ASALM (Advanced Strategic Air-Launched Missile)

[Forest Green]

I'm thinking that Mach 3 at ground level may actually be more useful than Mach 8-10 at 20+km.

 

[zjz]

With all of the renewed focus in the past five years or so on high supersonic and low hypersonic weapons I wonder if someone will dust off the ASALM programme and then restart it but taking into account all the advances in the relevant areas of aerodynamic research, material sciences, manufacturing technology, avionics and programming?

It would have been LRASM-B, but the program was dropped in favor of putting all effort on LRASM-A aka JASSM-based AShM .....

 

[zjz]

I'm thinking that Mach 3 at ground level may actually be more useful than Mach 8-10 at 20+km.

If you look at systems capable of sea-skim (Russian AShM), max Mach is around 2.5+ at sea level .... this probably marks the material (aluminium alloy, steel) limits to aerodynamic heating ....

Of course you can argue the use of composites, but that would probably make it expensive to be considered for one-shot devices .....

 

[NMaude]

Of course you can argue the use of composites, but that would probably make it expensive to be considered for one-shot devices ...

Or a titanium-alloy airframe for low-level M3 cruise.

 

[Forest Green]

If you look at systems capable of sea-skim (Russian AShM), max Mach is around 2.5+ at sea level .... this probably marks the material (aluminium alloy, steel) limits to aerodynamic heating ....

Of course you can argue the use of composites, but that would probably make it expensive to be considered for one-shot devices .....

What's the limit of the same material at 20km altitude? Can it do Mach 10? Probably not. So it's likely to be composites either way.

 

[NMaude]

What's the limit of the same material at 20km altitude? Can it do Mach 10? Probably not. So it's likely to be composites either way.

There are titanium-alloys too.