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General Atomics’ Long Range Maneuvering Projectile is a 155-mm artillery round with wings — that the company claims can hit a moving target 120 kilometers away, in a GPS-denied environment:

To strike targets at ranges over double, and in some cases triple, of existing base bleed and rocket-assisted projectiles, LRMP will deploy wings. According to Forney, using existing propulsion methods would “make it too complex,” so the design examined General Atomics’ prior work designing the MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-1C Grey Eagle drones. LRMP’s sensors and electronics were also derived from the company’s hypersonics and railgun programs.

“Where we ended up was, let’s develop a projectile that will launch out of a barrel, a standard 155 mm, No separate gunpowder, whatever bag of gunpowder there is, we’ll use that as an explosive to launch the system,” said Forney. General Atomics’ experiences in designing electronics to withstand the forces sustained by hypersonics and railgun projectiles.

Encased within a discarding sabot to protect LRMP’s wings and internals during firing, the round will reach its apogee of around 40,000 to 45,000 feet and deploy its wings. From there, the round will glide, and maneuver, to its target. From a 2023 interview, Naval News understands that this maneuvering capability could be used to conduct “endgame maneuvers” in its terminal engagement phase.

Regarding the unusual shape of LRMP, the company claimed that the design enhances the round’s precision and range. “Our projectile is not round. As you can see, it’s what’s called a rouleaux triangle, very close to a rule of triangle. So those triangular edges allow us to have more controllability and more lift to help us achieve that 120-kilometer range,” said Forney.

With recent lessons from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in mind, Forney highlighted that LRMP does not rely on Global Positioning System guidance. Instead, the company is currently developing an “alternate guidance system” that relies on machine learning and camera systems within the projectile. The model of LRMP displayed at AUSA contains two lenses, one on the nose and another oriented downward. “We have multiple seekers, camera systems on the projectile so that we can see ahead, we can see down, and we’ll get to target,” said Forney. He also claimed that the seeker would draw on lessons from the company’s work on the Vintage Racer program, which supposedly looked to deploy a loitering system from a hypersonic missile over a target area.

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