055 DDG Large Destroyer Thread

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ougoah

Brigadier
Registered Member
Any news about the HQ-26 missile? It was tested in 2017. When will it appear?

They will not show it because even the shape and size will give away too much detail. So something like HGV interceptors or BMD missiles they will not show at all unless it is at least one generation old i.e. there is something that has already replaced it as the "latest" and new concepts and ideas already being worked on or tested. Whatever they show that is strategic in nature is already two generations older than what they are working on currently.

If you notice this pattern, the DF-41 still has not been shown. US won't show the HGV inside the AGM-183 aka ARRW. China revealed the DF-17's HGV because China needed a deterrent. You don't want to reveal so much that it erodes your advantages and gives too much information yet you also do not want the enemy to think too low of you in case he misunderstands a situation and stumbles into war which you do not desire either. It is why in this era of China being much closer to the US than it ever has, is China beginning to be relatively more transparent than it has been in the past. China has never been too much of a slouch in tech and military hardware to be honest. It's been behind and has had ambitious projects it ended up cancelling or not meeting expectations due to lower development of industry in the past but it still always had respect for science and tech while trying to maintain a place in those fields despite the struggles of that era. It still explored flying machines before many nations despite being one of the poorest. It still launched a satellite and built computers on its own when many nations were far more developed and wealthy.

Naval warfare is still the most secretive out of all of PLA. Apart from stuff you can't hide like building new carriers and what new equipment on ships look like on the outside, we actually don't know too much about weapons. They won't show AShBM like DF-21 or DF-26, definitely not a look at the MaRV. So there is stuff you can't hide at all and stuff you actually have shown off. In that latter list it really is just GJ-11, WZ-8, and DF-17 HGV. Maybe include AShBM operation in that list since the US would have collected some flight path data on them when they were used in demonstration.

I would compare the strategic importance and value of secrecy of HQ-19/26/29 etc as much greater than showing just the size and geometry of GJ-11 or WZ-8. China wanted the US to know that it has a few A2AD equipment beyond whispers of AShBM which have proven to be real and can somehow be guided and maneuver contrary to what many armchair skeptics thought.

China has a habit of usually revealing or announcing things that they have already done and in service. This goes for the vast majority of projects. Contrast to some who talk, make models, and show powerpoint slides while patting themselves on the back. With China, since it has such a formidable adversary, whatever is shown is only revealed because it needs to be for some reason.
 

Lethe

Captain
Nobody is going to be using SAMs as anti-ship weapons. Don't confuse America's failure to develop a modern anti-ship weapon and its subsequent efforts to paper over the cracks with a real trend. The "anti-ship" capability of a SAM is like the "anti-air" capability of a 5" gun. It might be effective in certain circumstances, but nobody is going to rely on it to the exclusion of systems that are better optimised for the task.
 
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Gloire_bb

Captain
Registered Member
Nobody is going to be using SAMs as anti-ship weapons. Don't confuse America's failure to develop a modern anti-ship weapon and its subsequent efforts to paper over the cracks with a real trend.
If your SAM is large enough, flies far enough and does enough oomph- it only makes sense to do it this way.
Certainly for destroyers and above, which can carry many dozens of such missiles.
 

nlalyst

Junior Member
Registered Member
Since the interceptor will be using its own radar or fed information by another radar to "home" in on its HGV target, every single time the HGV turns, the missile will have to recalculate an interception point and do its internal probability analysis on where to look for the target next (or receive data on that from another source) and where the newest most probable interception point will be. This might happen dozens or hundreds of times every second if the HGV is moving around. There might be new software or "machine learning" solutions to optimise interceptors.
I think your idea of what a HGV is capable is quite different from the mainstream. Hypersonic gliders fly roughly level trajectories until they approach their target. Then they execute a steep dive onto target.
comparison - Copy.JPG

Their gliding altitude is a function of their speed: the higher the speed, the higher the altitude. Because they depend on drag to stay aloft, their speed rapidly decreases, and so does their altitude. That drag dramatically heats up the glider, and lights them up like a Christmas tree, making them an easy target for IR satellites in orbit. Continuous updates on their position and speed are nearly assured, except until the very end when their speeds drops so much that their IR signature becomes too faint. But by that time they will be well within radar range.

For almost all of its flight, the speed of the glider is significantly less than that of a ballistic missile.
trajectory - Copy.JPG
Because of their relatively slow speed in the end game, HGV may be vulnerable to endoatmospheric interceptors like the naval SM-6 Dual II or the terrestrial THAAD. I would wager that these would need just a processing/software upgrade to deal with SRBM/MRBM range gliders, if they already don't have the capability. Even the early AEGIS from the 80s had the capability to take out Kitchens diving from 27km at Mach 4.6.

In fact, a MaRV may be more challenging in the end game due to its vastly superior speed and maneuverability.
 
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by78

General
Some screen grabs. That's a spacious flight deck.

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Blitzo

Lieutenant General
Staff member
Super Moderator
Registered Member
They don't have the potential to do it all and still carry a heavy warhead. Heavy=potentially universal.
Heavy SAMs are now reaching the point where they are easily making the presence of light ASCMs on the same ship redundant (allowing to simply remove them from the ship).
SM-6 intends to become just that(SAM+terminate phase ABM+Long range ballistic ASCM), for example.

They fly much further, they carry similar warheads, they can prosecute the same targets - and they're still just as deadly to planes and to missiles in the terminal phase. +universality adds numbers on its own.

I did specify that would be useful against small boats...

And again, I group that into greater payload flexibility overall.

More importantly, please at least acknowledge that my main argument is that pursuing an all long vls armament in a ship involves tradeoffs.
 
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