What did surprise me if the figures correct was the high cost of integrating Spear 3 with the F-35B at £411 million.the signing of a £550 million (U.S. $750 million) production contract by the Ministry of Defence and contractor MBDA, the company announced Jan. 6.
guided firings of the weapon from a Typhoon in support of the Spear 3 development for the F-35B will start within 18 months // Spear 3 missile achieve initial operation capability on the aircraft in 2025
range in excess of 140 kilometers [~75 nm] is destined to be fitted solely to the F-35B models // a possibility Spear 3 might also eventually be installed on the Royal Air Force’s fleet of Eurofighter Typhoon fighters. // The F-35B can carry up to eight Spear 3 missiles in its internal weapons bay and further missiles on the wing.
The new demonstration and production contract announced today follows the successful implementation of the £150 million weapon development contract placed in 2016 and a £411 million deal in 2019 for integrating Spear 3 onto the F-35
The future holds out the possibility for Tempest to bring costs down as with Saab software installed on the new Gripen E. Saab Distributed Integrated Modular Avionics (DIMA) separating the flight-critical functions (FCF) from the mission systems, understanding aim to change software so as a customer can add new functionality through apps, similarly to a mobile phone and so hopefully bring weapons integration costs back to some level of reasonableness.
From <https://www.defensenews.com/global/euro ... eir-f-35s/>