Theory · a fight with ourselves
Can a net put a ballistic missile in a sack?
Müllabfuhr im Himmel is the joke that wants to be an engineering question. Here we try to kill it, then try to keep it alive.
01 · The no
A polymer net is not a Patriot.
A short-range ballistic re-enters at roughly Mach 3 to 4. An IRBM much faster. An ICBM re-entry vehicle around 7 km/s. Kinetic energy grows with the square of speed. One kilogram at 7 km/s carries about 25 MJ, several times TNT of the same mass. A fishing net that catches a 30 m/s quad will not catch a 2000 m/s warhead. It will become gas, or a brief spark in the plasma sheath.
A 50 metre rubbish sack around the bang is not a containment vessel. A typical SRBM warhead dumps its energy in a radius measured in hundreds of metres. The sack is inside the fireball. Command-detonated fuzes do not care that you hugged them. They go off because someone told them to, or because the shock of the hug looks like impact.
Against a true ballistic, a net is a slogan. Hit-to-kill exists because the energy of the closing speed is the weapon.
02 · The yes, if we cheat the word ballistic
Slow things in the sky are a different animal.
A Shahed-class inbound sits around 50 m/s. A subsonic cruise missile around 250 m/s. Fortem and Argus already net drones in that neighbourhood. A fishing-trawl of four or ten interceptors is a geometry problem, not a plasma problem. Warning time is minutes if you see them far enough. That is the Stachelschwein intercept layer, and it does not need a sack.
The only way a bag makes physics is if relative speed goes near zero. That is rendezvous, not intercept: match the trajectory, fly formation, then throw a shroud. That is docking. It wants minutes, not milliseconds, and a target that still flies like an aircraft. A ballistic re-entry vehicle in the last four seconds of plasma does not offer that appointment.
Boost phase is the other cheat: the rocket is still slow, still fat, still on fire. Seeing it from a German roof is the joke. Seeing it from a high ear (balloon, mother drone, someone else's radar) is a military problem, and then you still need an effector that is not PETG.
03 · Verdict
Keep the Müllabfuhr for drones and for slow cruise. Print it on the intercept page as a direction, not as a Patriot replacement. A ballistic in a bin is folklore until someone shows a closing speed under a few tens of metres per second. We will not smuggle that folklore into Scanner v0.1.