PAF Conducts Successful Test Launch of Taimoor ALCM

[Samurai]

Sorry for the long appreciation post, but I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the members of the PDF community here for their invaluable knowledge and information sharing regarding subject such as this, especially for non experts like myself. At first when joining the PDF, I was skeptical about this forum as I thought this might be some 4chan like forum with just usual trolling, shitposting and India vs Pakistan vitriol. But my skepticism has been proved wrong and there are some really insightful discussions going on here occasionally which now I really enjoy going through and engaging with the audience and experts to increase my knowledge especially the complex missile tech etc. Although some threads fall into the political right vs wrong fights which is understandable given the situation our country went through the past 4 or 5 years and the prevailing and endemic corruption and bad things since decades, but all in all discussion like such as on this thread are really my cup of tea and I like to learn more and I am very impressed by how we Pakistani strive to gain more by doing our SWOT analysis. I just hope that our military think tank (not the babu ones) also peers into these convos with keen interest, so that they can gain more insights and improve.

Edit: Not to forget that I also respect the knowledge shared by our foreign friends such as @Michael and really nice to gain pov from outside such as our Chinese friends.

 

[hussain0216]

@JamD, few doubts and you seem to be the best person to clarify them.
- Was it the first trial or the validation of the final product ?
- What is the estimated accuracy of this missile and what should it be considering the kind of targets it is meant for? It seems to have fallen outside the circle. From the angle of the video one can’t make out by how much due to parallax. Generally, such trials also have a video from above to show the accuracy of a weapon. Test of SMASH is an example of that.

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Many people are likely to get behind me for stating this but it should still be a concern for the planners since it was a launch in ideal conditions in uncontested space.

That's what testing is for

 

[maxpane]

In may there were many complete missiles and bombs . cant we use them to reverse engineer?

 

[JamD]

I think Fatah rockets and those nuisance value Yiha loitering drones were lofted just for psychological impact and public consumption that we responded. The real high value ground targets were the Bernala IACCS and the S-400 radars that were targeted most probably on the 7th while the Air duel was taking place. PAF used CM-400s for those.

Just my 2 c

This seems like the most reasonable explanation. Yet another example of over reliance on the PAF. Hopefully, rocket force fixes that. Hopefully.

If you are talking IR missiles with very old seekers then yes, I see flares on missiles as the same category of cope as tank dazzlers.

Basically right. Flares are a very cope method. I keep saying this but for subsonic CMs intelligence-based path planning is supreme. If you're being engaged by AD you've already lost.

I would be very surprised if they built only 10 units? A lot of work for very little return if the production run is that small. For this class of missile a production run of 200 would make more sense would it not given the size of the Indian IADS they will face when trying to destroy a given target. A ratio of a few missiles per high value target.

Given the design is local and not made for profit and some components will be sourced externally and other locally, it should not be that expensive a missile compared to the off the shelf purchase of something like a storm shadow where a lot of profit has to be baked into.

Here's the thing. Our SPD orgs are geared towards making nuclear delivery systems so they're really geared for making 10s of systems. These facilities are better described as labs rather than production lines. So they produce very low numbers really inefficiently. Yes, there isn't a profit incentive BUT a) most of the components must be sourced from the black market at exorbitant rates, and b) there aren't orders for 100s of these like stormshadow. Don't forget that this is basically a decent sized aircraft. Even my lowest estimate for it will be a million dollars with capacity to make 2 3 annually. Making more annually will raise the cost more because we will have very little benefit of economies of scale (we smuggle inputs) and well be paying for investment into production lines. So with all that in mind, is it worth for the PAF to spend 300 million dollars on Taimoor to knock out 5 6 HVTs? I think PAF will decide let's procure low tens of Taimoor and use them very smartly to hit well planned HVTs with well planned paths. Just my 2 cents, I don't know what PAF will do obviously.

 

[JamD]

Azb series max range is 250kms, than there is alrosoob whose status is unknown with 350 km range.
These weapons can't hit central India. Only Taimoor can. One I am sure of after 10 may they won't leave targeting indian airbases to PA or rocket force.
A hundred or 50+ are a given like CM400.
Tbh I think PAF felt let down after bholari.
Secondly I wanted to ask the infrastructure for raads has been there for 2 decades now, the only thing new here is guidance wouldn't that make production cheaper since we are even producing our own seeker

I think I answered most of this in the post above.

 

[Princeps]

Here's the thing. Our SPD orgs are geared towards making nuclear delivery systems so they're really geared for making 10s of systems. These facilities are better described as labs rather than production lines. So they produce very low numbers really inefficiently. Yes, there isn't a profit incentive BUT a) most of the components must be sourced from the black market at exorbitant rates, and b) there aren't orders for 100s of these like stormshadow. Don't forget that this is basically a decent sized aircraft. Even my lowest estimate for it will be a million dollars with capacity to make 2 3 annually. Making more annually will raise the cost more because we will have very little benefit of economies of scale (we smuggle inputs) and well be paying for investment into production lines. So with all that in mind, is it worth for the PAF to spend 300 million dollars on Taimoor to knock out 5 6 HVTs? I think PAF will decide let's procure low tens of Taimoor and use them very smartly to hit well planned HVTs with well planned paths. Just my 2 cents, I don't know what PAF will do obviously.

Does this apply to Fatah series and particularly Fatah-4 as well?

 

[maxpane]

sad sorry state . we are huge country but still struggling

 

[JamD]

Does this apply to Fatah series and particularly Fatah-4 as well?

I'm afraid so. I would hope/think that that's one of the things they'd need to change to make the rocket force really effective. A stop gap might be large numbers of off the shelves a100s.

 

[hussain0216]

this is the way to go thousands of these and few hundreds of Taimoor's

The only people confused are fanboys on message boards

I think military planners have understood what needs to be done

 

[Princeps]

I'm afraid so. I would hope/think that that's one of the things they'd need to change to make the rocket force really effective. A stop gap might be large numbers of off the shelves a100s.

One would hope shifting towards explicitly Conventional weapons (Fatah, Taimoor) might allow ramping up production, but perhaps that's too optimistic. As it stands we need cruise missiles in numbers and buying from China is the only option.

 

[JamD]

Does this apply to Fatah series and particularly Fatah-4 as well?

Just worth mentioning that scaling up production for F1 and F2 is MUCH easier than doing the same for F4 or Taimoor. CMs are basically UAVs and quite complicated.

 

[falcon34]

This seems like the most reasonable explanation. Yet another example of over reliance on the PAF. Hopefully, rocket force fixes that. Hopefully.


Basically right. Flares are a very cope method. I keep saying this but for subsonic CMs intelligence-based path planning is supreme. If you're being engaged by AD you've already lost.


Here's the thing. Our SPD orgs are geared towards making nuclear delivery systems so they're really geared for making 10s of systems. These facilities are better described as labs rather than production lines. So they produce very low numbers really inefficiently. Yes, there isn't a profit incentive BUT a) most of the components must be sourced from the black market at exorbitant rates, and b) there aren't orders for 100s of these like stormshadow. Don't forget that this is basically a decent sized aircraft. Even my lowest estimate for it will be a million dollars with capacity to make 2 3 annually. Making more annually will raise the cost more because we will have very little benefit of economies of scale (we smuggle inputs) and well be paying for investment into production lines. So with all that in mind, is it worth for the PAF to spend 300 million dollars on Taimoor to knock out 5 6 HVTs? I think PAF will decide let's procure low tens of Taimoor and use them very smartly to hit well planned HVTs with well planned paths. Just my 2 cents, I don't know what PAF will do obviously.

We do make turbojets especially for cruise missiles are selfs, gids has been parading those at expos quite a lot, seeker I don't know how pak origin it is but even for that there are many commercial solutions secondly, if we are still sourcing stuff from the black market tbh it sucks to be SPD
I don't how true this but most of the people relating to such I,ve met all them have said the supply chain issues have been resolved quite well, though guidance is something we still lack to this day but with recent test of gids IR seeker with Taimoor I think we've cracked that too.
Creating a subsonic missile like Taimoor in 2025 should be that be of hurdle consider 20s of experience with these weapons. The price tag is also quite than that being said it's less than a million bucks, no matter how exotic stuff they put in Tomahawk cost around 2-3 million with all those exotic features Taimoor and Raad are at best it's desi off shoots less than a million bucks seem quite reasonable
@Panzerkiel if it's not classified stuff how self reliant are we especially in terms of CM production?

 

[JamD]

One would hope shifting towards explicitly Conventional weapons (Fatah, Taimoor) might allow ramping up production, but perhaps that's too optimistic. As it stands we need cruise missiles in numbers and buying from China is the only option.

This will take time even if everything is ideal. We are basically asking for (limited) industrialization here.

 

[falcon34]

I don't think such a turbojet-powered REK is operational anywhere in the world.

It is, that is Raptor 6 I guess, that's where all of pak missiles REK evolved

 

[JamD]

We do make turbojets especially for cruise missiles are selfs, gids has been parading those at expos quite a lot, seeker I don't know how pak origin it is but even for that there are many commercial solutions secondly, if we are still sourcing stuff from the black market tbh it sucks to be SPD
I don't how true this but most of the people relating to such I,ve met all them have said the supply chain issues have been resolved quite well, though guidance is something we still lack to this day but with recent test of gids IR seeker with Taimoor I think we've cracked that too.
Creating a subsonic missile like Taimoor in 2025 should be that be of hurdle consider 20s of experience with these weapons. The price tag is also quite than that being said it's less than a million bucks, no matter how exotic stuff they put in Tomahawk cost around 2-3 million with all those exotic features Taimoor and Raad are at best it's desi off shoots less than a million bucks seem quite reasonable
@Panzerkiel if it's not classified stuff how self reliant are we especially in terms of CM production?

Yes but a CM is SO much more than just the turbo jet. I will list things that we don't make and must smuggle in some form:
1. Computers/processors
2. Actuators
3. IMUs
4. Various epoxies and fibres for composites
5. Many of the inputs used in the local products (do you really think we make the inputs for the IIR seeker?)
There's another factor. All of SPD orgs are black listed so even normal sounding things need to be smuggled and the smugglers charge huge markup.
It does suck to be an SPD org. They face quite unique challenges in this regard.

And it isn't hard to make the CM. It is hard to make them at scale when you don't have 100s of local and international orders and have to source inputs from shady places.

As late as 2023 SPD folks were guiding us to Dubai for parts so I don't know how well supply chain issues have been solved and what that even means. Maybe it means they've found reliable smugglers lol.