That jet powered bomb got me thinking, why not use a rocket motor? Would that not be cheaper? As long as we are talking about medium range, 100ish km weapon?
Then that got me thinking, why not cut up surplus air to air missiles (which are obviously not in high demand) and mate their rocket motors to a umpk module?
Then that got me thinking, if there are issues to that approach, why not use entire r-27R AA missile and repurpose it to AG weapon? It's really not that hard to do it.
You remove the seeker, which weigh 33 kg. You remove the fuze section which must weight another several kg. You replace the battery section with a smaller and lighter one.
You add the kometa satnav module and the logic board, literally taking it from the umpk kit, and link it to missile fin actuators.
Adding the 39 kg for existing warhead you could probably get 80-90 kg worth of warhead in this new weapon, without chsnging its weight and without meaningfully altering its weight distribution.
In a loftwd profile, against a ground target, such a powered bomb should easily double (if not triple) the range of the r27R in its original role. We're talking about 150-200 km. Probably over 250 km for the ER variant.
And given that the missile is designed to handle greater loads while turning, a simple gliding profile should be able to be maintained even with a heavier warhead. Guidance and fuze section is fairly volumious so a heavier warhead could fit in its space. Possibly quite a bit over 100 kg in weight.
Added benefits would be: terminal speed at target likely supersonic.
Sizable numbers of r27r produced. I dont know how many, but i doubt ruaf has fewer than 10000.
Ease of integration to planes, little need for separation testing.
Even regular su-27 and mig29 could launch them.
Plus r27r is largely obsolete for AA anyway and will likely be thrown away anyway soon. Ruaf is slowly getting enough r77 to replace them.
