AST 1227: BAe Sabre ASM

[overscan (PaulMM)]

AST (Air Staff Target) 1227 was a requirement for a PGM for antitank duties. BAe offered the highly supersonic Sabre, based on the Rapier SAM airframe with a laser seeker. Bill Gunston suggests the seeker was by Martin Marietta and related to the Copperhead seeker. Single shot kill probability (SSKP) of 80% was calculated for a typical tank.

Sources

• Bill Gunston, Illustrated Encyclopaedia of the Worlds Rockets & Missiles Salamander 1979, p117

 

[TinWing]

AST (Air Staff Target) 1227 was a requirement for a PGM for antitank duties. BAe offered the highly supersonic Sabre, based on the Rapier SAM airframe with a laser seeker. Bill Gunston suggests the seeker was by Martin Marietta and related to the Copperhead seeker. Single shot kill probability (SSKP) of 80% was calculated for a typical tank.

Sources

• Bill Gunston, Illustrated Encyclopaedia of the Worlds Rockets & Missiles Salamander 1979, p117

The French proposed a similar laser guided ASM based on the Roland SAM. The AS.2L (or AS.LL) was apparently dead by 1982.

Source

• Bill Gunston, An Illustrated Guide To Modern Airborne Missiles Salamander 1983, p80

 

[batigol]

Image from Flight Intl, May 1978. Any ideas as to what the dimensions were?

 

[CJGibson]

From BSP4

L= 7.7ft (2.3m) Diamter 5.25in (13.3cm) span across fins 15in (38cm)

Laser seeker was superseded by MMW technology.

Chris

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

Cleaning out old stuff from computer.

 

[pathology_doc]

It's almost asking for a fair-to-middling-weather SAM application, isn't it? Perhaps not that good against fast jets, but death to slower COIN aircraft and helicopters. Semi-active laser homing, with no guidance data-link to jam and potentially easier steering of a much tighter beam.

 

[thefrecklepuny]

Looks similar to the BAe ALARM anti radiation missile. Any connections I wonder?

 

[pathology_doc]

I can do no more than to echo what Robunos said over on the AGM-64 thread:


http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,21832.0.html


When you've found an aerodynamic planform on which you have expended much slide-rule (or computer) and wind-tunnel time, and you find it works, you're going to tend to re-use that planform an awful lot. It cuts down on the work you have to do, since any changes are limited to recalculating centres of gravity versus pressure (based on what you're stuffing inside and where in the missile it's going) to determine the dynamics, and perhaps scaling up or down a little. If you don't stray too far from the original dimensions and you can keep the weight distribution roughly the same, you may not even have to recalculate things like missile body bending moments, the required thickness of the outer skin, etc. etc. And first-approximation calculations of the new missile's aerodynamic performance (upon which, I am guessing, sales brochures are based) can be done very quickly.

 

[Grey Havoc]

Crosslink to the Martin Marietta Laser Guided Seeker thread.

 

[Grey Havoc]

It's almost asking for a fair-to-middling-weather SAM application, isn't it? Perhaps not that good against fast jets, but death to slower COIN aircraft and helicopters. Semi-active laser homing, with no guidance data-link to jam and potentially easier steering of a much tighter beam.

Combine it with a giraffe tank design and you could have had quite a good anti-tank/anti-helicopter system for the BAOR in service by the mid-1980s.