"Kinzhal" hypersonic aviation-missile complex

Kinzhal is an engine driven vehicle, and when it is launched it will be initially accelerated with a solid rocket motor to get it into the air and moving and up to a certain altitude... from there it will have a scramjet motor to power it.

Now depending on the distance to the target and the type of target and the flight route chosen for the attack the missile might try different tactics to get to the target in one piece. If it is launched out at sea and there are no radar signals between it and the target 1,000km away it might climb to very high altitude above any SAMs or interceptors reach and just cruise along at mach 7 or 8 and conserve fuel... as it travels of course it is burning fuel so it is getting lighter and lighter. As it approaches the target area it might go full throttle and climb even higher, but now it has burned off a ton of fuel so it is much much lighter so at full throttle at high altitude it might be able to accelerate to a higher speed than mach 10... certainly if it is flying at mach 10 at 40km altitude then if it then corkscrew dives on the target then it will reach rather higher speeds than mach 12... the Kh-22M flew at mach 3 at 20km altitude but when it dived on target it reached speeds of mach 4.2 at sea level... I would expect the Mach 4.5 Kh-32 to do better from a dive from 40km, and I would expect the Kinzhal to do even better than that from what ever height it operates from.

Sorry, my mistake.

The Iskander is a development of the Oka, which was a cold war replacement for the Scud with a flight range of about 500km with a nuke warhead (the lightest option), a 450km range with a conventional warhead, and a 300km range with a 750kg cluster munition warhead.

The OKA used external rear grid fins for flight control which reduced range but made it harder to intercept with air defence systems like SAMs.

The Iskander uses control fins inside the exhaust stream of the rocket motor and small external control fins that offer much less drag during flight.

With improvements in solid rocket motor propellent the range of the Iskander should have been greatly increased over the OKA, but it has not because the INF treaty limited its max range, so they have increased the manouvering performance to make it more immune to interception at the cost of dramatically reducing the flight range of the missile to keep it within INF limits.

Air launch of the Kinzhal means it is not and will not be limited by the INF treaty that does not apply to ship or air launched weapons.

BTW we have no information on the propellent used in either Kinzhal or Iskander, and the thrust vectoring control vanes inside the rocket motor suggest a dual fuel arrangement to maximise performance.


If you think about it... most sky rockets with a single tube of black powder fuel roar up into the air and then coast for a bit and then fall back down... not a very efficient use of propulsion really.

Several long range rockets have different propellants baked like a cake... if you think of a two layer cake that is pretty much all it is... the first layer is high sugar high energy fuel that burns extremely fast and generates the most acceleration and energy... once that has burned through the next layer burns slower but for much much longer.

The point being the slower burning fuel generates less thrust but burns for much much longer than the higher energy fuel.

If you were to fill a missile the size of Iskander or Kinzhal with only the high energy fuel then the burn time would be measured in seconds but the extra energy wouldn't help very much because there are physical limits to how fast that design can move through the air at a specific altitude or temperature so once it reaches that top speed the extra energy doesn't do any good and is basically wasted.

By using two types of fuel... one to get the missile up and moving which requires a lot of energy, and a second type that offsets drag and helps the missile maintain speed for much longer you get a more efficient use of propulsion... not as much as with a jet engine but rather better than with solid fuelled rockets of fixed performance.

Of course if you put rocket layers on top of each other like layers of fuel in a sky rocket you would need very strong side walls to take the pressure and heat of the rocket fuel burning so what they do is design it to burn from the inside out... bake a core tube of fuel and then bake a tube of fuel that goes around the outside. That way when you start the rocket motor you need most power which means surface area so you cut a star shape up the centre of the rocket to maximise the surface area and ignite it so it burns rapidly... expanding but blowing gas down the tube and out the bottom the heat and pressure pushing out on the remaining propellant so the walls of the missile can be thinner and lighter... as it burns outwards it burns out of the high pressure high energy fuel and starts burning the lower energy stuff... so instead of having high energy fuel burning for 30 seconds, you have high energy fuel burning for 20 seconds and then a low energy fuel burning for 2 minutes. The missile travels further for the same mass and the lower cal fuel is likely cheaper too.

From what I have seen of the small fins... I rather doubt they move... they are for stabilisation rather than steering control.

The missile moves very fast through the air but those external fins are tiny and would not change the direction of the missile very far or very fast.

If you look up the missile that preceded the Iskander... the OKA, it has enormous grid fins for flight control...

The reason the Iskander has a limit of less than 500km is because the fuel still has to be burning for it to manouver... otherwise you could just loft it upwards and have it fly much greater distances... but it would be much easier to shoot down if you did... and likely rather less accurate.

Manouvering is not energy efficient... most countries are going for range when they design and build missiles... range and accuracy are the main concerns generally for most countries.

The thing is that with Russia, range is not an issue because since the cold war until very recently they were not allowed missiles with a range from 500 to 5,500km in range so extra range was actually counter productive for their shorter ranged missiles.

With improvements in ABM technology, most particularly anti theatre ballistic missile technology like the S-300 and S-400 SAM types, not to mention Patriot and THAAD, they realised that range was not so important but accuracy and actually reaching the target were the most important things and so they explored missiles that could evade air defences as being the focus.

I suspect the North Koreans and the Chinese are also thinking the same thing as their missiles already reach SK and Japan so extra range in that sense is meaningless, but now they are clearly thinking range and accuracy alone are not enough they need to be able to manouver to ensure they get to their targets... which is only understandable really.

But now they have much more efficient scramjet engines to solve the problems of fuel management.

Rocket fuel is useful because of its high energy and the fact that if you want to have something more faster than mach 3 then it needed a rocket motor in the past to achieve and sustain that speed... if you wanted mach 3 then a ramjet could do the job... in fact up to about mach 4 or 5 you could use a ramjet efficiently for propulsion, but for higher speeds there is only rocket fuel... until now.

Scramjet means the higher speeds are acheivable in fact they are rather much more efficient than a rocket motor because a rocket motor needs both fuel and an oxygenator for that fuel to burn rapidly... as a general rule of thumb you need by weight about three times more oxygen than fuel for a rocket motor so a 3 ton missile might have 500kgs of fuel and 1,500kgs of material that reacts and generates enormous amounts of oxygen to burn the fuel rapidly in a violent high energy reaction to push the rocket along through the air. A scramjet will need rather more than 500kgs of fuel to generate the same amount of thrust... but it wont require 2 tons in total of fuel and oxygen because it scoops up the oxygen as it moves along.

More importantly it can change thrust like a liquid fuelled rocket can to optimise the fuel burn to fly further.

Many think the Soviets stuck with liquid fuelled rockets because they were backward, but in actual fact liquid fuels are generally much more powerful than solid fuels... improvements in solid fuel technology has narrowed the gap a bit, but liquid fuels can be throttled up or down or even shut down for optimal flight range performance, whereas solid fuels are on or off and once on they generally can't be turned off.

Imagine a trip in a car... there are two routes to the destination... one up a hill and then down a long slope to the destination and another on a long straight road to the destination. If your car is rocket powered then climbing up the hill burns a lot of energy very quickly but once at the top it is just a case of rolling down to the target location so the fact that the rocket stops at the top of the hill is not a problem. If you tried to take the straight road without the climb you could get to a higher top speed but you would run out of momentum on the flat straight road and run out of energy before you got there even though the road would be shorter than climbing the hill first.
With an engine you wouldn't take the hill route because it is further and slower, you would just use a high gear low revs drive on the straight flat road to the target.

The point is that now that the INF treaty is history they can work on new Scramjet models... for land based missiles they have TOPOLs so distance is not a problem even with rocket propulsion... the range is easy to achieve and a bit of extra weight or another stage for extra manouvering fuel is easy... in fact a two stage missile with a big solid rocket booster to get the whole weapon moving with a scramjet main portion and a manouvering IRBM will actually be relatively cheap and simple and effective and cover all of the EU and the middle east and asia if need be from Russian territory... in fact Alaska and most of the west coast of the US would be in range from the Russian far east and most of northern US and canada from the arctic bases...

I would expect they would be flying at relatively high altitude at those speeds... Kinzhal at mach 10 reportedly and Zircon at mach 9 reportedly... the main difference is that the Kinzhal will be burning a lower energy fuel so perhaps in a steep dive on the target it might accelerate due to gravity so when it hit a target at sea level it might be going mach 2 faster... perhaps Mach 12... its rocket motor will be overcoming drag and the extra energy of gravity should allow it to go faster in a dive... remember this is not an airplane so there is no maximum never exceed speed where its wings will stall, but because of the speed it is travelling it can only dive for a relatively short period before it runs in to the ground so it could not continue to accelerate to enormous speeds like mach 20 or anything.

With the Zircon it is a powered aircraft and as long as it still has fuel it can crank that engine up to full throttle, so it could probably accelerate to a much higher speed in a steep dive... but manouvering would limit how fast it could actually do so effectively.

Both missiles could probably dive in an irregular cork screw pattern that would make interception pretty difficult without losing too much speed... ironically imagine a Zircon diving at a carrier from 50km altitude at 3km dive speed a second... an interception of the missile 3 seconds from impact means all your interception missiles launched from nearby AEGIS cruisers will likely hit the carrier too... hahahaha... so if the missile hasn't been intercepted above about 3km altitude it is not going to be intercepted... and ironically enough even a lucky hit at 4-5km altitude means the debris will likely still hit the carrier and do some really serious damage anyway...

And it is the first generation scramjet... now that the INF treaty has gone the range of these missiles can be extended enormously to make them even more effective...

More importantly the nuclear propulsion of that cruise missile has the potential to act like a ramjet, but as there is no combustion it can act like a scramjet, which means in the future top speeds and flight durations could be eye watering for relatively small missiles...

mnztr wrote:
The reason the US kinda sucks on defensive missiles is that their docterine states offence is the best form of defence and they have built their Air Force to "ensure" control of the skies. The believe they can neutralize any air defence through ECM, Stealth and by attacking radars and launchers. It is a connundum. If the US was to fire a wave of cruise missiles can AS 400 take them ALL out? How long can they keep up this defence? Once you have a hole in the defence you can go in and finish it. It depends how sophisticated the spoofing, decoys and counter jamming is. Hopefully we never find out who is right.

magnumcromagnon wrote:

kvs wrote:I find it strange how outdated US missiles are.   Russia was working on bleeding edge missile tech even during the 1990s when workers were not paid or got paid in barter goods.   This fact underlies the current advanced state of Russian missile systems.  By contrast the US is selling the THAAD to Japan and others as some worthwhile system.   I know that the US has introduced new missile systems over the last 20 years, but their specs are underwhelming.   Now they are scrambling to develop supersonic-class anti-ship missiles (supposedly they will
just jump over supersonic to hypersonic in one leap).   Their ICBMs are ancient as well.   For the self-anointed masters of the universe
this is extremely strange considering how pauper Russia is doing in the missile tech realm.

Lets further investigate this. As I already mentioned the U.S. had access to parts of S-300V by the 'compromiser' Boorish Yelpsin, had access to Slovakian and Greek S-300's via NATO exercises, has had strong influx of scientists and engineers from Asia (to make up for their brain drain at home), had the luxury of having modern digital electronics and more than adequate funding, but yet PAC-3 still has overall inferior characteristics to S-300PS, a system introduced in 1979, and it's development started from the mid 1960's. That in itself isn't the biggest kicker, the biggest damnation against the Patriot series is the fact that Raytheon has completely given up on improving the PAC-3 series, and completely outsourced the development of PAC-4 to the Israeli based Rafael concern. A country of 320 million with the biggest military budget in history, is completely incapable of meeting the needs of their nations aerospace defense, and is reliant on a country of 6 million (1/53rd the population) to meet those very needs....the same country that 1/6th of their population (including many of their scientists and engineers) are ex-USSR.

Sounds like excuses. Nothing stops the US from having better tools for the job. No doctrine can explain keeping weapons obsolete. To
assume that stealth is effective against world leading scientific and technological powers like Russia is inane. The only enemy that the US
can dominate with its air superiority doctrine is 3rd world pushovers. It has in no way demonstrated it can do this against Russia. Other
than retarded chest thumping, circle jerk self affirmation about Russian inferiority in the mass media and entertainment media.

Again, what sort of doctrine prevents the adoption of weapons that would enhance air superiority, such as hypersonic AS missiles?

The reason the US kinda sucks on defensive missiles is that their docterine states offence is the best form of defence and they have built their Air Force to "ensure" control of the skies. The believe they can neutralize any air defence through ECM, Stealth and by attacking radars and launchers. It is a connundum. If the US was to fire a wave of cruise missiles can AS 400 take them ALL out? How long can they keep up this defence? Once you have a hole in the defence you can go in and finish it. It depends how sophisticated the spoofing, decoys and counter jamming is. Hopefully we never find out who is right.

The Russians are not asleep, they have carefully studied the way NATO and the US operate, the main point being Russia is not a third world country with one big Fixed SAM defending their command and control centres and communications hubs that can fire at one cruise missile at a time, with an airforce with little command and control beyond that controlled by those command and control centres.

Fire 4-6 cruise missiles and the SAM sites are overwhelmed and the major radars and Comms centres destroyed the defence of that state becomes independent individual systems that are really weak on their own and can be destroyed one at a time fairly easily with a well organised and trained and armed force like NATO or the US.

Their problem is that a Russian system like a single S-400 battery doesn't exist... there are dozens of radar sites in every area with different sized radars and SAMs and other systems all interlinked, and those detection systems reach to well outside Russian territory.

Any US attack to take down an S-400 will be very risky because any major cruise missile attack requires cruise missile carriers which are themselves vulnerable to counter attack... B-1Bs, Subs, Ships, tactical fighters... once they start launching missiles at a Russian S-400 system they become fair game and I can promise you that to launch the large numbers of missiles needed to overwhelm an S-400 battery you should expect to lose a lot of launch platforms and still not expect to get that S-400 system because it can defend itself and if it runs out of missiles it can move while TOR and Pantsir batteries continue to shoot down cruise missiles in enormous numbers... and of course local PVO aircraft monitor incoming threats and deal with some as well...

With a fully operational Russian network even Igla-S and Verba MANPAD batteries can effectively shoot down cruise missiles... the Barnaul command system can easily detect and track such weapons and cue soldiers to point and launch their missiles at the best times and places to bring down such weapons.

Ongoing improvements like Pine and S-350 and S-500 are only making the problem worse for the US.

Russia builds systems like AS400 because they have a massive country with huge empty spaces and long borders to defend. The US has airbases all over their counrty .Their defensive requirements are very different.

No. What is different is the method of providing air defence, and it is more to do with political power and stepping on shoes... the USAF has claimed all responsibility for keeping the skies over US military operations exclusively for US forces and their allies... and with their current focus on F-35s and F-22s and stealth it seems they are dropping the ball.

The Russian/Soviet air defences have evolved over time to meet the threat posed by the west and they have achieved their goals with new radar and sensors and weapon systems offering an interwoven defence network where even if a part is destroyed, the rest can still continue to operate.

Now that the INF treaty is gone the EU will realise what they need is an IADS like the Soviets and Russians have been developing for half a century or more to protect them even just from cruise missile attack.... cruise missiles are cheap to mass produce and most importantly the ones the EU wants to protect itself from are not the expensive precise missiles coming through the third window on the right in a HQ building in Brussels... what they need to stop is the much much cheaper one with a 200KT warhead that might miss the building by 200m or so but will still obliterate the entire city block and several more around it... much cheaper and simpler and with breeder nuclear reactor power stations much cheaper and quicker and easier to equip with a nuclear warhead...

They are going to need the cheapest gas supplier they can find...

Not to mention shipping crate versions.

The way Putin was talking regarding land based cruise missiles it sounded to me like he was talking about unifying launchers with the navy launchers... ie like a Russian AEGIS Ashore, but with the UKSK-M perhaps... it would mean standardisation, and also when they develop land launched IRBMs these weapons can also be launched from ships.... meaning 2,500km range manouvering hypersonic scramjet powered missiles could be launched from shipping crate, truck, train, riverboat, building, or ship... as well as air launched models...

Things are moving forward fast... the irony is that with the introduction of S-350 and Pine, and S-500 and the expansion of S-400, as well as S-300V4, new model BUK 3, TOR 3, new model Pantsir, Verba... and now 57mm autoguns replacing Tunguska... not to mention all the older systems and all the new and old radar sets, Russian air defence is stronger than ever... it really doesn't matter if the INF treaty gets ripped up, they are way better prepared for IRBMs than any of their neighbours including all of NATO and the EU and the US.

The US has ripped up that treaty because it says it ties its hands against China, but really it tied Russian hands more...

GarryB wrote:Not to mention shipping crate versions.

The way Putin was talking regarding land based cruise missiles it sounded to me like he was talking about unifying launchers with the navy launchers... ie like a Russian AEGIS Ashore, but with the UKSK-M perhaps... it would mean standardisation, and also when they develop land launched IRBMs these weapons can also be launched from ships.... meaning 2,500km range manouvering hypersonic scramjet powered missiles could be launched from shipping crate, truck, train, riverboat, building, or ship... as well as air launched models...

Things are moving forward fast... the irony is that with the introduction of S-350 and Pine, and S-500 and the expansion of S-400, as well as S-300V4, new model BUK 3, TOR 3, new model Pantsir, Verba... and now 57mm autoguns replacing Tunguska... not to mention all the older systems and all the new and old radar sets, Russian air defence is stronger than ever... it really doesn't matter if the INF treaty gets ripped up, they are way better prepared for IRBMs than any of their neighbours including all of NATO and the EU and the US.

The US has ripped up that treaty because it says it ties its hands against China, but really it tied Russian hands more...

Indeed, the smarmy yanquis snookered themselves with the shredding of the INF. Gorby sold Russia down the river with the INF and now
this BS is over. The yanquis only gain advantages by sneaky treaties which they disregard themselves. The INF is a perfect example.
Both the "practice target" missiles for the ABM and the ABM launchers are full blown violations of the INF. Russia should reply to
yanqui aggressors with hypersonic IRBMs. And don't play the yanqui games for pretending that only conventional warheads will be used.
High yield nuclear warheads are essential. Then all of NATO's launch sites and conventional warfare asset deployments will be glassed.
The yanquis will rue the days that they tore up the ABM treaty and the INF. Smug, dick-stroking assertions of technological superiority
as routinely repeated by resident NATO trolls on this board are for morons.