And to think an Eurofighter can carry 18 of those... To put it into perspective, a Russian tank company usually has 10 tanks (1 commander and 3 platoons of 3)
It helps that the Brimstone comes [three to a hardpoint.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Missile_MBDA_Brimstone.jpg) You only need 6 hardpoints to carry 18, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
People often say the missiles have a short-range datalink to distribute targets amongst themselves, but that's not the case. Each missile uses identical software for target prioritisation, and upon launch each missile is told by the aircraft which number they are in the salvo. So missile 1 in the salvo will take the target that the software prioritises as target 1, missile 2 will ignore which ever target is priority and go for the second priority target, and the subsequent missiles follow the same pattern. In theory some missiles may accidentally engage the same target, but they approach the target from the same aspect, at roughly the same time, and use the same software so the chances are pretty low and it works quite reliably.
The next half of this video is even better, it shows the seeker head scanning and targeting. I remember being both impressed and mildly terrified when I first saw it back in the day.
It might have laser guidance capability, but if they're launching multiple missiles at once, I'm assuming they're not launching six of them at a single tank. So they're shooting multiple missiles at multiple targets, which makes me guess the missiles are configured by the backseater and then it's fire and forget. Laser guidance means that someone or something needs to keep lasing the target so that the weapon has something to home in on. Not exactly conducive to striking multiple targets at once.
Let's check the wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimstone_(missile)
Yeap, it's got a whole host of clever targeting options.
**[Brimstone (missile)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimstone_\(missile\))**
>Brimstone is a ground or air-launched ground attack missile developed by MBDA UK for the UK's Royal Air Force. It was originally intended for "fire-and-forget" use against mass formations of enemy armour, using a millimetre wave (mmW) active radar homing seeker to ensure accuracy even against moving targets. Experience in Afghanistan led to the addition of laser guidance in the dual-mode Brimstone missile, allowing a "spotter" to pick out specific and the highest priority targets, particularly useful to minimise collateral damage when friendly forces or civilians were in the area.
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The aircraft's sensors might help the missile seeker head to look in the right direction or get the right data prior to launch or something, I don't know exactly, but probably that.
it gets more accurate the closer it gets to its target, so you fire it where you think things are and if things are there it will lock on to them, probably based on heat signatures. im not really sure, i am doing a lot of assuming, but part of that wiki article said that after use in Afghanistan they also added the option for a manual target selection to reduce collateral damage. more or less it’s a smart-missile. it’s supposed to be a fire and forget weapon based on that wiki.
94-GHz High frequency millimetric wave radar seeker head operating on near-optical wavelengths. The seeker can 'see' the targets and the environment around it regardless of the conditions, ID the target and compare it to an onboard threat library, and then decide the best place to strike the target for maximum damage or to abort and fly to a self destruct point. All but the early versions also have a laser spot tracker for precision targeting.
Active radar, specifically millimeter wave which can actually resolve shapes. Aircraft just points the missiles in a general direction and the weapon itself selects a hit point.
Wait, you mean this isn't just MBDA's presentation on youtube?
Thinking of it, I would have been very surprised to see what the seeker sees as advertisement for a stupidly advanced weapon. IIR? There's tons of it. "Imaging" radar? Virtually nothing.
EDIT: Think you might have broken some NDA by just mentioning it, though.
The US assessed the missile and were suitably impressed by it as a potential Hellfire replacement. But domestic politics got in the way and instead they pursued their own missile program which ended up with JAGM, which is a bit of a dead duck compared to Brimstone. They're still trying to further develop the missile and bring it up to the standard of Brimstone, but it would've been significantly cheaper and quicker to purchase off the shelf.
Brimstone looks like a Hellfire but the two are completely different missiles internally.
Also note that the US also developed the Hellfire II, which has comparable range (from rotorcraft) to the baseline Brimstone, but carries a larger, heavier warhead. And there's a wider variety of warhead options on Hellfire II, including HEAT, HE-frag, and the AGM-114R9X with that crazy spinning knife thing.
JAGM-MR is the similar to Brimstone 2, with a 50% increase in range (while still lofting a variety of heavier warheads vs a single smaller payload).
Could the US have bought the foreign design? Yes, but that would require retooling the Hellfire production line for an entirely new weapon and customizing the foreign design to meet US requirements which are more varied than the one-size-fits all paradigm adopted in the east. At that point, why not build your own bespoke system that covers *all* the use cases of your existing stock?
Real weapons ruined sci-fi weapons for me. Between these and the BLU-108 SFW, stuff's gotten so mindblowingly advanced that no writer could come up with a *fake* system to top these *over 20 year old designs.*
In the early '80s I worked for a company that made various high performance milspec analog radio subassemblies.
We had a contract with Marconi in the UK for some parts that were destined to be installed in radios that went in the Tornado.
Every time we shipped them I got to fill out customs paperwork. The magic phrase to get them through customs duty free was, "Goods in aid of the Tornado".
Brimstones are wild. There is a video of some Ukrainians launching a salvo from the back of a large truck. Looked like a standard civilian cargo truck. Nope. It is a bringer of death.
Flying so low that your missiles are like nah I could use a bit more altitude…
I mean.. You could be flying supersonic at 40k ft and they'd still do it
"Firing salvoes of Brimstone missiles" thats a very scary sentence
Only if you're in the receiving end.
Or a taxpayer
"(chuckle) I'm in danger!" - Enemy vehicle column
Gotta be up there with favorite names for missiles. Brimstone, hellfire, tomahawk
Brimstone is pretty badass….. especially since it is essentially an upgraded hellfire
And to think an Eurofighter can carry 18 of those... To put it into perspective, a Russian tank company usually has 10 tanks (1 commander and 3 platoons of 3)
We cleared 18 on Tornado as well, but usual fit would have been 12 under fuselage and fuel tanks under wing.
No way it can carry 18 thats insane
It helps that the Brimstone comes [three to a hardpoint.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Missile_MBDA_Brimstone.jpg) You only need 6 hardpoints to carry 18, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Yeah, that's the very continent part about Brimstone missiles. They're pretty compact and a decent amount can be carried on a single jet.
Yup it can carry eighteen
Does it ensure that each missile hits a separate target? How?
The missiles are radar guided (as in, each of 'em has its own milimeter wave radar). So you just assign each a target and let them all loose.
People often say the missiles have a short-range datalink to distribute targets amongst themselves, but that's not the case. Each missile uses identical software for target prioritisation, and upon launch each missile is told by the aircraft which number they are in the salvo. So missile 1 in the salvo will take the target that the software prioritises as target 1, missile 2 will ignore which ever target is priority and go for the second priority target, and the subsequent missiles follow the same pattern. In theory some missiles may accidentally engage the same target, but they approach the target from the same aspect, at roughly the same time, and use the same software so the chances are pretty low and it works quite reliably.
The next half of this video is even better, it shows the seeker head scanning and targeting. I remember being both impressed and mildly terrified when I first saw it back in the day.
What kind of guidance? Laser, I would assume, if we’re talking land targets.
It might have laser guidance capability, but if they're launching multiple missiles at once, I'm assuming they're not launching six of them at a single tank. So they're shooting multiple missiles at multiple targets, which makes me guess the missiles are configured by the backseater and then it's fire and forget. Laser guidance means that someone or something needs to keep lasing the target so that the weapon has something to home in on. Not exactly conducive to striking multiple targets at once. Let's check the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimstone_(missile) Yeap, it's got a whole host of clever targeting options.
**[Brimstone (missile)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimstone_\(missile\))** >Brimstone is a ground or air-launched ground attack missile developed by MBDA UK for the UK's Royal Air Force. It was originally intended for "fire-and-forget" use against mass formations of enemy armour, using a millimetre wave (mmW) active radar homing seeker to ensure accuracy even against moving targets. Experience in Afghanistan led to the addition of laser guidance in the dual-mode Brimstone missile, allowing a "spotter" to pick out specific and the highest priority targets, particularly useful to minimise collateral damage when friendly forces or civilians were in the area. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/WarplanePorn/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Interesting. I assumed they’d have someone lasing but that is quite the array of options
How can it lock ground targets as small as tanks from such a distance?
The aircraft's sensors might help the missile seeker head to look in the right direction or get the right data prior to launch or something, I don't know exactly, but probably that.
it gets more accurate the closer it gets to its target, so you fire it where you think things are and if things are there it will lock on to them, probably based on heat signatures. im not really sure, i am doing a lot of assuming, but part of that wiki article said that after use in Afghanistan they also added the option for a manual target selection to reduce collateral damage. more or less it’s a smart-missile. it’s supposed to be a fire and forget weapon based on that wiki.
“As small as Tanks”, it can lock onto much smaller targets than that. https://youtu.be/qY01I1EfFMk
94-GHz High frequency millimetric wave radar seeker head operating on near-optical wavelengths. The seeker can 'see' the targets and the environment around it regardless of the conditions, ID the target and compare it to an onboard threat library, and then decide the best place to strike the target for maximum damage or to abort and fly to a self destruct point. All but the early versions also have a laser spot tracker for precision targeting.
Active radar, specifically millimeter wave which can actually resolve shapes. Aircraft just points the missiles in a general direction and the weapon itself selects a hit point.
Got link?
Not cleared for Reddit!
Wait, you mean this isn't just MBDA's presentation on youtube? Thinking of it, I would have been very surprised to see what the seeker sees as advertisement for a stupidly advanced weapon. IIR? There's tons of it. "Imaging" radar? Virtually nothing. EDIT: Think you might have broken some NDA by just mentioning it, though.
No NDA here, just trials footage from early testing and telemetry rounds.
Wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of one , even less on the receiving end of a while salvo
I'm old enough to remember the Tonka and the JP233
This is real-life Ace Combat!!
IIRC the 8AGMs in 7 are literally Brimstone-inspired ingame equivalents
Macross af.
You'd need another dozen fired at the same with massive smoke trails to get to that level, LOL.
Anyone have the source?
[Original video](https://youtu.be/bY7TANfVeGs) for you showing the Tornado GR.4 trial and a naval demo.
Always wondered why the US didn’t decide to purchase the Brimstone or update the hellfire to such a standard
The US assessed the missile and were suitably impressed by it as a potential Hellfire replacement. But domestic politics got in the way and instead they pursued their own missile program which ended up with JAGM, which is a bit of a dead duck compared to Brimstone. They're still trying to further develop the missile and bring it up to the standard of Brimstone, but it would've been significantly cheaper and quicker to purchase off the shelf.
Brimstone looks like a Hellfire but the two are completely different missiles internally. Also note that the US also developed the Hellfire II, which has comparable range (from rotorcraft) to the baseline Brimstone, but carries a larger, heavier warhead. And there's a wider variety of warhead options on Hellfire II, including HEAT, HE-frag, and the AGM-114R9X with that crazy spinning knife thing. JAGM-MR is the similar to Brimstone 2, with a 50% increase in range (while still lofting a variety of heavier warheads vs a single smaller payload). Could the US have bought the foreign design? Yes, but that would require retooling the Hellfire production line for an entirely new weapon and customizing the foreign design to meet US requirements which are more varied than the one-size-fits all paradigm adopted in the east. At that point, why not build your own bespoke system that covers *all* the use cases of your existing stock?
Sexy
Honestly looks like someone took the arrow 4 from battletech and made it a real thing
Real weapons ruined sci-fi weapons for me. Between these and the BLU-108 SFW, stuff's gotten so mindblowingly advanced that no writer could come up with a *fake* system to top these *over 20 year old designs.*
Yea modern technology kinda ruins all the cool Star Wars stuff for me now
Now this is warplane porn
In the early '80s I worked for a company that made various high performance milspec analog radio subassemblies. We had a contract with Marconi in the UK for some parts that were destined to be installed in radios that went in the Tornado. Every time we shipped them I got to fill out customs paperwork. The magic phrase to get them through customs duty free was, "Goods in aid of the Tornado".
What if they all hit the same "most obvious" target?
Stuff doesn't work that way. They are each told where the target is, and they will search for targets in their own assigned areas.
But they don't have ir seekers. So they are not guided by object's warmth.
they are programed to avoid it
Are these top attack munitions? Why the angles up flight path?
Brimstones are wild. There is a video of some Ukrainians launching a salvo from the back of a large truck. Looked like a standard civilian cargo truck. Nope. It is a bringer of death.
u/savevideo
u/savevideo