What is LW? The effect I originally had in mind was just engagement time. For the system on board, all that matters are how many missiles are inbound and how much time it has to engage them. 20 missiles in 3 seconds is too much for the system, just to pick a figure, but 20 missiles over 3 minutes might barely strain it. The effect of fast missiles purely on the volley-tactic side is to reduce the time factor and stress the overall performance of the missiles. Fire two missiles ten seconds apart and they arrive ten seconds apart no matter their speed, but the stress on the system is not the same. The effect is the same as increasing the volley size. It's always going to be time/#inbounds and making the time smaller is the same as making the #inbounds bigger. The AEGIS system probably has some enormous capacity in terms of "max reliable kill rate per second", but somewhere it does top out, and a supersonic volley will exceed that capacity before the same number of subsonic inbounds. Is this not correct?
So overall there are at least four kinds of effects - evasiveness: how hard is it to hit the missile with defensive weapons, window: how long each missile is available to target with defensive weapons overall, surprise: how close can you get the shot to target before it can detect it? allocation: can you watch the "fall of the shots" before you decide what to do next, or do you need to just fire some # of shots at each missile and rely on a healthy safe average pk?
Basically, missile speed is going to affect all those things. I'm not sure whether surprise is something that can be had easily. Would the NAVY have search radars on any time these threats were possible?
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