Behind Enemy Lines

barneysplash

This is an SA-13 SAM taking out an F-18 Hornet from the film
"Behind emeny lines"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ahzoKCrQknk

Anyone know what the crack is with the warhead? It seems to shoot metal
bars into the target, before slicing through the fuselage without exploding.

OS119

barneysplash wrote:

This is a SA-13 SAM taking out a F-18 Hornet from the film
"Behind emeny lines"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ahzoKCrQknk

Anyone know what the crack is with the warhead? It seems to shoot metal
bars into the target, before slicing through the fuselage without exploding. What kind of missile would do that?

i would treat anything in that film with the deepest suspicion - and i've no idea if an SA-13 has a unitary warhead, sub-munitions or even a death ray, however planes don't take much to break them so SAM's don't need to utterly vapourise aircraft to shoot them down.

the British Starstreak missile system is three sub-munitions that fly in close formation that have only 0.45kg of explosive each - the reality is that they probably don't need that. aircraft in flight are alarmingly delicate objects, belt it with a lump of metal at 2,000mph and you'll do it an enormous amount of damage.

barneysplash

Thanks for the reply, I just watched the film on telly the other week and
thought that it looked a bit "Hollywood"

AbusesToilets

I wouldn't take too much from that sequence, if i remember it correctly the missile flies for over a minute and manages some pretty sharp changes in direction.Been awhile since i looked it up but i know that in general most AA missiles have a fairly limited flight duration,usually less than a minute.

the locust

I think the missle is a 9K35M "Gopher" for the SA13 SAM system. Most SAM missles including this one are heat and fragmentation, as it doesn't take a whole lot to bring an aircraft down once you hit it with something, they will crash or return to base. I
ts a cartoon/hollywood misconception that its one missle warhead - it is, but the warhead flies close to the target and explodes a huge frag grenade to better take down the plane. Smarter missles like the Gopher - use infrared and explode behind the aircraft throwing the frag forward like a shotgun effect.

However I totally appreciate the fact that the movie glamourises this, the missle flies around the sky for like five minutes before exploding! Gophers have a range of 5000m which the f18 would have covered in a heartbeat! A real gopher would have launched and blew up so much faster almost like flak.

see http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/sa-13.htm for more

barneysplash

Yeah I didn't think a speed machine like the F-18 would have much trouble in thr real wrld against a dodgy 1980's Eastern Block sam.