Posted on 09/26/2011 8:12:16 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Chasing Norway’s New Stealth Cruise Missile
By Andrew Tarantola on September 27, 2011 at 7:20 am
This is the Naval Strike Missile, Kongsberg’s latest and greatest cruise missile, as it skims over the Pacific Ocean before tearing into its target on the far side of an island.
The testing for this next-generation anti-ship missile took place off Point Mugu, California, in June of this year. According to Konsgberg, the NSM had only 1.5 seconds to acquire and positively ID the ship as its target before striking.
The state-of-the-art missile weighs about 400kg and has a range of 100 nautical miles, both along the coast and in the open ocean. It uses GPS, inertial and terrain reference systems to maintain its bearings. Being a cruise missile, and the only fifth-generation long range precision strike missile in existence, the NSM is capable of flying over land while avoiding obstacles and skimming just above the surface of the ocean to avoid radar detection. The NSM will also make a random high G-force manoeuvre in order to confound enemy countermeasures just before it strikes with a 125kg multi-purpose blast/fragmentation warhead. The NSM is also capable of independently detecting and recognising targets through its imaging infrared (IIR) seeker and on-board target database.
It’s being developed as the basis for the Joint Strike Missile program to be carried aboard Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II “Joint Strike Fighters” when they enter service. The Royal Norwegian Navy has also already chosen it for service aboard Fridtjof Nansen class frigates and Skjold class patrol boats as well as by the Polish Navy. [Wikipedia, Kongsberg]
“The state-of-the-art missile weighs about 400kg and has a range of 100 nautical miles,”
Isn’t that the same range as a 30 year old Exocet?
No-the earliest Exocets had only a third of that range while being far heavier.
Old battleship sailors are laughing right now.
A hit at a higher angle and/or closer to the waterline would be more impressive.
I’ll take a dozen, and some spare parts.
Painting it orange kind of defeats the stealth part, doesn’t it?
And shouldn’t it *explode* before it goes out the other side of the ship ?
/sarc
Cool stuff.
Cool
Kongsberg. I can’t hear or read that name without remembering that company’s role in helping the Soviets to create better, quieter submarine propellors.
An “on board database of targets.” The database is probably stored in solid state memory made in a Chinese factory. What could possibly go wrong with that?
In 1987, Tocibai Machine, a subsidiary of Toshiba, was accused of illegally selling CNC milling machines used to produce very quiet submarine propellers to the Soviet Union in violation of the CoCom agreement, an international embargo on certain countries to COMECON countries. The Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal involved a subsidiary of Toshiba and the Norwegian company Kongsberg Vaapenfabrikk. The incident strained relations between the United States and Japan, and resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two senior executives, as well as the imposition of sanctions on the company by both countries.[5] The US had always relied on the fact that the Soviets had noisy boats, so technology that would make the USSR's submarines harder to detect created a significant threat to America's security. Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania said "What Toshiba and Kongsberg did was ransom the security of the United States for $517 million."
 "YEAH!" |
No, the Exocet anti-ship cruise missile has considerably shorter range than the Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile. The Exocet MM-38, MM-39, MM-40 missiles have ranges of 38, 39, and 40 kilometers or about one-fifth (19 to 20 nautical miles) the range of the Kongsberg NSM (100 nautical miles).
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