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Correct. It's a basic engineering problem that I'm sure you can understand with a car analogy. Let's say your car has a 10-gallon gas tank and you get 20mpg average. You have a range of 200 miles, plus or minus. Let's say that you have to drive somewhere 300 miles away with no gas station enroute. So you start lightening the load...take all the junk out of the trunk, inflate the tires, strip out the passenger seat, etc. At some point, though, you start messing with the structural stability and engine performance of the car ("radiator? Who needs that heavy piece of junk?").Got it, thanks.
Is keeping the missile together on reentry a hard problem? I'm not a rocket man (little or otherwise) but it seems to me that's a problem that was solved many decades ago, and I assume NK knows how it was solved. But maybe it's harder to accomplish in practice than I imagine?
barfo
A missile is already, almost by definition, engineered to be a flying gas tank for the warhead. There isn't a lot of spare stuff involved. So designers try to do things like thin out the skin, or reduce the complexity of control valves, or remove cooling apparati, or whatever. (Caveat: I don't have intricate details of NK missile design, classified or not, so this is all speculation). But it's not trivial to go from having a "successful" missile that goes 2000km or so (the February test) to 13000km. Especially when dealing with temperatures on reentry at roughly Mach 10 to Mach 15 or so. That's the equivalent of having that 200mi-ranged car go to 1300 mi, but with jet engines on the back. I'm not saying they can't (enough fuel, big enough tank, sure, it may get propelled pretty far) but there's nothing talking about guidance (they just hit their own damned city, for goodness's sake) or warhead integrity or QA or ...
If you'd like, there's some fascinating (to me, at least) reading on Werner Von Braun and the rocket programs he was running for almost 4 decades. Lots and lots of failures, even with literal geniuses working all over the programs.
