"Burevestnik" Nuclear-powered cruise missile

These cruise missiles might spend 4 months flying around the south Atlantic... and then approach the US from the south... 4 months after most of the population centres in the US are vapourised do you think there will be order to the point where major air bases are rebuilt and air defence is operational?

Even without WWIII how good is CONUS air defence?

Even if they spot the missiles what will they do about them?

In fact they could probably have them operate at medium or high altitude... it would not be that hard to get them to supercruise if the engines are powerful enough.

They could even make them rather huge and fit them with dozens of small nuke warheads that could be dropped all over the US... perhaps even a dirty engine that spews out radiation and just have it fly all over north america for 5-10 years... don't even fit it with warheads...

Could the burevestnik be made into a conventional cruise missile with unlimited range, with which Russians can bomb any part of the planet from the safety of Russian territory. In a major war against NATO, they could constantly target US merchant shipping in the atlantic without having to risk submarines.

With a conventional warhead the motor would remain largely intact, and represent a significant radiation hazard.

Further more in conventional warfare low flying cruise missiles are easy targets for airborne radar and air defences... satellites could pick up the heat signature and airborne radar could detect them a long ranges and they could be engaged easily enough by air power....

With a nuke warhead used after WWIII however air defence networks and satellite recon will be in tatters...

Also, why can't the nuclear engine be made such that it absolutely doesnt contaminate anything with its exhaust? The exhaust should be just hot air, why not seal the reactor even more?

It could... to give you a reason why... the Tu-95 bomber modified to have nuclear propulsion resulted in an aircraft with unlimited range but a 6 ton payload because of the weight of the nuclear propulsion and the shielding to protect the crew... to get airborne the biggest payload was about 6 tons.

It had unlimited flight range... but could not take off with low fuel and then be fuelled in the air to maximise range, so with only 6 tons payload it was too limited to be useful.

The missile plume is probably clean as a whistle when flying.

No hydrocarbons... quite green compared with a kerosene engine...

Obviously the Burevestnik with its thermal ramjet uses air so doesn't need fuel as such.

Yes... a conventional engine scoops up oxygen to burn the fuel carried in tanks, this motor uses air as fuel, but does not need oxygen to burn so it should operate at very high altitudes rather efficiently... assuming rocket boosters to get it moving it could have a ramjet motor design with no moving parts and with no combustion it would act as a scramjet because the intake air would not need to be slowed to allow fuel to burn with air to create hot gas exhaust...

Rather interesting really....

You can't really call it a scramjet as scramjet means supersonic combustion ramjet and there is no combustion involved...

More importantly the heat generated by flying at hi supersonic speed for extended periods would likely reduce the weapon to ash within a few months...

However if the plane is a small turbojet to get moving and nuclear ramjets to accelerate to orbital speed, you could then leave the atmosphere and pump slush nitrogen into the "engines" which super heats them and blasts them out the back as thrust in the vacuum of space...

Nitrogen is a good idea because it is inert, so there is never risk of fire or explosion, and the atmosphere consists of 70% nitrogen so it is abundant...

There is no reason why it could not be hypersonic or faster... a normal ramjet is limited by the fact that it must slow down incoming air to subsonic speeds before fuel is added and burned... in this engine there is no need to slow the air down at all so there would be no practical upper speed limit really...

Obvious problem being nuclear material in the engine so no use in conventional war, so it would not be as usable as Kinzhal for instance.

i rather suspect the purpose of this weapon is a get you back when you think you have survived type system... which means flying low or flying very high it really does not need high speed... that would just mean it would cover more distance, but at the end of the day that is not really important.

being subsonic at very low altitude it might actually be supersonic at higher altitudes... who knows.

Unlike a conventional jet it wont get much lighter over time as the fuel burn rate will be tiny...

A conventional scramjet engine can operate at very high altitudes... above about 30km there is very little air, but moving at 6 times the speed of sound or faster the amount of oxygen going through the engine is more than enough to burn fuel...

At normal air pressure at normal temperatures you can blow on embers... you are not adding fuel, you are increasing the oxygen available for the fuel to burn... obviously however if you blow too hard you risk blowing any fire out.

In a normal jet engine supersonic air will blow out the flame and the fuel stops burning... in a scramjet no speed of airflow is high enough to blow out the fire... it can burn fuel supersonically...

Of course with this nuclear engine there is no fire and no flame to blow out... likely the speed limit would be the short period of time the air flows through the very hot bits would limit its ability to heat the air blowing out the back of the engine... remember air heated expands... hot expanding air means thrust.

Ironically the temperature this engine is working at even water could be injected to increase thrust... when water is heated to 1,000 degrees or more it turns instantly into a gas... a litre of water would generate a huge volume of gas... so flying through a rain storm would likely increase the engines thrust enormously...

Very interesting really...

A high-altitude hypersonic version of the Burevestnik would require a nuclear engine with a power output literally 10x greater, if not more. Not beyond the pale, but its a huge leap beyond the current tech being trialed.

And it introduces the problem of scale... to make it 10 times more powerful might make it 50 times heavier... which means it is not powerful enough any more so it needs to be even more powerful again etc etc.

The end result will be a very very fast weapon but a lot of work for what it is intended for.

In a few decades it might be the best option to get an aircraft from a runway to orbital speed where other more exotic propulsions take it to other planets, but for now... probably not.

The atmosphere goes up to about 100km or so, above about 20km no normal aircraft can operate normally... the highest altitude achieved by jet engine powered aircraft is about 31km, but that is not level flight that is a climb parabola... sometimes called a zoom climb.

The point is that if you are a fast moving missile it is easier to operate at higher altitude.

When you are stationary on the ground a small area like your hand has to move very quickly to generate any sort of lift to effect your body weight.

Stick your hand out the window of a moving car and you can feel real force acting on you when you change the angle of your hand in the wind.

Increase speed to mach 8 and all of a sudden even a small control surface generates a lot of lift... and small control surfaces are better because while they generate a lot of lift they don't generate a lot of drag.

Moving at mach 8 means an enormous volume of air moves through the engine each second... which means you can operate much higher than if you were moving slower.

30km is a practical limit for turbojet propelled aircraft moving at up to about mach 2-3.

Keep in mind that this aircraft is a lightened version of the MiG-31... the SR-71 is just too long to operate at such heights and would not get enough body lift to stay airborne at anything like that height... even though it can fly faster.

This is just a guess, but I would say Zircon should be able to operate between 40-60km altitude due to its speed and its performance for manouver should be pretty good for an object moving that fast.

Keep in mind that when flying at Mach 3.2 (its top speed) an SR-71 cannot turn 180 degrees and stay within the boundaries of the state of California... and a missile should be able to turn much faster... but also moving much faster will not be super agile...

Note unlike most rocket powered high speed missiles however the Zircon will be powered so manouvers might slow it down a little but it can speed up again too.

The problems of scale exist yet would benefit from increased speed.

What I mean is that a hypersonic little missile might be tricky because a small missile does not have much space for fuel.

Something huge like a spaceshuttle however has that big ass fuel tank plus the weight of all that fuel that can be replaced by the nuclear reactor and shielding...

If you had a missile with a 10,000km range then it has a lot of fuel weight in the design... in other words the fraction of the vehicle that consists of fuel would be high compared with a much shorter ranged missile.

This extra weight can be replaced in a nuclear powered missile...

In an ATGM you might have 5kgs of space for propulsion over 3-5km, but with a 5,000km range cruise missile you probably have a 2.5 ton missile of which probably 1.8 tons is probably fuel... 500kgs is warhead and the remaining 300kgs is electronics and structure and engine.

If we are looking at 10 ton missiles then a nuclear powered ramjet motor should be rather interesting. A ramjet motor by nature has a large hollow empty area where the air flows and fuel is heated/burned. In the case of a nuclear powered missile that area can be used for a solid rocket motor to get the whole weapon moving initially... the missile would not lose a lot of weight during its flight because it is not burning fuel and its fuel fraction would be tiny because the engine fraction is so big and heavy.

So the missile would remain about 10 tons all the way, but over time the engine would increase speed and climb in altitude and would eventually become hypersonic and rather tricky to deal with.

If you want something to fly low over the Ukraine then it wont be hypersonic... it would barely be supersonic...

Because if they knew they were going to launch a first strike on Russia using SSBNs then they could simply sail their SSBNs under a carrier group at medium speed... anything under the water or on the water or above the water following the SSBNs would be detected and could be engaged... even with nuclear propulsion a subsonic cruise missile is an easy kill for even a very basic fighter aircraft let alone SAM.

Also you would pretty much have to have them following SSBNs everywhere... which greatly increases the chances of one of them crashing and being captured... and you can imagine the condemnation in the west over nuclear pollution and nuclear weapon proliferation... potentially handing a nuclear warhead to anyone who finds it...

Besides stopping some SLBMs from hitting Russia does not scare the US... what scares them is that after 5 years they step out of their bunker and all of a sudden things start exploding... i mean lets be real... they could have a base with 500 of these cruise missiles that is secret somewhere in the huge vastness of Russia... they could be in some old obsolete coal mine... they might have an automatic timer that doesn't even launch the damn things until 4 years after the first attack.

Actually that would be a cool computer game... Crysis 10... you have to move through post apocalypse Russia trying to hunt down these missiles before they launch to protect the newly built little pockets of humanity that have survived... no 21st C stuff... remember it has to work in -40 degree C temps so we are talking Mosin rifles and AKs... none of that M16 shit.... ahahahahaahahha.

Well I suppose a subsonic nuclear powered drone would still work I would love to see the look on a ukropi SAM officers face when he can't shoot down a Russian recon drone becuase it is nuclear powered.

He wouldn't know it was a nuke until he shot it down and looked at the wreckage... likely getting a lethal dose before he realised its design is somehow different...