Russia's Future Technology Weapons

Also with SFF warheads the penetrator is not ideal because it is still relatively soft and relies on speed and mass essentially for penetration as it does not have a point to concentrate its penetration energy on.

Also... the 30mm cannon on the Apache helicopter has a 30mm diameter HEAT dual purpose round taht can penetrate 50mm of armour so rather small calibre rounds can still use effective HEAT warheads.

The problem of course is that 50mm penetration is not generally enough for most modern armoured targets from any direction... a top attack munition generally goes for 100mm+ penetration to be useful.. but a 57mm warhead from the RPG-16 could penetrate 200mm plus of armour so it is not impossible... and with a suicide drone it wont be spin stabilised like a 30mm cannon round so its penetration should be even better.

The Bofors Bill-2 actually has an oval shaped downwards firing HEAT warhead to penetrate the roof structure of armoured vehicles... they don't have to be round and facing forward...

In fact the road side TM-83 is a circular mine with a diameter of 250mm... you could mount it on a UAV horizontally at the wing root facing downwards... the whole mine is about 20kgs but it blows a hole 80mm wide in teh side of a tank up to 50m away that will penetrate 400mm of armour which means it will penetrate the roof of any target... Just a simple system to fly the mine over the target could be used with perhaps a laser for precise aiming.... for a Russian weapon you could aim for the turret bustle of western tanks... a guaranteed kill, or perhaps the engine deck for a 100% mobility kill...

On a bigger UAV that flys higher you could have a stack of them and release them in flight with tail fins to steer them towards targets and at 40m altitude boom... what could trophy do to stop that?

You could make them smaller and lighter for a 200mm penetration if you want... perhaps using a cheaper HEAT liner material so they can be made in enormous numbers and add a mechanism so that if they don't detect a target on the way down when they land they flip over pointing their HEAT warhead directly upwards and the next heavy vehicle rolls over it and boom in the guts... belly armour is generally weaker than roof armour... and an 8cm diameter plasma beam coming up through the floor beaming anything in its way to heaven... something to fear from a crew point of view.

Interestingly some radar guided weapons operating at high resolutions like those mounted in fighter aircraft or on attack helicopters don't just look for a radar return, they look at the shape of the return so the soft angles of fabric would actually be a good thing because the radar platform is less likely to think it is a tank as opposed to a rock or other natural feature returning a radar signal.

The MMW radar on an Apache would see the soft angles of a Nakidka screen and might mistake it for something different because it lacks the hard angles and distinctive shapes of a T series tanks with ERA blocks mounted on it.

Modern missiles like Brimstone would use a MMW radar sensor to look for the signature of a T series tank... with Nakidka applied the signature would be totally different and might be ignored as noise because of the reduced and distorted radar signature and lack of IR emissions you would expect from a tank.

https://en.kalashnikovgroup.ru/media/ttkh-2021/mr-155-ultima-ttkh

Scramjets will be revolutionary.

With a normal jet engine including a ramjet, the air is sucked into the front of the tube and the tube gets narrower which compresses the air going in, and then fuel is added and ignited which causes the gas to expand generating thrust.

The main problem for all jet engines except scramjet engines is that the airflow needs to be subsonic for the fuel to burn which means a MiG-31 flying at mach 2.83 has airflow from the air around it getting sucked into its engines but the engine has to slow the air down to being subsonic before it gets to the combustion chamber and fuel added and ignited, so this high speed air is slowed down before fuel is added to accelerate it out the back of the engine to make it generate thrust... and to generate useful thrust at mach 2.83 the gas coming out the rear gets more fuel injected into it and ignited in the after burner.

To create a subsonic airflow the air intake on the engine has to be able to open and close... when the aircraft is sitting on the tarmac before takeoff you want the air intake to open as wide as possible to get as much air coming in to the engine as possible because it is not moving so the more air you can suck in will be needed to get thrust. Some aircraft like the Tu-22M3 you can see extra intake doors along the air intake allowing more air to go to the engine for takeoff.

When the aircraft is flying at near mach 2 however there is too much air so the air intake actually closes up a bit to reduce the amount of air going into the intake so the airflow can be slowed down to subsonic speeds for the fuel to burn.

A scramjet can take that mach 2.83 air and compress it, which will slow it down a little, and then add fuel and burn it but they don't need to slow it down to subsonic speeds so the airflow might be over mach 1.8 in the combustion section of the engine which means when it comes out the back it is probably moving mach 1 faster than the airflow from a turbojet engine... that means extra thrust... even at very high altitude and as we see from Zircon the engine operating at 3km/s means the air is not slowed down or restricted to burn the fuel, so it can keep generating thrust at very high speeds... but it is a jet engine so you can control the speed and the thrust...

I could see new missiles being like fighter aircraft... for long range missions it would carry external fuel tanks, and of course at the speeds these missiles fly they will be generating a lot of heat so why not add a fuel tank in front of the missile with an external fuel line feed back to the missile behind it... the airflow heats the fuel which absorbs the heat generated by flying at high speeds, which can be pumped back to the rear where the missiles scramjet engine is located... it could throttle up or down depending on the situation... accelerating to very high speed means it gets where it is going fast, which requires full throttle to climb and accelerate but once at altitude and speed then a reduced throttle will maintain that speed to extend range and when that fuel tank is empty it can be dumped... but then the fuel might be very efficient at cooling the missile so imagine a missile with a stage in front and a stage behind that are both fuel tanks with the complete missile in the middle... turbo pumps pump the fuel from the rear fuel tank into the front fuel tank and fuel from the front fuel tank back to the scramjet motor in the missile in the middle. The first external tank to be empty would be the rear tank which can be jettisoned first when it is empty and then the front tanks fuel is used up so by the time it has burned up two external fuel tanks but has full tanks on board the missile it will have travelled for quite some time at a rather significant flight speed... perhaps mach 8 or 9 or perhaps faster because the new scramjet is more powerful by now... remember once it reaches altitude and speed it can throttle back and use its fuel efficiently... unlike a solid rocket powered weapon. So its flight range could be thousands and thousands of kms at very high speed... and when it ditches its second external fuel tank it is fully fuelled and ready to hit a target hard... with a thrust vectoring nozzle control its ability to manouver would be eye watering.

For those wondering how you could have a jet engine and an external fuel tank in front and in the rear, the Zircon likely has a rear mounted scramjet and the SA-5 based test missile had its test model scramjet mounted on its nose for testing so having things in front or behind the scramjet doesn't matter.

Rotating Detonation Engines will be just as radical.  IMHO these things, once proven, will offer a HUGE leap in aircraft performance and will greatly extend operational range from a given quantity of fuel.  A Chinese university recently tested an RDE on a Su-34 sub-scale model source

New EMP wepons

https://t.me/OstashkoNews/97466

“The military plans to install these weapons on the latest Russian drones.
Such system can be used to destroy missile warheads and communications devices on aircraft”

If that is the case I hope they are designed to destroy themselves as they are used because handing such technology to nazis is not the best idea...