Discussion about India's MIRV options

[Safriz]

Agni series had to be MIRVd but no news about it. Lets see the dimensions of India's allegedly most advanced Missile Agni-5.
At 17.5 meters long the warhead is 3 meters tall and 1.2 meters wide. Such a large warhead cannot be MIRVd period.

Lets look elsewhere.
The smallest Indian Strategic Yie; warhead seems to be on K-15 Sagarika SLBM. At 10 meters tall with booster and diameter of 0.74 meters,the warhead still seems to be very tall at 2 meters. (Abouth same dimensions as Pakistan's Shaheen-1A and Shaheen-3 Warheads which is also MIRVd on Ababeel) eaeBut the diameter is small enough to be MIRVd on a 2 meter tall K-4 SLBM

On a K-4 a maximum of 4 Sagarika K-15 Warheads can be fitted.

But hold your horses here i am assuming that upcoming Indian K-4 SLBM will be the standard 2 meter wide (Standard for the rest of the world's SLBM). But wiki page and many other sources say the K-4 is 1.3 meters wide???
If that is correct the even K-4 will not be MIRvd and will carry only one Agni-5 sized warhead which is about the same width and 3 meters tall.
Further to support my argument about upcoming K-4 i analyzed the only official video available .

I took a screen grab of the clearest frame.

Then calculated the width to height ratio using GIMP
If the width is 20 Pixels the height seems to be 200 Pixels. So there is a 1:10 width to height factor here. Or the missile is about 10 times tall as it is wide.
So if we assume the width to be 2 meters as is the case with most other SLBAM in the world with MIRV, the the missile will have to be 20 meters tall as per the dimensions visible in this picture. Such tall missile cannot be placed in any Submarine.
But if we take the width of the missile as 1.3 meters as being widely reported then times ten is 13 meters which is still tall , but we can say there is an error in counting pixels from this blurry image so lets say the missile will be 1.3 meters wide and 10 meters tall.
As established above,it is impossible for the missile to be MIRV as seen from 1:10 width vs length ratio as visible in the picture and establishing that it is 1.3 meters wide not 2 meters.

Open to discussion as this is just my take.

 

[war&peace]

You just know about M of MIRV...the rest is way beyond your comprehension.

 

[Safriz]

@HRK @JamD @Mrc @amardeep mishra @Gessler @The Deterrent @Bratva @Khafee @Hindustani78

Have a look plz......................... Specially at the dimensions of K-4

 

[amardeep mishra]

Agni series had to be MIRVd but no news about it. Lets see the dimensions of India's allegedly most advanced Missile Agni-5.
At 17.5 meters long the warhead is 3 meters tall and 1.2 meters wide. Such a large warhead cannot be MIRVd period.

Hi Shaheen Missile!
To be honest,I am a control engineer and computers and electronics is something I am good at. Warhead design is more metallurgical in nature and I am sure more knowledgable people in that domain would be able to answer your queries. But based on various seminars I attended, BARC has been able to miniaturize a 200-300kt device to below 300kgs.
Actually,they are actively developing Agni-6 exclusively for MIRV purpose.Agni-6 is essentially a glorified agni-5. Agni-6 will have all composite stage(even the first stage and rocket motor will be composite!). It will have a throw weight capacity of 3t(thanks to weight savings rendered by using all composite stages!) and a MIRV of at least 4.Here are couple of pics from a 4-5 year old seminar held at IIT Bombay.

As you can clearly see,it is A-6 that will have 4 MIRVs.

The picture above is that of K-5 SLBM,this will be our true long range SLBM with dia=2m(same as A-5,6) and using various advanced features such as telescopic aero-spike.If you care to see the design,then you would find out that the 3rd stage is embedded in the payload fairing section(making the design very very compact)!

But hold your horses here i am assuming that upcoming Indian K-4 SLBM will be the standard 2 meter wide (Standard for the rest of the world's SLBM). But wiki page and many other sources say the K-4 is 1.3 meters wide???
If that is correct the even K-4 will not be MIRvd and will carry only one Agni-5 sized warhead which is about the same width and 3 meters tall.

No the dia of K-4 is similar to shaheen series(i.e 1.3m against 1.4m) and length is around 12m. And no it is not armed with MIRVs. You see missile development is an iterative process,one cant design a world class missile in one go. And since India happens to be much more transparent with her development efforts,you can see what has been accomplished(along with all the research literature). India started with K-15 SLBM with a very conservative range of 750km(with 1t warhead) and 1900km(with 180kgs warhead).This missile was mainly intented as proof of concept and to validate all the necessary technologies like underwater ejection,ignition of engine to name a few. Then came the K-4(a 1.3dia,12m length missile) which has a range of 3500kms. And work is currently under full swing to develop K-5(whose picture one can see above). K-5 will be India's answer to trident and M-51 class missiles.
In fact design of K-5 has assumed higher priority than A-5 at the moment.