SPOTLIGHT: How Desert Sting and Thunder add to UAE defence armoury

[Philip the Arab]

In the first of our SPOTLIGHT programmes where we turn the beam of discovery onto products and companies to keep abreast of their plans and successes, we head to Abu Dhabi. In November 2019 when the new UAE defence conglomerate, EDGE, was created by bringing the nation’s defence companies under a single umbrella, one company Halcon, a key part of the new Missiles & Weapons cluster was on the verge of producing its indigenous designed family of precision guided weapons known as Desert Sting. At IDEX 2021 in February, Halcon was proudly showing off the extended family and in this programme Khalifa Al Tamimi, the design engineer and project manager explained how Halcon’s new weapons are making a difference for customers – and for arming new light attack aircraft.

The computer animation is actually really good in my opinion.

It seems the Desert Sting entered production, although I don't know what that machine does.

 

[Gomig-21]

Absolutely awesome. Man, I gotta be truthful and tell that I am pissed to see the UAE get so advanced it self weaponizing and merging the right companies under the right umbrella to work together on specifics to produce such weaponry. And to start with 3 different size warheads to accommodate different attack aircraft will only lead to bigger and better and more powerful weapons. Love seeing Arab brothers pushing that envelope so hard and HALCON is seems to be surpassing the others in EDGE and if they get orders -- which they obviously should in not time at all -- then the sky is the limit. Great post.

 

[Philip the Arab]

@Gomig-21
And the important thing is that there is a lot of local production of mechanical and electronic systems that will allow more local production and reduce imports to all but the most advanced items.

It is far from just assembly and the sky is the limit considering that the UAE air force has already started purchasing items from them.

 

[Gomig-21]

@Gomig-21
And the important thing is that there is a lot of local production of mechanical and electronic systems that will allow more local production and reduce imports to all but the most advanced items.

It is far from just assembly and the sky is the limit considering that the UAE air force has already started purchasing items from them.

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It's truly incredible how much engineering goes into not only the production of those things, but understanding how seekers work with relation to the radar that locks and deploys them AND THEN, the built-in seeker takes over PLUS they have to install proximity fuses because direct hits are an almost impossibility with all the jamming and decoys and pilot evading skills etc. These are no easy tasks and I really hope that Egypt with its unwavering close relationship with the UAE is participating to a certain extent to learn its own development of missiles and particularly BVR without Isrhell sabotaging the efforts.
The good thing about Eypt's military paranoia is that it will certainly keep that filthy zionist infiltration at bay.

WAY TO GO UAE MASHAALLAH ALEIKUM. Who would've thought desert dwellers were capable of these things which started a rather heated debate between me and this Russian fella (who's actually a nice guy TBH) but when I showed him HALCON's Skynight? firing system that launches what 16 x2 =36 missiles at incoming cruise missiles, he went off and said it was a bunch of BS because the Desert Dwellers didn't pay their dues and learn from scratch like the USSR and the USA did for almost half a century. So I calmly told him did he see what China achieved in what, 40 years or so and now with super computers, reverse engineering is a million times easier than the cold war. He didn't have much to say after that lol.

 

[Titanium100]

Absolutely awesome. Man, I gotta be truthful and tell that I am pissed to see the UAE get so advanced it self weaponizing and merging the right companies under the right umbrella to work together on specifics to produce such weaponry. And to start with 3 different size warheads to accommodate different attack aircraft will only lead to bigger and better and more powerful weapons. Love seeing Arab brothers pushing that envelope so hard and HALCON is seems to be surpassing the others in EDGE and if they get orders -- which they obviously should in not time at all -- then the sky is the limit. Great post.

Halcon is relentless when it comes to defense related material.

@Philip the Arab

The computer animation is neat by the way did they enter already service? or they are in early stages of bulk production?

 

[Philip the Arab]

Halcon is relentless when it comes to defense related material.

@Philip the Arab

The computer animation is neat by the way did they enter already service? or they are in early stages of bulk production?

Not really sure, I'm pretty sure its in low rate initial production for the Desert Sting series. It may have entered service on the Seeker 400 drones purchased from Denel.

I think they are likely developing a UCAV platform that will carry all the missiles under development below a few hunded kg. They developed servo actuators for drone with very similar specifications to the Turkish Baykar ones.

Halcon will soon(If not already) be a bigger company than Denel Dynamics(which is already dead). I think in the next 5 years it will be over 1000+ employees.

 

[Titanium100]

Not really sure, I'm pretty sure its in low rate initial production for the Desert Sting series. It may have entered service on the Seeker 400 drones purchased from Denel.

I think they are likely developing a UCAV platform that will carry all the missiles under development below a few hunded kg. They developed servo actuators for drone with very similar specifications to the Turkish Baykar ones.

Halcon will soon(If not already) be a bigger company than Denel Dynamics(which is already dead). I think in the next 5 years it will be over 1000+ employees.

The platform and specification design sounds quite interesting. I could envision more then 1000+ and could be perhaps room for 5000+ covering multiple areas and working on over 100+ separate projects where each team of experts are focussed on their separate project where they aer divided in teams and they will only get another project once they complete that one