Euronaval 2024 – Safran unveils NGDS with hard-kill/soft-kill combination
The New Generation Dagaie Systems (NGDS) by Safran continues to evolve, coping with the latest requirements of worldwide navies, looking to weapon systems capable to deal with simultaneous attacks by asymmetric threats such as low-cost unmanned air systems (UAS) and kamikaze unmanned surface vehicles (USV) alongside more demanding weapons such as loitering munitions and anti-ship cruise missiles
Based on mature technologies and in service with the French Navy and a number of international naval forces, the NGDS decoy launcher has evolved in the latest years to accommodate a wider range of countermeasures but recently, during the pre-Euronaval tour, Safran unveiled a solution that combines both hard-kill and soft-kill capabilities. This to satisfy the urgent requirement coming from latest operations such as those in the Red and Black Seas, where new asymmetric threats are putting a lot of pressure on the combat system capabilities of naval platforms equipped with limited short and very short range defence systems.
Safran unveiled an NGDS that combines the same common traversing/elevation mount used so far for accommodating the baseline 12-round launcher developed for the French Navy which uses the Lacroix Defense 150 mm calibre SEALEM and SEALIR decoy rockets alongside anti-torpedo decoys, or the more recent 12-barrel assembly that can accommodate both mortar and rocket-fired 130 mm countermeasures rounds, with a new module equipped with up to eight MBDA Mistral short range surface-to-air missiles in addition to six large soft-kill ammunition.
“Having exploited the flexibility and robustness of the NGDS design, which is capable to accommodate a variety of countermeasures of different calibres and firing (rocket and mortar) solutions, we have been looking back to the experience we acquired with TETRAL and SADRAL products with MBDA to develop a solution that can be offered in a short timeframe to our existing customers as an upgrade of current NGDS, or as a new product capable to combine both hard-kill and soft-kill systems,” the Safran representative said. This without the need of adding new weapon systems on already crowded ship superstructures.
The existing traversing/elevation mount is capable to accommodate a payload of up to 1,000 kg and is able to train very rapidly in both azimuth and elevation in order to deploy decoy payloads with a high degree of accuracy in time and space; Safran has maintained a central module of six large decoy launchers to which it added on each side a quad launcher for MBDA Mistral missiles, for a total of eight ready-to-fire munitions. Target designation could come from the combat management system or from an embedded target acquisition sensor, fitted with an infrared camera managed by a local control console. The solution has been conceived so far to accommodate different kind of weapon systems, being surface-to-surface or other surface-to-air missiles, but the commonality with munitions already in service with the French Navy, to which the solution has been presented, or other customers, led to the selection of the Mistral.
Developed as a company-funded project looking for a customer interested to invest into such solution, the project is so far in the preliminary design stage having, the company having conducted studies, modelling and other activities with missile launching solutions already exploited in the past. However with the funding, a reasonable and optimistic timeline to develop the system could require between six and twelve months, according to Safran.
Photos and images courtesy Safran and P. Valpolini
