It's more likely that the Indian Navy initially planned to use 8 x BrahMos NG and since it wasn't ready on time, Plan B was to use a 2 x twin BrahMos ER setup per the ol
You can be absolutely correct, but I don't think navy has at any point shown such profound interest for BrahMos-NG. They usually go for what's cent percent tangible.
In fact BrahMos-NG in itself is an utterly baffling topic for me.
Take the example of Astra, it was fired for the first time in 2014. [Remove an year or two because a party generally avoids defence spending after immediately coming into power or near an election, focusing more on welfare schemes. One two years more because of Chinese BatMan] 2021, DRDO was launching Astra as VL-SRSAM. By 2022, DRDO was already on Astra Mk-II. By 2025, we can expect an Astra Mk-III. Even without the leeway of 3-4 years, DRDO managed to churn out a new variant every 2-3 years.
BrahMos is not
sarkaari, there's no babudom, no tight budget...still the only feat they've managed to pull till date is indigenized bits and pieces, "increase" the range to 850km (increase in quotation, because they didn't increase it, they simply unlocked the "actual Russian range" decreased due to MTCR), literally dropped one from Su-30 instead of ground launching...this much in two and a half decades since first firing. And none of these are as significant as DRDO stuffing a dual pulse motor or ground launching one. What happened to BrahMos-NG? What happened to the much touted AWACS killer air-to-air missile? And BrahMos-2?
And I'm completely ignoring the fact that most of these indigenization has been done by the likes of less appreciated firms like Astra Microwave, Alpha Defence Technologies, DRDO, Data Patterns and who not.
You'd see how BrahMos-NG is slowly getting replaced at all other non-BrahMos Aerospace booths like IAF/Navy/HAL by other systems like Rudram and CATS in all the exhibitions. Moreover, if I'm not wrong then the initial mock-ups of this NGMV has 4x regular BrahMos on each side of the superstructure.
So extremely sorry for long rant and TL;DR, my theory's those are just some random missile tubes like Harpoon that someone added to show tentative 8x AShM. Just like how the much circulated leaked image of P-18 is actually Italian DDX.
I managed to enhance the image of the banner from the event and there is a possibility of 16 x VL-SRSAM since the X-Band MFR radar is similar to the one in INS Rana.
We can see some kind of VLS peeking out behind the Naval officer's ear in the photo.
Those can very well be 8x VL-SRSAM VLS on each side.
But what are the chances of them being the dome of AK-630?