Interesting. I cant imagine the French are happy about that. Good for the indians tho.
Hehehe, yeah, but does make sense for them to standardise all their aircraft to use the same missile. Sounds a like a logistical nightmare to use multiple.
IIRC the UK was trying to keep the family of weapons memorandum alive. The US wanted the FoW memorandum dead; but unless Britain broke it’s obligations the US needed Britain’s consent in order to dissolve it. So by continuing to meet its obligation Britain was able to extract concessions out of the US in exchange for cancelling the MOU (they were after a significant discount an the price of AMRAAMs if I remember correctly). Got to love geo-politics!
The FoW is also how the US ended up lumped with AIM-9X. They were banned from developing any new IR missiles, but the were allowed to upgrade existing ones, so had to go down the rout of fitting a new seeker and TVC module to AIM-9M.
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Poor guys are gonna have to wait for block 3 for any real range improvements XD. Even then, i doubt it would have ASRAAM type range. Maybe better than IRIS-T, But not by much.
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Ty for the correction, the number seemed way off.
Thats even worse for the MICA tho, not that much more expensive compared to the other AAMs, yet its only really used on the Rafale/M2Ks, with india ditching the MICA for the ASRAAM on their jets entirely it seems…
Yep, would be really funny if block 1 came with the ASRAAM and IRIS-T
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but i feel like the IRIS-T is still turning better
I was referring to range.
Using commercial deal 90% of the time end up with way off numbers, same as recently with f16 etc…
So better to not read too much about it, still it’s understandable to try to find a way to know the cost.
Interesting, so the US and UK screwed eachother in a nice lose lose situation (with some advantages for both tbf), while everyone else went their own ways…
How truly geopolitics-like lol.
yep, and now they are returning the favour with the Meteor intergration on the F-35
Ive seen a few people wonder if its going to be delayed until after Aim-260 is export ready and they’ll try to get people to buy them instead
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would the 260 fit in the weapons bay?
I think so.
I’d hope their smart enough to design their new missile to fit inside the weapons bay of their primary fighter
Oh it definitly will, except they wont try, they’ll just force ppl to buy the AIM-260 on anything they havent already allowed Meteor integration on already.
Thats if they dont invade Canada first or collapse under the economic idiocy of their current admin and populace.
Pretty sure they are doing/did the same thing with AH-64E and JAGM iirc?
Well it’s more that the US tried to screw everyone else over by locking them into AMRAAM purchases, and then refusing to buy a European SRAAM, and the UK saw that they had enough leverage left to at least benefit from the situation. There were other factors two like Hughes promising to move work to UK on other programmes.
The UK also believed that Hughes had a strong enough lobby in the US that they would be able to convince the US government to allow exports, as they would have a stake in the sales.
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The AMRAAM-AXE would fit in the internal weapons bay, but since thatd be a cheap an effective miasile, the US aint integrating it despite it being developped and offered.
The US defense industrial complex is at best a jobs program, and at worst just a money printer for the owners and their friends.
I think that was purely a cost thing. It was cheaper to buy JAGM than to build Brimstones
but the US system have to be the best because they are the most expensive /s
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