Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
On the way up, perhaps, and maybe that's the key here. Surely they go up much slower than they come down. Maybe the NATO plane was close enough to the launcher to catch it going up. Once it comes down, there is no way that an air-to-air missile would be fast enough, and I doubt it could carry a sufficient guidance system.
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Um.... any object that follows a ballistic trajectory goes up as fast as it comes down.
The issue isn't whether it's going up or down, it's how high it goes -- the missile is going to be slower as it closer to top of its trajectory, regardless of whether it is going up or down. With an ICBM, that point is very very high about the Earth. With a Scud, it presumably isn't, so maybe good radar plus good planes plus good missiles enables it to be shot down.
