Of the deployment methods suggested, we can immediately discount ballistic missiles—engineering these drones to survive reentry would drive up costs way in excess of any benefit.
Ballistic missiles need not be ICBMs. Even short range ballistic missiles are difficult to intercept, and those have much lower peak temperatures as well as a higher payload fraction.
Yep, looks like we don’t need much engineering below a thousand km to survive reentry in the payload container.
We do however need a deployment method to get the drones out of the missile and to the target.
At it’s slowest point of the descent the rocket is travelling way to fast for a sensitive drone. The rocket will have to release a container, which deploys a parachute, which then releases the drones.
This is well within current capabilities, but is the kind of thing thats difficult to get right without real life testing and iteration—very difficult for a terrorist group to do in secret.
This is essentially the same problem as distributing bioweapons from theater-range ballistic missiles: solvable for large industrial states but hard, expensive and requires a lot of testing
Ballistic missiles need not be ICBMs. Even short range ballistic missiles are difficult to intercept, and those have much lower peak temperatures as well as a higher payload fraction.
Yep, looks like we don’t need much engineering below a thousand km to survive reentry in the payload container.
We do however need a deployment method to get the drones out of the missile and to the target.
At it’s slowest point of the descent the rocket is travelling way to fast for a sensitive drone. The rocket will have to release a container, which deploys a parachute, which then releases the drones.
This is well within current capabilities, but is the kind of thing thats difficult to get right without real life testing and iteration—very difficult for a terrorist group to do in secret.
This is essentially the same problem as distributing bioweapons from theater-range ballistic missiles: solvable for large industrial states but hard, expensive and requires a lot of testing