The most lethal of all laser-aided systems, the beamrider missile is a family of weapons designed to use a laser to steer a projectile onto an enemy platform. The difficulty in employing near-field obscurants to defeat LBMs is that once the missile has reached the obscuring field it has already been well-guided and for all intents and purposes can be considered on-target at the point when the onboard forward-looking guidance systems take over. This means that the probability a hit or near-hit remains high. An obscurant capable of rapidly being deployed at hypersonic speeds and at kilometer ranges along the designated Beamriding-Vector (BV) would scatter and disrupt the columnated targeting signal causing the guidance system of the now unattended missile to hunt for the beamrider signal and wander off target causing a miss. Deploying obscurants at hypersonic velocities faces a number of challenges; specifically, the compression (bow shock) and recompression (tail shock) sweep any released particulate into the munitions turbulent wake where they aggregate. The Momentum-Arrest & Shock Collapse LBM countermeasure utilizes an onboard Explosive Impulse Brake to near-instantaneously halt the munition thereby causing shock collapse and allowing for wide area dissemination of obscurants through launchable submunitions.
