Ukrainians just converted Neptune anti ship cruise missiles to target ground objects. The S-400 strike wasn't a one-off. Is that technically difficult?
Why are cruise missiles so specialized between ground, air launched and the role they perform?
Cruise missiles
what do you need to convert? Just point them to the air, do some calculations on the map and let the gravity do the rest
It's easier to make out the radar signature of a large, angular target in the midst of a featureless plain compared to a small missile battering surrounded by hills and trees.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/08/25/to-blow-up-russias-s-400-battery-in-crimea-ukraine-tweaked-its-cruiser-sinking-neptune-missile/?sh=561dc71c57d3
Guidaince packages mostly.
Hellfires, TOWs, and Mavricks got retired for the new JAGMs with Trisensor radar, laser, and EO/IR seeker heads.
holy fuck
based missile numbers
Well fuck I wasted Quints on MIC autism posting.
Anyway JAGMs are based I eagerly await being able to mount these on everything.
Loved the hellfires but the Romeos honestly sucked.
Radioaltimeter maybe?
Oh and warheads, Antiship warheads arent the best for surface tagets but are still servicable.
In the same way Airburst is better for light targets but Impact HE will work decently.
>thinking quickly, Ukraine constructed a cruise missile, using only a squirrel, some string, and a cruise missile
Warheads. You usually want to cause a large explosion on contact with a standard cruise missile. An ASM has to pierce through a good number of bulkheads before it detonates. Some even using something that's vaguely similar to tandem rounds. One explosion to get into the hull, the second bigger one to do the actual damage.
You shoot an ASM at a ground target like a regular cruise missile? It's going to suck for the poor bastard directly underneath it, but it's not going to do a whole lot beyond that.
aaaaaaaaaaah this post made me physically cringe
If it has INS and/or GNSS-based waypoint guidance, not much. Mostly a software patch.
>The War Zone: A representative of the Ukrainian Defense Department told the newspaper that Ukraine has modified its Neptune anti-ship missiles to hit ground targets, and that they will fly to Moscow and other Russian cities in the near future.
>In April of this year, Ukraine worked on the modification of the P-360 "Neptune" for the use of missiles against ground targets, but this required a new guidance system, which did not exist at that time.
>However, Ukraine has developed a guidance system that takes the missile to a predetermined location. The missile's infrared homing head then searches for and locks onto a target based on a preloaded image, and then makes a final attack on that target. If it can't find a target, the missile stops its attack.
https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1696619110120014142
>If it can't find a target, the missile stops its attack.
doubt lol
Not really a difficult routine, self destruct or loop around the area and try to find another valid target. Shit was standard in 70s-80s cruise missile tech.
Ok, but when they are fighting a serious war I can see the Ukrainians leaning into an "in case of doubt strike the area anyways rather than self destruct" kind of algorythm for the missile.
>be missile
>fired at enemy
>can't find enemy
>"fuck it, I tried"
>go home
Meh it just return to port under its own power
>>The War Zone: A representative of the Ukrainian Defense Department told the newspaper that Ukraine has modified its Neptune anti-ship missiles to hit ground targets, and that they will fly to Moscow and other Russian cities in the near future.
Are you fucking serious? We're not just gonna see a barrage of paper planes hitting Moscow but actual honest to goodness cruise missile strikes?
I cannot WAIT for this war to reach the Russian homefront like that. Let the vatmorons suffer as the Ukrainians have.
Boiling frog shit. They hit them with these clunky lawnmoer Drones, then the more agile and plentiful paper plane ones. Now they are setting up for periodical strikes with proper cruise missiles. At least Russia has the excuse that wax paper planes are very hard to detect, so their air defenses are not useful. I just know the cruise missiles are gonna hit every god damn target too.
>I just know the cruise missiles are gonna hit every god damn target too.
Hoping that they hit oil refineries, give Russia's economy one last push into the abyss
>you were born just in time to see muscovy burned to the ground
maybe this timeline isn't so bad after all
Total Zigger Death.
Muscovia Delenda Est.
Neptune is a lot like Harpoon in performance and its fairly short ranged so unlikely. That is unless Ukraine gets something Tomahawk class working and then yes. They can hit Moscow.
How long until we see them in action?
S400 that was hit recently is neptun job according to russmorons. So yeah small chance that they already in action
>Why are cruise missiles so specialized between ground, air launched and the role they perform?
They kinda aren't.
LRASM is JASSM with a fancier seeker and there are other examples of that.
And that's not a new thing, the AGM-84 Harpoon quickly became the AMG-84E SLAM, and then later the SLAM-ER
SLAM-ER? I barely even know her.
So, do they have any more Neptunes? I read pre-war stories that said Ukraine got one (maybe more?) samples for evaluation but never got around to acquiring them officially. Their total absence from the war (besides Moskva, but I still doubt it) seemed to have supported that. Now we’re talking about them again? Did they manage to start a production line?
Also it’s frustrating how there’s SO LITTLE news about Ukrainian arms industry while everyone discusses Russian stuff NON STOP. I get that Russia simply has a much larger MIC base but that’s barely an excuse.
1. We talking about antiship missiles. After Moskva got hit puccians redislocated all of their Black sea fleet out of reach for those. Ukies also got their share of harpoons and we didn't hear about them even small bit.
2. Fog of war. They def continue working on their home made spg programm + cruise missile + whole bunch uav but they keep low profile and doing that for good reasaon
>So, do they have any more Neptunes? I read pre-war stories that said Ukraine got one (maybe more?) samples for evaluation but never got around to acquiring them officially.
your confusing the neptune launcher with the neptune missile
theres only like 2 neptune launchers in existence but we actually have no clue how their Neptune missile stockpile looks like right now though i doubt its more then 20 missiles
>2 neptune launchers in existence
*2 batteries actually, 1 test and 1 production variant, each battery, iirc, consists of 4 launchers, 4 tubes each.
As for numbers, for example, in a recent interview Zelensky said that Ukraine makes literally thousands of times more Stugna than pre-war. So probably every Ukrainian missile program now has a blank check. R360 has two bottlenecks-ability of Motor Sich to make enough engines and ability of Arsenal to make enough guidance systems for them while simultaneously making Iglas, tank scopes, guidance systems for several other projects and seeker heads for R-27 and R-73, but I'm 99% sure Ukraine will pull an uno reverse this winter
>Why are cruise missiles so specialized between ground,
Requires a rocket booster to get going before the internal engine kicks in.
>air launched
Does not require a booster.
>and the role they perform?
Anti-ship missiles need a radar and/or IR/visual sensor suite to detect and strike targets, thus meaning more weight and typically being larger. Those that are meant to strike static land targets don't strictly need any sensor suite anymore (though they typically still have something like a radar or visual sensor system to confirm targets and flight paths), just a GPS tracker and guidance package, can theoretically carry a larger warhead for the same weight and size.
Because they're generally larger, anti-ship cruise missiles are easier to make into dual use like the Tomahawk which originally had two variants, a land attack and an anti-shipping version. it's easier to convert antiship missiles into land attack than vice versa.
> Those that are meant to strike static land targets don't strictly need any sensor suite anymore
> Looks at Taurus and her TRN/IBN, IIR, GPS, INS, DSMAC, SAASM and fucking turbo prop coffee machine
So they don't but they do?
Things like DSMAC are a relic of previous time and, most importantly for the Tomahawk allowed for it to pick out sea targets better from chaff and could target more important vessels in a fleet in addition to allowing it to operate without need of early GPS.
Again, if you want to be very literal, modern land attack cruise missiles don't require anything more than INS and GPS to strike a static target. That doesn't mean that other sensors aren't useful and we're seeing Tomahawks in particular using their cameras to perform real time BDA by loitering during and after a strike before attacking a target. You can look at Shasneed and Bober for example of land attack cruise missiles without any sophisticated sensor suite. Those with sensor suites operate largely on "I want this munition to hit its target and have a very high pk since I'm already spending this much money on it and the targets I plan on attacking with this weapon are extremely important to destroy so it needs to be able to survive the trip to the target and then make sure it's hitting the target." line of thinking, which is a rich man's game for the time being.
>INS and GPS
Do any cruise missiles use image recognition to locate their position? E.g have a camera take a picture of the ground, and compare it against an onboard database of terrain images for an area
Tomahawks use image recognition to assist in navigation so they aren't completely reliant on GPS and INS. Basically the operators load a digital map of the area into the guidance system the missile will repeatedly check what it sees to the map to confirm its position.
For location? No, Tomahawks do use it during the terminal phase to make sure they are at the correct target however.
>E.g have a camera take a picture of the ground, and compare it against an onboard database of terrain images for an area
They do something very, very similar to this, but they use radar mapping instead of visual. This is largely due to it coming from a time when it was relatively easy to get topographical radar data via satellite of terrain. Fun fact, during the Gulf War the US sent Tomahawks over Zagros Mountain range in Iran because they knew the missiles find their way through an area with a lot of topographical features and feared that if they sent the missiles directly over the deserts of Iraq they would lose their way due to the lack of topographical features.
Why have we never made a ground launched tomahawk?
A ship is kind of like the ground
we did
The US and Russia signed a treaty banning ground launched intermediate missiles. Russia violated the treaty so now the US is beginning to make those.
Anti-Ship missiles generally have radars and ship recognition software because they are looking for moving targets often surrounded by civilian targets.
Normal cruise missiles don't have a radar and just fly to target coordinates.
>S400
>cant defeat drones
>cant provide air defence
>cant defeat SEAD
>cant protect itself from cruise missiles
Just what the fuck is the point of the damn thing?
Sell to dumb Turks to exclude them from getting F-35s.
TzD continues unabated
Neptuneski is becoming Tomahawkski?
What's the distinction between a cruise missile and a kamikaze drone? The Tomahawk uses an air-breathing engine.
drone implies remote user control.
I love how ziggers cope to this is "what about that one time Ukrainian missile fell into Poland?"
>"what about that one time Ukrainian missile fell into Poland?"
*Russian missile
>Why are cruise missiles so specialized between ground, air launched and the role they perform?
fuel payload, warhead types, targeting suites, ability to fire-and-forget, command and control systems to target the missile
also lots of proprietary bullshit from the people who make them because why would you sell one missile that does everything when you can sell two missiles that do half of one thing each, AND require a subscription to some dogshit software you had some senile boomer write in winforms and cobol like it's 1991 (yet requires a SPECIAL OS that is definitely not just Windows Vista with a few extra registry keys)?
Classic western anti-ship missile
>optimized for very low altitude flight over relatively flat seas with variable altitude flight profile
>radar based terminal guidance
>not very long range due to rocket engine
Classic western land attack cruise missile
>optimized for flight at treetop level
>TERCOM guidance for navigating using land features
>turbofan engine for much longer range at higher cost
A tomahawk is much more expensive and quite a bit bigger than a harpoon.