U.S. Army
The Army’s Multi-Mission Launcher is expected to fire a variety of missiles.
U.S. Army
The Army’s Multi-Mission Launcher is expected to fire a variety of missiles.
This is just an update to the old Chappral (Sidewinder) anti-aircraft system of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-72_Chaparral
The arrival sounds great.The only question I have is it cost effective to use a highly expensive sidewinder missile against an inexpensive drone?
It would probably be cheaper using LASERs to take out those drones.Not to mention faster as well.
Holy carp, using a sidewinder misile to take out a mortar round? That doesn’t make a hell lot of sense to me.
What i have seen of drones, are that they are kept aflight by electrical motors, unless we are talking the ones that are actual airframes with missiles under the wings, which are not ‘drones’, but ‘remotely piloted vehicles’.
Electrical motors do not put out much of a heat signature, considering that the motors are cooled by the very propellers they power.
The ‘rpv’s’ actually use turboprops or small jet engines, either of which DO create a heat signature.
The ‘chapparal’ system was a tracked/wheled vehicle with four Sidewinders mounted. Another heat-tracking missile is the Stinger shoulder fired missile, which also was mounted on wheeled vehicles, and as an R&D project, mounted on the turret of tanks, and lastly, mounted on the turret of the PHALANX CIWS system, mounted on either wheeled/tracked vehicles.
Makes sense one artillery battery can serve multiple functions just by swapping ammunition