Nothing in the Farnborough material told us what Brontanax will be armed with, and that omission matters more than most of the specification gaps. Weapons integration determines internal bay geometry, electrical and data interfaces, release-clearance workload and, ultimately, whether the aircraft can be sold abroad without a multi-year certification programme for every new customer munition.
The obvious UK candidates are already in production. SPEAR 3, the networked light cruise missile developed for Typhoon and F-35, is close to an ideal CCA weapon: small, powerful, network-enabled and British. ASRAAM and, at the higher end, Meteor would give a teaming aircraft a genuine air-to-air contribution, though a beyond-visual-range missile on an uncrewed platform raises engagement-authority questions the MoD has not yet answered publicly. Small precision glide weapons and podded electronic-attack payloads are the low-risk starting point.
The physical constraint is internal carriage. A low-observable airframe of roughly Hawk proportions has limited internal volume, and every weapon carried internally competes with fuel. External pylons would restore payload at an immediate cost in signature — acceptable for permissive missions, self-defeating for the penetrating role BAE has implied. Expect a two-configuration answer rather than a single one.
The certification burden is the hidden cost. Each weapon type on each configuration needs separation modelling, ground testing and flight clearance, and doing that for an aircraft with no pilot to make a judgement call in the moment is new territory for the UK Military Aviation Authority. A programme that clears two weapons well will field faster than one that promises six.
The signal to watch is not a press release but a contract notice. When a UK munitions supplier is named against a StormFighter integration line, the weapons question will effectively have been answered — and the aircraft's real mission set, as opposed to its brochure mission set, will become visible for the first time.