Anti-air thread: Everything that goes up must come down, and we'll help you go down

[Ramlaen]

Speaking of the cost of Tamir missiles, "Levin needed durable and reliable switches, but he didn’t have the budget for the usual military suppliers’ high prices. One morning, he noticed a radio-controlled car his son used to play with and had an idea. Using a pocketknife and screwdriver, Levin took apart the vehicle and found that the switch would work just fine for Iron Dome. Rafael located the supplier of that component, a company in Asia that happily agreed to sell a large quantity of switches, unaware that the customer was an Israeli arms manufacturer".

 

It might be worth trying to compare pre 2014 and post 2014 costs when Raytheon started making sub-components.

[N-L-M]

17 hours ago, Ramlaen said:

 

They are realistic if it does not use an active seeker, I suspect Tamir missiles use an RF data link for mid course updates and a lidar "electro optical" seeker/fuze.

 

 

Electro-optics don't come cheap and the Tamirs don't have transparent noses. But what they do have is fucking huge air-search radars controlling them, so midcourse works, and terminal SARH is possible even with a cheap shitty low-gain reciever (as the targets have no EW). As the Israeli air search/ fire control radars are all AESAs, they could probably timeshare illumination like the De Zeven Provincien's Thales APAR, overcoming the problems of SARH illumination bottleneck saturation.

Even with all the above considered, the 50-100k price tag is suspiciously low.

[Ramlaen]

6 hours ago, N-L-M said:

Electro-optics don't come cheap and the Tamirs don't have transparent noses. But what they do have is fucking huge air-search radars controlling them, so midcourse works, and terminal SARH is possible even with a cheap shitty low-gain reciever (as the targets have no EW). As the Israeli air search/ fire control radars are all AESAs, they could probably timeshare illumination like the De Zeven Provincien's Thales APAR, overcoming the problems of SARH illumination bottleneck saturation.

Even with all the above considered, the 50-100k price tag is suspiciously low.

 

I didn't mean a nose mounted IIR sensor, as you said the nosecone is not transparant. I meant the fuze, presumably aimed to the side, that reads when it passes a target and triggers the warhead when a Tamir is oriented correctly.

[N-L-M]

I don't see how this would make it any cheaper. Radar and laser proximity fuzing has been around for quite a while and is fitted on Sidewinders and AMRAAMs.
To kill small targets you need a small terminal miss distance, which usually doesn't come cheap.

[Mighty_Zuk]

Outdated numbers, guys. 

As of July 2018, the cost of Israel's interceptors are:

 

Arrow 3 - $2.5 million.

 

Stunner - $700,000.

 

Tamir - $30,000.

 

Don't ask why these missiles in Israel are cheap. Ask why in America they're expensive.

[Ramlaen]

3 hours ago, Mighty_Zuk said:

Outdated numbers, guys. 

As of July 2018, the cost of Israel's interceptors are:

 

Arrow 3 - $2.5 million.

 

Stunner - $700,000.

 

Tamir - $30,000.

 

Don't ask why these missiles in Israel are cheap. Ask why in America they're expensive.

 

That price for Arrow and Stunner are about what I would expect, but that price for Tamir is so far outside what I would expect that it makes me wonder if it's based on only Israel's share of the cost.

 

Also can you link where those numbers came from.

[N-L-M]

And why is the Tamir that much cheaper than the Stunner? These numbers don't seem to make sense, which has been my problem all along.
If you have a source for those numbers I'd like to see it.

[Mighty_Zuk]

7 hours ago, N-L-M said:

And why is the Tamir that much cheaper than the Stunner? These numbers don't seem to make sense, which has been my problem all along.
If you have a source for those numbers I'd like to see it.

The source for the numbers is a TV presentation, whose related article was deleted and can only be found in screenshots posted in forums. That's why I didn't link it in the first place.

 

I don't know about the exact numbers, but an Iron Dome missile is naturally far cheaper than a Stunner because the Iron Dome doesn't have complex navigation of its own, at least from available sources. None has really specified exactly how it is guided from what I know, except that it has a passive radar guidance and INS.

The Stunner has 2 active sets of guidance. An active radar, and an array of optical sensors.

Plus it has an extra rocket booster, and a 2nd stage that has 2 pulses, which at some point get it to a (reportedly) hypersonic speed (not sure how the optical sensors work in that environment, but theres still the radar).

Every component in it must be better hardened and more sensitive.

 

I'll give you at least some new info I found that in 2014 the cost of a single interceptor missile for the Iron Dome fluctuated between $80K and $95K.

 

You gotta understand, though, that other than gaining new capabilities, a central objective is cost reduction. With the threat of several tens of thousands of rockets falling inside Israel throughout the course of a single war, cost becomes a serious issue.

[N-L-M]

I highly doubt the Stunner is hypersonic with its structure. A first stage DTRM isn't that expensive.

It's possible that the Iron Dome interceptors are really cheap and shitty and only *just* good enougf for their job (which is of course good engineering), but numbers like 20:1 compared to a Stunner is.... stunning. To the point where I'm really suspicious that at least one of the numbers is a lie.

Cost is an issue for other missile systems as well, and yet the Tamir is Sidewinder-sized and reportedly costs a whole order of magnitude less? This sets off bullshit alarms.

[Ramlaen]

Which is why I think Tamir are 'simple' command guidance and/or SARH, use what would normally be considered substandard parts and have an economy of scale (how many batteries and interceptors will the $1.4 billion the US has spent on Iron Dome get you).

[N-L-M]

Command guidance is out of the question at least for the terminal phase, you cannot get the required accuracy- your accuracy is limited by the accuracy of the fire control radar, which has both range estimation errors the the target and interceptor, and time delay (long pulses for good gain at range and things)

Lower quality standards may account for it, but Sidwinders, AMRAAMs and ESSMs are also mass produced. Just how much did RAFAEL throw QC into the trash to literally make a missile an order of magnitude cheaper?

Or are Sidewinders just not that expensive? 

Having just gone through GIS, I note the following: the opaque ogive on the Tamir is split into half clamshell-style, and it looks like the halves can separate to expose the seeker.

If so that'd mean that when switching to terminal the seeker head gets exposed, but until then it's not, which keeps it cool. This would allow the use of uncooled IR seekers, which are indeed much cheaper.

Combined with the peripheral IR, this could also solve the odd engagement geometry fuzing problem critics like to harp on about.

Like the seekers in the Spike-SR, which is cheaper than Javelin. With a terminal engagement range of 1-2km, that's good enough.

That nose seeker is either a small uncooled IR head or a very small simple SARH reciever. And I'm currently tending towards the first.

[Mighty_Zuk]

Yeah I kind of forgotten about that...

You don't have to wonder. It's definitely an optical seeker. That's at least what I remember from my last visit in Rafael's museum.

[N-L-M]

The real trick isn't it being optical, it's being uncooled. Cooled IR is expensive as fuck, but gives better performance. The Stunner has an exposed optical window in the nose, which must be cooled. This would explain why the Stunner runs around 500k more after accounting for size differences.

[Ramlaen]

The youtube channel that asaf posted a video from in the APS thread has a video on Iron Dome which asserts there are seperate optical and radar guided versions of Tamir.

 

 

[Mighty_Zuk]

5 hours ago, Ramlaen said:

The youtube channel that asaf posted a video from in the APS thread has a video on Iron Dome which asserts there are seperate optical and radar guided versions of Tamir.

 

 

I didn't quite understand the warhead part.

Yeah, I know Rafael patented a new warhead design and that some of the guys I met that are somewhat close to the program have talked about it being perhaps the most unique aspect of the missile, I never quite understood the idea there. What really separates it from traditional fragmentation warheads?

[LoooSeR]

MAZ-543M trucks near Almaz-Antey factory, for S-400 systems.

 

Spoiler

 

[N-L-M]

4 hours ago, Mighty_Zuk said:

I didn't quite understand the warhead part.

Yeah, I know Rafael patented a new warhead design and that some of the guys I met that are somewhat close to the program have talked about it being perhaps the most unique aspect of the missile, I never quite understood the idea there. What really separates it from traditional fragmentation warheads?

If it really is a bunch of linear shaped charges, it'd be able to penetrate warheads and set them off. Blast-frag probably has more limited capability and would end up destroying the rocket but leaving an intact warhead to fall somewhere.

[LoooSeR]

Derivatsiya details

 

Spoiler

 

[LoooSeR]

 

Launcher

 

Verba missile

Spoiler

 

 

[LoooSeR]

 

[LoooSeR]

Tunguska

[VPZ]

 

 

[LoooSeR]

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

[LoooSeR]

Iranian Sepehr early warning radar shown on iranian TV

 

[Mighty_Zuk]

There's news that IAI will be ramping up the US MIC's share in the Arrow missile's production, under a subsidiary called Stark (industries). 

All that is left is to let them build the Jericho missiles and then we can move on to a full fledged iron suit.