Best Look Yet At Ukrainian MiG-29 Releasing Hammer Rocket-Assisted Bombs
Best Look Yet At Ukrainian MiG-29 Releasing Hammer Rocket-Assisted Bombs
The video shows a now deceased Ukrainian MiG-29 pilot executing a toss release of the French-made weapons.
Why does the plane do that wild roll when it releases the bombs? Won't that fuck with the navigation or the flight path of the bombs?
4No.
You obviously did not read the article, so here's a summary:
"With unguided munitions, a toss/lofted technique significantly reduces accuracy. Hammer and [U.S.-supplied unpowered] JDAM-ER [glide-bombs] both come standard with GPS-assisted inertial navigation system (INS) guidance packages that would allow them to zero in on set coordinates even when employed indirectly.”
"Much more importantly, the French precision-guided munitions have the REK [Range Extension Kit tail unit], which is a solid-fuel rocket booster designed to extend the weapon’s range. This is already a very useful additional capability when employing these weapons in level flight at higher altitudes, giving 500-pound/250-kilogram class versions the ability to hit targets up to 43 miles (70 kilometers) away. That is similar to the stated maximum range of the unpowered JDAM-ER with its pop-out wing kit.”
The whole point of having these guided bombs is that you can wildly roll away as soon as you achieve the correct range to target, and you would want to bail out of the combat zone as soon as possible because the entire combat zone is likely filled with enemy anti air assets that can kill you, and you want to get out of their range as quickly as you can.
They are GPS assisted, internally (self) navigating, rocket assisted bombs.
What that means is, you have already set the GPS location you want to hit, you loose the bombs and get the hell out asap, the rocket fires and the fins on the bomb actuate so as to generate a flight/glide path for the bomb that will guide it to the target.
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Basically, its much more akin to a short range, air to ground missile than it is to a 'dumb' unguided bomb.
The difference being that the rocket on this is used to fly the bomb upwards, to gain altitude and thus range, then it glides downward toward the target, as opposed to a more conventional air to ground missile that would not have a glide stage and would be doing powered flight the whole time.
That, and these kinds of things are a hell of a lot cheaper than actual missiles, so you can get and use more of them.
A whole lot of the reduced cost is because air to ground missiles usually have their own expensive optical or thermal or radar sensors that allow them to maintain a lock on a specified target after separating from the aircraft, whereas these GPS guided bombs just aim for the exact GPS location of the target the aircraft gives before they separate from the aircraft. So, they're going to miss a rapidly advancing tank, but if the target is static, or some kind of mobile vehicle that takes a while to pack up and move, they stand a decent chance at hitting that.
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The other engineering achievement of these things is the pylon, which interfaces between the russian-designed target designation systems on board the russian-designed aircraft, and translates this into being able to GPS program the specific target coordinates of the NATO-designed guided bombs before they are loosed.
An extremely oversimplified metaphor here would be that if you have American appliances or gadgets, you're going to need an adapter to charge/power them if you take them to another country with different power sockets and standard voltages.
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In general, this is what is called a stand-off munition, which is a custom designed or modified version of a weapon that allows you to accurately hit targets from a range outside the ability of the enemy to smack back at you.
19Thanks for the detailed explanation! And for the record: I did read the article but failed to grab those bits of information I asked for. Maybe I'm not good reading between the lines as those guys did not exactly explain it like you did (they didn't want to expand their technique in too much detail for obvious reasons).
I wish all these pilots all the best!
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It's a toss technique designed to get maximum range with minimum risk...you like, lob them.
The gps does the rest.
6The clip, shot from inside the jet’s cockpit, looks to show the pilot utilizing a toss bomb technique, which is exactly how the rocket-boosted munitions were designed to be used.
Apparently these things have two guidance systems in them - one GPS, one inertial - and are intended to be flung over terrain to reduce the chances of the aircraft getting seen by defences
6Yea, but look at how badass it looks!
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