I dont know where the cuting edge startracker tech is nower days, but in the first cold war this stuff was borderline analog. Basically lining up some light sensors with tubes on them into the position of the stars u wanted to track.
If then lets say one star turns into 2 stars (one is just a reflection of a sat) then the chance of fucking up tracking could be 50/50.
But yeah today theres gona be probably 3-12 cameras and some digital wiz calculations, but i doubt that most legacy ICBM systems are upgraded to that.
ima stay fully non credible here and just claim that the starlink constellation can probably be used engage basically everything because there is no "beyond visual horizon", the constellation is probably useable as distributed synthetic aperture in multiple wavelengths.
Its also very usable for guidance telemetry.
With all that infrastructure in place...not sure if there is still need for flying trucks with limited amounts of air to air missiles.
Just add a solid booster stage to some Meteor missiles that have starlink telemetry and u can engage basically everything that flies in a 900km range around each missile battery.
Ill doubt i have the technical expertise to judge any of that.
I think the future of air defense against most air breathing mid sized airborne targets will include:
Initial target detection via decentral passive radar detectors (using satellites as radar illumination)
computational layer to choose the next available air defense asset capable of intercepting
guidance of interceptor to the area of interest via telemetry link
once the target is in visual range THEN some far IR cam+"AI buzzword of the day" comes in for terminal guidance
I dont even know if it makes sense to call the computation in the missile itself "AI" cuz it dosent take much intelligence for matching 3D models of airplanes to the life picture of the cam and keep that in center.
Against the open sky the contrast is so good that fucking 70s analog tech could track a IR blob against it.
Top down against ground clutter the process may be more complicated but can be easy tackled by just giving it better optics that only keep the jet and not the ground in focus.....
So its painted in something that has contrast at 12μm wavelength? at this point paint aint gona cut it and u have to put heating stripes below the aircraft's skin.
There are basically no "fantasy" elements, the book keeps you on edge with every page, its the most tense book i have ever read, i fr could NOT LAY IT DOWN until it was thru.
Stuff why u should read the book:
Liquid nitrogen hand granades
magnetic pneumatic shootable grappeling hook
French special forces beeing assholes
more Deus ex machina moments than i ever saw before in a singular book
and imagen all the lenses, mirrors and and prisms in that, precision to the nanometer in surface finish, all that in a multitude of spectra