because of the superior french technology /s
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Which is why the Indian Rafale will the best with ASRAAM :P
Meteor
Honestly, could just be that the French are screwing ppl by selling them the Rafales, then doing as the US do and barring the integration of anything but the MICA for IR munitions, letting them rob ppl blind.
I thought the indian Rafales used MICA as well? The $2.7mil number comes from a 2012 indian deal
I think they are swapping or something
The ASRAAM is one of the most advanced missiles available and Indian Air Force (IAF) selected it as its future unified air-to-air combat weaponry within visual range (WVR). The ASRAAM will replace the older French Magic II and Russian R-73 Vympel, and will be integrated on all IAF fighters, including the Sukhoi Su-30MKI, Rafale, and future Tejas. - Source
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.