Air launched Sea Dart

[Maury Markowitz]

Does anyone have dimensions and weight of the Sea Dart without the Chow booster? Everything I can find includes it.

Gibson's Hypersonics has a couple of images of Sea Dart (or Air Dart one imagines!) under various aircraft. Although it seems the size might work, the weight seems... questionable.

 

[Pirate Pete]

Does anyone have dimensions and weight of the Sea Dart without the Chow booster? Everything I can find includes it.

Gibson's Hypersonics has a couple of images of Sea Dart (or Air Dart one imagines!) under various aircraft. Although it seems the size might work, the weight seems... questionable.

You will probably find one if Chris’s other tomes useful:

The cover illustration shows a Vulcan armed with as you put it ‘Air Dart’, and there are more details inside…

 

[Hanse]

Does anyone have dimensions and weight of the Sea Dart without the Chow booster? Everything I can find includes it.

Gibson's Hypersonics has a couple of images of Sea Dart (or Air Dart one imagines!) under various aircraft. Although it seems the size might work, the weight seems... questionable.

Were they just planning on a smaller booster for air-launch?

 

[TomS]

This drawing at least has a scale so you could get a decent estimate for the length.



As far as weight, Sea Dart minus booster ought to be in the same ballpark or somewhat lighter than Phoenix (450-470kg launch weight).

 

[Zoo Tycoon]

The Sea Dart at launch weighed 550Kg of which the Chow booster accounted for 385Kg (ish). There’s a used Chow on display at “Explosion ” in Portsmouth U.K. with some good close up photos online…. Which I can’t find, I would guess at it being 0.7-8m long.

I reckon a sub sonic launch wouldn’t bring the Odin to life;- it required just under two seconds at about 1.2-3 Mach in good low level dense air. I guess the booster could have been smaller for an air launch.

 

[TomS]

The Sea Dart at launch weighed 550Kg of which the Chow booster accounted for 385Kg (ish). There’s a used Chow on display at “Bang” in Portsmouth U.K. with some good close up photos online…. Which I can’t find, I would guess at it being 0.7-8m long.

I reckon a sub sonic launch wouldn’t bring the Odin to life;- it required just under two seconds at about 1.2-3 Mach in good low level dense air. I guess the booster could have been smaller for an air launch.

I'm a bit surprised that the Chow was that heavy (70% of the launch weight) . But I guess that's what you get for a missile that is mostly a hollow tube.

 

[zjz]

See Annex B.9 on some info/data on Sea Dart :

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA322627.pdf

 

[zjz]

I have no access, so I am unsure if there are useful info here ....

Sea Dart | PDF | Missile | Military Technology

The Sea Dart was a British naval surface-to-air missile system deployed on Royal Navy destroyers and aircraft carriers from the 1970s-2000s. It engaged targets up to 56 km away using radar guidance and had nine confirmed combat successes against aircraft and helicopters in the Falklands War and...

www.scribd.com

 

[zjz]

With reference to this link :

Sea Dart surface-to-surface.

It puts the Sea Dart launch and impact weights at 1208lb = 548kg and 600lbs = 272kg respectively .....

Not sure if the data in the link is correct, but if you compute the difference of 1208-600 = 608lb = 276kg, the weight should consist of both the booster + fuel used by the ramjet engine ....

 

[Firefinder]

Know somewhere on this site there are a bunch of pictures of a V bomber, believe the Victor, with Sea Dart Missiles hanging from the wings and a chin for the guidence radar.

 

[pathology_doc]

It's been a while since I read the book - I really should dig it out again - but IIRC one of the issues they identified with this scheme is that the Vulcan couldn't carry a big enough radar (i.e. to illuminate targets at sufficiently long range) to match the missile's performance envelope... and unlike Phoenix, Sea Dart doesn't have independent terminal homing, so even if you could send it midcourse updates it would still need an external illuminator.

Granted, with the way electronics are being microminiaturized now, you could probably build an Active Sea Dart within existing physical parameters (e.g. putting the illuminator in the shock cone), but not back when the ADV Vulcan was first being considered.

 

[Hobbes]

I have no access, so I am unsure if there are useful info here ....

Sea Dart | PDF | Missile | Military Technology

The Sea Dart was a British naval surface-to-air missile system deployed on Royal Navy destroyers and aircraft carriers from the 1970s-2000s. It engaged targets up to 56 km away using radar guidance and had nine confirmed combat successes against aircraft and helicopters in the Falklands War and...

www.scribd.com

knowing Scribd a little, that will be a PDF of the Wikipedia article on Sea Dart, i.e. useless.

 

[TomS]

I have no access, so I am unsure if there are useful info here ....

Sea Dart | PDF | Missile | Military Technology

The Sea Dart was a British naval surface-to-air missile system deployed on Royal Navy destroyers and aircraft carriers from the 1970s-2000s. It engaged targets up to 56 km away using radar guidance and had nine confirmed combat successes against aircraft and helicopters in the Falklands War and...

www.scribd.com

knowing Scribd a little, that will be a PDF of the Wikipedia article on Sea Dart, i.e. useless.

Not even that good. It mixes in photos of the missile, the seaplane, and some boat also named Sea Dart.

 

[zjz]

I have no access, so I am unsure if there are useful info here ....

Sea Dart | PDF | Missile | Military Technology

The Sea Dart was a British naval surface-to-air missile system deployed on Royal Navy destroyers and aircraft carriers from the 1970s-2000s. It engaged targets up to 56 km away using radar guidance and had nine confirmed combat successes against aircraft and helicopters in the Falklands War and...

www.scribd.com

Thanks for the feedback, guess it's a bad recommendation