Raketenmüllabfuhr

Raketenmüllabfuhr is the discarded early idea of Stachelschwein DDS: bag ballistic rockets with nets between drones. The question arrived as a bonus, not as a job. Four drones hold a net. A ballistic rocket flies in. What happens?

If the rockets will not put themselves in the bin, the rubbish truck comes to the rockets.

The sentence stays. The product nav does not get it. Level 1 is the scanner on the roof. Rocket defence stays with the military until there are ears you can measure.

Four drones spanning a net like a fishing trawl. A rocket flies in.

Does the net stretch and snag? Is there a hole, and the rocket is through? Friends said: too fast, too hard, it just flies through. Coarse physics agrees, long before anyone says ICBM.

Anti-drone nets catch quadcopters and slow fixed-wing birds because they are slow, light, and have open rotors that eat string. Fortem DroneHunter and Germany’s Argus A1-Falke work in that league. A Shahed-136 sits around 185 km/h. That is net territory.

A Grad 9M22 rocket weighs 66 kg and reaches about 715 m/s in Soviet ballistics. Kinetic energy:

E = ½ × 66 × 715² ≈ 17 MJ

TNT releases about 4.2 MJ per kilogram. 17 MJ is roughly four kilograms of TNT, as motion only, warhead not counted. Four multirotors plus a few kilos of Dyneema cannot absorb that or turn it.

A hole. A tear-off. Almost no path change.

At these closing speeds the material has no time to stretch like a rope. The impulse is local and high enough that fibres snap or melt. Result: a rip or a hole, the rocket continues, barely slower.

If the net snags, it fails at the mounts or takes the drones with it. Momentum: four times five to twenty kilograms against 66 kg at 715 m/s. The drones get thrown. The rocket path barely moves.

Stretch-and-tangle is the wish image, a fishing net around a slow fish. That wants mass, an anchor, time, and drag. A soft net between four light carriers is not an anchor.

A small path nudge, a tumble, an early fuze: that is the thought behind cages against FPV on the ground. On a ballistic warhead with an impact fuze and a steep dive it is uncertain, and it is not an intercept.

That escalated quickly. A 50 metre sack around the bang stays an image, not a design. The sack would sit inside the fireball.

“Ordinary rockets” are not Mach 20. They are still steel at Mach 2.

Mach 20 is ICBM re-entry. Below that sit several classes, and that is what decides whether drones get a vote.

If you say “no ICBM, just ordinary rockets”, you usually land on Grad, HIMARS, Iskander. That is a different physics from Shahed.

100 quadcopters do not change the class. They change the labour.

100 typical quads at 5 kg are 500 kg of hanging mass. They are effectively still. The Grad brings about 47,000 kg·m/s of momentum. The net has to take that in milliseconds. Fibres fail locally before 100 carriers notice. More carriers means more strings snapping at once. Not an anchor.

A Grad salvo is 40 tubes in about 20 seconds. You would need many nets, in many places, metre-accurate, in wind, at night, under counter-electronics. That is not a physics upgrade. That is a logistics nightmare.

Against Shaheds: interceptor swarms yes. Against a single Grad: the net stays paper.

You are the bug on the windscreen.

Attack drones that ram mass into the rocket nose are Ukrainian interceptor logic against Shaheds. Against a Grad nose the momentum transfer is almost empty. 2 to 8 kg of plastic against 66 kg of steel, or against a hardened ogive. The quad comes apart on the nose. The nose does not come apart on the quad.

Hitting is the real problem. A 122 millimetre tube at supersonic-plus, from a hovering drone, is a guidance problem in fractions of a second. Against Shahed (slow, large, propeller, minutes of time) that is solved. Against Grad it is not, not with cheap multirotors.

A warhead on the interceptor stops being a net story and becomes a small air-to-air weapon. That is closer to a cheap missile than to Stachelschwein.

The only famous “net” against an ICBM was a rigid hammer.

Homing Overlay Experiment, 10 June 1984: first successful hit-to-kill against an ICBM dummy outside the atmosphere. The overlay was a fold-out ribbed umbrella, about 4 metres across, aluminium ribs and steel weights on the kill vehicle itself. Closing speed on the order of 6 km/s. Not a soft catch net. A larger rigid hammer. That line became today’s exo kill vehicles.

Patents for net interceptors against RPGs and cruise missiles exist. Alexander Bolonkin proposed AB-Nets around 2008: fibre nets that hang a drogue on the rocket. Concept papers, not fielded systems.

Practice of the last decades: Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, Patriot, THAAD, SM-3, GMD. Missiles against missiles, hit-to-kill or fragments. Lasers against drones, sometimes against rockets in boost. Soft nets are the tool against drones and RPGs. Cope cages over positions are a different league from an Iskander in a dive.

We skip rocket defence for now and leave it with the military.

We do Level 1 first and can still level later. Level 1 is the Stachelschwein Scanner: Remote ID, sound, later radio and camera, fusion in the monitor. Intercept against Shahed-class stays drawn, not week one. Raketenmüllabfuhr stays magazine.

The useful prey for roofs, cheap sensors and many small interceptors is the Shahed class, maybe later slow cruise if the interceptors fly like small fighters, not like camera drones. 100 quadcopters do not turn a net into a Patriot.

Stachelschwein DDS listens first. The rubbish truck in the sky comes when the ears stand.