You might be better off firing a MALD-J at the AEW (I am assuming you meant AWACS) as it has a massive range advantage over a Meteor, it can do it's own jamming, and it runs cool enough to not trigger MAWS on the way in. Put a IIR seeker & a 20lb warhead in it and you are golden as a way to take out ISR, IFR, AEW, AWACS, etc.
True but a MALD-based weapon doesn't have the versatility for use in other A2A roles.
Why not?
If I can only detect a VLO platform at 25nm (Typhoon CAPTOR-M vs. F-22) and the difference between my A-Pole and his is miniscule in terms of what I can do to exit the seeker volume, why isn't it a superior option to have a missile _pre launch_ with 500nm on the MALD and say 250nm on the MALI, so that it can steam away at .85 or whatever and then have the cuing fighter come in behind it?
If the point is to solve for A-Pole, vs. F-Pole and you are range constrained in terms of the distance you can pull the stealth target in handing off the missile, then there rapidly comes a point where you are Q or thermal limited on the missile being able to get down range and 'lock on' before the enemy weapon can do the same.
An AMRAAM comes at you in HPRF at a HUGE amount of watts, for it's size. And then it settles to MPRF for the terminals, once it's acquired.
Presumably, other weapons are similar with the understanding that AAM-4 and PL-15 may in fact have multi waveform target scrubbing to pick up transient scintillance as edge glint or creeping waves on key features.
Does it really matter if Missile 1, somehow closing at Mach 6 (and as agile as a cement truck, especially at or below 40K) picks up the targets at 10 seconds and Missile 2 is closing at Mach 3.8 and gets the lock-on, 5 seconds later? Whoever lives or dies, it's not going to be about turn away and extension at those ranges. Such may even prove counterproductive on a signature-by-aspect level of RCS flicker.
OTOH, if the missile is 20nm downrange already, and you catch the Romulan Warbird decloaking (not easy on an F-22 with no longwave IRST, his ELS should catch your LPD APG-77 first, just based on long term exposure of the radar operating bands). Now does it matter?
I would say yes. Because now, a missile which can boost to 1.5 from .9 on a turbine. Or 3 from .9 on a booster in the turbine plenum, can cross those five miles in a huge hurry, possibly faster than the threat can work the switchology to launch. Assuming equal detection thresholds.
And remember, at least by-aperture, the J-20 has better passives than the F-22, by a lot.
Now, let's take this another step. You don't fire from the F-22 bay but from an MCALS on a C-130 or C-17. So that, now, you have a wave of 10-20 drones headed down range. And they all share at least a basic hunting datalink. Don't laugh. The AGM-124 WASP had this, in 1979, wherein a missile would loft downrange, look at the target footprint (pilot launch intuit), find a target or light a second pulse and climb up to look again. When it found a target, it signalled to all the other missiles: "Got One!" and thus interrupted their homing algorithms as it dove on target. LOCAAS was even more sophisticated in that it could coordinate search zones with different spiral/grid/bounding search priorities between missiles, recognizing, via autopilot no-go zoning, suching things as prelaunch inputs (from TRN) as lakes and streams, forests and roads as likely search boundaries.
Against a VASTLY higher value target, all that a hunting missile has to do is sweep a given lane with a modern SFPA @ 640X480 or equivalent. Again, look no farther than the Raytheon (I believe...) Box Office weapon which had both the ND-10 motor from the Python and a twist-to-stare seeker with 256X256 coverage.
AIM-9X is a cheap knockoff compared to what COULD have been and the denser a detector count you go with, in a 6" or even 8" seeker, the more you can treat the totality of the fired missiles as a search tool, rather than purely a homing terminal guidance (Think DTP-N/CPT, at the weapon level).
Now you can throw out your missile screen as far as you want, hounds before the hunters, and assuming:
1. The enemy politely agrees to not scatter their CAPs or Road Bases.
2. They GLI Zulu launch at all.
3. They don't copy you.
You don't have to worry about who sees who first. Because the missile impulse can be scaled to the cruise velocity or run through specific ('radish' on the AGM-129) mixer artifacts, in-stream, to scatter. So that IT is not seen before IT sees the enemy threat air which is literally pushing thousands of pounds of thrust out the back end, even in loiter cruise.
What bothers me is that we are not seeing pictures of the AIM-260 and it's called a 'Joint Advanced Tactical Missile' (T3 Triple Threat Terminator = SEAD and high value strike as well as air to air) while retaining the Air Intercept Missile label.
Of course, if the enemy doesn't come up, and you have just fired 20 missiles at 2 million each, it would be a shame to not have them dive on AGE, BOQ, Command Condos, Fuel Farms, Active Ramps etc. at the airbase.
But the lack of imagery speaks to something unique to the missiles' capability which would be given away by an expert having a gander. For comparison, the AIM-120 was accurately (proportionately) drawn as early as 1978 in F-16 cutaways, right down to the wingtip mounting and photo'd as early as 1980 when it was carried under the F-14 in a completely accurate air loads and ballistic test vehicle.
So... Given this system will be mounted, first and preferentially, upon the F-22 (internal) and the F/A-18E (not) why are we not seeing it?
I think that a partial answer may lie in the uber-secure weapons igloo status. Obviously, if it has an inlet and is not a ramjet then it may be air breathing on a gel or liquid and still not be a 'ramjet' perse. Via a supersonic combustion phase turbine.
But the other thing that I wonder about is a radiosource thermal generator. Similar to what you are seeing on the SSC-X-9. Now, I don't claim to know a lot about the use of even minor (alpha not neutron) generators to increase combustion temps in rarefied atmosphere as a specific impulse booster. But the weapons handling pattern matches to prior high security storage of nuclear weapons. And would explain why a missile which was considered still within the carriage box limits of an AIM-120 would, in fact, have three to five times the functional effective range of say 20-25nm, exhibited by the Deny Flight Danish (?) F-16 which bagged that Orao in the CAP or landing pattern as it flew a long elliptical track.
Not even high grain propellants are going to give a nominal '40nm' ranged weapon a sudden improvement to 120-150nm in the same 350lb/12ftX7in carriage box. Fifteen to twenty percent? Sure. Better endgame energy? You bet. But whatever you want those kinds of standoffs /for/, if you make an order of magnitude increase in the combustion temps and then separate the contaminated booster from the kill vehicle, before going down range in a Mach 6 loft to 80-100K on an HGV trajectory, then you could still get a Mach 3-4 terminal profile, as a more conventional boost+boost kill after a very high midcourse loft.
Especially if you are also looking at a desired BPI/API weapon as TMD interceptor in the high endo, the ability to dump the mass as tail-wags-dog effect of a dead booster can and compress the residual system to a very short KKV with ACM and close coupled aeros makes more sense as having sufficient control authority (50-150K) to be effective.
Think about the VLS limits and sheer cost (7 million per SM-6, 10 million per SM-3IIa, 20 million per DF-21) of maintaining a purely S2A based AAW/TMD defense of a fleet unit transiting into the littorals to support Taiwan. Or trying to come through the Hormuz narrows in a Khalij Fars ICD threat zone where the missile is doing depressed trajectory strikes in combination with coastal Noors ASCM.
Which Super Hornets could not approach, conventionally, because of the nearby A2AD IADS presence.
Then compare this to the very limited Air to Air engagement in recent times. And the fact that there has been literally NO REASON to be penetrating a TARCAP force to 'save the missiles!' as you would a bomber with a 12nm JDAM BRL.
This missile is not what it seems to be. And the fact that it's not been shown says a lot about what the genuine threat optimization may really be for. And possibly how it achieves it.
An air launch SM-6 equivalent with a 'hot booster' in an AMRAAM weight class could do a lot to counter particularly the Iranian ballistic threat in a wartime environment where the risk was always present of either an Israeli nuclear response or a Saudi loss of refinement capacity similar to Abqaiq/Khurais. Now assume you wanted to conserve Mk.41 VLS cell counts for either offensive strikes with Blk.V Tomahawk. Or added inner-zone defenses for the battlegroup itself.
Doesn't a forward TMD which can catch missiles in the high probability boost or ascent phase rather than dodgy midcourse or terminal make a lot of sense, especially if it can hide within the auspices of a 'long range AAM' that is, in fact, utterly worthless against VLO targets which we cannot see that far anyway?
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