Anyone know why they didn’t shove a new motor into the aam-4b?
It gets an AESA seeker, which puts it on par with r-77m/pl-15/aim-260 in terms of seekerhead tech.
However, it range is much worse than all of those, why go through the trouble of developing such an advanced seeker head if it’s just going to be kinematically out ranged by basically every other modern fox 3?
If I recall right, it literally uses the same body as the normal aam-4 (might be wrong on this), or it uses the same motor.
-
The base AAM-4’s seeker is, not great, from what we know it’s pretty mediocre even compared to the seeker used by early amraams, it was in honestly desperate need of an upgrade.
-
Japan was already leading the world in AESA technologies, they have more firsts in it then any other country, the technology needed to put an AESA seeker in a missile was basically already there, and it used many commercial off the shelf components. (Leading to an extremely low cost, production costs for the 4B were even lower then that of the base 4, which already came it an less then half an Aim-120)
-
Japan didn’t really have great rocket motor production capabilities, up until very recently they’ve largely relied on foreign designed rocket motors, as they did not have any real research into their production.
-
Japan did look into and test a thrust vectoring solid fuel ram jet for upgrading the AAM-4 at the same time, however despite successful testing, it was only a proof of concept, and there was no budget to build large scale production examples.
-
The AAM-4B is much older then all of those other examples, over a decade older in some cases.
-
The seeker for the AAM-4B, was, almost since it’s first conception, planned to be used in more then just the AAM-4. Japan’s AAM/ASM/SSM development is all one big tree, and the seeker from it ended up being used in both the ASM-3, as well as the Type-12SSM, and it’s many variants.
8 Likes
A ramjet AAM-4B would be cool. Probably still too expensive even today though.
I mean, if it wasn’t for Britain pulling out japan would’ve had JNAAMs about now.
Yeah… Also wonder why they pulled out. Maybe they’re looking to just buy AIM-260s?
As far as i can tell, Britain went over the budget they initially allocated for it, as the last official stuff about the project was them asking japan for more money to help them cover their (the British’s) side of the project.
Speaking of the Cobras, it still really irks me that only the Kisarazu has countermeasures. My bug report has gone ignored for forever, and probably won’t be accepted because it’s based on photographs, which Gaijin is incredibly averse to. It will probably never be possible to actually get the Kisarazu changed because it’s very doubtful imo that the Japanese MoD/SDF would go out of their way in material to say that the Fuji AH-1S specifically does NOT have the countermeasures present on its American counterpart.
1 Like
Gaijin: sees stuff from mod.go.jp
Also gaijin: not a reliable source
1 Like
We are so back o7
5 Likes
Unfortunately no ASM-2 revealed so unless we get a dev stream surprise it’s a little bleak
What is that pod? Doesn’t seem like for ground targeting because it doesn’t bring any air to ground munition
J/AAQ-2 NAVFLIR. The only targeting pod it should have is the Sniper ATP.
We’ve to wait for the Dev Server anyway, until we can actually report anything.
5 Likes
Kinda looks like the FLIR navigation pod?
Separate radar vehicle for type81 is interesting. Wonder how that’ll work
1 Like
The IRIS-T SLM Devblog already explains how Multi-Vehicle Systems will work;
5 Likes
shouldn’t it be the 81C Kai the radar version?
it still have the glass one though…
I can imagine a name change (considering there its coming as seperate “vehicle”), but the Type 81 (C) itself is already called Tan-SAM Kai.
Maybe they can call it “Type 81 (C) (ARH)” or smth like that.
3 Likes