"Kinzhal" hypersonic aviation-missile complex

Never heard of a country named Kremlin.

A Kremlin is what you get when you feed a Mogwai after midnight...

The main reason they get awesome performance from the Iskander is because of the MiG-31s flight performance with external payloads... to be honest they should be able to achieve much much better performance with scramjet powered weapons in due course... for the very same reasons that you can get much better range performance from jet powered aircraft compared with rocket powered ones.

If the requirement is long range then jets make more sense unless you demand very high flight speed as well then you go to ICBM sized ballistic rockets, but with scramjet technology the options are swinging back to jet powered aircraft...

For some time there was a race between rockets and cruise missiles to create an intercontinental range weapon... ICBMs won that race, but now cruise missiles have been given an enormous boost with scramjet engines and might become much more prolific...

Why Kinzhal is called a hypersonic maneuvering rocket. it's an ordinary ballistic missile like Iskander-M. The missile maneuvers but only to a limited extent like Iskander-M. Only Awangard and Cirkon are hypersonic missiles with the possibility of considerable maneuvers.

So Iskander- M is hypersonic wepons, Bulava is hypersonic wepons, Yars is hypersonic wepons... V-2 is hypersonic wepons All balistic missile is hypersonic wepons.

Iskander max speed is 2100m/s. So this is hypersonic wepons. Old Soviet R-5 it was hypersonic wepons. This is normal balistic missile like Kindzal.

The question is what is revolutionary in Kindzal? I understand Avangard, Cirkon but why Kindzal balistic missile launch from aircraft platform. Balistic missile with MaRV and maneuvrable warhead is nothing new.

But this is not a type of hypersonic weapon like Avangard and Cirkon. It is a ballistic missile launch from an airplane against ship targets like Chinese ballistic missiles launched from the ground against ship.

Why Kinzhal is called a hypersonic maneuvering rocket. it's an ordinary ballistic missile like Iskander-M. The missile maneuvers but only to a limited extent like Iskander-M. Only Awangard and Cirkon are hypersonic missiles with the possibility of considerable maneuvers.

Hypersonic means high supersonic... generally meaning mach 5 plus in this day and age.

So calling the Kinzhal a hypersonic manouvering rocket is just saying that the mach 10 kinzhal can manouver as it approaches its target.

The Iskander is also a hypersonic missile... it flys at mach 6-7, which makes it hypersonic and it does not fly a ballistic path like the bullet fired from a gun... a predictable trajectory.

Both Kinzhal and Iskander manouver during their flight to their target making interception very very difficult.

So Iskander- M is hypersonic wepons, Bulava is hypersonic wepons, Yars is hypersonic wepons... V-2 is hypersonic wepons Laughing All balistic missile is hypersonic wepons

No. V-2 was barely mach 3 on impact and a totally ballistic weapon. V-2 was supersonic ballistic missile, Scud from Desert Storm with extended range was coming in at mach 6 or so because of its extended range but it was not manouvering either so it was a hypersonic ballistic missile... not hard to intercept for ABM systems because although moving very fast its flight path was largely predictable.

Note Patriot struggled with the Mach 6-7 Scud upgrades because it was not designed to hit ballistic missiles and normal aircraft don't move this fast, so firing an average of 32 Patriots at Scuds they found none of the Scuds were actually shot down because the Patriot missiles were hitting the bodies and rear areas of the scuds... but in the final part of the trajectory the bodies and rears are pointless and have done their job so being shredded by fragments from Patriot missiles didn't make any difference it was the falling warheads that were the problem and they hit the ground intact and did their damage anyway.

An S-300V would have targetted the warhead of the Scud and destroyed it in the air because it was designed to hit ballistic missile targets and could direct its warhead fragments at where the targets warhead was.

The Patriot did what it was designed to do... the US clearly were not expecting to fight an enemy with any ballistic weapons... go figure... the Soviets were very well prepared....

Old Soviet R-5 it was hypersonic wepons. This is normal balistic missile like Kindzal.

Kinzhal is based on Iskander and is a manouvering hypersonic missile with extended range because when it is launched it is already 10km plus up in the air and moving at over mach 2.

The question is what is revolutionary in Kindzal? I understand Avangard, Cirkon but why Kindzal balistic missile launch from aircraft platform. Balistic missile with MaRV and maneuvrable warhead is nothing new.

The Iskander isn't just a dumb ballistic missile like Scud... it has sensors on board to detect radar tracking signals so it knows when something is coming to intercept it and it can turn to avoid it and turn again and again to make itself a difficult target... just like Kinzhal does.

A MaRV uses its manouvering performance to manouver away from the warhead bus to hit targets well beyond the trajectory of the ICBM it was launched from... it wont be dodging bullets all the way down...

But this is not a type of hypersonic weapon like Avangard and Cirkon.

Actually it is, the difference is that Avangard is launched from an ICBM, while Zircon is a replacement for ship launched Onyx missiles and also Granit missiles and uses scramjet propulsion and will be powered from launch to impact with target unlike Kinzhal which is rocket powered.

It is a ballistic missile launch from an airplane against ship targets like Chinese ballistic missiles launched from the ground against ship.

Again... that term ballistic means it is launched upwards on a curved trajectory towards the target which it basically falls down upon at high speed but on a relatively predictable trajectory... so even though it is moving fast you can estimate a point in front of it to intercept it easily enough.

The difference is that with Zircon or Kinzhal while your interceptor missile is launched and on its way to that intercept point the target might have started climbing and turning left... shifting the interception point 20-30km from the original point, so you immediately command your interception missile to turn and head for the new interception point, but then your interception point changes again because the incoming missile turns back to the right to an equal angle distance on the other side of its original trajectory so and the interception point shifts 40-60km to the right of the second interception point... which your first launched missile can't now reach in time because that would require a 180 degree turn which would massively reduce its effective range so it can no longer reach the intercept point (your interception missile would be coasting so a hard 180 degree turn would burn up all its energy and it would drop from the sky...

The enormous speeds of these targets means even small flight direction angle changes shift intercept points by enormous distances... 3 seconds before interception and the target turns 10 degrees the tracking system might not detect the new final angle of turn and therefore not know where the new interception point would be by the time the intercepting missile has blown past anyway... you could launch dozens of SAMs and still miss...

Thank you for explaining GarryB. The Cirkon missile, although slower will have better energy for maneuvers. Kindzal can maneuver but loses energy on every maneuver. It is accelerated by an ordinary rocket engine that works for several seconds. American ABM systems like PAC-3 or THAAD were tested against maneuvering warheads. for example, HERA missile which has a maneuvering warhead from Pershing 2. SM-6 missile is to slowly to intercept Kindzal and Cirkon, Oniks

Yeah dude... if anything could intercept them they wouldn't all be having a cow about Russia introducing an uninterceptable anti ship missile...

These missiles climb to a reasonable height and they can manouver in three dimensions... they will be moving through the air at very very high speeds at very very high altitudes where the air is very thin... any speed they lose by turning left or right will be minimal and any speed lost in a small climb will be regained when it dives on the target...

Zircon (note Russian anti ship missiles generally have names related to material... minerals... the Zircon is named after Zirconium, Onyx is a precious stone, Yakhont means Jewel, Granit is a hard stone material etc etc.) is a powered missile so any flight manouvers will not really slow it down much if at all and when it gets to the target area it should be able to accelerate quite a bit because it will probably have burned a ton of fuel and be one ton lighter yet still able to operate its scramjet engine at full thrust...

PAC-3 and THAAD have never been tested against Manouvering hypersonic targets... the HERA warhead is for precision, not evasion.

S-400 and S-500 can't shoot down manouvering hypersonic missiles either... for all the same reasons I mentioned that American missiles can't.

Moving at mach 10 means covering about 3 km per second HE detonates at about that speed so a HE warhead that explodes 1m behind one of these missiles and the missile will be safe because the momentum will mean the shrapnel of the explosion wont catch the missile.... even from 1 metre behind because in a fraction of a second the momentum of the missile will carry it hundreds of metres in the other direction, while the target is moving the other way at a rate of 3km per second...

If you shoot at a duck you will miss, you have to aim ahead of the duck but to do that you need to know which direction the duck is travelling and hope your pellets get to it before it changes direction.

Iskander and Kinzhal and Zircon are moving so fast your eye could not follow them... in fact if one blew past a few metres above you the supersonic shockwave from their passing would rip you to pieces and kill you.


Weapons like this are fantastic because they make war much less likely because when Russia has these the US Navy is totally pointless and helpless.

They have hypersonic missiles and very good IADS so they have a few years head start on developing countermeasures for them... I suspect it will involve high power lasers or particle beams or possibly missiles that work in teams to attack their target together.

Nothing available now will work reliably... except the mass use of airburst nuclear weapons in the path of these missiles and even then you will need to use a lot to be sure.

Well to be fair most in service missiles that are hypersonic are ballistic so interception is fairly straight forward... the S-400 can intercept targets going up to 4.8km/s... what it can't do is anticipate manouvers at random from a non ballistic target.

The new Russian missiles... Iskander ground based missile, Kinzhal air launched derivative, and the new systems... Avangard, Zircon etc are new and rather different from what has come before in that they are designed to evade interception... it was part of their design.

For the failure of Patriot in Desert Storm, it is rather unfair on the US system simply because there was never any requirement for the system to shoot down ballistic missiles... it would be like complaining that Sidewinder wasn't very good at sinking ships.

Now they have PAC-3 and THAAD that are custom designed to hit ballistic weapons.... NOTE BALLISTIC WEAPONS.

It would be like saying a tennis star like Federer would be great at catching birds because he can intercept tennis balls most of the time... the problem for Federer is that he can get the tennis ball most of the time because after it leaves his opponents racket it tends to follow a very predictable path so he can anticipate where he needs to move his body to so he can reach the intercept point with his tennis racket... think of Federer as the SAM and the racket as the warhead of the SAM... if the SAM goes the wrong way the warhead wont reach the target because the racket can only reach so far.

When we talk about manouvering hypersonic missiles replace the tennis ball with a bird at top speed flight... it can climb out of his reach, it can change direction multiple times... and that might slow it down a little but Federer does not have the mobility for that to matter...