You forgot to add, that Brahmos would never be able to hit Bin Ladin or anything in Afganistan, because it has too short range. And it is not the best cruise misille, it is not even the best antiship misille (that's Shipwreck). While Brahmos can perform better in antiship role than Tomahawk, the land attack capabilities are limited because of range, small warhead and high weight. I found especially funny your claim about "advantage" over Tomahawks range "The Brahmos range is 2.5 - 3 times more" , while the image you provided clearly states the Brahmos range is 280km(300kg warhead) compared to Tomahawk 1500km and that with 454 warhead (2500km with nuclear warhead). Maybe even the future US artilery will have longer range!! At best the ship launched version is able to hit only coastal facilities. And I wonder how good will be the Su-30 flight performance and RCS with misille weighting more than 2 tons.
Besides I read on one non English source that Brahmos is now not capable to hit ground targets emiting no radar radiation (that means it is efective only against ships) - it simply lacks many Tomahawk ground attack target capabilities - like optical target recognition and it also cannot hit moving targets, or be reprogrammed during flight like the newest tactical Tomahawk.
I don't know if it has GPS equivalent guidance (India has not their own GPS and I don't know if Brahmos uses russian Glonass) so I see it's land attack performace will be quite poor.

BTW I don't say it's bad antiship misille, it has range advantage over Sunburn, but it simply isn't the universal multifunction misille as promoted.





[edit on 13-5-2005 by longbow]

Originally posted by Stealth Spy

It's not as versitile as the Brahmos , and can only be launched from airplanes and most critically, its not supersonic.

Why is being supersonic that important? The kinetic energy gained when hitting something realitave to the yeild difference in the chemical warheads is extremely small. It is only slightly harder to shoot down a supersonic missile than a subsonic - but the subsonic missile can travel at much lower altitudes and "hug" terrain much more effectively - making it extremely hard to target. Quicker time to target would be nice, but the US is "working on" TLAM's that can hover over a general area and be fed a new target via sattelite and attack that quickly.

Don't you think that if the capabilites of supersonic cruise missiles were that good with current technology that at least one western country would have one by now?

Yakhonts are actually based on Shipwrecks. That might provide you with why these two look very similar.

Yakhonts provide faster speed for several reasons because it has a smaller payload and smaller range (I think they switched the engine too but I'm not too sure about that). Brahmos is a SSM not a LACM, although it has limited capabilities. Its not meant to be like the TLAM, TLAMs are LACM with limited naval attack capability.

Good missile but I prefer Shipwrecks, fired in salvo of 12? Nothing in the world is gonna stop that. (Shipwreck is the only SSM designed to be fired in salvos where only targeting info provided for one missile is needed in stead of 12, the missiles act as a whole, Yakhonts weren't made for that.)

Even though our own GPS Beidou isn't a truly "Global" positioning system, it is the start and sattelites can be relocated to where conflicts are at and guide missile with fairly great accuracy. Beidou is operational and is only a part of something more that would come in the next few years so China would stop on the dependance of Galileo, Glonass and GPS.

The Brahmos may be the best joint Indian and Russian anti-ship cruise missile in the world, and that is certainly contestable, but it is not the best all-around cruise missile in the world.




seekerof

True seekerof.. for it to truelt be the 'best' c misssile its gotta have a range of around 1000km(at least a variant of the brahmos should) and well you can slap on a little RAM paint to it.. Then at supersonic speeds it will be almost impossible for it to be shot down..

And the benefit of a missile supersonic is the time factor..thats all...

As for the tomahawk being "very" accurate and my it is quite accurate in those pics chinawhite provided; well all those injured/dead civilians in Iraq/Baghdad after the first onslaught of tomahawks comes to mind..
The US briefings at Qatar I think were plagued by journalists repeatedly questioning the credibility of the "so called" US precision weapons"..
Just a note to be remembered and NOT forgotten..
We tend to forget things soo easily these days


And now finally to answer all GPS claims:

This is for all who KNOW how a GPS works and/or own one! :

Since The whole GPS system is a simplex method of communication with non-geosynch satellites and the positions of receivers are only known to those who are "holding" them, it is impossible for any country owning a GPS system , say the US (like W4rlord mentioned), to selectively prohibit any one country from using the system.
Esp. say if India uses the US GPS, then it will only be able to use the civilian resolution of around 100m (C/A code) and the military(P code) will not be usable.
So the GPS will be only used as a waypointish/nav co-od input for minor course corrections enroute to the target.
To resolve the actual target within the last 100 m will obv be the job of the cruise missile it self using its active-passive radar/imaging to search, lock on and destroy the target..
So if the country in charge of the GPS system( say US) wants to prohibit a particular country(say India) from using its GPS then it must shut down all civilian GPS globally..
IT does not have the capability to shut down satellites only in the region of conflict as to satellites are not geosynch and will as always move to other areas as well..
If they somehow manage to selectively trigger timer ckts on those specific satellites over the region of desired blackout then those satelites will require over 4 to 6 hours to restart (warm up), reacquire their own positions wrt othre satellites, update their ephemeris(sat almanac) and then start transmitting again.And since GPs sats have a 12 hr orbital, I calculate that they'd be blacking out almost HALF the globe!!


Hence it'll be too much of hassle to do selective GPS blackout..
Having said that I doubt that Russia will in any eventuality block out India from using the GLONASS because I think India is heavily investing and/or
technically contributing to GLONASS.

Hence the chinese necessity to build their own GPS Beidou..
How many satellites does Beidou have?
You need 21 in 6 orbital planes to achieve the above mentioned 100m civ/30m mil resolution..

[edit on 14-5-2005 by Daedalus3]

Originally posted by Daedalus3
True seekerof.. for it to truelt be the 'best' c misssile its gotta have a range of around 1000km(at least a variant of the brahmos should) and well you can slap on a little RAM paint to it.. Then at supersonic speeds it will be almost impossible for it to be shot down..

if it was 1000km it would need to be bigger. its already very hard to stop a tomahawk.
flies very low (tree top level) and has a very small RCS

if it was 1000km it would need to be bigger. its already very hard to stop a tomahawk.
flies very low (tree top level) and has a very small RCS

both missile has diffrent purpose.
brahmos is anti ship which can attack land target and his navigation is upgraded for landattack.

tomhawk is basicly a land attack missile which never configure for ship attack.

maybe we should compare a AGM-84 Harpoon to Branhmos.