Originally Posted by
Low average
If we can't even successfully fire telemetry rounds, it points to deeper issues and lowers my confidence that we're capable of vaporising Moscow or Beijing from thousands of miles away.
ORAC has covered this in his previous posts. Adding telemetry also adds a different layer of complexity but the telemetry is there to measure performance and allow intervention in the event of a malfunction after launch. Without the telemetry you cannot guarantee the misssile is performing as expected, and you cannot intervene if it is not, which means your safety calculus (risk to 3rd parties, geo-political effects, etc.) becomes invalid unless you know even a malfunctioning missile will stay within the range safety trace.
You might expect a salvage or destroy in situ op will be under way, and any investigation will look at the data to determine exactly where/why the termination happened. I hope we will not be told the outcome, because we do not need to know. Warshots of any weapon can and do fail, and it would be reasonable to expect there to be a back-up process in the event a launch against a primary target fails at an early stage. It would be even more reasonable to expect it will not be discussed on PPrune.
The fact that the crew was able to execute a firing at the end of a complex chain of events should raise confidence rather than lower it - every other time they have run this sequence it will have been a simulation or a 'switches safe' practice.