butch4343
Posts: 327
Joined: 3/26/2015
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BillSirKill,
A bit more meat on the bones about Brimstone if you like, Brimstone was developed in the 1990s, it was borne out of the need to improve the survivability of attack aircraft against armour on the battlefield. In the 1960s NATO aircraft were equipped primarily with rocket pods for use against armour, certainly in RAF Germany that was the case, and these generally required the delivery aircraft to complete a pop up manoeuvre exposing it to enemy fire.
Studies showed that a low altitude attack with cluster bombs (CBU) offered increase survivability and many European air forces adopted either the British BL-755 or the US Rockeye CBU. A further study in the 1980s showed an A10 with 4 CBU's had a 1% chance of knocking out a tank with a one pass attack. (If anyone has a source for this I would be grateful for the link :-))
In the mid 1980s the NATO countries tried to find a common solution to the problem of hitting armour and failed to agree, the UK decided to pursue a true standoff anti-armour weapon capable of hitting targets in all weathers (Interestingly the US developed the BLU/108 Sensor Fused Weapon for the same reason). The MOD started with the basic hellfire ATGM, with the intention of merely changing the seeker, they wanted to replace the laser guidance of the hellfire with a millimetre seeker to take care of the crummy European weather. They wanted the standoff range of the hellfire to keep the launch aircraft away from battlefield SHORAD systems and the weapon had to be highly autonomous (I don’t think CMANO gives the option of BOL, but it should), as it was intended to be used primarily on single seaters. (Harrier, Jaguar and Typhoon) IIRC a four ship attack would score something like 21 kills from 24 brimstones.
Brimstone was designed so that it would ignore targets outwith or within a geographical area, and would disregard certain types of targets (Ignoring trucks and APCs and targeting specifically MBTs for example).
The cold war ended and as a result Brimstones development was dragged out, it entered service in the mid 2000s, the NATO experience over Kosovo reinforcing the need for an all-weather anti-armour weapon. Brimstone 1 was used in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it was highly regarded due to its precision and its lighter warhead meant lower collateral damage where that was a huge concern for NATO, its delivery mode could be tailored for the situation, example, to knock down a compound wall, a “flat” delivery would be employed, or if you want to eliminate insurgents in one compound only, then a vertical attack could be employed. In the end it was Tornado that ended up carrying the Brimstone.
In 2008 a laser guidance capability was added under Dual-Mode Brimstone, this allowed aircrew to manually guide brimstone to the target. This again enhanced the weapons use in the desert wars we have fought.
Brimstone 2 is in effect the next variant of Brimstone, that further enhances all the features both variants, and it will involve rebuilding all Brimstones to a common standard.
Ironically after arguing that brimstone would be a little changed version of Hellfire, it turns out only the fin assemblies bare any commonality!
There’s more on it here
http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/uk-complex-weapons/brimstone/#Dual_Mode_Brimstone
Enjoy!
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