Tu-22M3: News

Scramjet solves those fuel issues.

Mir wrote:@Tolstoy

Vulcan is pretty potent but I think you are confusing it with Granit.

Brahmos was developed from Onyx - which in turn was designed to eventually replace a number of missiles including Granit.

Your explanation is correct. But it is GarryB who is comparing Brahmos with Vulcan. Brahmos is an inferior version of Onyx, leave alone comparing it with Vulcan.

Rubbish! Zero help from India.

That is the racist in you talking.

At the very least the Brahmos got land attack capacity because India wanted it and India funded it.

The Russian military then realised it might be useful to apply that to their own missiles.

Vulcan is at least two generations ahead of Brahmos.

Vulcan is enormous and does not have superior performance to Onyx from which Brahmos is indirectly developed from.

Brahmos is an improved Yakhont missile.

When fired in a swarm one of the Vulcan missile climbs to a higher altitude and designates targets while the others attack. Brahmos never had any such capabilities.

Vulcan does that, but so does Granit and surprise surprise Onyx does that too... except the upgraded electronics means Onyx can be grouped in much bigger groups than the older missiles can because improved electronics and datalinks means more communication channels and more processing power and memory capacity.

If the front section is the fuel tank it will be destroyed during the cruise phase because of extremely high Mach speed (Mach 6 and above).

The idea of the fuel tank in front is so the fuel can absorb the heat from high speed and then be pumped back directly into the engine where the heat can be used to improve ignition... when the fuel is used up in the nose mounted fuel tank it can be jettisonned and the internal fuel system of the missile can be used to maintain speed and altitude with a reduction in weight and volume with the loss of the front mounted fuel tank.

Your explanation is correct. But it is GarryB who is comparing Brahmos with Vulcan. Brahmos is an inferior version of Onyx, leave alone comparing it with Vulcan.

The only time I mentioned Vulcan was this:

Kh-31 and Kh-35 and Granit and Moskit and Vulcan etc etc all had land attack capacity added, the technology was developed with India when they gave Onyx the ability to hit land based targets too.

And my comment stands... Granit and Moskit and Vulcan are all big heavy rocket ramjet powered missiles... Granit is about 7 tons and Moskit was about 4.5 tons and Vulcan was about the same. They each had flight ranges of 200-500km or so and flew at about mach 2 with a big heavy warhead.

In comparison the Onyx is a 2.5 ton missile with a range of about 500km and a flight speed of about mach 2.

The Onyx is a new generation missile because its ramjet appears to be rather more fuel efficient so the missile does not need to be a similar weight to a light fighter jet like Granit.

Brahmos is an upgrade of Yakhont... a down graded export missile, but it adds features like land attack capacity to make it superior... but of course the Russians will introduce the upgrades and improvements to all of their domestically used missiles, but obviously the export Yakhont will not get those upgrades without Indian permission understandably... because they paid for them.

Zircon is essentially an Onyx with the ramjet replaced with a scramjet and obvious aerodynamic improvements and upgrades to deal with flying much much faster.

The main problem with Granit and Vulcan and even Moskit was that they were so big you need huge expensive ships to carry useful numbers of them... on the Kirov class cruisers they replaced 20 Granit tubes for 80 tubes that could carry Onyx or Zircon or land attack cruise missiles or anti sub ballistic rockets etc etc etc.

The 24 launch tubes on the Oscar II class SSGNs could be replaced by 72 missile tubes for Zircon or Kalibr, but more importantly smaller ships like the Sovremmeny class can carry more than 8 anti ship missiles at a time, and a ship like the Udaloy can carry more than 8 anti sub missiles... in fact frigates will be carrying 32 missiles, which means a single ship can carry the equivalent main armament of four cold war destroyers using much more potent missile to do a better job.

GarryB wrote:At the very least the Brahmos got land attack capacity because India wanted it and India funded it.

Russia didn't need the help of any country to design/fund land attack cruise missile. India went for Brahmos because they couldn't afford Onyx.

The main constraint of developing land attack cruise missiles in large numbers is that they are expensive to produce. The warhead weight is typically less than 50% of the total weapon weight, while the cost of these weapons is usually 50 times or more than guided bombs. That aside other cost drivers are complex guidance and propulsion systems.

GarryB wrote:Vulcan does that, but so does Granit and surprise surprise Onyx does that too.

Surprise, surprise Brahmos lacks swarming capabilities.

Russia didn't need the help of any country to design/fund land attack cruise missile.

The Russian MIC could obviously have developed Brahmos on their own, but the Russian military didn't ask for it and weren't prepared to pay for land attack capacity.

The Indians wanted an Onyx like weapon but the Yakhont, which was a down graded export model didn't appeal to them so they started a joint venture to get the missile they wanted.

At the time they made it it was better than Onyx in some respects because they added land attack performance that Onyx and Yakhont didn't have, but Onyx is not for export and has no flight range or warhead size restrictions on its design unlike Yakhont that Brahmos is based upon.

Now the Onyx will have all the upgrades developed for the Brahmos, but it is not for export, and of course they wont apply such improvements to Yakhont because if you want such improvements then India would prefer you bought Brahmos instead.

India went for Brahmos because they couldn't afford Onyx.

Brahmos was probably more expensive than Onyx. If you think about it it makes sense. If you like a cellphone made by a company that makes thousands of them but you want some very specific added features and you want to make them yourself then obviously the cost of setting up production and the cost of developing the new features and the cost of putting your new phone into production does not have the economies of scale the original phone already had so of course your new phone is going to cost more because you also have to pay for development and production and you wont be producing it in the huge numbers the original maker will be making theirs in.

But you get what you want and end up making a phone you can call yours... because you paid for it.

The main constraint of developing land attack cruise missiles in large numbers is that they are expensive to produce.

Ironically you hit on a real issue.

India wants to make the things it uses, and that makes sense, but if you are going to make things for yourself you should not pay to make the complex expensive things you wont need a lot of... like Su-57.... it will be an expensive plane but making it yourself makes it even more expensive... unless you plan to make thousands of them.

It makes more sense to licence produce things you need in enormous numbers and then you will get value for money and a secure supply in difficult times.

The things India should be licence producing for itself (in my biased opinion) are small arms ammo, ATGMs and AT rockets and munitions, MANPADS, Artillery shells and main gun rounds for vehicles, light fighter aircraft and helicopters and short range air defence missiles and of course drones.

I would include land attack cruise missiles too because they are like light aircraft... you can make tens of thousands... don't put fuel in them and leave the batteries out too and when you need them put in new batteries and fuel them up and you have the capacity to overwhelm the enemy.

Some could be modified to be like drones if you want.

Western countries often run out of cruise missiles during "incidents" because their missiles are so expensive they never have enough... Russia is in a much better situation because they not only have enormous numbers of weapons but they also have lots of different types of weapons.

During the first few days of the war you need the best weapons to sneak through the defences but as you destroy the defences then older more obsolete missiles can be used and they can be very effective.

If you are keeping things in storage then you are keeping them to use so use them when you get the opportunity to free up space for new production ammo to be stored ready to use later on.

Surprise, surprise Brahmos lacks swarming capabilities.

Why do you think that?

Yakhont has swarming capabilities... ironically against many western targets it seems they don't need it because flying low and supersonic is enough to evade most western defences anyway.

Nowadays in a same computer board you can just put the softwares for both anti ship and land attack modes. The land attack mode need a GLONASS chip that is maybe 2x2cm and some inertial navigation electronic that are maybe 10x10cm.

You can fit them in any missile.

Back in the days, such stuff would be as big as a car engine. That's why new missiles are smaller.

And against ships you don't need more than 300kg warhead. Any ship would feel such explosion very badly. Just like any ground target would be destroyed if you hit it directly with a precision of 10m or lees.

When the old missiles were first designed they would likely have a custom designed computer chip for the job like a modern calculator has a chip for calculations.

The processing speed of chips was so slow that you needed custom designed computer boards to make sure it could do what is needed, but with modern chips you can make a computer board and create features with software instead of hard wiring everything.

A modern cell phone sized computer would have the processing power to collect radar and sensor data and make decisions and transmit information to other platforms, where a 1970s computer to do that was simply not possible.

The advantage is that with new hardware a missile upgrade could be a software update with new equipment added... perhaps a chaff or flare launcher for instance to distract enemy air defence systems...