January 7, 201016 yr Remember the Soviet Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS)? Classic Cold War era 'hide under your school desk and kiss your butt goodbye' stuff. Detailed article at Air Power Australia.
January 8, 201016 yr Remember the Soviet Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS)? For years dreaming with FOBS, after reading about it at very short age in Popular Mechanics (really, in the traslated Mecánica Popular, Edición Caribe), I remember also a very short mention of FOBS silos in "The Kremlin Cardinal". And at last, it was a real menace, not only a propaganda atrezzo. Flight trials of the system began on 16 October 1965 from silos at LC-160 and LC-162 at Baikonur. Since orbiting of nuclear weapons was a violation of international treaty, the Soviet Union conducted all tests on a 'fractional orbit' basis - i.e. the test warheads were deorbited after less than one orbit of the earth. The launches were however logged and tracked as satellites by international treaty. There were four launches in 1966 and 10 in 1967. The United States only publicly noted the probable FOBS mission of the tests on 3 November 1967. The system was formally accepted for military service on 19 November 1968. A military regiment to operate the missiles was formed in August 1971. The system was in service at 18 silos at Baikonur from 25 August 1969 to January 1983. Under SALT-2 12 of these silos were demolished, the remaining six being retained for launch of R-36M's converted to orbital launch vehicle use. In common with other R-36 versions, the missile had a 7.5 year guaranteed fuelled storage life and a five minute reaction time. Some other links I'm remembering now: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/ogch.htm (origin of the quote) http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/tsiklon.htm
Create an account or sign in to comment