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Yes and no. They have ARH and IR MICA which are used as bvr and wvr missiles and they have 80km ranges (but it could be >100km in the same conditions when a r-77-1 reaches 110km). French give generally effective ranges and not "max" ranges for their missiles.
Indeed.... if they were American missiles you would probably double it.
The ranges in the sales brochures mean nothing, but some people think they are set in stone... if you get 110km away from an R-77-1 then you are dead... which of course is bullshit.
110kms is both aircraft at high altitude and heading towards each other... the target being something that can't or doesn't pull more than 2-3 gs and certainly does not turn away and keeps closing with you.
In the pilots manual it will likely have a range of 60-70km as launch range... that way if they stop closing it will still get to them... In other words kill probability (PK) is not 100%... probably more like 40% against a target that does not know it is coming... at 100km the PK is probably about 4% for a fighter... maybe 10-20% for a bomber which BVR missiles were designed for... note remember in the manual the pilot wont be launching anything at 100km unless it is a warning shot to tell them to keep clear and I don't want a fight right now because I am doing something else or I am low on fuel... this shot will distract you while I leave...
They don't have a r-73/Sidewinder type.
Funny because for a while the Soviets had two... The R-3 and R-13 were essentially Sidewinder developments, but for aircraft whose job is something other than being a fighter or interceptor they had the R-60 mini missile which was rather good for what it was but was not intended to be a sidewinder replacement.
Su-24s and Su-25s carried them, but their small size and light weight (ie some models were 45kgs with a 7km range) they had a twin launch rail so aircraft like the MiG-23 started carrying them on twin pylon mounts, which effectively meant they had two BVR missiles under the inner wings and four R-60s under the front fuselage two pylons, which was carried on to the MiG-29 on 6 pylons.
The R-60 and the Sidewinder models were replaced with the much more capable R-73 which is still used by everything that wants a short range self defence missile.
They are developing a new replacement for the R-73 that gets all sorts of names... R-74 et al, but the Morfei or 9M100 seems to be different... the 9M100 is smaller... a bit like a new R-60, with the R-74 or whatever replacing the R-73.
I suspect both new missiles will have two way datalinks and lock on after launch capacity, as well as thrust vectoring rocket motors... the Morphei will be small and slim and intended mostly for self defence shooting down SAMs and AAMs for fighters and bombers. The R-74 or whatever will be much bigger and longer ranged with a bigger warhead for hitting aircraft and other targets at greater ranges.
The fact that it might need to turn 180 degrees on launch makes me think that Morfei and Hermes are likely not the same missile, though they might share the same guidance and datalink... I don't think the Hermes will be as manouverable as the Morfei will need to be.
On ships in redut launchers each tube for the 9M96 it will be able to fit 4 9M100s, and most ships will have Pantsir as well and possibly naval TOR too.
It is worth having combinations because the Morfei wont start out cheap, but good quality QWIP sensor chips can be stamped out in enormous numbers making the price go down to the level of a camera phone element, but the datalink will be a video link showing what the missile sees... wont be super cheap... TOR and Pantsir are command guided missiles that will remain super cheap and very accurate.
Meteor is a mach 3-4 and can reduce its speed smart way.
That is true the Meteor can run its engine at full power and recover speed if its flight performance gets sluggish... but what I am getting at is that like most missiles it is not an aircraft it is a projectile. The fins it has on it do not create lift and hold it up in the air like wings on a plane do... to stay in the air it needs speed or its body weight will no longer be supported. When you get above about mach 5 you get something called body lift and many hypersonic weapons and aircraft are shown with little in the way of wings but a flattened body and rely of airspeed for lift.
The Hollywood vision of an air to air missile effectively dogfighting with a fighter aircraft or any other type of aircraft is bullshit... especially when the missile misses and then turns around to have another go... moving at similar speeds to the target it is trying to hit... like it is a torpedo or something...
Even when you see RPG rocket launchers in movies they are slow, though they often do play it in slow motion, or pretend to to get their cheap home made rockets to look like they are going faster than they actually are...
I remember an episode of Mythbusters where they fired a real RPG-7 and they were shocked at how fast it was.... it leaves the muzzle at about 188m/s, but after travelling about 30-40m it starts its own sustainer rocket motor and accelerates to supersonic speed... I seem to remember about 375m/s... which is damn fast.
Air to air missiles go much faster or they would drop like rocks.
What you say applies for R-37M. And that's why it is used against awaxs or cruise missiles that have straight trajectories.
It is much worse for R-37M because it probably has a low burn rocket motor that burns for most of the flight but it burns at such a low rate it is effectively countering drag so it is helping maintain speed better it is not adding speed just slowing down the rate at which the missile slows down while coasting to the target area to then dive down and attack the target.
When you are coasting hard turns will destroy air speed and make you rapidly approach that stall speed when you drop like a rock... with no wings for lift the stall speed of any missile is very high.
The fancy tail lattice fins of the R-77 do not generate lift... a tiny little triangular fin can redirect air and cause the missile to turn, but you can't deflect it too far otherwise it stops redirecting the air and starts acting like an airbrake and not turning the missile the correct direction. The grid fin design of the R-77 and a lot of other high speed missiles allow the fin to be turned to sharper harder angles and not stall and turn into an airbrake, so it allows much harder turns at very high speed without failing and turning into an airbrake... it means the missile can turn harder and chase targets pulling more g than the smaller control fins can... of course trying to turn too hard and you will find it acts as a super enormous airbrake... but I assume they know all of this and have programmed the missiles flight control system so that if it does turn into a massive airbrake trying to make a turn that they use the opposite control to create the air brake and the normal control less so that it provides turning force. Having a strong turning force on one side and on the opposite side a structure turned too far acting like an airbrake should allow an eye watering turn to be executed.
BTW the unusual butterfly front control surfaces on the R-27 are actually designed to create less drag in a turn and more turning force in a turn... it effectively works like a forward swept wing. On a normal triangle swept wing there is span wise flow that travels down the fin and off the end forming a vortex of drag... when turned to high Angles of Attack (AoA) that vortex means extra drag as well as turning force until it stops generating turning force and is just an airbrake.
With the control fins on the R-27 the airflow effectively goes the other way because of the forward sweep angle so when it hits the wing root it can't form a vortex off the wing tip which reduces drag and preserves more turning force.
I answer her.
I think that future missiles will have dual seakers. ARH and IIR. A bit like the new kh58USHKe that has a passive anti radiation radar and IR seaker.
Modern electronics are small enough to allow both on a same missile.
I agree... multi function seekers will become much more common, but really not new. The Soviet version of the Styx anti ship missile could be exported with radar or IR seekers. Back to the topic of Brahmos as an Air to Air Missile, India actually used some anti ship missiles against ground targets... they had IR seekers and were used against Oil Storage areas in Pakistan. They timed their attack in the early evening or at night because the day sun had heated the oil in their huge storage tanks but the ground surrounding cooled rapidly at night so the oil tanks stood out in IR and were easy to target with the missiles (which normally work by spotting ships in sea water... which is almost always a contrast because the sea will be a different temperature from a ship almost anywhere...)
The point I am making is that the domestic missile was so big that they had both the radar and the IR seeker on their version so they could use either or both guidance options.
It was not a case of miniaturised electronics and sensors, more a case of a very very big missile.
They did that a lot... their SS-N-14 Silex anti submarine missile was a rocket powered missile that carried a torpedo out to where a sub was detected and dropped the torpedo into the water to hunt down and sink the sub. The Udaloy Destroyers carried it as standard main armament but it didn't have any anti ship weapon... so it could hunt subs but any corvette could sail up and attack her and all she had to defend herself with was 100mm guns.
The Metel missile was considered to be the same weapon as the Australian Ikara which also launched torpedo via missile to where the target was from a ship so the torpedo could then chase down and sink the sub... the difference is that the missile the Soviets used... had an IR sensor in the nose in later models that could be used to passively detect and home in on surface ships totally passively. The rocket that carried the torpedo also had a 300kg HE warhead... which was actually massive overkill because it did not drop the torpedo so it had a two ton torpedo with its warhead and fuel as well as a 300kg warhead that could be used against surface ships as a backup. Most of the time when there was no enemy ship but there was a sub the torpedo was dropped and did its job and the IR seeker and warhead did nothing. It was easier to add that to the design than to add an anti ship missile for self defence... though a Udaloy is a big ship and they probably could have fitted Kh-35s if they needed to.
The new replacement for metel is 91ER1, which is just a rocket boosted torpedo with little anti ship capacity.... its ballistic trajectory gives no warning to the sub but a ballistic mach 2.5 target should be fairly easy to shoot down by most modern ships these days... the torpedo itself is a small 350mm torpedoes so would damage most ships but not be catastrophic... the same launch tube could carry a range of other missiles to deal with surface ships.
I would add that modern missiles with different sensors like IR and radar will actually have the processing power to actually effectively use both, for instance for an AWACS killer missile the passive radar signal from the plane will indicate from a very long way away it is there, but the IR signature of all that radar energy generating heat can also be used to find it and when you get close active radar could be used if needed to precisely locate the target again if they are being tricky with jammers and flares and chaff etc etc.
