jhelb Tue Nov 07, 2017 10:49 am
GarryB wrote:I think the two main technologies to effect missile design over the next few decades will be scramjet engines and increased processing power making multi sensor seekers cheap and plentiful.
Up until recently if you wanted a weapon to move fast there was no real choice except solid or liquid fuelled rocket.
With a ramjet you needed something to accelerate the object from standing still to preferably over mach 1... early attempts were long and cumbersome with a long solid booster rocket on the rear, or solid rocket boosters wrapped around the missile making it huge and bulky.
The Soviet innovation of combined rocket ramjet was an elegant solution that made such weapons much more compact and viable.
A scramjet engine offers the potential for either solid rocket and scramjet or variable cycle turbojet scramjet...
So for a missile you have a solid rocket motor accelerate and elevate the missile starting a climb and increasing speed, which then burns out and then fuel is added and a ramjet burns to accelerate the missile to higher and higher speeds.
The potential for small jet motors is interesting... the 1990s test of a tiny scramjet motor on the nose of an SA-5 SAM showed that a scramjet does not need to be big... a normal jet engine needs a subsonic airflow so flying at less than mach 1 or so the air flowing through the engine can be subsonic coming in the front and then compressed and then blow out the back at supersonic speed.
Flying at mach 3 however means the airflow needs to be slowed to subsonic speed... fuel added and then burned and then blow out the back fast enough to generate thrust in an airflow already moving at mach 3... which is not so easy.
With a scramjet you don't slow the airflow... you suck it in to the motor and then add fuel and burn it and then the air mass exits the engine at higher speed than it came in at.... which equals thrust.
A scramjet can generate thrust at supersonic speeds, which makes it much more powerful than any ramjet or turbojet engine...
Another factor for near future technology will be CCD chips which can detect light in a range of frequencies... on board real time processing will allow all sorts of targeting options previously unavailable...
Thanks GarryB. As usual a very well informed answer. What about other techs (for lack of a better term) like
• new propellants
• multi mode seeker
• navigation on chip
Also, the US was working on some bespoke technologies related to missile & missile defense like
Homing Overlay Experiment (HOE) vehicle. The objective of this revolutionary experiment was for one missile to destroy another outside the atmosphere using only force of impact. This was important because the ability to destroy an enemy missile without explosive warheads on the interceptor missile would minimize lethal effects on the ground.
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/100years/stories/hoe.html
ERIS (Exoatmospheric Reentry Interceptor Subsystem) ERIS missile would incorporate a kill vehicle with a long wavelength infrared scanning seeker, a data processor and flight divert attitude control propulsion motors on a two stage rocket booster.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/eris.htm
I’m also certain Russia is currently working on some exotic missile, missile defense tech stuff, but not much is know about these technologies yet