Well, the public unveiling of the Nirbhay happened yesterday and the first test didn't quite stick to the script as it were. But then, this is the first test of what seems like a contemporary and complex design and one would expect that things will be perfected over the course of more tests. Be that as it may, Nirbhay's layout conforms to the now 'classical' notion of a cruise missile as embodied by Raytheon's Tomahawk family and the Novator Alfa.
Nirbhay, unlike what I had speculated before, does not have a propfan engine. Rather it is propelled by an imported turbofan at the moment. This was confirmed to me by Avinash Chander, chief controller of DRDO's missile cluster, in a recent interview for Geopolitics magazine (
March 2012). The crash images of the Nirbhay-01 further attest to this. The fact that it does not have a podded engine or a protruding intake but rather an almost 2D intake certainly does no injustice to DRDO's claim of having a very low radar cross section - a basic requirement for a successful subsonic cruise missile design.
