GarryB Sat May 05, 2018 6:51 am
They said Iskander. My interpretation was Iskander rocket nor cruise missile (otherwise why to specify calibers and iskanders apart? ) . Me wonders why ballistic rocket on ship? kind of stealth sub Dongfeng-21 ?
A couple of things... first of all a naval Iskander is not limited in range or payload by the INF treaty, so while the Iskander that we know is limited to 500km range, any naval or air launched model is not.
Second... the new Kinzhal has a body shape very similar to Iskander... perhaps they have made air and ship/sub launched models with greatly boosted range and speed performance... so that if or when the INF treaty is folded... Mk41 launch tubes in eastern europe already violate that agreement anyway so if the US refuses to stop violating the INF agreement and remove its land based AEGIS system then Russia could deploy a land based solid fuelled rocket with much better performance than Iskander... say Iskander II... all the development could be done via a naval version so when the agreement no longer applies they can deploy new missiles immediately?
On a ship, the semi ballistic Iskander without range restrictions could be useful... it manouvers to evade interception, has very high speed and excellent terminal accuracy.
The thing thet worries me is diameter 0,95 /iskander vs. 0,7 Onix
Would be a bit of an issue... maybe make the naval version narrower and much longer to fit the available space...
They will not put it on a large nuclear sub for sure. It would have to come to close to the shore to be effective. Why put an expensive sub in danger? But a modified Kilo with 4 or 8 Iskanders would be a very effective weapon in the Baltic or Black Sea.
A naval model with perhaps 1,500km range and perhaps a really big solid rocket booster to get it to high altitude and moving fast... the way the MiG-31 gets the Kinzhal moving before release... I mean, 2,000km range and mach 10 flight speed is impressive... having it available on the end of a MiG-31 or a Tu-22M3M is impressive performance enough, but having it pop up anywhere on the planet from a new SSGN would be very interesting too.... and making it compatible with the UKSK launcher means even corvettes could carry it... as will pretty much every new Russian armed ship.