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The question I have is: can you scale down the well-guided missile? I thought guidance is mostly an issue of fast chips and well designed software. But perhaps
by chongli 4y ago
The question I have is: can you scale down the well-guided missile? I thought guidance is mostly an issue of fast chips and well designed software. But perhaps you need big missiles if you want them to fly fast and have a lot of range.
Talking about anti-air of course. Lots of small missiles aren’t going to be effective against hardened ground targets.
- JohnBooty 4y agoBut perhaps you need big missiles if you want them to fly fast and have a lot of range. I'm just a layperson but this has always been my understanding. Modern air combat is all about firing from beyond visual range, so I think they optimize pretty strongly for that. See my other answer, though - air to air missiles ARE generally (always) proximity fuzed. They don't need to precisely impact the target, they just need to get close.
- XorNot 4y agoMore then that, air-to-air missiles generally are designed to blow a load of metal shrapnel through whatever they "hit": so there's a problem where if you're fleeing from a missile and it explodes behind you, even though it "missed" the payload can still hit the plane it was chasing if the plane doesn't change trajectory.
- nradov 4y agoSensors matter a lot for guidance. In order to build an effective radar guided missile it needs a fairly large array. So in practice the minimum missile diameter ends up being something around 7 inches. Long range surface to air missiles have to be much wider than that. Data links also make a big difference. So the missile needs another fairly large antenna to receive guidance cues from other platforms.