RUSSIA’S ROCKET DRONE

One of the nas­tier weapons in the Russian arse­nal is get­ting an unmanned spot­ter. According to C4ISR Journal, the Smerch mul­ti­ple launch rocket sys­tem (MLRS) can now be stuffed with a drone that spots a tar­get 90 kilo­me­ters away in just four min­utes.
The 92-​​pound unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle, or UAV, is fired in one of the Smerch’s 300 mm rock­ets. Once it gets to its tar­get, it can loi­ter for about a half-​​hour at an alti­tude of 600 to 1800 feet.

The UAV car­ries a TV cam­era and sen­sors that trans­mit imagery and coor­di­nates with the MLRS, which in turn iden­ti­fies a more pre­cise tar­get loca­tion.
Trials of the UAV have shown that it reduces by 25 per­cent the num­ber of times rock­ets need to be fired to hit a tar­get. It is a prece­dent, said Sergei Malevsky, with Smerch-​​maker Splav State Research and Production Association. You can also have three in one: recon­nais­sance, strike and con­trol…
Malevsky lamented that due to finan­cial con­straints, it will be hard to mar­ket the prod­uct to the Russian armed forces.
The most likely clients would be the coun­tries that already oper­ate Smerch, said Marat Kenzhetayev, an expert with the Center for Arms Control here.
In ser­vice since 1987, Smerch was deliv­ered to Algeria in 1999 and Kuwait in the mid-​​1990s.

April 25th, 2005 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.