We’ll have to see on the Peregrine, but yeah, any new 5th gen is a decent way off and probably still not as good as things like the Block 4 F-35, and we have no specs on either the Peregrine or Kaan or KF-21 so probably best to just pretend they don’t exist for now.
We are very close to British ASRAAM exclusivity, all we need is the Aussie F/A-18A and we have it, for now at least. Not that I have any real issue with sharing it, it just feels like a nice attainable thing that would be genuinely unique to the British tree, like the AIM-54 for you
That should have been the case with the Paveway IV too thinking about it, the only real users of it are Britain and Saudi, not that the bomb is even anything special, it kinda seems weird to have given it to Germany and Italy
they got the LJDAM too same as Britain, but they also have the Paveway IV for some reason, like I said it’s kind of weird that they didn’t just give Britain the Paveway IV and Germany and Italy the LJDAM since they’re incredibly similar
Yeah, I believe the seekers on the AIM-9X and IRIS-T came from the ASRAAM program originally or at least they all use the same basic seeker, both the US and Germany pulled out because of the cold war ending basically, then used a lot of what was learned making the ASRAAM to build their own missiles, the AIM-132 designation is a holdover from US involvement but they didn’t want the missile, despite developing their own separately like 10 years later. The whole thing is weird, and the ASRAAM as the name suggests was meant to complement the AMRAAM, it’s a shame it didn’t work out like that, but tbh I’m not sure the US could cope with using a none US made weapon, so it was probably doomed from the start
Anyways, ignoring the tangent, what I was trying to say was that the AIM-9X, ASRAAM, and IRIS-T are all effectively equivalents, the ASSRAM has the range, the IRIS-T pulls insanely hard, and the 9X is somewhere in between, all with effectively the same seeker head
Yeah, what I mean is that the ASRAAM pioneered the use of that kind of seeker in IR missiles, it was selected for the ASRAAM way before the 9X program started and definitely inspired its use in the IRIS-T.
Also quite funny is that the 9X was originally a competition between Hughes and Raytheon but Raytheon bought Hughes defense division a year after Hughes won the contract
well, they do generally have pretty good stuff. i have noticed that the main selling point of some raytheon stuff is it being “affordable” and good, seems to be the place they occupy as a defence contractor
Sausage rolls are king, unfortunately where I work is like the only town in the whole of the North of England that doesn’t have a Greggs or even a Pound Bakery, and it is a fact that I curse almost every day, there’s one place that does sausage rolls and they cost £2.40 each, daylight robbery is what I call that