Recently, the US military is using the F-18F platform to integrate the Navy's "Standard-6 long-range ship-to-air missile," which makes the outside world speculate that the AIM-260 long-range air-to-air missile project launched by fighter jets is not going well, and it is necessary to use the "Standard 6" as a backup plan.
In fact, ship-to-air missiles have been launched by fighter jets as air-to-air missiles for a long time, and in the 1970s, the "Standard-1" model was already used by naval fighters, but it was used for anti-radar, that is, anti-radiation missiles, and played a certain role in the Vietnam War.
The A-6 "Intruder" attack aircraft is equipped with an anti-radiation "Biao-1 missile", which can theoretically also be used as an air-to-air missile, because the range of the launch in the air may be farther, but the technical level at that time could not do it, so it can only be used as an air-to-ground air-to-air ship**.
Now the technology has made great progress, and the US military is likely to have long-range air defense plans to integrate these two types, of course, the AIM-260 project is still in progress, even if this integration is successful, it may be a "spare tire", and the "Biao-6" missile of 2 million US dollars is not suitable for complete use as a long-range air-to-air missile.
In addition to our army's Thunderbolt-17 and the US military's AIM-260, the Russian army's "Product-810" long-range air-to-air missile (indicated by the orange arrow) project is also slowly progressing.
The project is said to have started in the late 1990s and has not yet been put into service, indicating that it has encountered a major technical bottleneck.
The model of "Product-810" is different from the one in the Su-57** configuration diagram above, and the aerodynamic layout is very similar to the SA-N-7 "Gadfly" ship-to-air missile, and it is also somewhat similar to the "Standard" series of missiles of the US military, using two large side strip wings and aerodynamic tail rudder....But it is very different from the aerodynamic layout of our army's Thunderbolt-17 like "one arrow".
According to the Russian side, the "product-810" has a range of 400 kilometers, a speed of Mach 6, a dual-thrust solid engine, a projectile diameter of 380 mm, and a launch mass of 600 kg, which are all indicators that long-range air-to-air missiles should have.
In the middle section of the "Product-810", the material used to make the bomb wall seems to be very thick, which is conducive to intercepting the incoming supersonic vehicle with a large overload, that is to say, thick can be strong, otherwise the overload weight will be too large and it will be broken by itself.
However, such an aerodynamic layout seems to be not suitable for long-range air-to-air missiles, because the fuel carrying of missiles is very limited after all, and if you want to have a long range, you must reduce the protrusions on the missile body, that is, the wings not only have "dead weight" to waste fuel in vain, but also flight resistance, which further increases the loss of fuel, and this common part of short-range and medium-range air-to-air missiles must be removed as much as possible, otherwise the volume and mass of the missile will be very large, resulting in medium-sized fighters that cannot be mounted, such as the "immortal bird" of the US military Long-range air-to-air bombs can only be mounted on the F-14, and the F-18 cannot be used at all.
The Soviet R-33 long-range air-to-air missile and the huge MiG-31 interceptor could only carry 4 pieces.
Another bottleneck encountered by Russian long-range interceptor missiles is the missile-borne radar, although the long-range interceptor missiles in the 2020s are all launched by fighters and guided by early warning aircraft, but the terminal attack still requires the missile-borne radar to carry out the final accurate lock, the most advanced missile-borne air-to-air radar is an active phased array, and it is developing in the direction of a miniature digital array radar, because the former needs to convert the digital signal into an analog signal transmission - the received is also an analog signal and then analyzed into a digital model by a computer, Such a back-and-forth switching not only consumes energy but also may lead to signal distortion, and it is difficult to finally determine the target, while the digital array radar transmits and receives digital signals and does not use the switch, which will have a better accurate locking effect.
However, the T R component used in the digital array radar is made of gallium nitride material with better radio frequency effect, which is more energy-efficient than gallium arsenide material, and has a higher transmitting power and a longer detection rangeOne of the main factors, coupled with funding problems, led to the slow progress of the "Product-810" project.
At present, the only countries that can develop long-range air-to-air missiles are China, the United States and Russia, the Thunderbolt-17 has been put into service, the US military's AIM-260 seems to have completed about 90% of the research and development, and the Russian army's "Product-810" has a completion rate of about 70%, but it will eventually be put into service.
With the modernization of equipment, the future fighter and its aviation ammunition will be very expensive, and the air force will also become an "aristocratic service".