Russia does not currently have scramjet missiles in its equipment. They only test Cirkon, and nothing is known about it.
Kinzhal is supposedly operational, and Zircon is very close.
This means it can fly 3,2Ma... constant speed (944 ms right? Ma=2,95,4)
The Mach 2.83 top speed was a limit of the engines... specifically the fan blades over heating issues.
With newer blades able to operate at higher temperatures and to survive higher rotational speeds the top speed might have increased...
Eustace jumped form baloon on 41kms so there is air there
You are not understanding what I was saying.
A zoom climb allows a plane to operate for a short period at a height it would not normally be able to fly at... but not because it is a vacuum.
These high speed aircraft have very thin wings optimised to generate lift to keep the aircraft in the air, but also for very low drag at high speed.
Just because it can zoom climb to 37km doesn't mean above that height is no air, it just means the air at more than 30km or so is too thin to support a MiG flying at max speed in level flight, so to get to that height or higher it needs to perform a special manouver called a zoom climb.
It is not unique... the F-15 needed to do that too to intercept high flying fast MiG-25s in the Middle East... F-4s with Sparrows were not good enough... they needed the faster higher flying F-15 for the job.
In the same sense you would need a MiG-25 to intercept an SR-71 and for the same reasons a MiG-23 would likely not be good enough for the job.
Spaceship one with speed of 3,500 km/h can have ballistic ceiling about 100 km although is rocket propelled.
Rockets don't use lifting surfaces like wings to keep them airborne, so their ceiling is based on rocket thrust... not speed.
I dont think 100 km is any fetish here. More important is fighting satellites, PGS (flying 50-90 kms) and X-37 kind of intruders. Perhaps also bombing of enemy CVS. Kind of modified Kinzhal fired form 50km can possibly fly 4,000km or so.
More likely 2,500-3,000km I would say... the rocket booster would get it up to a higher speed than at lower altitudes as there is less friction/drag and it would not need to climb at all... with smart fuel control that should greatly reduce the amount of fuel used to climb and accelerate, which can then be used for efficient cruise flight... which should be excellent for extending range.
Spaceship One with 3000 km/h got to 112 km ceiling
Key is in the title...
Space ship one. MiGs are air breathing jets...
So GarryB, all the legacy subsonic cruise missiles that Russia still has, that are powered by TURBOJET ENGINES, can they be refit with Ram Jet or Scram Jet when these missiles are upgraded or will new TURBOJET engines be used to replace the old ones ?
Supersonic flight at low altitude takes an enormous amount of fuel, so for most existing cruise missiles adding ramjets would make the engine slightly lighter, but I don't think it would increase speed or performance all that much.
I think it would be more valuable to develop very high speed missiles like Kinzhal, that could be used to hit air bases and SAM sites and command centres to make penetration of the air defences much easier for the subsonic missiles that follow behind.
Eventually a pulse detonation design could be adapted to existing types to increase the thrust so a lower thrust and fuel burn rate could achieve increases in range, but as most are subsonic I don't think it makes sense to try to turn them into supersonic missiles... the other changes needed to flight controls and nose cones would mean a lot of expense for little practical gain... to fly supersonic they could not hug the ground...
Flying faster means flying higher so they lose their low penetration advantages and you introduce heat issues... flying faster generates more heat that must be dealt with.
If they do upgrade older missiles I suspect it will only to be with more fuel efficient engines that extend range rather than increase speed.
Again, MiG-31 is already almost a 3 M plane (even more as you point out). That is not critically slow IMHO even when it is clear that the faster the better.
Well the MiG-25 was a mach 2.83 plane too and it had an 11 ton thrust engine... there was talk of fitting it with the 15 ton thrust engine of the MiG-31 but they went with the MiG-31 instead...
MiG-31 and MiG-25 were engine limited to Mach 2.83 to prevent damage to the engines...
Improvements should increase the speed limits I would expect.
So this is quite old... but still apparently complex,
Well ramjets predate WWII but talk of ramjet powered missiles is not talked about as being old technology really... and V-1 buzzbombs used pulse detonation engines so they aren't new either... it is new for Russia.
Certainly, but this part of making the combustion supersonic is where the technology is still apparently stuck at. That is why PDE is crucial.
If the goal is mach 4.2 then scramjets are not needed... they can be a block 5 upgrade in 10-15 years time.
For now a turbofan/ramjet motor should be quite straightforward... the hard issues are dealing with the heat...
It seems you suggest the combustion in a rocket is not subsonic, am I right or did I misunderstood you?
I don't know for sure.... normally propellant needs to burn rather than detonate, but some propellants spontaneously explode when they come into contact with each other...
Replace gun powder with HE in a normal rifle bullet and destroy the gun and injure the operator... a CIA trick during the Vietnam war... to try to undermine confidence in Soviet supplied equipment... I am sure all those American soldiers who picked up AKs because their government issue rifle wasn't working appreciated that...
Exactly the point of the detonation engine. You can theoretically move all the way from subsonic to highly hypersonic since as you said you do not need anymore to slow down the incoming air. From the interview posted by GunshipDemocracy:
You are saying pulse detonation engines can get us to orbital speeds, but scramjets will do that too... and turbofans will be needed to get from the hangar down the runway and into the air...
PD might improve the performance of a turbofan, but not to the point where a ramjet or scramjet is going to be less efficient I don't think...
... nuclear things tend to be difficult to handle you know!
Actually thankfully I don't know...
There was a big US cruise missile developed in the 50s or 60s that was nuclear powered... a nuclear powered ramjet... it flew at mach 3 at very low level and had two propulsion options... a clean model where a material was superheated by the reactor and was then pumped into the engine to superheat the air as it went through, and a dirty model where the fuel rods directly heated the air.
This was a big missile and flying at almost a kilometre a second the shockwave from the missiles flight could kill people and damage buildings on the ground... the dirty propulsion would also irradiate the air as it passed.
Being nuclear powered it could fly for years and could carry... I think about 24 small nuclear warheads that were ejected up in flight and slowed by parachute to then drop to the ground... by the time it landed and exploded the missile would be out of the blast radius and continuing to its next target.
They never built it.... deeming it too dangerous... because they knew the other side would develop the same thing.
Yes I understand the advantages of speed, only say that a 30% increase in speed is not bringing the weapon into another category capable of countering i.e. hypersonic threats, even more if the range is not very big. Still unsure about the project, what requirements, basic technologies and actual time frame will end up being implemented dunno
The 31 is getting older and is very useful... so its capabilities need to be provided by something else... PAK FA is not fast enough and would be too expensive anyway. MiG-41 is a from scratch new design that will likely do the same job rather better in several ways... what is not to like?
Perhaps this "extra" 2thousands km/h can add dynamic ceiling from 30 till 80-100 kms? Not to mention new level to technology for hypersonic transport/planes?
As I was trying to say it is not all about speed... the SR-71 normally operated at Mach 3.2 and there is no evidence it could fly any faster, though there are claims of 3.5 but I have not seen any real evidence to confirm that... the SR-71 is a very long aircraft that is rather unbalanced and unable to operate at very high altitudes... it never tried to beat the MiG-25s 37.5km altitude record because at higher altitudes its front would likely have stalled and its nose plunged and possibly destroyed the aircraft if it had tried.
Its altitude limit is something like 80,000ft which is not really that high at all. 37,500m is something like 116,000ft.
Hmm mesh can heat of course air but this is not about temperature but heat transfer, right? with mesh it is hard to imagine adiabatic expnasion ti si more like grill on steroids.
More dense mash? mesh and you have problems with air flow.
Not mesh like a screen door to stop bugs getting into your house or a pot scrubbing pad... but something that encourages air flow, with maximum surface area for heat transfer from the mesh to the air as it passes through...
Someone claimed the MiG-41 could possibly leave the atmosphere and travel trough space. The ultimate short cut.
Lots of problems there too... there was talk of a long range super high speed airliner that used rockets that left the atmosphere and hit the atmosphere at very shallow angles so it skipped along the atmosphere like a stone skipping on water...
problem is that these aircraft are moving very very fast and the atmosphere is not perfectly uniform... you could clip a bulge that hits a wing and spins you... no air resistance and no airflow keeping you nose forward so clipping the wing could spin the plane terribly so when it came to the next skip contact you could be at any angle and with no way to reorient yourself... eventually you will lose enough speed to no skip and to instead plunge down into the atmosphere... going sideways at mach 4... let alone 6km/s will rip your aircraft apart...
As I mentioned above a zoom climb to max your altitude.... that is what you would have to do to pop out of the atmosphere... but the thing is that at such altitudes the air is rather thin anyway so the aircraft outside the atmosphere could coast indefinitely without slowing down... but with no conventional assistance from the engines... so moving fast using no fuel is good... until you drop back down into the air and have to restart your engines to maintain speed...
the thing is only the very top of the parabola will you get this free ride... I just wonder if it is worth it...
That is only until the production line of the -31 gets restarted
Why restart MiG-31 production when you can start MiG-41 production with a new from scratch design and all new materials and production capability... not to mention computer aided design and testing...
Well, the requirements for the threats are pipe dreams and bluffs to a great extent... it is risky to rush headlong into developing the next superweapon to counter them.
Mach 4.2 is not a super technology... they could probably do it right now... using turbofans and ramjets... but what they can do with a totally from scratch design minimise the amount of surface area needing to take enormous temperatures and optimise the airframe for very very high speeds so in 10 years time when that pulse detonation turbofanscramjet engine makes much faster speeds possible they can make minor modifications and add it... something they certainly could not do with a slightly modernised new build MiG-31.
You are very kindly giving them 2.000 km/h for the price of 1 M aren't you? Very Happy Never mind, they need to be much faster than stated until now to be hypersonic or to go to near space... more progress is needed!
At beyond mach 5 you get body lift so wing lift is no longer important...
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Never mind, they need to be much faster than stated until now to be hypersonic or to go to near space... more progress is needed!
