Notice

CDE themed competition: defence against airborne threats

Further information on this Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) competition for research funding.

• From: Centre for Defence Enterprise and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory
• Published: 30 June 2014

Documents

Defence against airborne threats competition document

PDF, 532 KB, 14 pages

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Details

This competition was briefed at our Innovation Network event on Thursday 22 May 2014. View the presentation slides.

Total funding available for this competition is £420,000.

This competition closes on Thursday 3 July 2014 at 5pm.

Summary

UK forces face a range of airborne and sub-orbital threats from which they need to be protected.

The conventional interceptor missile approach (which seeks out and destroys the incoming threat) has severe limitations in terms of cost, rate of fire and/or magazine capacity as well as in other areas. We are therefore inviting proposals for novel technologies for hard-kill protection from airborne and sub-orbital threats (eg UAVs, anti-ship missiles, but with a particular focus on ballistic missiles) without having to rely on interceptor missiles.

There are 3 main challenges within this competition:

1. How can we effectively counterattack such threats at a range of greater than 10km without using missiles?
2. How can we check that a counterattack has been successful? This is essential to understand whether or not we need to shoot again. This is a particular problem if the counterattack would not result in a large, obvious explosion.
3. How can we drastically increase the cost effectiveness of existing systems? This should address systems which are unguided and unpowered (bullets or shells), guided but unpowered (guided bullets or shells), powered but unguided (rockets) or both guided and powered (missiles).

Proposals must be submitted through the CDE portal by 5pm on Thursday 3 July 2014.

Technical team email: MDCNovelTech@dstl.gov.uk

Centre for Defence Enterprise

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Published 30 June 2014