I see people pointing out that almost all ballistic missiles are hypersonic in the terminal phase, so there is no such thing as a “hypersonic ballistic missile.” What makes Tayfun Block 4 different from other ballistic missiles such that it’s called hypersonic? Or is it just a marketing gimmick?
For a ballistic missile :
1. to reach hypersonic speeds during it’s flight for a given time, and
2. being hypersonic ,
are two very different things.
Yes, majority of longer than 300km range SRBM class ballistic missiles reach 5mach speeds for a while, especially during midcourse and right after their apogee in their downward travelling towards earth. But they are not hypersonic weapons. These missiles start losing speed after 20000m when they hit denser layers of atmosphere. In fact some of them barely reach supersonic speeds when they hit their targets.
First Tayfun missile flew for 456seconds and hit a target 561km away from where it was fired. If it had a suppressed trajectory of say 80km, it actually flew for: 561 + 80 + 80 =721km in total.
So:
721/456 =1581metres per second average speed, which relates to ~5.5Mach. (At that altitude 1 Mach is approximately 285m/second)
That means if we ignore the time of first acceleration and last 20km flight where the missile speed diminishes to 1.5 Mach ; First Tayfun was flying at a speed well above 6 Mach during midcourse.
But that doesn’t make this First Tayfun a hypersonic weapon either.
Tayfun block 4 however has been designated as a hypersonic weapon. That means :
1. It has to perform manoeuvres during flight,
2. It has to hit its target with speeds at or higher than 5 Mach .
To achieve 2nd condition it has to reignite it’s engine during terminal phase. Roketsan MD clearly stated that Block 4 is a hypersonic weapon and it hits it‘s target at 5 Mach speed.
