For every ALARM you carry on the EFT you lose three Brimstones. On the Tornado you can carry four ALARMs before losing any Brimstones, that more than offsets the three fewer Brimstones you can carry to start with.
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Spoiler
Depends on whether you want AAMs or Fuel tanks / Trading Brimstoens for ALARM on the Wing pylons
Aerodynamic heating can differ between blunt body penetrators (like the IR seeker), and sharp penetrators like the CAMM.
But yeah, purely from a deltaV standpoint it’s a bit weird that CAMM doesn’t just reach about Mach 5 if you use it for calculating the requirements of ASRAAM.
It would be nice for gaijin to one day better represent drag, especially at above Mach 1.5 for both planes and munitions.
And there is another factor, that ARM vs Radar is an ongoing technology war, with each new thing in their respective cathergory bringing something new.
I agree and US have developed MALD for this purpose but ultimately Brimstone is slow and short range.
I don’t think it could ever reliably be a DEAD weapon.
SPEAR perhaps but with modern SAMS speed is as important as numbers.
MBDA state ASRAAM experiences more than 1,000°C of aerodynamic heating compared to about 600°C for Meteor. I found a research paper on the aerodynamic heating of missiles, it is a bit dated (1955) but it appeared to show that you would need to be going at over Mach 5 to have any real chance of reaching 1,000°C of aero heating, the rate at which heat is radiated off the body of the missile into the surrounding atmosphere makes it very hard to achieve that level of aero heating without extreme speeds.
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I agree more with @Metaltank1990 on this point. Brimstone, for example, range aside is still a decently fast and small target, so it’s harder to deal with it using anything else but surface to air missile. And if you manage to get 2-3 planes with a dozen or so of these armements on a specific area, there’s currently no air defense in the world that would not be saturated.
Now, brimstone is still short range as you said, but the same logic applies to longer range weapons, hence the range of new small glide bombs proposed recently, from the standard GPS to even proposal of multi seeker systems
I suspect SPEAR 3 might be doing this.
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My classes on hypersonic and aerodynamic heating are a bit rusty, but you also have to consider that rounded body like an IR seeker experience hotter concentrated hotspots while a more streamlined seeker will have the heat radiate a larger area with lower temperature.
From your paper from 1955, it’s more likely that this was probably considering radar seekers since long range IR just wasn’t a thing. Now, probably doesn’t account for the 400ºC difference between meteor and ASRAAM, so the later is most likely faster in peak speed
Ages ago, I could have sworn I read something somewhere about an ARM version of the Spear, but its just as possible I miss-read it or am just miss-remembering it
Also they appeared to be referring to heating experienced by the skin of the rocket motor case, so the shape of the missile’s nose likely has limited impact on that.
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Ah yes, in this case the shape of the seeker doesn’t really have an impact expect on the area were the seeker ends
Maybe against a SAM battery you are going to take unacceptable losses when by the same point you could just dump a load of smaller diameter glide bombs.
At which point they would probably be shot down but then that battery is vulnerable to a follow up attack as it rushes to rearm the spent launchers.
I don’t think it’s particularly efficient and puts the airframe at risk when using a system like Brimstone.
It’s supposed to fill our SEAD role. So either it has a passive detection method. Or probably more likely, RWR like Next Gen DASS can provide GPS coordinates, that cues up a SPEAR 3 with the ATR profile of the target type and location and off it goes.
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It depends on the radar system/location. If you can fly below the radar or terrain mask, get within range to fire off a volley of Brimstones and run away, you wont be in any risk of the SAM
Sounds fun, hopefully we get it one day in game ))
I hope with the ARM mechanics they’ll add they make it so you can target RWR pings
its not really an advanced system, iirc the F-4G could do similar
or could at least add coordinates of SAM radars to nav computer
I would really like to know how and how much the heating of the seeker-head and its optics impact the quality as the (likely) magnesium fluoride glas itself would start to radiate IR waves. The 1000 °C is also pretty close to the melting point of 1263 °C of such a glas. I would assume the optics + glas get cooled by the gas (pressurized argon) which was used to cool the IR-CCD before it gets vented.
From my understanding doctrinally the Brimstone isn’t really a SEAD weapon. I was taking it as an example because it’s a typical LOAL system that can be carried in very large numbers on a single airframe.
For SEAD and saturation of SAM sites I would more think of those American GBUs that can be carried by the dozens on the F15, or the recently proposed gliders from MBDA with dual seeker and carried on 6x pylons (so 18-24 on things like the rafale/eurofighter), although those don’t actually exist yet