Simple. Supersonic needs BIG resources to fly, hugely powerful engine, nearly an order of magnitude larger drag force (which typically scales as (velocity)^2, i.e. Mach 3 missile faces 11 times ((3/0.9)-2=11.11) the drag-force of a Mach 0.9 missile, if similar sized), and hence larger amount of fuel. In other words, super-sonic missile MUST haveJake1992 wrote: ↑22 Jul 2022, 22:09I thought the whole idea of the project was to make one missile that could do both land attack and anti ship to give that greater flexibility ie instead of have 8 anti ship and 8 land attack you’d have 16 that can be used for either role.
Is stealthy going to be as greater use as we think though, from what Iv read to seems speed make a missile harder to stop than stealth. We’re taking about a sub Mach 1 missile here it doesn’t really fill me with confidence.
- much smaller warhead
- AND/OR significantly shorter range
than sub-sonic ones. Just physics. We can easily compare Concord and B747.
Example is not well known in detail, but to my understanding;
- StormShadow is 1.3t, has a 450 kg warhead, with 550 km range in lo-lo profile, a high-subsonic missile
- ASM-3A of Japan is 1t, has unknown warhead (said to be less than 150 kg), with 400 km range in hi-lo profile, Mach 3.
- BrahMos-A, 2.5t, warhead 200-300 kg, with 400 km range in hi-lo profile, Mach 3.
Very different ones.
Of course, super-sonic missile is more expensive (high-power engine and super-sonic airframe is much expensive than a TNT gun powder). Hypersonic? Will be surely hugely expensive.