Iranian Kh-55

well i never said iran couldnt RE the missiles or make something based on them. im just doubtful as to whether iran can actually do it in time to pre-empty any US military advantures (which is the whole point in having the missiles in the first place – to form a deterrant).

remember that if washington is to attck iran, it would do so well before it thinks iran might actually have nuclear weapons (for obvious reasons), so this time frame stretches from tommorrow to around 3 years max at.

secondly, i never said that RE and feilding of the KH55s would be mutually exclusive. iran will almost certainly, IMHO, be working to feild the missiles at the same time as they are studying it.

this would make the most sense as it would give iran a strategic precision strike capacity almost immediately, which will be a far better deterrant then ballistic missiles with conventional warheads (or even chemical and biological warheads as a cruise missile makes the agent delivery process much easier and far more efficent).

after all, what’s the point in keeping ready made missiles sitting in warehouses doing nothing when you really need them?

Hi
interesting conversation you are having here, just though i should drop a line about iran and laser gyros.

from IRNA,

Quote:
Air Force reports success in producing laser navigation systems
IRNA

Tehran, Sept 15, IRNA — Air Force Commander Brigadier-General Reza
Pardis said here on Monday that Air Force experts have been able
to develop the technology for producing laser navigation systems for
the first time in the country.
The Persian-language newspaper `Jomhouri-Ye Eslami` quoted Pardis
as saying that the experts had succeeded to produce the Intertial
Navigation System (INS), which uses laser gyros and satellite
facilities to determine the geographical position of an aircraft and
report it to the pilot.
He said the foreign brands of INS systems is worth about 100,000
to 120,000 dollars, stressing that Iran`s ability to produce these
systems could have considerable economic gains for the country.
Pardis added that the Air Force started the INS development
project in cooperation with the Department for Electronic Industries
of Defense Ministry as well as a group of university professors about
two years ago.
He also said that the technology for producing INS systems is
exclusive only to certain countries such as the US, Britain, France
and Russia, and that some other countries are producing these systems
under a license without having the right to transfer the technology. AA/210
End
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2003/09/mil-030915-irna01.htm

the article is from some time ago.

i really think you should not doubt Iran’s ability or reverse engineer such engines.

we are just going around in circles. i’ll let you have the last word on the matter and lets just agree to disagree on this one and let time be our judge.

OK, but this is one incident… we don’t know they don’t have more from another “incident” and most of what I have said has to be speculation based on scarce information.

we are just going around in circles. i’ll let you have the last word on the matter and lets just agree to disagree on this one and let time be our judge. 😉

4 or 5 missiles is better then zero. there is nothing more the iranians can learn from taking 6 missiles apart compared to 1 or 2.

Just handing you a half dozen missiles will not put you in a position to use them any time soon. You need to take them to bits first to see how they work and what parts they use what materials are the bits made of and how strong are they. Then you need to work out what you need to fire them. What is the launch command that starts the engine, what systems need to be prepped before launch, what information does the guidance system need before it will work. It would be really handy if you could make more, so you don’t want all your eggs sitting in operational units doing nothing but waiting to be used. And that is just the begining. How are you actually intend to use them and are they able to do that job. Do you want a nuclear version or are you wanting to take advantage of the precision guidance and give them conventional warheads. (If you just want a nuclear delivery system then a ballistic missile is probably easier… the first one you launch you airburst over the target in space to make any air defence network inoperable and then you hit your enemy with as many ballistic missiles as you could afford.)
Unless they want to attack Afghanistan or Iraq a cruise missile would have to cross too much foreign territory to get to Israel if that is their target.

considering the way the US has been eyeing iran, i think iran’s leader’s top priority is to make sure their government can last until the new weapons become operational. they dont have the luxery of being able to say, ‘we got time, no rush.’

If they have nuclear weapons then they do have that luxury. If they don’t then half a dozen cruise missiles with conventional warheads will not save them. If the US attacked them and they launched all 6 at targets in Iraq and american bases in the region the reality is that the vast majority would probably be shot down unless they were launched in a surprise attack. Even SA-8s are good at bringing down cruise missiles. As long as their was a decent model Patriot near the target (and I would assume that any target worthy of the 6 cruise missiles would also be worthy of Patriot protection) it should bring down a cruise missile. Remember Patriots problems were against ballistic missiles, which it wasn’t designed to handle. It was designed to handle low flying high subsonic aircraft and should be able to get those. (Its poor performance against low flying anti ship missiles the Iraqis fired probably has more to do with the horrible inaccuracy of those missiles meaning they never got near anything important enough to defend with patriots… though I haven’t read any analysis of what happened…)

well it is import in this case. even if iran could develop a nuclear weapon, chances are it will be heavy, so they’ll need a missile with a big payload. equally, range is important in that it can give them more targets to aim at, and more places the enemy will need to defence, thus thinning out their defence and increasing the chnce of missiles getting to their targets.

I disagree with your logic here. Why must it be heavy? Early western and eastern bloc weapons were large and heavy but that was because of older technology levels and lack of accuracy in guidance systems making larger warheads necessary. An old Russian anti ship missile might need a 800kt warhead because the guidance system was crude and unreliable. With a guidance system getting the missile within 20m or so of the target means a warhead of 10kt would be plenty for most targets.

When you plan to design a new rifle you don’t study muskets and get the local blacksmith to hammer out a few barrels for you. You look at and try to take advantage of current technology. All those Russian scientists in country could probably earn a few dollars more if they wanted. Equally since the end of the cold war the western countries have been poaching the best from the east. Is it that far fetched to think the ME might be doing the same.

SAM, radar, both nees to work for a successful intercept.

A radar trace coming low and fast over the water will alert more than just SAMs.

you only flight test something when you first develop it and you are unsure of how everything is working together.

Not true. When you buy a new piece of kit for yourself you test it yourself too. Needless to say the Skyhawk and the Maverick are both tried and tested systems but when NZ got their first Mavericks for their Skyhawks they tested them together and used the experience to write manuals for the pilots as they train.

again, confusing the issue. in that case, and many other like it, it was a ‘sting’ operation conducted by the FBS with PRIOR knowledge. in short, the sabotaged the weapons because they knew where they were going.

There are plenty of cases where the destination of something isn’t known till the last minute and an opportunity is taken. Removing an important part or reversing a part so it fails are just two examples.

had the FSB or any other security org had any idea of the missile transfer to iran and china, they would have just stopped it, if they wanted to. there is zero reason for them to sabotage the missiles since there was still a major risk of tech transfer.

true, but then they might have wanted the money but didn’t want Iran to have the capability. Iran wouldn’t pay for nothing but by making what they got worthless…

For all we know the Soviet programmers might have put in a code to prevent the use of the weapon without proper authorisation codes, or so that the computer crashes if a target location in the former soviet union is chosen and programmed. Limiting fuel loads in border air bases to deter defection was common. This would be a simple protection too.

since the US invaded iraq, which puts them a stone’s throw away from iran.

Which gives them easy access to Iran but you could also say it puts US troops (in Iraq and Afghanistan) well within the reach of Iran which was not the case before US troops were there… it was more one sided the US could get Iran but Iran couldn’t reach/hurt the US except by closing off the persian gulf (which of course hurts iran too by stopping oil flow).

equations. they know the desity and weight of the chemicals, just find something none-toxic with the same properties and use a crop duster to spray a bit of the dessert and find out.

Both the Soviets and americans did extensive testing on their own citizens. Must have been important to do so.

since iran doesnt seem to have either operational at the moment, chemical agents seem like the only likely candiate, which the Kh55’s accuracy is ideal for.

It is not evident they have chemical weapons either nor the capability to produce effective weaponised chemicals quicker than they could weaponise nuclear material.

fitting the orginal KH55 on F14s is already hard enough, fitting an even bigger missiles would be boarding on the impossible.

Why would they even consider fitting them to F-14s?

Did the Russians ever fit Kh-55s to Mig-31s? Either ground launched of fitted to a medium bomber makes rather more sense.

its all down to maths, and better mathmetitions then you or i have done their best. if two engines really were as good as u suggest, why isnt anyone actually using it? the sums just dont add up, plain and simple.

That just means that no one with inadequate small engines has designed a cruise missile yet. Two engines are not ideal… the better solution would be solid rocket booster launch and simply use that underpowered engine for cruise speed. (I am talking about ground launch… for air launched weapons being over weight will not be a problem… by the time it gets to the target area a few thousand kms away it will be much lighter and therefore faster as long as it is low drag.)

then you’ll probably have to add a BM booster to the back to get it airborn since the turbofan engines were just design to keep the thing in the air and has nowhere near the thrust to lift it off the grouud.

Most turbojet engined missiles use solid rocket boosters to get airborne from ground launches. Missiles like the ground launched Kh-55 through to the Harpoon or Uran. It is no big deal. Once airborne and up to speed the thrust needed to keep them in the air is very low.

and what makes you so sure iran has the ability to make such radars small enough to fit in a cruise missile?

They have had access to the F-14s radar for several decades.

it doesnt need to be. GPS sats are just signal broadcasting devices. so they can broadcast electronic signals. doesnt take a major re-fit to allow them to broadcast signals on a slightly difference frequency.

Even a minor refit of something in space is a really big deal.

indeed, but true, since even the chinese have occassionally found things they cant digest easily or quickly.

Very true, and often what they produce is adapted to their needs and so unlike the original it is difficult to identify it as a copy. (as it really isn’t… more of a modification).

I am under the impression that you think they will use these weapons as operational systems. I disagree. I think 6 is no where near enough to warrant operational deployment. After studying these weapons for a few years they should be able to reverse engineer a weapon that might not have the range or flight performance of the Kh-55 but will certainly do the job they want it to. This is no doubt not the only thing they have gotten hold of from the various former soviet republics and indeed I wouldn’t doubt they are aquiring new skills all the time either through hard work or espionage.

4 or 5 missiles is better then zero. there is nothing more the iranians can learn from taking 6 missiles apart compared to 1 or 2.

I do understand that, but I don’t think they will use any of these operationally in the near future. These 6 will be stripped and examined very carefully and put back together several times by technicians and one or two might even be tested to check the performance. From what they learn they will be able to make their own missile that they control. For all we know all Soviet missiles might have a failsafe mechanism… where if a coordinate inside the USSR is selected as a target then it will fail, or generate some small error that seems to be a glitch but isn’t.

considering the way the US has been eyeing iran, i think iran’s leader’s top priority is to make sure their government can last until the new weapons become operational. they dont have the luxery of being able to say, ‘we got time, no rush.’

No it isn’t. Payloads can be very small in fact if it is a nuclear weapon. A 200kt nuke the Kh-55 normally carries is less than 80kgs in weight.

Equally for the Russians 3,000km was necessary to cover the necessary targets from the standoff range the missiles would be launched from. Who knows what range the Iranians might decide they need.

well it is import in this case. even if iran could develop a nuclear weapon, chances are it will be heavy, so they’ll need a missile with a big payload. equally, range is important in that it can give them more targets to aim at, and more places the enemy will need to defence, thus thinning out their defence and increasing the chnce of missiles getting to their targets.

No, it doesn’t. We are not talking about SAMs performance but radar performance. Even if it is on the water it will be seen on radar simply due to its speed. If there are mountains to fly behind then a course can be planned to avoid most known radar sites so that the enemy won’t know what has hit them till it has hit them.

Mountains and hills would rarely be flown over… more likely flown around. We are talking nap of earth flying.

SAM, radar, both nees to work for a successful intercept.

in ‘difficult terrian’, i was refering to forested areas, where th trees will not always so up so precisely on the primitive ground avoidence radars many cruise missiles have.

But the major part of the guidance of a cruise missile are computer parts and computer programmes…

which can be checked independently.

So why bother with flight testing at all? Missiles or aircraft? If all the parts work individually then the whoel system should work right?

you only flight test something when you first develop it and you are unsure of how everything is working together. the KH55 is a tried and tested missile. the system configuration works, and if all the parts are in good condition, then the missile will do what it was designed to do.

Yes, and it all passes with flying colours but when it is actually needed you use the weapon but none of them hit their targets. Later on you find out that in the real world there are things called sand storms. You also find that at the altitude you programmed the missile to fly for the first part of the attack makes the control surfaces freeze and the time for them to unfreeze is less than the time it takes to hit the ground, or the vibration from the engine make the gyro out by 10km for every minute of operation, or the fuel lines easily become clogged or come loose etc etc etc… maybe you never find out what is going wrong and you just have to start again from scratch. Maybe a enemy spy puts a bug in the guidance computer so that if it ever crosses onto a particular country it crashes.

again, only of real concern when dealing with new and untest technology, whereas the KH55 has already been perfected and its design has already solved all of the above problems and more.

No, I am suggesting that the 6 missiles that the Iranians got might have been altered on their trip to their destination. I have a nice amusing video of a group of Chechens what are test firing some recoiless rifle rounds (SPG-9 rockets) and strangely enough the whole weapon explodes, killing the firer and the guy standing next to him. (I assume they are dead… there doesn’t seem to be too much left). Doesn’t pay to buy weapons from the FSB…

again, confusing the issue. in that case, and many other like it, it was a ‘sting’ operation conducted by the FBS with PRIOR knowledge. in short, the sabotaged the weapons because they knew where they were going.

not the case with the missiles, since both the russians and ukrainans (most of them anyways) thought the missiles were heading back to russia.

had the FSB or any other security org had any idea of the missile transfer to iran and china, they would have just stopped it, if they wanted to. there is zero reason for them to sabotage the missiles since there was still a major risk of tech transfer.

Iran calls the US the great satan, the US calls Iran an evil empire. Since when did name calling mean anything?

since the US invaded iraq, which puts them a stone’s throw away from iran.

But without testing how will they know the ideal height for detonation?

equations. they know the desity and weight of the chemicals, just find something none-toxic with the same properties and use a crop duster to spray a bit of the dessert and find out.

doesnt have to be inch perfect you know.

If you want bio weapons or nuclear weapons capability for this cruise missile then accuracy is no needed… in the case of the nuclear weapon anywhere in the city will do, in the case of the chem or bio weapon… just fly it at minimum altitude releasing the stuff when it gets near a city or urban area.

since iran doesnt seem to have either operational at the moment, chemical agents seem like the only likely candiate, which the Kh55’s accuracy is ideal for.

No. Once it has reached cruise speed it uses no where near full power to maintain speed. The two engines effectively doubles the power at the cost of slightly more fuel consumption due to extra weight. If they can keep drag down then there is no reason for double the fuel to be needed.

its all down to maths, and better mathmetitions then you or i have done their best. if two engines really were as good as u suggest, why isnt anyone actually using it? the sums just dont add up, plain and simple.

The Kh-55 was constrained in size because it had to fit in a weapon bomb bay. There is no reason why the Iranians couldn’t make a 4 ton model that was simply longer but otherwise the same dimensions even with a far less fuel efficient engine and still get a range better than the Kh-55.

fitting the orginal KH55 on F14s is already hard enough, fitting an even bigger missiles would be boarding on the impossible. and if you try to launch the thing from the ground, then you’ll probably have to add a BM booster to the back to get it airborn since the turbofan engines were just design to keep the thing in the air and has nowhere near the thrust to lift it off the grouud.

But modern airliners travel rather more than 3,000km, and modern airliners don’t have radar to update their nav computers like the cruise missiles do.

and what makes you so sure iran has the ability to make such radars small enough to fit in a cruise missile?

you’d need a fairly good radar to get good enough ground mapping.

And when was that tested and proved?

it doesnt need to be. GPS sats are just signal broadcasting devices. so they can broadcast electronic signals. doesnt take a major re-fit to allow them to broadcast signals on a slightly difference frequency.

Hahahahahaha…. sorry there is something very ironic about a Chinese person saying that….. :diablo: (no disrespect)

indeed, but true, since even the chinese have occassionally found things they cant digest easily or quickly.

i never said it would be impossible. just implausable given the time frame we are talking about (1~2 years).

I am talking about what they are going to be doing with the missiles… are you assuming I mean they have already started production of cruise missiles?

and anyways, didnt i already point out that iran will be studying and trying to reproduce the missiles anyways?

I am under the impression that you think they will use these weapons as operational systems. I disagree. I think 6 is no where near enough to warrant operational deployment. After studying these weapons for a few years they should be able to reverse engineer a weapon that might not have the range or flight performance of the Kh-55 but will certainly do the job they want it to. This is no doubt not the only thing they have gotten hold of from the various former soviet republics and indeed I wouldn’t doubt they are aquiring new skills all the time either through hard work or espionage.

what you dont seem to understand is that the KH55s, old as they may be, offer a quantum leap for iran in terms of the strategic strike capacity it now offers them.

I do understand that, but I don’t think they will use any of these operationally in the near future. These 6 will be stripped and examined very carefully and put back together several times by technicians and one or two might even be tested to check the performance. From what they learn they will be able to make their own missile that they control. For all we know all Soviet missiles might have a failsafe mechanism… where if a coordinate inside the USSR is selected as a target then it will fail, or generate some small error that seems to be a glitch but isn’t.

Not exactly hard to hide amongst all that code.

(and with cruise missiles, thats really whats most important).

No it isn’t. Payloads can be very small in fact if it is a nuclear weapon. A 200kt nuke the Kh-55 normally carries is less than 80kgs in weight.

Equally for the Russians 3,000km was necessary to cover the necessary targets from the standoff range the missiles would be launched from. Who knows what range the Iranians might decide they need.

and has anyone actually made a BM that accurate? remeber that with BMs, you have the added difficulties of the massive heat caused during flight (which tend to fry delicate optical sensors), and the massive speeds involved (meaning final course adjustments have to be far more accurate and made much more quickly).

SS-21 and SS-26 missiles are accurate enough to use conventional warheads and have CEPS of less than 20m.

it kinda works both ways. for difficult terrain, the cruise missile would be forced to fly higher, but then there will be more interferance for the targeting radars of the SAM. for flat, open terrain, cruise missiles can drop close to the mininum engagment altitude of SAMs.

No, it doesn’t. We are not talking about SAMs performance but radar performance. Even if it is on the water it will be seen on radar simply due to its speed. If there are mountains to fly behind then a course can be planned to avoid most known radar sites so that the enemy won’t know what has hit them till it has hit them.

Mountains and hills would rarely be flown over… more likely flown around. We are talking nap of earth flying.

well having a missile that can only go in a straight line at a fixed speed is going to majorly limit your planning options.

I didn’t say it couldn’t manouver, just that it can’t change throttle settings rapidly. Having the throttle at economic cruise for the initial part of the flight and then flat out for the period inside enemy territory is normal for aircraft and cruise missiles alike.

remeber that cruise missiles ‘like’ to weave in between mountain ranges to minimise the risk of detection. having a ‘one speed only’ cruise missile pretty much takes that option off the table.

I repeat, pulse jet engines are not good for rapid throttle changes. No where did I say they couldnt’ change the throttle settings. Even the turbofan engines of the A-10 don’t throttle very quickly… are you suggesting the A-10 is no good at low level?

wrong. cruise missiles will always have far fewer parts then there are lines of code in a computer programme. even then many of the parts are redundency units.

But the major part of the guidance of a cruise missile are computer parts and computer programmes…

then if all the circits and wires joining all these parts work properly, there is no reason why the missile wont work.

So why bother with flight testing at all? Missiles or aircraft? If all the parts work individually then the whoel system should work right?

its a similar case with the control surfaces and nav computers and terminal guidence sensors.

Yes, and it all passes with flying colours but when it is actually needed you use the weapon but none of them hit their targets. Later on you find out that in the real world there are things called sand storms. You also find that at the altitude you programmed the missile to fly for the first part of the attack makes the control surfaces freeze and the time for them to unfreeze is less than the time it takes to hit the ground, or the vibration from the engine make the gyro out by 10km for every minute of operation, or the fuel lines easily become clogged or come loose etc etc etc… maybe you never find out what is going wrong and you just have to start again from scratch. Maybe a enemy spy puts a bug in the guidance computer so that if it ever crosses onto a particular country it crashes.

huh?

are you suggesting that the ukrainians sabotaged their own missiles on the off chance they might be stolen?

you can possilble beleive that!

No, I am suggesting that the 6 missiles that the Iranians got might have been altered on their trip to their destination. I have a nice amusing video of a group of Chechens what are test firing some recoiless rifle rounds (SPG-9 rockets) and strangely enough the whole weapon explodes, killing the firer and the guy standing next to him. (I assume they are dead… there doesn’t seem to be too much left). Doesn’t pay to buy weapons from the FSB…

and all the warheads were shipped back to russia. the fact that the missiles remained meant that the russian had no direct control of them.

Nor responsibility for them either, but they were made in Russia and who knows what was in the original code. (see above).

huh?

Iran calls the US the great satan, the US calls Iran an evil empire. Since when did name calling mean anything?

well you are forgetting the accuracy of the KH55. you can air burst the thing a couple dosen, a couple hundred metre or a couple thousand metres above the ground to maximise effect,

But without testing how will they know the ideal height for detonation?

the idea is to tell the bush administration, ‘we have the means to hurt you badly, and if you invade, then there’s not much reason for us not to use it is there? so hand off.’

If you want bio weapons or nuclear weapons capability for this cruise missile then accuracy is no needed… in the case of the nuclear weapon anywhere in the city will do, in the case of the chem or bio weapon… just fly it at minimum altitude releasing the stuff when it gets near a city or urban area.

and you double the fuel consumption, halving the range, at least.

No. Once it has reached cruise speed it uses no where near full power to maintain speed. The two engines effectively doubles the power at the cost of slightly more fuel consumption due to extra weight. If they can keep drag down then there is no reason for double the fuel to be needed.

as i said before, iran can easily get a ‘cruise missile’ like UAV airborn, but the range and payload wont be anything like that of the KH55 no matter how many engines you slap on.

The Kh-55 was constrained in size because it had to fit in a weapon bomb bay. There is no reason why the Iranians couldn’t make a 4 ton model that was simply longer but otherwise the same dimensions even with a far less fuel efficient engine and still get a range better than the Kh-55.

even mordern airliners with state-of-the-art laser gyros and flying a pretty simple flight plan regularly have a couple to dosens of miles difference between where their inertial guidence systems tell them they are and where they are in reality.

But modern airliners travel rather more than 3,000km, and modern airliners don’t have radar to update their nav computers like the cruise missiles do.

what are you talking about? the infrastructure in already in place. US GPS sats can jam recievers on the ground by broadcasting doggy Glonass signals or just sending out interferance signals to scramble the russian sat transmissions.

And when was that tested and proved?

er, having an example doesnt automatically mean you can make a copy.

Hahahahahaha…. sorry there is something very ironic about a Chinese person saying that….. :diablo: (no disrespect)

oh, and another thing, im not sure if its still being done, but in the past, nations had a habbit of releasing slightly inaccuract maps. not much of a problem when you are driving a car or walking or even flying in a comercial jet. but its kinda big issue when you are trying to programme a missile to navigate using those maps.

Yes, Russia might do taht for Russian territory in case the Chechens use it against them, but how likely are they to be doing that for maps of Taiwan or Israel, or Iraq?

You are forgetting we are talking about a country that put a few hundred people in a building with all the shredded documents the Americans left behind, gave then as much sellotape as they needed and left them to reconstruct thousands or hundreds of thousands of shredded documents… no matter how long it took!

They already have had access to all sorts of sophisticated military equipment… access to working cruise missiles is not going to set them back a few years.

i never said it would be impossible. just implausable given the time frame we are talking about (1~2 years).

And do you know how much less time it would have taken if someone had supplied them with 6 complete examples?

same as above, possible but not probably.

and anyways, didnt i already point out that iran will be studying and trying to reproduce the missiles anyways?

im just saying that the 6 missiles will not all be for accidemic study, with the emphysis now on using them to form some sort of deterance capacity to buy time for iran to improve its overal miliatry capacity.

what you dont seem to understand is that the KH55s, old as they may be, offer a quantum leap for iran in terms of the strategic strike capacity it now offers them.

and you cant just diejest it all in a year or two and make something equivilant, no matter how many people you lock in a room to try it.

on the other hand, alot of the things you are suggesting would already be doable for iran. the kinda basic short range cruise missiles like the ones you are decribing can be easily converted from C802 AShMs, provided iran has the capacity to develop decent low level nav systems, termal guidence and maybe a better turbofan engine.

however, none of that will come close to matching the KH55 without anything short of a quantum leap in the tech level of iran atm (judged by the stuff they are making right now).

so, to sum up again. anything iran tries to make using the methods you have descirbed so far will not come anywhere near the range or payload of the KH55 (and with cruise missiles, thats really whats most important). anything they might be able to cook up in time would not be significantly better then a re-fitted C802, and thus would not be worth the trouble.

Not strictly true anymore. The same guidance features that make cruise missiles accurate can be used in BMs to make them just as accurate.

and has anyone actually made a BM that accurate? remeber that with BMs, you have the added difficulties of the massive heat caused during flight (which tend to fry delicate optical sensors), and the massive speeds involved (meaning final course adjustments have to be far more accurate and made much more quickly).

That depends upon terrain. The S-300 series is desigined to engage cruise missiles as well as BMs. It even has radars especially designed for low targets.

it kinda works both ways. for difficult terrain, the cruise missile would be forced to fly higher, but then there will be more interferance for the targeting radars of the SAM. for flat, open terrain, cruise missiles can drop close to the mininum engagment altitude of SAMs.

generally long range SAMs are only useful if they can catch the cruise missiles during the ‘economy’ flight phase where they are high up (and even then only some missiles do that while others go nap-of-the-earth all the way).

Whether they are mountains or buildings is irrelevant. The flight plan for the weapon will be prepared in advance with the known performance of the weapon in mind. They aren’t going to try to get a weapon to fly 9g manouvers all the way to the target.

well having a missile that can only go in a straight line at a fixed speed is going to majorly limit your planning options.

remeber that cruise missiles ‘like’ to weave in between mountain ranges to minimise the risk of detection. having a ‘one speed only’ cruise missile pretty much takes that option off the table.

Both are made of many parts that need to be able to work together. Testing them in isolation means nothing if they don’t work together.

wrong. cruise missiles will always have far fewer parts then there are lines of code in a computer programme. even then many of the parts are redundency units.

then there is the operational realities. for computer programmes, the programme tend to only work as a whole, making it hard to test things bit by bit. with a cruise missile, there are many functional units (nav computer, engines, control surfaces) which can be tested on their own. then if all the circits and wires joining all these parts work properly, there is no reason why the missile wont work.

of course, there is also the option of testing the missile without firing it.

having a turbofan engine means that you can drain most of the fuel tank and test the engine much the same way you test a fighter’s jet engines. if that is working, you just top up the fuel and its ready to go.

its a similar case with the control surfaces and nav computers and terminal guidence sensors.

Yes, it is only those devious russians that have intelligence services. There is no equivelent to the FSB or KGB in the Ukraine. Everyone knows the Ukrainians trust everyone and would have nothing to do with her evil neighbour in the post cold war period…

huh? :confused:

are you suggesting that the ukrainians sabotaged their own missiles on the off chance they might be stolen?

you can possilble beleive that!

The FSB was the KGB. The KGB had control of all nuclear warheads. Whether they were Ukrainian KGB or Russian KGB or Belorussian KGB.

and all the warheads were shipped back to russia. the fact that the missiles remained meant that the russian had no direct control of them.

Iran WAS a US ally. Pakistan doesn’t even have oil… it is an ally of convenience at the moment. Such things change rapidly.

come on, thats just being stubben. iran never was a US ally, rather the US liked the oil reserves that was under the place and made the government in iran pro-US by means of a coup de tart, which backfired and now iranians hate the US more then ever.

iran has lots of oil, but there’s no chance in hell that the US will get the kinda sole access deal on it through negotiations when the likes of china and india are getting so oil hungry. hence the US’ desire to find a way to get at the oil through other means.

Great Satan, Evil Empire… are you trying to suggest a difference between these countries?

huh?

But the obvious response will be devastating and will include nuclear weapons. How many infidels do they think they could get with such an immature weapon? (Have you seen evidence of real world tests performed by the iranians?)

i never said it was about jihad to wipe out infidels. rather as a means to try and make sure the ‘infidels’ keep their hands to themselves.

in the world of nuclear weapons, there can never be the kind of absolute military victories of the past, hence its not common for nuclear powers to have a go at each other, and there lies the goal of todays would-be nuclear wannabies – a nuclear weapon = US military action free card.

Many are so fine they would take hours to descend to ground level, by which time they would be so diluted they would have little effect. Also wind speed and direction would have a huge influence on the result. In the end I doubt it would justify the retaliation for the agressor… but don’t think that will stop the victim from launching a nuclear strike in return.

well you are forgetting the accuracy of the KH55. you can air burst the thing a couple dosen, a couple hundred metre or a couple thousand metres above the ground to maximise effect, and the missile will deliver the missile to a couple of metres of the optimum height, which is good enough to achieve maximum effect (wind effect is a double edged sword, and can be used to the attacker’s advanatge since info on whether patterns are easily accessed via any number of internation websites like CNN. if the attacker cant take advanatge of that, he can just programme the missile to go off at a low altitude where wind affect is neglagable).

also, remeber that this is meant to be a DETERANT. even if iran had nuclear weapons they would still only be a deterant. in effect, even the US’ massive nuclear capacity is only a deterant against any of the established nuclear powers.

the idea is to tell the bush administration, ‘we have the means to hurt you badly, and if you invade, then there’s not much reason for us not to use it is there? so hand off.’

Even if the missile is 4 tons… twice the weight of a Kh-55, just fit two engines.

and you double the fuel consumption, halving the range, at least.

as i said before, iran can easily get a ‘cruise missile’ like UAV airborn, but the range and payload wont be anything like that of the KH55 no matter how many engines you slap on.

A bit like suggesting AMRAAM has a max range of 20km isn’t it?
Most modern cruise missiles use inertial guidance to get them to a place where they can use their onboard sensors (optical or radar) to find the target area. Even ballistic missiles do the same.

sounds easy, but if your missiles does any kind of complex fight pattern on the way in, your going to be in big trouble. even mordern airliners with state-of-the-art laser gyros and flying a pretty simple flight plan regularly have a couple to dosens of miles difference between where their inertial guidence systems tell them they are and where they are in reality. thats why airliners all have GPS navegation with the gyro pretty much acting like a backup in case the GPS packs in.

And when such signals flood the airways the missile will just continue to use inertial guidance and use Glonass signals. BTW the power and proximity of the jamming signals means you’d either have to spend trillions and have active jammers every few kms along the flight path… and have them operating all the time… which no doubt will make civilian and military use of such systems impossible… I wouldn’t doubt the Iranians have a few specimins of US military GPS systems already from failed cruise missiles and UAVs.

what are you talking about? the infrastructure in already in place. US GPS sats can jam recievers on the ground by broadcasting doggy Glonass signals or just sending out interferance signals to scramble the russian sat transmissions.

If they have Kh-55s then they have the inertial system it used.
All they need to do is upgrade their current Mig-29s to SMT standard and they will certainly get Ring laser gyro technology.

er, having an example doesnt automatically mean you can make a copy.

You can download DTMs (digital terrain maps) from the internet if you have a credit card. It doesn’t need a map of the planet… just the ME.

i was refering to info about the world the cruise missile is in so it can compare with its maps to find out where it is.

oh, and another thing, im not sure if its still being done, but in the past, nations had a habbit of releasing slightly inaccuract maps. not much of a problem when you are driving a car or walking or even flying in a comercial jet. but its kinda big issue when you are trying to programme a missile to navigate using those maps.

no, just point out the rather simplistic view you were taking on how hard it is to build a modren cruise missile.

You are forgetting we are talking about a country that put a few hundred people in a building with all the shredded documents the Americans left behind, gave then as much sellotape as they needed and left them to reconstruct thousands or hundreds of thousands of shredded documents… no matter how long it took!

They already have had access to all sorts of sophisticated military equipment… access to working cruise missiles is not going to set them back a few years.

and do you know how long it took for the americans and russians to develop sensor and computing packages that would allow a missile’s onboard computer to match those maps with the real world its flying in?

And do you know how much less time it would have taken if someone had supplied them with 6 complete examples?

no simple radio is going to give you anything like the details your missile will need to know to be able to figure out where it is and where it should go next.

A radio altimeter plus a barometric altimeter will give you an indication if you are over water or if you are off course. (The barometric altimeter tells you your height above sea level, while the radio altimeter tells you how high above the surface you are… together these can tell you if you are on course. Add a compass and a Glonass receiver (which even if it was jammed would not be jammed for more than 60% of the weapons flight) and a digital terrain map of the region and you can hit anything (fixed) you want.

cruise missiles are actually far better first strike weapons. not only are the far more accurate compared to BMs,

Not strictly true anymore. The same guidance features that make cruise missiles accurate can be used in BMs to make them just as accurate.

they are much more difficult for SAMs and other air defences to even target never mind attempt to engage. then of course, there is the matter of the price tag.

The only real difference is warning. BMs give rather more warning but are not “easy” to intercept, by any means.

the only way to effectively deal with cruise missiles is to use AWACS to guide in fighters.

That depends upon terrain. The S-300 series is desigined to engage cruise missiles as well as BMs. It even has radars especially designed for low targets.

and funnily enough, no one had been using pulsejets on their cruise missiles for decades.

Not strictly true. The Russian Dan aerial target drone uses pulse jet technology and pulse jets were suggested for the Kh-101/102.

when flying nap of the earth very close to mountains, a little throttle control becomes pretty neccessary.

Whether they are mountains or buildings is irrelevant. The flight plan for the weapon will be prepared in advance with the known performance of the weapon in mind. They aren’t going to try to get a weapon to fly 9g manouvers all the way to the target.

except these are missiles and not computer programmes.

Both are made of many parts that need to be able to work together. Testing them in isolation means nothing if they don’t work together.

as for FSB tempering. well considering the fact that the break up of the USSR wasnt exactly a planned event, and the small issue that ukrian has been an independent country ever since, there’s not much of a chance of that happening.

Yes, it is only those devious russians that have intelligence services. There is no equivelent to the FSB or KGB in the Ukraine. Everyone knows the Ukrainians trust everyone and would have nothing to do with her evil neighbour in the post cold war period…

and afte the break up, its not like the ukrainians are just going to let the russias walts in and disable all their weapons.

The FSB was the KGB. The KGB had control of all nuclear warheads. Whether they were Ukrainian KGB or Russian KGB or Belorussian KGB.

also, iran cant be compared with pakistan! pakistan is a US ally for god’s sake.

Iran WAS a US ally. Pakistan doesn’t even have oil… it is an ally of convenience at the moment. Such things change rapidly.

and look all the crap even they got from the americans. then of course, there’s also the ‘slight’ difference in that the government in pakistan doesnt refer to the US as the ‘great satin’.

Great Satan, Evil Empire… are you trying to suggest a difference between these countries?

not when you put it in the middle of a city, or a troop barricks considering the US’ zero tolerance for body bags.

But the obvious response will be devastating and will include nuclear weapons. How many infidels do they think they could get with such an immature weapon? (Have you seen evidence of real world tests performed by the iranians?)

chemical agents are actually fairly easy to release via exlposions (well some are at least), its the bio weapons that are hard to release since the explosion tend to kill the bio agents.

Many are so fine they would take hours to descend to ground level, by which time they would be so diluted they would have little effect. Also wind speed and direction would have a huge influence on the result. In the end I doubt it would justify the retaliation for the agressor… but don’t think that will stop the victim from launching a nuclear strike in return.

so, you cant expect to fit the engines of a small missile into a large one and expect the new missile to be able to fly. there just wont be enough thrust, with or without wings.

Even if the missile is 4 tons… twice the weight of a Kh-55, just fit two engines.

and how many radar guided ground attack missiles are there with thousand mile ranges on the market today?

A bit like suggesting AMRAAM has a max range of 20km isn’t it?
Most modern cruise missiles use inertial guidance to get them to a place where they can use their onboard sensors (optical or radar) to find the target area. Even ballistic missiles do the same.

i dont think the americans would resort to iraqi style GPS jamming tactics. they’d just flood the air with radio signals of the same frequency as the one your GPS sat is using.

And when such signals flood the airways the missile will just continue to use inertial guidance and use Glonass signals. BTW the power and proximity of the jamming signals means you’d either have to spend trillions and have active jammers every few kms along the flight path… and have them operating all the time… which no doubt will make civilian and military use of such systems impossible… I wouldn’t doubt the Iranians have a few specimins of US military GPS systems already from failed cruise missiles and UAVs.

as for modern laser gyros. well do you have even good reason to beleive iran has access to these?

If they have Kh-55s then they have the inertial system it used.
All they need to do is upgrade their current Mig-29s to SMT standard and they will certainly get Ring laser gyro technology.

its not just computing power, its the ability to feed the computer enough detailed data to compute in the first place.

You can download DTMs (digital terrain maps) from the internet if you have a credit card. It doesn’t need a map of the planet… just the ME.

The kh-55 only flys at medium altitude for the first part of its flight. Why do you think the Iranians are stupid? They are hardly going to build a weapon to fly at 10,000m all the way to the target.

no, just point out the rather simplistic view you were taking on how hard it is to build a modren cruise missile.

Yes, and basic computer maps used for navigation can be compiled from information bought from most countries with operational satellite systems… the Russians for a start. With the odd inflight navigation fix periodically throughout its flight would be good enough for a 3,000km flight. A simple low powered altimeter radio system it could avoid the ground quite easily.

and do you know how long it took for the americans and russians to develop sensor and computing packages that would allow a missile’s onboard computer to match those maps with the real world its flying in?

no simple radio is going to give you anything like the details your missile will need to know to be able to figure out where it is and where it should go next.

Perhaps more to do with their priorities? I mean an invasion of Taiwan would make anti shipping weapons more useful than cruise weapons. Ballisitic weapons like scud based missiles would be much harder for Taiwan to stop and a low flying sub sonic missile flying over water with no hills to hide behind across the straits.

cruise missiles are actually far better first strike weapons. not only are the far more accurate compared to BMs, they are much more difficult for SAMs and other air defences to even target never mind attempt to engage. then of course, there is the matter of the price tag.

the only way to effectively deal with cruise missiles is to use AWACS to guide in fighters. even then its hard for the fighters’ AAMs to engage the missiles. add in some of your own fighters at high altitude with BVRAAMs and you would quickly find that trying to intercept cruise missiles over water is a pretty bad idea for the defending side.

On the contrary, it is very simple and as long as it is not used in a vehicle that requires rapid or repeated throttle changes it is very reliable and very fuel efficient… and cheap enough to mass produce in the millions. For long range subsonic flight it is actually hard to beat.

and funnily enough, no one had been using pulsejets on their cruise missiles for decades.

only med/high altitude cruising doesnt require rapid throttle changes. when flying nap of the earth very close to mountains, a little throttle control becomes pretty neccessary.

Really? Try computer programming. All the parts of Windows probably worked when they were submitted, but when put together all of a sudden there are problems… millions of problems. Obviously they are tested missiles… they worked or they wouldn’t have been built, but how does Iran know the FSB didn’t have a hand in making sure some parts were left out or were faulty?

except these are missiles and not computer programmes.

weapons systems like cruise missiles are designed to be simple for the obvious reasons of cost saving and reduced melfunction probablity since there are fewer places where things can go wrong.

you can easily break a cruise missile down to its functional components and test each. if the sensors work, the engines run, the computer checks out and all the wiring is in order, there’s not a great many other places where a problem might arise. and all of those can be easily checked as well.

as for FSB tempering. well considering the fact that the break up of the USSR wasnt exactly a planned event, and the small issue that ukrian has been an independent country ever since, there’s not much of a chance of that happening.

had the FSB, or any other russian orginisation had any idea of what was going to happen during the last days and weeks of the USSR, the KH55s and all the other military hardware scattered all over the former soviet republics would not have been there to start with.

and afte the break up, its not like the ukrainians are just going to let the russias walts in and disable all their weapons.

When I say testing I don’t mean attacking real targets… I mean flying it over a flight range at a fake target. The US is hardly likely to invade over a missile test. They didn’t invade Pakistan when they tested their nukes, and they already have Iran under sanctions so what else can they do.

one of the main reasons the US is taking its time with iran is its presumption that iran is not yet in any position to pose a threat to the US (and probably more importantly, israel). but a 3000km cruise missile test kinda changes things a little.

also, iran cant be compared with pakistan! pakistan is a US ally for god’s sake. and look all the crap even they got from the americans. then of course, there’s also the ‘slight’ difference in that the government in pakistan doesnt refer to the US as the ‘great satin’. 😉

Quite true, but then they were far too focused on ballistic missiles after DS. If Saddam really did have WMDs they really would have been in trouble.

i dont think it was just a case of ‘lucky we were wrong’. doesnt quite make sense to not give all your troops proper NBC protective kit if you think they are likely to get gassed does it? but i think we already have enough on our plate already. 😉

I think you over estimate the effect 200kgs or so of material could make.

not when you put it in the middle of a city, or a troop barricks considering the US’ zero tolerance for body bags.

In comparison to the Israeli or US nuclear reply this will be pssing in the wind and the Iranians know it.

well the iranians would have good reason to believe that when weighed against the loss of hundreds of troops or a city, the americans and israelis will deem any benefits they precieve from invading iran as not being worth the risk.

its just the same game as in the cold war. you raise the stakes for your opponent until he folds and go pick on someone else.

Making the material is actually much less difficult than using it effectively. One drop of nerve gas on the skin can kill but as the Japanese subway attack shows that dispersing even a large amount in a confined space is not hugely successful.

that was actually kind of a bad case, since the attacks actually had mixed results because most of the attackers had second thoughts and only ‘competely’ their tasks half heartedly.

then of course, they only punched holes in bags to realease the chemical, so only a tiny amount got out (and none in some cases since the bags werent punctured). but as we have seen, even such small amounts of nerve agent released had pretty nasty effects. imagine the effect of 100~200kg of the stuff airbursting over a city in the middle of the day. 😮

chemical agents are actually fairly easy to release via exlposions (well some are at least), its the bio weapons that are hard to release since the explosion tend to kill the bio agents.

When you haven’t been paid for six months and an armourer comes to you at the gate and offers you 100 US dollars to have a nap for 20 minutes what do you say? TOW missiles and other weapons have disappeared from US bases. It is very easy to hid too. No body measures how much HE you use… you take out 20kgs and they don’t expect you to bring any back. Who is to say that explosion seemed like 15kgs instead of 20?
Obviously a cruise missile is a little different, but not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. Equally “finding a fault” with the engine of a cruise missile would require a new engine or guidance component etc etc whatever you need.

well, i think ‘i’ would be getting a little suspicious if they came with trucks instead of a briefcase.

gaurds only take bribes when they think they arent going to get caught. and i doubt anyone will be studpid enough to imagine the quater master will not notice a couple truck loads of things going AWOL.

as tempting couple hundred dollars would be to a person in the situation as you have described, i doubt they will think it worth going to prison over.

then of course, there is the issue of one not just keeping this kind of weaponry in any old weapons dump, and security around bases where strategic weapons are kept will obviously be much tougher then you average AK storehouse.

This is not a supersonic fighter. Without the need for manouver capability or supersonic performance a high thrust to weight ratio would only be needed if it didn’t have any wings and used thrust to keep it in the air. Needless to say that the MLRS rockets might extend their range by adding wings to the missiles, and of course the addition of wings to unpowered bombs greatly extends their range. There is even some projects to add pulse jet engines and wings to dumb bombs to create cheap simple standoff weapons.

as i said before, the missile will very likely need to exacute sharp turns in low level flight.

the simple fact of the matter is that designers design the biggest missile they can around the engine they have available. so there will not be much more untapped potential in the engines of any missile. so, you cant expect to fit the engines of a small missile into a large one and expect the new missile to be able to fly. there just wont be enough thrust, with or without wings.

I don’t know of any Iranian nuclear weapons programs… so why are the Americans so worried… They aren’t stupid. Worse comes to worse they could simply buy a radar guided weapon that has land attack capability and produce a few extra of those systems.

and how many radar guided ground attack missiles are there with thousand mile ranges on the market today?

Really? Why do you think that? A jammer is an emitter. A few weapons to attack the jammers in the first wave should sort that out. Equally with a modern ring laser gyro a flight of 3,000km or less would probably not need any updates. The occasional radar update of the terrain used to compare with an onboard map should offer sufficient accuracy to get close enough to the target to recognise and attack it.

i dont think the americans would resort to iraqi style GPS jamming tactics. they’d just flood the air with radio signals of the same frequency as the one your GPS sat is using.

as for modern laser gyros. well do you have even good reason to beleive iran has access to these?

Plus to jam you need to know it is coming. In such a case F-15s with AMRAAMs would probably be better than jamming.

why not both?

Russian computing technology was good enough in the late 70s for Tercom. Buy a playstation 2 today and that is like a supercomputer in comparison. The models don’t need to be 100% accurate or show every building and tree… a simple relief map would do.

its not just computing power, its the ability to feed the computer enough detailed data to compute in the first place.

Posted on the YJ83 thread. Check out the recent JDW (feb) on Iranian turbofan development.

many modern SAMs have probably got better range then the V1s. doesnt make them good cruise missiles if you change the seeker.

Modern submarines have longer ranges than SAMs, it doesn’t make them good as being cruise missiles either… probably something to do with choice of propulsion. The V1 had a pulse jet propulsion, which is potentially quite efficient as long as there are no serious throttle changes… like on cruise missiles.

remeber that in the modern day battlefeild, a cruise missile’s job is much more then just flying in a strait line, miles above the ground to their targets.

The kh-55 only flys at medium altitude for the first part of its flight. Why do you think the Iranians are stupid? They are hardly going to build a weapon to fly at 10,000m all the way to the target.

nap of the earth navagation capacity is just as much a trademark of modern crusie missiles as is range and accuracy.

Yes, and basic computer maps used for navigation can be compiled from information bought from most countries with operational satellite systems… the Russians for a start. With the odd inflight navigation fix periodically throughout its flight would be good enough for a 3,000km flight. A simple low powered altimeter radio system it could avoid the ground quite easily.

china has been making turbofan/turbojet powered AShMs for decades. its not incompotence which resulted in them only feilding cruise missiles (pretty short legged ones at that) only a couple of years ago. their newest cruise missile is only now entering service.

Perhaps more to do with their priorities? I mean an invasion of Taiwan would make anti shipping weapons more useful than cruise weapons. Ballisitic weapons like scud based missiles would be much harder for Taiwan to stop and a low flying sub sonic missile flying over water with no hills to hide behind across the straits.

but a pulsejet is both unrealiable (by modern standards) and very fuel thursty, which is bad for range.

On the contrary, it is very simple and as long as it is not used in a vehicle that requires rapid or repeated throttle changes it is very reliable and very fuel efficient… and cheap enough to mass produce in the millions. For long range subsonic flight it is actually hard to beat.

well i think they can check all the components seperately. if all the aprts work on their own, then the whole should function well as well.

Really? Try computer programming. All the parts of Windows probably worked when they were submitted, but when put together all of a sudden there are problems… millions of problems. Obviously they are tested missiles… they worked or they wouldn’t have been built, but how does Iran know the FSB didn’t have a hand in making sure some parts were left out or were faulty?

after all, not only will testing a missile be wasteful, it will also effectively tell the americans that iran has a got the missiles. while this might work as a deterrance, its equally likely to backfire and trigger a US response.

When I say testing I don’t mean attacking real targets… I mean flying it over a flight range at a fake target. The US is hardly likely to invade over a missile test. They didn’t invade Pakistan when they tested their nukes, and they already have Iran under sanctions so what else can they do.

as for the ability of the Kh55s to penetrate US and israeli defencs. well considering the fact that iraq managed to fly some of their ancient silkworms past the US air defences so easily, it doesnt really fill you with confidence about them being able to shoot down far more modern weapons.

Quite true, but then they were far too focused on ballistic missiles after DS. If Saddam really did have WMDs they really would have been in trouble.

some deadly chemicals are not hard to cook up. industry makes tonnes of the stuff as by products every hour, its really just a case of th iranians choosing the most suitable.

bio weapons are harder to make, but as the US mail incidents showed, its not that hard either.

then there’s also the option of filling part of the warhead with radioactive waste from their nuclear reactors, airbursting the things and rendering major cities uninhabitable.

I think you over estimate the effect 200kgs or so of material could make.

In comparison to the Israeli or US nuclear reply this will be pssing in the wind and the Iranians know it.

weapons grade, kill on contact chemical and biological agents are extremely hard to cook up, but something that can kill people and can speard easily is far simpler to whip up.

Making the material is actually much less difficult than using it effectively. One drop of nerve gas on the skin can kill but as the Japanese subway attack shows that dispersing even a large amount in a confined space is not hugely successful.

you cant just walk into a high security weapons depo with emplty trucks and come out with full ones without being noticed, no matter how highly placed you may be.

When you haven’t been paid for six months and an armourer comes to you at the gate and offers you 100 US dollars to have a nap for 20 minutes what do you say? TOW missiles and other weapons have disappeared from US bases. It is very easy to hid too. No body measures how much HE you use… you take out 20kgs and they don’t expect you to bring any back. Who is to say that explosion seemed like 15kgs instead of 20?
Obviously a cruise missile is a little different, but not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. Equally “finding a fault” with the engine of a cruise missile would require a new engine or guidance component etc etc whatever you need.

the wings can help to creat lift, but they can only do so much. the increases in weight will still need to be accounted for my similar increases in thrust to keep the missile flying (C802 missiles also have wings, albert smaller ones, but its not that great a change).

adding bigger wings will also add to weight, so the benefits are not that great.

This is not a supersonic fighter. Without the need for manouver capability or supersonic performance a high thrust to weight ratio would only be needed if it didn’t have any wings and used thrust to keep it in the air. Needless to say that the MLRS rockets might extend their range by adding wings to the missiles, and of course the addition of wings to unpowered bombs greatly extends their range. There is even some projects to add pulse jet engines and wings to dumb bombs to create cheap simple standoff weapons.

the only iranian experience with radar seeker production i know of is for the seekers of the C802 AShMs.

I don’t know of any Iranian nuclear weapons programs… so why are the Americans so worried… They aren’t stupid. Worse comes to worse they could simply buy a radar guided weapon that has land attack capability and produce a few extra of those systems.

easily jammed.

Really? Why do you think that? A jammer is an emitter. A few weapons to attack the jammers in the first wave should sort that out. Equally with a modern ring laser gyro a flight of 3,000km or less would probably not need any updates. The occasional radar update of the terrain used to compare with an onboard map should offer sufficient accuracy to get close enough to the target to recognise and attack it.

Plus to jam you need to know it is coming. In such a case F-15s with AMRAAMs would probably be better than jamming.

its getting the missile within seeker range that is the hard part. without proper low level navagational aids, the missile will need to fly high to avoid terran (which will make it a easy target), or somehow be guided all the way via a TV link.

Russian computing technology was good enough in the late 70s for Tercom. Buy a playstation 2 today and that is like a supercomputer in comparison. The models don’t need to be 100% accurate or show every building and tree… a simple relief map would do.

Nope, that is not fair… when was the last time you heard Russia or China or any non western country jump up and down because someone has gotten nukes?

well thats probably because they feel that the US is doing enough jumping for everyone. 😉

remeber the active role china nd russia are playing in trying to defuse the NK nuclear stand off. part of that is aimed at stopping a war in their back yard, but another part in due to their preference for no one else to have nukes.

also, thus far, none of the world’s new nuclear aspriants are considered to be a potential threat to either china or russia. if japan was to try and go nuclear, you’d be seeing alot of jumping on the part of mosco and beijing. 😀

But that has more to do with unreliable powerplants/fuel systems, lack of any real guidance system except a primitive gyro and inefficient engines. With more modern (and I mean 1960s) guidance systems and a more modern jet engine performance can be greatly improved very easily.

many modern SAMs have probably got better range then the V1s. doesnt make them good cruise missiles if you change the seeker.

remeber that in the modern day battlefeild, a cruise missile’s job is much more then just flying in a strait line, miles above the ground to their targets. with the intergrated air defences many nations (the ones iran will be trying to penetrate), the only way a slow missile can get through is to fly low.

nap of the earth navagation capacity is just as much a trademark of modern crusie missiles as is range and accuracy.

china has been making turbofan/turbojet powered AShMs for decades. its not incompotence which resulted in them only feilding cruise missiles (pretty short legged ones at that) only a couple of years ago. their newest cruise missile is only now entering service.

The important bit… the engine, he built himself. It was a pulse jet engine like the V1 which is why so many comparisons were made with this missile.

interesting, must have missed that bit in the original report. cheeks.

but a pulsejet is both unrealiable (by modern standards) and very fuel thursty, which is bad for range. the only way to even approach the range of modern crusie missiles without making BM sized vehicals in through turbojet/turbofan engines.

They don’t even know if they work or not… I doubt they would just store them for war time. We are talking about 6 missiles. Fly one to test performance, take one to bits for materials testing and you have four left. Considering the air defences of Israel and Irans other neighbours you’d need more than four subsonic missiles to penetrate their defences reliably.

well i think they can check all the components seperately. if all the aprts work on their own, then the whole should function well as well.

after all, not only will testing a missile be wasteful, it will also effectively tell the americans that iran has a got the missiles. while this might work as a deterrance, its equally likely to backfire and trigger a US response.

if the US starts to really go after iran like they did with iraq, then iran will probably ‘test fire’ one of these missiles. otherwise its in iran’s best interest to keep their options open.

as for the ability of the Kh55s to penetrate US and israeli defencs. well considering the fact that iraq managed to fly some of their ancient silkworms past the US air defences so easily, it doesnt really fill you with confidence about them being able to shoot down far more modern weapons.

If they have bio or chem weapons I haven’t heard about it. Iraq had them because the US supplied the original cultures for bio weapons. Anthrax spores of the type useful to weaponise don’t actually fall from the sky naturally.

some deadly chemicals are not hard to cook up. industry makes tonnes of the stuff as by products every hour, its really just a case of th iranians choosing the most suitable.

bio weapons are harder to make, but as the US mail incidents showed, its not that hard either.

then there’s also the option of filling part of the warhead with radioactive waste from their nuclear reactors, airbursting the things and rendering major cities uninhabitable.

weapons grade, kill on contact chemical and biological agents are extremely hard to cook up, but something that can kill people and can speard easily is far simpler to whip up.

We know about these six… what about the hundreds of other missiles we don’t know about. Things go missing in airbases around the world. The KGB/FSB held the warheads so they will be safe but the missiles are something else.

nuts and bults easily go missing, landmines and SAMs can go missing, but 20 foot cruise missiles dont disappear so easily.

you cant just walk into a high security weapons depo with emplty trucks and come out with full ones without being noticed, no matter how highly placed you may be.

IIRC, the missiles in question were redirected en route to russia. that was how their absence was not noticed for so long. the ukrain side would not have noticed any missing missiles since they were struck off the inventory lists, and some bribs and fancy accounting would ensure that the russia side thought they got the right number as well.

but seeing how the things arent transported that often, its not like there were that many opportunities to pull similar switches.

also, im sure that all sides would have carried out detailed inventory checks after the claims came to light, and if there were more missiles missing anywhere else, we would hav heard about it already.

The weapon itself is less than 2 tons. It is the wings that hold it up, and if needed a rocket booster could get it airborne from a truck or it can be air launched.

Maybe if it was a VTOL missile. The engine power to fly at mach 0.7 at 100m is not that great and is not related to aircraft weight directly but to drag and wing loading. The worst case situation they could make it truck launched and give it bigger fixed wings that generate more lift than the originals.

the wings can help to creat lift, but they can only do so much. the increases in weight will still need to be accounted for my similar increases in thrust to keep the missile flying (C802 missiles also have wings, albert smaller ones, but its not that great a change).

adding bigger wings will also add to weight, so the benefits are not that great.

That depends upon the radar. If it is a radar from an anti shippin missile that looks at flat oceans for ships on their own then it will be no good for land atack but radar is used by many aircraft to map the ground and find targets. A ground mapping radar with a moving target indicator could allow it to take out moving targets and would easily have the resolution to target specific buildings or instalations.

the only iranian experience with radar seeker production i know of is for the seekers of the C802 AShMs.

GLONASS.

easily jammed.

The optical camera in the Iskander-E and Tochka-U give CEPs of less than 20m using built in target comparison logic to find its actual target and fly towards it. The Iranians have Mavericks with IIR seekers. Combining the two technologies (Iskander-E and Tochka-U are replacements for the Scud and FROG-7 respectively and have ranges of 280km and 120km respectively and are therefore exportable to anyone) could give all weather excellent CEPs for low flying slow missiles. (The Iskander-E comes in at about mach 6).

its getting the missile within seeker range that is the hard part. without proper low level navagational aids, the missile will need to fly high to avoid terran (which will make it a easy target), or somehow be guided all the way via a TV link.

neither look that appealing.

to be fair, its not just the ‘west’ but everyone that has got nukes already.

Nope, that is not fair… when was the last time you heard Russia or China or any non western country jump up and down because someone has gotten nukes?

well that is somewhat misleading. sure, its easy to make a ‘crusie missile’ like the V1. but remeber that over half the V1s germany fired splashed in the sea or crashed miles from target. even those that did arrive ‘on target’ had practially zero military use as it was luck that decided where they dropped. the V1s and other early missiles were also very shortranges, even for their day.

But that has more to do with unreliable powerplants/fuel systems, lack of any real guidance system except a primitive gyro and inefficient engines. With more modern (and I mean 1960s) guidance systems and a more modern jet engine performance can be greatly improved very easily.

he also had the advantage of being able to mail order all the components from US and european companies.

The important bit… the engine, he built himself. It was a pulse jet engine like the V1 which is why so many comparisons were made with this missile.

oh, dont get me wrong, im not saying they will not bother trying to learn anything from the Kh55s. what im saying is that the main motavating factor behind getting the weapons and their main use will be practical rather then technical.

iran might set aside one of the missiles for study, tops. but the rest will be intergrated onto launch platforms and readied for use (probably chemical and bio weapons for now, but they will be working towards nuclear weapons as their main aim).

They don’t even know if they work or not… I doubt they would just store them for war time. We are talking about 6 missiles. Fly one to test performance, take one to bits for materials testing and you have four left. Considering the air defences of Israel and Irans other neighbours you’d need more than four subsonic missiles to penetrate their defences reliably.

(probably chemical and bio weapons for now, but they will be working towards nuclear weapons as their main aim).

If they have bio or chem weapons I haven’t heard about it. Iraq had them because the US supplied the original cultures for bio weapons. Anthrax spores of the type useful to weaponise don’t actually fall from the sky naturally.

as for getting more. you must be kidding me! it would be a spectacular coup for them if they even got the 6!

We know about these six… what about the hundreds of other missiles we don’t know about. Things go missing in airbases around the world. The KGB/FSB held the warheads so they will be safe but the missiles are something else.

you might not see any legal obsticals stopping other countries from selling more Kh missiles to iran, but america is hardly going to let that stop them from bribing and bullying everyone into not doing it.

And the US was also going to bully or bribe the Russians not to build the nuclear reactors in Iran…

well i dont think fuel consumption will be their top problem. just making an engine that can keep such a huge missile in the air is a great challenge in itself, and making it small enough to fit in the missile is going to be harder still.

The weapon itself is less than 2 tons. It is the wings that hold it up, and if needed a rocket booster could get it airborne from a truck or it can be air launched.

you cant just pop the blades of the C802 into a KH55 sized missile and expect everything to be dandy. the strength of the engine blades will have to increase in proportion to the increase in weight. that is what is challenging as iran will probably have to invent whole new materials and manufacturing processes to make blades strong enough for the missile.

Maybe if it was a VTOL missile. The engine power to fly at mach 0.7 at 100m is not that great and is not related to aircraft weight directly but to drag and wing loading. The worst case situation they could make it truck launched and give it bigger fixed wings that generate more lift than the originals.

has only got experience with radar seekers, but these arent that suitable for land attack.

That depends upon the radar. If it is a radar from an anti shippin missile that looks at flat oceans for ships on their own then it will be no good for land atack but radar is used by many aircraft to map the ground and find targets. A ground mapping radar with a moving target indicator could allow it to take out moving targets and would easily have the resolution to target specific buildings or instalations.

GPS would also be out of the question since the US will just flip a switch and cut civilian service in the area at the first sign of trouble.

GLONASS.

its not like they can just stuff a camera in the nose and ‘joystick’ it in at the end.

The optical camera in the Iskander-E and Tochka-U give CEPs of less than 20m using built in target comparison logic to find its actual target and fly towards it. The Iranians have Mavericks with IIR seekers. Combining the two technologies (Iskander-E and Tochka-U are replacements for the Scud and FROG-7 respectively and have ranges of 280km and 120km respectively and are therefore exportable to anyone) could give all weather excellent CEPs for low flying slow missiles. (The Iskander-E comes in at about mach 6).

The difference in this case is that the west has decided that no one else is allowed nuclear weapons. Based on that any nation that tries to get nuclear weapons can be abused for it. In the case of the Kh-55s going to Iran there is no international law against it that is relevant.

to be fair, its not just the ‘west’ but everyone that has got nukes already.

Actually that is both not true and true. Making a cruise missile is incredibly easy. A New Zealand chap made news a while back building his own missile. The WWII V1 buzz bomb is actually good enough… all it needed is a guidance package accurate enough to make it a useful weapon.

well that is somewhat misleading. sure, its easy to make a ‘crusie missile’ like the V1. but remeber that over half the V1s germany fired splashed in the sea or crashed miles from target. even those that did arrive ‘on target’ had practially zero military use as it was luck that decided where they dropped. the V1s and other early missiles were also very shortranges, even for their day.

if iran really just wanted a way to hurl missiles at someone close, changing the seeker head on their C802 AShMs would have done.

as for that new zeland chap, well technocially he only make a UAV, since the aim of that thing will probably be closer to the V1s then anything remotely modern.

he also had the advantage of being able to mail order all the components from US and european companies. something Iran will not be able to do since all duel use items going that way will no doubt be checked against a ‘black list’ of prohibated items.

The Iranians don’t have to match the performance of the Kh-55, even if they built a missile with half the range it would be a good start. The new technologies will improve their skills base and point them in new directions. They will learn a lot and that will show in their own new designs.

oh, dont get me wrong, im not saying they will not bother trying to learn anything from the Kh55s. what im saying is that the main motavating factor behind getting the weapons and their main use will be practical rather then technical.

iran might set aside one of the missiles for study, tops. but the rest will be intergrated onto launch platforms and readied for use (probably chemical and bio weapons for now, but they will be working towards nuclear weapons as their main aim).

with all the rehtoric from washington, the leaders in Iran cant be under too many illusions about how much time they have to come up with a way to detter US advantures or to back down to US pressure, and i dont think they’ll be putting that much faith in next gen weapons systems that wont arrive for years if not decades.

Now that they have them who is to say they can’t or wont get more? Or even that they haven’t gotten more?

well there are no more reports of any more of these missiles missing, and seeing how its not easy to misplace a 3000km cruise missile, i think its safe to assume that 6 is all they managed to bag.

as for getting more. you must be kidding me! 😮 it would be a spectacular coup for them if they even got the 6!

you might not see any legal obsticals stopping other countries from selling more Kh missiles to iran, but america is hardly going to let that stop them from bribing and bullying everyone into not doing it.

They might not be able to make engine parts like those in the Kh-55, but lower quality ones that are durable might drop the fuel efficiency by 20 or 30% but that still means they could have a decent weapon that just has a shorter range than the Kh-55. More fuel would solve the problem. Sketches of the Kh-101 and Kh-102 show a triangual body that can hold more fuel… there is no reason why the Iranians couldn’t design a new body shape that is more efficient than the body they (kh-55) have. Rather than to make it more stealthy (the reason the Russians changed the shape) it could be to just hold more fuel to compensate for the less efficient engine… larger wings could also be used and perhaps a slightly lower flight speed to increase range at the cost of making it a bit more interceptable.

BTW I don’t think they will be churning out thousands of them tomorrow.

well i dont think fuel consumption will be their top problem. just making an engine that can keep such a huge missile in the air is a great challenge in itself, and making it small enough to fit in the missile is going to be harder still.

you cant just pop the blades of the C802 into a KH55 sized missile and expect everything to be dandy. the strength of the engine blades will have to increase in proportion to the increase in weight. that is what is challenging as iran will probably have to invent whole new materials and manufacturing processes to make blades strong enough for the missile.

then there also the issue of getting the missile to hit the target once you have got it airborn. so far iran, as far as i know, has only got experience with radar seekers, but these arent that suitable for land attack. and without a satilite capacity, its not like they can just stuff a camera in the nose and ‘joystick’ it in at the end. GPS would also be out of the question since the US will just flip a switch and cut civilian service in the area at the first sign of trouble.

I dont remembering nations like iraq (before they get invaded), syria and Iran (or india and pakistan for that matter) ever signing treaties assuring that they would never develop nuclear weapons, but look at all the crap they are getting for apparently trying.

the world is not a very fair place, and there are sh!t loads of hypracrits on every side, all playing to try and get the most for themselves. thats just life.

No different from the west decideing to create something called the universal declaration of human rights (ie rights everyone gets no matter what) and then ignoring it through things like echelon (violates basic rights to privacy) and of course guantanimo (which right hasn’t been violated there?).

The difference in this case is that the west has decided that no one else is allowed nuclear weapons. Based on that any nation that tries to get nuclear weapons can be abused for it. In the case of the Kh-55s going to Iran there is no international law against it that is relevant.

well i think you are making it out to be alot easier then it really is. making a decent crusie missile is hard even if you got all the complete blue prints. this is mainly due to the fact that it needs many fields of a nation’s industry to have reached certain levels before you can make all the parts.

Actually that is both not true and true. Making a cruise missile is incredibly easy. A New Zealand chap made news a while back building his own missile. The WWII V1 buzz bomb is actually good enough… all it needed is a guidance package accurate enough to make it a useful weapon.
The Iranians don’t have to match the performance of the Kh-55, even if they built a missile with half the range it would be a good start. The new technologies will improve their skills base and point them in new directions. They will learn a lot and that will show in their own new designs.

as such, i somehow doubt they will be able to quickly and easily make their own copy or versons of these missiles. and given that, they would most likely use these missiles as NBC weapons delivery systems to force a credable detterrant instead of wasting them on conventional strike.

Now that they have them who is to say they can’t or wont get more? Or even that they haven’t gotten more?

They might not be able to make engine parts like those in the Kh-55, but lower quality ones that are durable might drop the fuel efficiency by 20 or 30% but that still means they could have a decent weapon that just has a shorter range than the Kh-55. More fuel would solve the problem. Sketches of the Kh-101 and Kh-102 show a triangual body that can hold more fuel… there is no reason why the Iranians couldn’t design a new body shape that is more efficient than the body they (kh-55) have. Rather than to make it more stealthy (the reason the Russians changed the shape) it could be to just hold more fuel to compensate for the less efficient engine… larger wings could also be used and perhaps a slightly lower flight speed to increase range at the cost of making it a bit more interceptable.

BTW I don’t think they will be churning out thousands of them tomorrow.

But without an international treaty violation it is no ones business except the Ukraines… in other words it is none of our or the US or anyone elses business.

I dont remembering nations like iraq (before they get invaded), syria and Iran (or india and pakistan for that matter) ever signing treaties assuring that they would never develop nuclear weapons, but look at all the crap they are getting for apparently trying.

the world is not a very fair place, and there are sh!t loads of hypracrits on every side, all playing to try and get the most for themselves. thats just life.

Obviously they won’t actually launch any of these weapons, except perhaps to test to see if their versions offer the same performance. I was referring to this class of weapon rather than the actual weapons themselves. Of course they will take on board the new technologies and ideas of these weapons, but I don’t think they will copy them exactly unless they already exactly suit their needs. (and as I don’t know their exact needs I cannot comment accuractely). They might want more range or they might settle for less range and a heavier warhead etc etc.

If they only ever had 6 then I doubt they would actually use them, but the basics are simply a low flying sub sonic drone which I am pretty sure the Iranians could replicate quite easily. It might not have an engine as reliable or as fuel efficient, the guidance might be made up from imported parts (I don’t know the level of Iranian electronics), but these weapons are quite old technology. I am sure if they wanted it they could mass produce conventional versions quite easily.

The engine in the Kh-55 is quite good, but it is certainly not Russia’s best. If they buy a few Kh-59MKs they could have even newer small turbojet engines. I am not sure which engine is used in the Kh-101 and Kh-102 but I would assume that it is newer and more fuel efficient than the model in the Kh-55.

well i think you are making it out to be alot easier then it really is. making a decent crusie missile is hard even if you got all the complete blue prints. this is mainly due to the fact that it needs many fields of a nation’s industry to have reached certain levels before you can make all the parts.

if it was as simlpe as getting your hands on an example, take it apart and copy all the different parts, everyone would be chunning these babies out like apple pies.

right now, i doubt iran has the ability to make all the parts needed in country, with the eletronics and engines being major potential stumbling blocks (based on the fact that iran still needs to licence produce chinese AShMs).

as such, i somehow doubt they will be able to quickly and easily make their own copy or versons of these missiles. and given that, they would most likely use these missiles as NBC weapons delivery systems to force a credable detterrant instead of wasting them on conventional strike.

OK Distiller,
Even if Iran got its hands on some KH-55’s how is it gonna launch them. They are ASM’s carried by Bombers. Iran will lauch Kh-55, Syria Probably can
launch SS-18 acquired through some other ex-soviet state.

Hardware? Perhaps F-14 or Falcon VIPliner. Can be done. Thing is about 8m long and a little shy of 2000kg.
Question is if they also have the GFE and the software.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/37c2003c-7565-11d9-9608-00000e2511c8.html

—

Iran and China linked to Ukraine missiles
By Tom Warner in Kiev
Published: February 2 2005 22:01 | Last updated: February 2 2005 22:01

An investigation by the Ukrainian secret police has found that Iran and China bought long-range missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads from Ukraine, one of the country’s politicians said on Wednesday.

Grigory Omelchenko, an ally of the country’s new leadership and a former head of the anti-mafia committee in the Ukrainian parliament, claimed on Wednesday that Ukraine’s SBU secret police had found that 12 Kh-55s were illegally exported in 1999-2001. He said six of the air-to-ground cruise missiles were sold to Iran, and six to China.

The Kh-55 – which the US calls the AS-15 – has a highly accurate guidance system and a range of up to 3,000km, which would put Israel in striking distance of Iran. The missile was part of the Soviet bomber fleet weaponry left behind in Ukraine.

The allegations, made in Ukraine’s parliament yesterday, bolster claims by the US and other governments that Iran is seeking to develop the ability to produce nuclear weapons. They also raise concerns about Iran and China’s efforts to improve long-range missile technology.

Mr Omelchenko, a one-time SBU officer, said that last year the SBU prevented an attempt to export 14 Kh-55s and arrested a former SBU officer, who is being tried in Kiev’s Regional Appeals Court.

He accused high-ranking officials linked to Leonid Kuchma, the former president, of covering up the SBU’s findings about the sale to protect a “highly placed person from the circle of President Kuchma, who was involved in the illegal arms sales”.

Last November, Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State, said he ha d seen intelligence that Iran was working to adapt missiles to deliver a nuclear weapon.

In September the US slapped sanctions on a private Ukrainian company for violating a US ban on proliferation to Iran, without specifying what it was suspected of selling.

OK Distiller,
Even if Iran got its hands on some KH-55’s how is it gonna launch them. They are ASM’s carried by Bombers. Iran will lauch Kh-55, Syria Probably can
launch SS-18 acquired through some other ex-soviet state.

come on, these missiles were supposed to have been sneaked out of the country, probably to make some corrupt generals/polititions a nice nest-egg for their retirement. as such, i doubt any treaty ranked very high on their concern list.

But without an international treaty violation it is no ones business except the Ukraines… in other words it is none of our or the US or anyone elses business.

with an arsenal of only 6 missiles each, and with zero chance of imported resupplies, i somehow doubt either china or iran will be in any hurry shooting these babies off.

Obviously they won’t actually launch any of these weapons, except perhaps to test to see if their versions offer the same performance. I was referring to this class of weapon rather than the actual weapons themselves. Of course they will take on board the new technologies and ideas of these weapons, but I don’t think they will copy them exactly unless they already exactly suit their needs. (and as I don’t know their exact needs I cannot comment accuractely). They might want more range or they might settle for less range and a heavier warhead etc etc.

that is their best hope of quickly forming a proper nuclear detterance against the US. and in the end, being able to force the americans to behave is far more worthwhile to iran’s leaders then to just blast 6 holes in important places in israel or the US.

If they only ever had 6 then I doubt they would actually use them, but the basics are simply a low flying sub sonic drone which I am pretty sure the Iranians could replicate quite easily. It might not have an engine as reliable or as fuel efficient, the guidance might be made up from imported parts (I don’t know the level of Iranian electronics), but these weapons are quite old technology. I am sure if they wanted it they could mass produce conventional versions quite easily.

The engine in the Kh-55 is quite good, but it is certainly not Russia’s best. If they buy a few Kh-59MKs they could have even newer small turbojet engines. I am not sure which engine is used in the Kh-101 and Kh-102 but I would assume that it is newer and more fuel efficient than the model in the Kh-55.