Exocet

The Exocet (French for "flying fish") is a French-built anti-ship missile whose various versions can be launched from surface vessels, submarines, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.

Etymology

The missile's name was given by M. Guillot, then the technical director at Nord Aviation. It is the French word for flying fish from the Latin name exocoetus, a transliteration of the Greek name for flying fish ἐξώκοιτος (exōkoitos), which literally means "lying down outside (ἒξω, κεῖμαι), sleeping outside", because it sometimes stranded itself in boats.

Description

The Exocet is built by MBDA, a European missile company. Development began in 1967 by Nord as a ship-launched weapon named the MM 38. A few years later Aerospatiale and Nord merged. The basic body design was based on the Nord AS30 air to ground tactical missile. The air-launched Exocet was developed in 1974 and entered service with the French Navy five years later.

The relatively compact missile is designed for attacking small- to medium-size warships (e.g., frigates, corvettes and destroyers), although multiple hits are effective against larger vessels, such as aircraft carriers. It is guided inertially in mid-flight and turns on active radar late in its flight to find and hit its target. As a counter-measure against the air defence around the target, it maintains a very low altitude during ingress, staying 1–2 m above the sea surface. Due to the effect of the radar horizon, this means that the target may not detect an incoming attack until the missile is only 6,000 m from impact. This leaves little time for reaction and stimulated the design of close-in weapon systems (CIWS).

Exocet (typeface)

Exocet is a typeface designed by the British typographer Jonathan Barnbrook for the Emigre foundry in 1991. It was originally designed for the European annual series Illustration Now.

The font is inspired by ancient incised Greek and Roman letter carvings, with geometric shapes used for the main construction. For example, its stylized Q is based on qoppa, an ancient form of Q. The O with a cross () is an early form of theta.

It is an all-capital font, but with different capital glyphs for both lowercase and capital letters. However, the only letter that have visually distinct forms is T, with the lowercase t being a cross.

Variants

It is available in “light” and “heavy” varieties. There is no italic.

A sans version of the font from the same designer, called Patriot, was released in 1997 and is available from Virus.

Notable uses

It was used extensively for product designs in the 1990s, most notably for the American tea company Tazo. It can be seen in the 1993 movie Demolition Man where it is used extensively in the museum scene. It was also used in the film Dogma, the film Star Trek Nemesis, the Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting Planescape, the English translation of the Korean manhwa Priest, the Diablo computer game series and the Sony PlayStation scrolling shooter game Einhänder. The stylized Q logo from the Quake series of videogames is thought to be a modification of the exocet Q.

Exocet (disambiguation)

Exocet is a type of anti-ship missile. Exocet may also mean:

See also

See also