Congratulations to India and DRDO for such a successful flight. It is really a great achievement, and judging by DRDO's present technological advancement and the characteristics of Nirbhay, it has left Babur a bit behind (though deployment status is another story).
Exactly which turbofan is being used aboard Nirbhay?
For those expecting the range extension of Nirbhay, there are 3 fundamental ways of range extensions for subsonic cruise missiles:
1. More efficient turbofan
2. Missile redesign to accommodate more fuel.
3. Increase length of the missile body.
Now, unless there is official confirmation, range is not likely to be increased. Reason being, the turbofan has already a quite good performance, and I doubt there will be a better one available anytime soon. Same is the case with internal design. And comparing with other renowned cruise missiles, the length is already optimum (however only as much as 0.5m of extension in length could give rise to considerably large range extension).
Now if "4 more " waypoints where covered then only 10 Way points where planned. And when the controllers saw extra fuel they went for the extra 4 waypoints. That dose point towards that Nirbhay can take commands from the controllers and can have "Lock-On After Launch" and if it can report back it's vitals also it can report back a realtime video link which can be analysed to further optimize it's mission. And dose this also validate that we are using sat-com for the communication with it ?? 1050Km
Umm fuel consumption is already per-determined, so there is nothing like "when they saw extra fuel...". Most probably the extra waypoints were also planned, but only 10 were required by the test parameters.
Lock-on after Launch is not practical in this case as the required TERCOM maps have to be fed prior to launch for an accurate terrain hugging flight.
Real-time (not really, with a lag) video transmission back to monitoring station is a must for a cruise missile test.