Russia does have guided rocket variant of Smerch isn't it ?
Not really. They have rockets fitted with gyros to reduce the distance they spread in flight so volleys land closer together which makes them more effective on an area target like a group of soldiers moving through a forest or open ground. Their guided rockets are Tochka-U and Iskander and are separate systems used for different targets.
There are guided rockets in the sense that they have unguided rockets with sensor fused submunitions that detect tanks or armoured vehicles as they fall and target them with a directed attack using self forging fragment warheads to penetrate the roof structure of the vehicle and damage engines or kill crews, but the rockets themselves are ballistic and not guided.
Such rockets on ships would be useful for landings to clear large areas of ground of troops and light enemy emplacements in a rapid volley that doesn't need to be precise, but they use 122mm rockets rather than Smerch which is a 300mm rocket system.
Naval variant of guided rockets probably would be a good idea.
Though at times I'm unable to understand what purpose do guided rockets serve when cruise missiles already exist.
Rockets and missiles are for different things, but these days the purpose has become blurred with guided rockets...
Very simply in the 1980s a Hind attack helicopter had three main weapons... nose mounted HMG or cannon, four pods of unguided rockets, and four anti tank guided missiles. The missiles were expensive but necessary to take out tanks which are simply too heavily armoured to reliably be taken out with rockets in terms of accuracy and penetration performance. Guns use very cheap ammo but require short range engagements which makes the helicopter vulnerable to return fire by similar calibre guns. Rockets are cheap and simple and could be carried in large numbers and could be used against a wide variety of targets, but most of the time if you saw a tank you used an anti tank missile from as far away as the missiles performance allowed. If the threat was a group of enemy soldiers all spread out and firing small arms at you a volley of a dozen rockets would spread shrapnel over a wide area so even if you didn't kill all of them they would be ducking and diving rather than firing at you... note precise gun fire or missile fire is of no use because of the number of individual targets that all need to be dealt with or suppressed. Rockets fired in volleys or one to two rocket bursts aimed at various bushes or trees from which the enemy fire is coming from suppresses that fire well enough and cheaply enough without needing a more expensive weapon.
Today however... a simple cheap guidance system you can fit to a cheap unguided rocket means instead of firing rockets in volleys to hit area targets or unarmoured point targets, you can now use fewer rockets. For instance you see an enemy truck... an ATGM is overkill and might just punch a small diameter hole right through without destroying the truck straight away... but it might be too far away for cannon or HMG fire. With unguided rockets the accuracy of them means you might need to fire 4-5 rockets to hit it with enough fragments to stop it and set it on fire. Even with cheap rockets having to fire 4-5 per target means 4-5 targets per 20 shot rocket pod... with guided rockets you don't increase the cost too much but you use rather less of them so one rocket from 4km range will hit that truck directly and destroy it, so instead of hitting 4-5 trucks per 20 shot rocket pod you can get 17 or 18 targets per 20 shot rocket pod.
Say the new guidance package triples the cost of the rocket... if you are using 4 times less rockets it actually works out cheaper to use guided rockets than unguided rockets.
Of course when dealing with area targets then guidance is no advantage in terms of dealing with targets, but the guidance system means you can loft the rockets into the air and engage targets from much greater and much safer ranges because there is less risk of return fire which makes the helo safer.
For naval use unguided rockets are used to clear areas of potential enemy forces or to destroy mines... the point is that the landing forces will also likely have destroyers and cruisers supporting operations so they will likely have guided 152mm shells that could take out point targets from 70km range or more... guided rockets would be less useful as their biggest benefit would be to deliver a huge amount of fragments and HE all in a very short period... almost all at once... which is really something you can't do with missiles or shells... except with nukes of course.
Guided rockets are still rockets. They won't change their flight path once launched. The guidance make them hit more precisely but you still need to launch them very close to the target. A moving ship will be very hard to hit.
A simple guidance package for Smerch to hit a ship would be pretty simple and much easier than with land targets because ships are huge and contrast easily against their sea water background... the problems would be such rockets would be fairly straight forward to intercept being largely ballistic weapons with some terminal manouvers to hit their targets... the other problem is getting to within 120km/90km of a ship target to fire them.
First , the Kalibr seems like more expensive than the Tomahawk
Of course... it is because of all the corruption right?
The above cost means for the price of one F-18 the USA can buy 60-70 tomahawk, but for the price of one Su-30/35 Russia can buy 20 Kalibr.
Your logic is pointless... the US spends more on weapons than any other 30 countries on the planet, it is of course a given that the US can afford to buy more missiles than Russia can... the question is... are they? Or are they spending money getting their carriers and destroyers and new stealth fighters fixed...
And of course there are many platform to target, but the best is if no launch platform depends on any other to gather targeting data, and from that point all satellite/communication will increase the effectiveness.
The USA thinking the network is a necessary for each element to work .
The idea of every platform for itself is the opposite of networking and cooperation...
... it would be like looking at a good idea like Grad 122mm rocket artillery system, cheap simple and light and based on widely produced and used trucks already in production, and making it very very expensive and also based on a platform at that time only the US used (Bradley), which is tracked and expensive to buy and to operate with no commonality with any other tracked vehicle in their allies inventory...
What also makes the Tomahawk exceptionally lethal is its capability to carry a 1,000-pound conventional warhead which can be reprogrammed midflight.
And what makes it useless is that even individual Syrian units without an IADS were able to shoot down three quarters of them...
Any other data for the cost of the Kalibr ?
Or for the Onyx ,as well.
That information is secret, and neither of those missiles are for export anyway.
What you are calling Kalibr exported to India is actually Club.
The Kalibr has only one price point, and that showing it as three times costlier than the tomahawk, not in the term of exchange rate, but compared to the fighter airframes of the same MIC.
Kalibr has a range of 2,500km in its current model and has never been exported to anyone. 500km range Clubs have been exported in various types but export prices includes profits that are not included when the Russian Navy buys them. Export aircraft prices are similarly not accurate indications either... especially when we have no idea what the contracts include... all we can be sure of is that US products are horribly over priced and the US loves to spend on bling and don't care they are getting screwed.
Based on the snippit of information you posted here.... ie:
Based on sales of the export version of this missile to India, Gundarov suggests each Kalibr cost $6.5 million; but he concludes that the 44 missiles sold domestically to the Russian defense ministry and fired off last October amounted to 2.7 billion rubles ($41 million—approximately $980,000 per missile) (Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, July 22). Other than testing or advertising the missile capability, some of which landed in Iran, there was no real underlying military purpose for using Kalibr missiles in Syria. Either way, the process was certainly expensive.
Kalibr is a land attack missile with a 2,500km range, it would be illegal for Russia to sell such a weapon to India and the dickhead who claimed each missile cost $6.5 million each but then concludes that the 44 missiles sold domestically to the Russian defence military and fired off last October cost 41 million dollars... how the fuck could they cost 6.5 million dollars each if 44 of them cost 41 million... but you stick to his bullshit claim of 6.5million per missile... are you drunk or just biased. BTW the underlying reason for using cruise missiles in Syria was to kill terrorists... something American forces there don't seem interested in at all, they just seem more interested in protecting their moderate terrorist friends. Seems 11/9 wasn't enough... of course you are going to keep giving your wife and friends STDS if you bed with whores.
That is three times more expensive than the tomahawk , compared to the fighter airframes of the same MIC.
Why did you pick very specific aircraft for the comparison?
That's still based upon a Jamestown article which Jamestown is bullshit.
It is a propaganda outlet sending out bullshit to keep the gardens in the west green and growing by pointing out there is nothing wrong in the US and oh what a terrible state Russia is... it produces nothing and is a third world country that exports oil...
Before these articles about Russia not needing to use cruise missiles in Syria were articles saying they couldn't help Syria if they tried and Assads days are numbered because their terrorists are going to do to Syria what they did to Libya... that was the plan... US oil companies would swoop in and take all the oil contracts for Syrian oil and the country would be in such a broken state they would need to pump a lot of oil to pay to fix all the damage and that will further force down the price of oil to try to hurt Russia... their main problem is that Russia has pretty much gotten off its oil dependency problem and are growing in all sorts of areas, while the rich and powerful in the west have not diversified and are still addicted to oil... of course that is not going to bite them in the ass... but it will all be Putins fault... all his aggression and opposition to the peaceful west... bastard....