generally now a days longer range missles are going to have less wingspan to lessen draig (i.e. like the aim 260 vs the aim-120Ds)
thats kind of it though, they already have their aim174b taking away from sm-6 stockpiles, if they are designing a whole new missile already its in their interest to avoid dipping into the supply line for the sm-6 too much considering its importante to the surface fleet, the sm-6 has quickly become THE main missile. i wouldnt speculate too much until we get more info.
pl-17
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do you have any sources showing that? the graph i showed for what would be an even longer ranged anti-air/ground standard missile had the concern of keeping the missile under control even for very long ranges shots. that’s the reason for me to assume other missiles would have a similar maximum altitude
This is from a paper estimating the capabilities of the AIM-174B, it weighs 860kg of which 358kg are fuel, it is believed to have a burn time of 30-40 seconds and doesn’t have any kind of dual pulse. With such a short burn time it absolutely needs to loft past 30km of altitude even when launched from a hypothetical mach 1.8 Superhornet to reach 400km.
The SM-3 block IIA has dual pulse and is more than twice as fast than the AIM-174B so it’s range limiting factor against ground targets is the 600 second flight time limit as shown on your graph, for targets that are well within kinematic range lower loft means shorter time to target.