Sounds like You are describing wunderwaffle missle who would cost as much as jet shooting it:
For older missiles the old PIR type IR emission detector was sophisticated enough for hitting aircraft and it was cheap enough to be widely used.
For the air to ground use however it was useless against ground targets because you could not tell what you had locked.
Old thermal imagers were enormously expensive and simply would be overkill for use against aircraft.
Against ground targets you could look at the image and select a real target... indeed many targets could be selected by computer processing of the image so you could let it find potential targets itself with the operator confirming targets and locking them.
Also there are plenty of multichannel weapons about like good old KH-25 family, why would You want to put all seekers in one missle and see it explode?
Kh-25 is not multichannel... it has several seeker options but it can't use more than one guidance option at a time. For instance with a laser spot seeker it is the Kh-25ML or AS-10 Karen laser homing missile... with that seeker fitted it cannot be used against radar installations seeking radar waves like an anti radiation missile.
What would be benefit of added weight and cost. Not to mention You want to tailor missile to Your needs. There are plenty of weapons who have TV guidance in late stage.
If you can make it cheap enough the benefit is flexibility in use... a big radar station is radiating so you launch an anti radiation missile... but the launch is detected so the radar station turns off for a few seconds in the hope the missile will miss. Unknown to the radar station your anti radiation missile has an IR sensor and a very large radar generates a large amount of heat so even though the incoming missile can no longer detect a radar wave signal to home in it can still see a hot spot at exactly the same location it previously saw the radar emissions so it hits the IR target instead of the radio wave target... the radar gets destroyed anyway.
Another combination is ARM and GLONASS... as it flys towards its target it calculates the coordinates of the target so when the radar turns off the missile continues to the location where the radar signal was detected/tracked so the target gets hit anyway.
We have seen versions of the Kh-58 anti radiation missile with IR sensors.
New technology like QWIP sensors make things even more interesting.
[quote]So GarryB, is it possible to design an air-to-air or air-to-ground missile that has several types of seekers in just one missile? In other words the missile will have
1. Radar Guidance
2. IR Guidance
3. TV Guidance
4. Satellite Guidance
Is it possible to design such a missile? Thanks again.[/qutoe]
Very much so.
In fact you can go a step further... radar guidance can be passive ie anti radiation missile, or active, with active radar homing. Satellite inertial guidance is a common standard backup, and IIR and TV guidance will become common with QWIP technology.
Very simply if you look at a digital camera that you have... whether it is a digital video camera or the camera on your cell phone, if you look through the viewer to take a photo or video and point a TV remote control at the viewer and push a button on the remote control... you should see a flashing light behind the black panel on the front of the remote.
Very simply modern CCD chips are sensitive to normal visible light, but they are also sensitive to IR light... not actual heat... they are not thermal cameras, but active IR light.
A QWIP chip is similar and can be made sensitive to a range of light from UV to visible light through to IR. (note UV just means beyond violet light wave and IR means beyond red... visible light is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet... so you have beyond red (IR), then red, then orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet and then beyond violet (ie UV).
A QWIP sensor chip can be made sensitive to all those frequencies and more so like the alien hunter in predator you could switch between frequency ranges to get the best view of the target.
On a clear crisp morning visible frequencies will give the best view, but at night or in bad weather IR can be used to improve normal light frequencies.
A radar dish in the nose of a missile able to detect radar emissions and to send a radar signal in active mode with side mounted optical ports able to detect IR and visible light and UV rays and an internal GLONASS navigation system and you have a real multirole seeker.
Of course it is more realistic to have a radar model with Glonass and an EO model with GLonass... the former can be used against aircraft or moving ground targets and enemy radar, while the latter could be used against pretty much anything... it can see in the dark and it could detect laser spots so you could use it with laser homing systems too.
The point is that QWIP sensor chips can be printed like CCD chips and AESA modules so eventually they will become very very cheap and you will be seeing them all over the place... modern optics are much much smaller than the 1980s... in the 1980s a thermal imager was a vehicle mounted system and an image intensifier was huge... today a modern thermal scope is tiny and it has a ballistics computer built in and laser range finder and target marker etc etc.
Regarding combinations of guidance system some combinations make sense... for instance a TV system might be fooled by camouflage... adding IR means paint or foliage no longer hide targets... but with IR camo being able to use a laser to mark the target means even the most heavily camouflaged target can be hit accurately.
The EO seekers for Ugroza have moving target capability so a tank moving along a road can be locked and targeted by the system. A tank parked and hidden by camo can still be accurately hit by someone pointing a laser at the target... either on the ground or in the air (ie UAV) or the launch aircraft itself.
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