"Orval Fairbairn" wrote in message
news ...
In article ,
"Jim Doyle" wrote:

Recently I've been reading about the UK BVRAAM project.

One question really:

Originally it had four mid-fuselage wings for manoeuvrability, now it
has
none. This seems a little odd, since it makes sense that the more agile
missile will have a greater number of control surfaces.

Since then I've found that the new design shall use bank and turn at
long
range, and in the immediate short term prior to the kill - skid turns.
How
do you skid a missile at 2M+? Exhaust deflection? If anyone can explain,
I'd
be very grateful!

Cheers,
Jim Doyle



The missile body at M2+ has enough aerodynamic forces acting on it that
it doesn't need wings. All you have to have is a method of attitude
control.

For the portion of the flight time that it is making distance on it's target
then I guess so. With a decent sized warhead, casing and other gubbins the
thing's going to have one hell of a lot of momentum cracking along, upon
reaching it's target it'll need to be agile to not be spoofed by evasive
action, so how'd you steer it without control surfaces?