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Thales UK unveils new Lightweight Multirole Missile
By Nick Brown
02 June 2008
Thales UK revealed its new Lightweight Multirole Missile (LMM) on 2 June, drawing heavily on the earlier Starburst and Starstreak surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to develop a low-cost weapon system aiming to engage a wide range of air, land and sea targets.
Steve Hill, head of Thales UK's Air Systems Division, said that the new laser beam-riding missile would be able to defeat a "sensible target set" including rigid inflatable boats (RIBs), jet skis and small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as well as most targets regularly encountered on modern battlefields, from bunkers and light vehicles up to and including tracked armoured personnel carriers, with a relatively light, flexible warhead.
"We've done a lot of experimentation with the concept warheads we're looking at and we think we're getting a very effective use against reasonably armoured vehicles and asymmetric targets, vans loaded with explosives etc of course," he stated. "It's no good going into some of the operations that are ongoing with a massive Hellfire that's going to rip a place apart. It's not always precise enough, it doesn't give the flexibility that you need."
Hill also cited a desire to reduce costs as a key motivator for the programme, saying that: "In markets where we don't have a political relationship, it's becoming increasingly difficult for us to compete on an even keel. You could argue as well that in our home markets - Europe and the UK - that is equally becoming important for budgetary reasons, so we've tried to develop a weapon significantly cheaper than current systems - we're talking in the region of 50 to 60 per cent of the cost of Starstreak."
In essence, the new missile is built within the same basic airframe footprint as Starburst, so it can fit in the same canister as a Starburst/Starstreak missile, and features four flip-out, movable forward fins and four more fixed fins at the back. Unlike the helical-flightpath, fixed-fin concept taken with Starstreak, the point-accuracy that Thales was seeking with the LMM requires the missile to fly a much more traditional path down the centre of the laser beam, steered by the fully controlled forward fins. The control actuation for this uses low-cost off-the-shelf components, brushes and DC motors.