@Developereo
I understand you are taking a theoritical path to intercept. A few points to be noted
1. Cruise missiles are almost impossible to be hit because of their maneuvering (speed and trajectory) capability, which generally the interceptor does not have. There are hardly any example of cruise missile being intercepted even though they are subsonic.
2. The interceptor generally hit at an angle which means the margin of error is 0.004 second (in this case), which by itself is impossible to achieve. With that you have onboard sensors to detect IR, radar & optical signatures.
3. As you should know these cruise missiles operate at low height which is normally very difficult to detect from far (because of the noises and attenuations). Together with the supersonic speed, it becomes more difficult to detect and react in time as the time. We need to keep in mind that the reaction time for any missile is quite a few seconds. The distance any radar can see for low height, detect, send signal, interceptor react, correct the orientation and gain the speed will limit the effectivity of any interceptor system for cruise missile.
The problem is similar to an objective question I had in IIT entrance long back- why is the speed of a vehicle limited at night ? (The answer is the perception time of human being and the range of the headlight).
So any interceptor's capability is restricted by the perception time of the total system (detect target to set the missile in correct path and correct speed) and distance the radar can see.
Hope I could explain.
Hmmm,
you will understand this.
and I hope to explain my best.
You need to fire a missile from point A and hit point B, how do u find point B ?
You can use INS, GPS, or image recognition.
When the starter of the thread said the third country in the world, I suppose what he has in mind, was the third country in the world to have used the image recognition technology on cruise missiles.
I think that is a valid claim.
Satellite imagery can be acquired easily, commercial imagery is available with 30cm resolution.
The same imagery is then mapped onto a GIS system, imagery is stitched and coordinated using DGPS technique.
Thus, what I can do now is plot path marker from point A to point B, and keep an eye out for the correct path markers to know if I am on the right path.
This will also explain why the missile is called "terrain hugging", because it has to be close enough to the terrain to SEE and then process the image data.
Now comes the part of super sonic missile, sure one can make a super sonic cruise missile ( I like to see it as a customized Mig 21).
But problem arises to use the image recognition navigation technology on a super sonic missile.
Since the speed of the missile is high, a LOT of processing power is required on board the missile.
Assume, sub sonic missile needs to self correct at 10Hz only.
The processing that goes behind every correction cycle is of the order of 10 Mips.
Now you can extrapolate to what a super sonic system needs to do.
This problem is compounded by the design of Brahmos as such.
If you know, this problem is exactly same why bigger better radars can not be fitted to mig-21.
At present the processing power and remote sensing technology to support super sonic flight is not available.
There are some serious blocks regarding miniaturization and power consumption.
Who knows, the Indians might have cracked a small powerful enough processor.
But to the best of my knowledge that is far from happening.
I hope I have been able to explain my point.