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AAD: Sosna nears production
Jeremy Binnie, Pretoria - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
18 September 2014
The Sosna short-range air-defence system seen mounted on an MT-LB, which was the carrier used for KBtochmash's successful Strela-10 system. Source: KBtochmash
The Sosna mobile short-range air-defence system will complete its firing trials later this year and production will start for India in 2015, according to Dr Vladimir Slobodchikov, the managing director of technical sciences at Russia's Nudelman Precision Engineering Design Bureau (KBtochmash).
"There is a final series of trials that will happen in October," he told IHS Jane's at the Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) show held in Pretoria on 17-21 September.
Slobodchikov described the Sosna as the "the last line of defence" against aircraft, precision weapons, and lightly armoured ground targets.
It uses the same Sosna-R two-stage missile that is used with the company's Palma naval air defence system, which is in service with the Russian and Vietnamese navies.
This had a range of between 1 and 10 km, Slobodchikov said, and carried two warheads, together weighing 7 kg, and two fuzes. The first rod-fragmentation warhead was to destroy proximity targets, while the second fragmentation warhead was for destroying targets on impact.
Each Sosna vehicle had 12 ready-to-fire missiles and could be reloaded in 12 minutes, Slobodchikov said.
The missile is radio-command guided when in its boost phase, after which a laser beam riding guidance system takes over. The optical fire-control system makes the Sosna highly survivable, effective in cluttered environments, and difficult to jam, according to KBtochmash.
Several Sosna vehicles will typically operate together with a command vehicle carrying a surveillance system to designate targets for the other vehicles.
Each vehicle could also use its TV and thermal cameras to scan a sector covering 60° in the horizontal and 20° in the azimuth, Slobodchikov said.
The Sosna also has a passive optical detection capability that provides 360° horizontal coverage and from -5° to 60° in the azimuth.
Slobodchikov declined to detail the system's detection ranges, but said they were adequate to find targets in sufficient time for a missile to be launched so that the target was destroyed when it was still 10 km away. He also said that the Sosna's autonomous optical sensor system could simultaneously track 50 targets and engage one while moving.
KBtochmash displayed a model of the Sosna mounted on a MT-LB armoured carrier at AAD, but Slobodchikov said any vehicle of the same size could be used. He said he did not know what vehicle the Indian military would use with its Sosnas.