Indian Missile News And Discussion

[Arun_S]

Kritavarma ji,

In the following diagram (it is an old diagram from BR days) you can see that all the Agni-III missiles varients Agni-3A, 3C, 3SL are 3 stage configurations. However the upper stage is different on each one. Ranging from a full 2 meter dia composite stage, and couple of different sizes of SUM(Small Upper Motor located inside the nose cone shield), where in 3SL even teh first two stages are reduced length stages.



GoI seems to be referring to Agni V as a 3 stage missile with a 2 meter dia upper stage, thus closer to what earlier called as Agni-3A. As you can see there is no external appearance difference between Agni3A and 3B, the latter is a 4 stage vehicle with the fourth stage being a SUM located in the nose shield.



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Added later:

Agni-3A configuration with three large Agni-2 style RV is the base configuration of Agni-missile family (as confirmed by retired senior defense official to this author). And this very well be the 0.5 longer missile that V.K. Saraswat is pointing out. (My original line drawing expected it to be just 0.3 m longer and I am off by 0.2 meter. But considering the total length of Agni-3 it is ....... !