South African missiles/rockets/PGM's - Prototypes, Projects, Concepts, etc.

Forgot to mention, if it goes through there would also be a chance of it being an air defense system in different versions not unlike the IRIS-T

Only problem is, Germans cant produce enough to deliver on time because of Ukraine and the UAE has better financing ability though its banks.

View attachment 745499

Funny enough the land version as pictured above, of the IRIS-T was actually tested and qualified out in South Africa at our Denel Overberg test range...

There was a fair amount of talk of doing the same thing with A-Darter, in terms of turning it into a SAM at the time. The problem I suspect, is that it would have overlapped into UmKhonto's territory, which is suspect is a lot cheaper, uses the previous generation seeker head (U-Darter) - but is still very accurate and effective (search up Finnish real life tests of UmKhonto under very difficult conditions - they were very happy with it's successful results afterwards).

I agree that the Cheetah missile would be a much better bet - developed in South Africa, based on the existing Mongoose armour APS missile (under a contract placed on Denel by Rheinmetall Germany) - Denel developed it much faster and very, very much cheaper than what Rheinmetall are used to. So it's a cheap, but very effective C-RAM type missile.

To either lengthen the Cheetah, or perhaps much easier to add some sort booster to it would certainly improve it's range quite a bit from the current 8 Km max range. It's actually a very cheap 'Iron Dome' setup - with a shorter range, much more ready to launch missiles (60), and at a fraction of the cost..

 
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As far as I know, yes. There isn't much left to save there but Astros/MTC-300 IP and their rocket production is still very valuable.
If all the IP is still intact it shouldn’t be super hard to get A-Darter back up and running faster.


A-Darter motor test



View: https://youtu.be/Zanm3AYbJdc?feature=shared




And of course, if EDGE is interested in the A-Darter there’s a good chance they’re interested in the Marlin as well

They’re stealth UCAV program is running smoothly with mainly Brazilian(ex Embraer mostly as well as Akaer) and some South African expertise but they don’t have the A2A missiles required for it to be a revolutionary system yet.

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The latest Cheetah brochure - it adds in a lot more specs than the Rheinmetall one in my post #219 - it is from the latest Denel brochure pack, so Denel clearly still has the right and necessary IP to sell this missile..
 

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The latest Cheetah brochure - it adds in a lot more specs than the Rheinmetall one in my post #219 - it is from the latest Denel brochure pack, so Denel clearly still has the right and necessary IP to sell this missile..
Which is super odd, will it be produced in both countries? They have different weights as well and dimensions.

Skyknight dimensions

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If all the IP is still intact it shouldn’t be super hard to get A-Darter back up and running faster.


A-Darter motor test



View: https://youtu.be/Zanm3AYbJdc?feature=shared




And of course, if EDGE is interested in the A-Darter there’s a good chance they’re interested in the Marlin as well

They’re stealth UCAV program is running smoothly with mainly Brazilian(ex Embraer mostly as well as Akaer) and some South African expertise but they don’t have the A2A missiles required for it to be a revolutionary system yet.

View attachment 745605

Well it would be great news to me if it gets a good kickstart to get going again - I was very pleased when Brazil first joined the A-Darter program, and very dissapointed when it fell apart (I'm still not sure today what the actual reason for that was) - I certainly think that we have a lot of synergy and a lot to offer each other as countries, and not just from a weapons point of view..!
 
imo solutions like the Cheetah/Skyknight are the best solution. See @Graugrun post above about cost.

Keep up with the cost, probably not but with enough production you could get the missile down to a good price.
And i don't believe it until i see an prove that they can do it. In the end bullets would allways be the cheaper option
 
More like they more or less just finnished development at the time ukraine war started with then only 1 customer. Can't produce 1000s of missiles out of nothing but there pushing for increased production which should get to (i think) ~400 a year
I don’t think that supplying the current conflict is an immediate consideration for Brazil, South Africa or the UAE. There is no obvious demand for 1000s let alone 400 A-Darters per year.
 
I don’t think that supplying the current conflict is an immediate consideration for Brazil, South Africa or the UAE. There is no obvious demand for 1000s let alone 400 A-Darters per year.
I do agree, 400 is quite high although I wouldn’t be surprised if they could produce around 200 a year.

UAE needs weapons for Rafale and their stealth UCAV Jeniah

Brazil needs for Gripen

South Africa needs for Gripen

As well as if the system is developed into a SAM with commonality to the AAM (E.G NASAMS)

If they could also integrate missile into other countries jets there is even more export potential there, Israel integrated Python variants into many other countries aircraft including Singapore. Most recently it integrated the Python-5 on RSAF F-16 C/D.



And no, they will never export it to Ukraine considering the governments of all 3 nations all have great relations with Russia and wouldn’t risk that to sell some missiles
 

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