@siegecrossbow
Could you post the original source? I wonder what the launch altitude and speed is?
Could you post the original source? I wonder what the launch altitude and speed is?
Chinese air to air missiles
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
That would certainly be how it does the determination. I said it as much as well but not as clearly. It's easy work for the engineers tasked with this. Whether missile's own seeker or datalinked.
Unfortunately I only tracked down this single screen shot from a post in Baidu Tieba. If anyone is a subscriber to the Chinese science, technology, and innovation journal then he/she may have access to the whole article from the 2019 edition.
My educated guess is that the criteria is the same as that of PL-12 as disclosed by an academician in an interview — two fighter aircraft flying towards each other at Mach 0.9 and an altitude of 11km. However, there is no hard proof of that in the article.
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Altering duration of a solid-fuel rocket engine?
My bad. I meant the pause duration between pulses.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Very interesting! Do you have a better quality scan? As a lot of the words and numbers are hard to make out in this one.
On the bolded part, I would have to disagree because even a dual pulse rocket with zero time delay between pulses is going to be significantly superior to a single pulse rocket of the same size.
The biggest limitation with solid fuel rockets is that they cannot be throttled, so it’s one speed the whole way.
The obvious problem with this is that beyond the maximum design speed of the missile, all that additional thrust is just wasted on exponentially increasing drag.
A dual pulse rocket solves this issue by allowing you to configure the two rockets to burn at different rates. Rapid for the first stage for maximum acceleration, and slower for the second to maximum range and burn time.
The domestic PL15 with 30s delay between burns should have superior terminal performance and KP at extended ranges because it is adding 30s of powered flight to the end of its flight envelope, where it matters the most
Makes sense. When between burn pulses, the missile is flying on pure inertia, but through very thin air so it will be loosing speed fairly slowly. The longer the time between burns, the more ‘free’ range it gets.
Carrying on from the point earlier, when a rocket motor is ignited, it is most efficient at the start when it is accelerating the missile to its designed top speed. Once you reach that speed, you start to hit a brick wall in terms of additional velocity due to the massively increased air resistance. But since solid fuel rocket motors cannot be throttled back, it is just in effect wasting almost all of its burn pushing against that air resistance and not adding much in the way of range.
With a head-on engagement, the missile is launched at the target when the distance from the launch platform is 180km, but because it is head on, the distance the missile needs to fly is a lot less.
With a chase shot, you will be firing the missile a lot closer to the enemy plane, but the total distance covered by the missile will be 180km by the time it catches up to the fleeing enemy.
Apologies. I found more information on the article and I was off by a little with my guess.
The launch vehicle is traveling at a speed of Ma 1.2, not Ma 0.9. All other specs I guessed correctly.
It seems second set of data is also in a heading-on scenario just lower altitude and speed. It's some what surprising to me that denser air at 3km would decrease missile range by almost tenfold compare to at 10km.
Going out of thick air to launch and then back, switching between going offensive/defensive, and so on is absolute core of modern BVR tactics.