| You really need to play combat flight sims (like DCS) to understand why a ramjet AA missile makes a lot of sense ;) It's not mainly about top speed, but about endurance (e.g. flying under power for the entire flight time of the missile). The gist ist that traditional BVR AA missiles are only powered at the start of an engagement (and a lot of that power is used to gain height) until their rocket engine runs out of fuel. For a large part of its flight, traditional AA missiles glide without power towards the target, meaning the missile will lose speed from the moment the rocket engines are switched off, and even more for each required maneuver that needs to be performed afterwards (that's why it is a valid strategy for the targeted airplane to evade the missile by forcing it into a turn during its unpowered flight phase - e.g. instead of doing a 180 and flying straight away from the missile, fly a roughly 90 degree course to the incoming missile to force it into a wide turn, which means the missile will lose more energy than it would when remaining on a straight course). A ramjet powered missile on the other hand flies under power for the entire engagement, it can 'cruise' towards the target and then for the final phase of the engagement speed up and home in on the target (or generally do complex maneuvers) without losing speed, which gives the target airplane much fewer options to evade the attack. > I read some funny commentary once about how to shoot down a modern fighter jet: Two missiles. They can dodge the first one, but sacrifice so much speed, that the second one can easily find its target. With a ramjet missile you don't need a second missile to exploit the target's depleted energy. And the two-missile strategy also doesn't really work when the other aircraft fires a single Meteor from a greater distance first ;) |