Behind the China Missile Hype

So I put forward this idea in the end of carrier age thread, and after thinking about it a little bit more I want to give it a slightly higher profile.

Assume DF-21D has the necessary CEP to hit a carrier full on (while it's moving etc of course). If you wanted to do the most damage below decks, what kind of warhead would you use? I've always thought an armour piercing HE warhead would be best -- the warhead going at Mach 10 would penetrate below decks and let loose its ~2000kg HE. But what if we replaced those two tons of explosives with an explosively formed penetrator along the lines of anti tank weapons? The principle has been sound with tanks, using the massive pressure to form what is basically a bolt of liquid metal. Modern ATGMs have warheads of some 10 kg. Times that by two hundred and put it on AShBM (basically the world's largest top attack ATGM lol) -- feasibility? Potential damage? This is based on the idea that the decks below the flight deck are far weaker/unarmoured/relatively soft. Would a EFP be able to cut a hole through that soft core once it's past the hard surface?

Kurt said:

The crossbow can be tracked in Europe via the Greek gastraphetes and oxybeles. These were improved into the ballista that was produced from individual missile weapons to siege artillery sizes. In the Middle Ages the ballista was further improved on the Iberian peninsula into the esprignal that in turn competed with the Medieval crossbow. In Europe there's a great discussion about the crossbow-gap in between findings and sources from the battle of Hastings and the Late Roman Age. it has not yet been solved, but linguistically there are clear signs for a continued use of the concept in some Romanized areas, albeit calling the crossbow "ballista".
In China they used a very different approach to crossbows with a long draw length, several bolts and even the very successful repeating crossbow. But there are no signs that specific mutual inventions influenced each other. Multiple bow weapons and the repeating crossbow of Chinese design (we had our own much more complicated design in the West that never worked) are not known in the Western part of Eurasia and torsion artillery is not known form the Eastern parts of Eurasia. This may have to do with the people in between who rode small horses, used bows while mounted and the closest they got to crossbows was by arrowglides to their bows.

It's an often repeated myth that the Vatican outlawed crossbows. There are several different versions of the corresponding council and none explicitly outlaws crossbows. All of them are adverse to the use of missile weapons against Christians. The church had no qualms with butchering non-Christians, including Christian heretics. You have to see these documents in the light of the papal struggle for a peace of God with the aggressiveness within the Christian community directed to more noble tasks than infighting - go on a crusade. As the English (archers) and Scandinavian (crossbowmen) massed missile troops were to proof the social order, based on nobles as heavy cavalry with close combat weapons only, could be threatened by these weapons and the high clergy (they were the younger brothers of the nobles) had preached that order as God's will. Wilhelm Tell and Robin Hood are famous insurgents against that order who relied on the mastery of their missile weapons.
You could compare the situation to the enforced disarmaments of Chinese armed border peasant communities that provided excellent archers, but had the potential to rebel against the Son of Heaven and his order and wreak havoc with their bows.

What Europeans definitely hold the Chinese accountable for are the iron stirrups that created our knightly nobility in the first place and it took us quite a lot of bloodshed to get rid of them again. But this system could have also worked with the Celtic horned sattles we already had, although a stirrup is much better. It seems you just send us as stirrups and nothing to shoot the guys using them.

But we should open a new threat for this because it has little to do with the DF21.

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I mean, this is precisely the argument China can use, if you can consider cross bow not a copy, then why is anything which western nations are staying China stole; stolen?

Again, repeating crossbows were one stream of development, Lets look at Tang dynasty arcuballista with draw strangths of 950 kg or multiple bow designs. The Tang is obviously after the Qin.

The cross bow was in wide spread use 800 BC in china, the gastraphetes came 300 some years later; there is no reason why cross bow technology or the idea of useing the bow horizontally cannot travel to europe over 300 years. As catapults, a Chinese invention was documented, imported and improved to europe over the same period of time.

Frankly I really don't care, as I genuinely believe copying is bs. even if you copy something, you still need to be able to build it and that requires skills and industurial might. It doesn't really matter where the technology came from, what matters is that the said contry pocesses it. -> may it be cross bows or cruise missiles. My example was only to illustrate how people feel that if someone do something similar to their's it is copying, while if you were inspired by someone else, it is creative inspiration.

Bltizo said:

So I put forward this idea in the end of carrier age thread, and after thinking about it a little bit more I want to give it a slightly higher profile.

Assume DF-21D has the necessary CEP to hit a carrier full on (while it's moving etc of course). If you wanted to do the most damage below decks, what kind of warhead would you use? I've always thought an armour piercing HE warhead would be best -- the warhead going at Mach 10 would penetrate below decks and let loose its ~2000kg HE. But what if we replaced those two tons of explosives with an explosively formed penetrator along the lines of anti tank weapons? The principle has been sound with tanks, using the massive pressure to form what is basically a bolt of liquid metal. Modern ATGMs have warheads of some 10 kg. Times that by two hundred and put it on AShBM (basically the world's largest top attack ATGM lol) -- feasibility? Potential damage? This is based on the idea that the decks below the flight deck are far weaker/unarmoured/relatively soft. Would a EFP be able to cut a hole through that soft core once it's past the hard surface?

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Interesting question, for maximum energy release inside the ship a thermobaric weapon would be the option. The high speed and weight of this device would allow for the aforementioned kinetic energy penetrator that best splits into several smaller projectiles shortly before impact. An interesting problem could be that a kinetic energy warhead passing through a carrier doesn't necessarily sink it as long as damage is rather localized on the ship and doesn't affect structural stability to the degree of collapse. Developing a warhead also means there can be countermeasures, so I'd be clever and have different warhead options ready for that weapon.

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Lezt said:

I mean, this is precisely the argument China can use, if you can consider cross bow not a copy, then why is anything which western nations are staying China stole; stolen?

Again, repeating crossbows were one stream of development, Lets look at Tang dynasty arcuballista with draw strangths of 950 kg or multiple bow designs. The Tang is obviously after the Qin.

The cross bow was in wide spread use 800 BC in china, the gastraphetes came 300 some years later; there is no reason why cross bow technology or the idea of useing the bow horizontally cannot travel to europe over 300 years. As catapults, a Chinese invention was documented, imported and improved to europe over the same period of time.

Frankly I really don't care, as I genuinely believe copying is bs. even if you copy something, you still need to be able to build it and that requires skills and industurial mighttp://www.sinodefenceforum.com/navy/behind-china-missile-hype-3-5869.html#post175982ht. It doesn't really matter where the technology came from, what matters is that the said contry pocesses it. -> may it be cross bows or cruise missiles. My example was only to illustrate how people feel that if someone do something similar to their's it is copying, while if you were inspired by someone else, it is creative inspiration.

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The case for gastraphetes is consider watertight from historians' perspective. It was a Syracusean development in order to take the Carthaginian fortress of Motya and part of a whole new batch of weapons.
The Macedonians before going on their great tour of conquest discussed using some type of gastraphetes/ballista (that would have made them similar to contemporary Chinese armies), but settled for pikes and for unknown reasons there's no reference to China among the initial Macedonian conquest. Contact starts later with Greek and Buddhist influence merging in China while the Greek West doesn't become Buddhist.
We do have many sources of direct contacts between Rome, Byzantine and China, but we lack for example torsion artillery in China and while the Muslims refered to saltpeter as Chinese snow, crossbows were called Frankish bows. The technology transfer seems to have been selective for reasons not yet fully understood, but it seems to have to do with production and engineering knowledge (proportion formulas for best performance). Another reason can be that former militaries like their modern counterparts were convinced of their own weapon systems and had biases to adopt some practices. The Byzantines for example were fond of bows and late to adopt crossbows. The Late Roman army might have had some Chinese influence on missile warfare via their Persian connection, but where is the conclusive evidence? Persian armour shows both Roman and Chinese influence, but they don't use crossbows in the depictions.

Kurt said:

The German naval policy is an issue that has been discussed at length. The historian Nipperdey has in my opinion written the best account. Germany was more dependant on her SLOC than Britain and it was perfectly justified to develop a fleet that could protect these. The High Seas Fleet failed miserably in that task because the Germans were overly fond of Mahan and totally neglected SLOC protection and fleet in being operations. The British quickly wiped the oceans clear of German surface ships and the impressive battle fleet couldn't have exploited a possible victory against Britain because most of their ships, unlike their name, were not fit for the High Seas. In essence, the German navy had no chance to win from the start. Adding insult to injury, the Germans regarded themselves as strong and despised submarines as weak, so they weren't among the first developers of such and were very lucky that civilians in Germany took an interest in the subject. If the German navy would ever have been meant for a threat to Great Britain, it would have required amphibious capabilities in order to raid the island and force the British fleet to fight under conditions they didn't chose.
The German gun and resilence designs were good, but speed was too slow, so they never had a chance to outrun some British ships and shoot down lighter armoured ships. This development in the surface fleet just happened after WWI as part of the lessons learned. Another issue was the tonnage that the Germans keeped high instead of keeping the fleet small and modern. The old ships were a waste of money for little fighting value. The problem was that German naval build-up was based on numbers and kind of ships being fixed by law instead of modernizing a smaller fleet to have as much fighting power as possible for the buck with a tonnage that would have betrayed their capability. Naturally during such a period of rapid development it's very hard to adjust to something that new and it took till after WWII for that idea to enter the minds of the military.

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Almost every seafaring nation was obssesed wtih Mahanism. Merit and deficite of the German designs are another discussion. The high sea fleet by its existance did what it could and that is to restrict the royal navy in the atlantic and guard for a possible amphibious invasion on the northen German coast line freeing up men from garrison duty to the trenches.

All countrie's old ships were of little combat value. What value were british Predreadnaughts and protected crusiers during WW1?

Kurt said:

The Moghul Empire united most of India as well as their religious based social system. The Muslims and other religious groups were kind of rebels against the caste system, but had their own problems of militaristic states that constantly needed money for some kind of fight that was meant to justify the existence of the empire and the life of the leader.

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As I said, India was never united as one; "most" is not "all" Also, Mughals, were not Indians, they were Timureds who were muslims and were the reminants of the mongols.

Kurt said:

European accounts are quite astonished at the low level of Indian craftsmen's tools and amazed by their feats of outstanding skill that enabled them to create everything equal in quality to European products or even better. This wealth of craftsmanship enabled the Indians (and Indonesians) to produce ships of any size for Europe of highest quality that in turn greatly helped the whole globalization. Exactly this base of artisans was systematically harrased and their ascendancy to industrial production from the Moghul empire weapon production and early East India company Indian industry was destroyed during the late British raj. It's good to have a well educated engineer, but what can he achieve without craftsmen?

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Lets see, I am an Engineer, is it nice to have Technitians/craftsmen? Yes. Can I train them myself? totally. And this is what China did, they have a cardre of highly trained engineers whom instructed illterate chinese farmers to build the burmese road in less than a year, how how to make foundations, build bridges, constuct the tools necessary for its constuction, surface roads and to maintain them. Building 1000 km of road through hard terrain in a year; a feat still considered hard with modern machinaries. Its not that hard to start something if you are truely well trained in engineering.

Kurt said:

Things get stolen all the time, but the victim of a theft still feels betrayed, even if he stole things himself. Do you suggest we stop persecuting theft? I highlighted the problem of theft from a Western point of view. I'm fully aware that Chinese inventions suffer from similar depredations and increasingly will. The problem is that the fear-mongering related to that theft gets politically exploited.

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So are you suggesting that China, India, Greece, Egypt, and every other decendent country of major ancient civilization invade everybody else because their ideas were stolen? If so by all means, I doubt any eurupean nation can win a 1v1 fight against China or India.

Kurt said:

Getting back to the DF21, there's a psychological build-up for a future clash with China ("because they steal our jobs and our know-how and want to rule the world") and all weapons that challenge current US supremacy are perceived threats. Don't bother with this logic of its own, this can lead into a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know the joke, the biggest army garanties world peace and all other armies, no matter how small, are threats of world peace.

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Oh totally, but you see, the biggest military always look down on everyone else so the public is willing to have war with them. But this is also true for USA vis-a France, Freedom fries anyone?

History have shown that the only country really prepared for Nuclear war was the Soviets; and the US public was fed enough popaganda for it to happen. Not a single Soviet ICBM were launched towards the US, but it is enough to deter the US from meddling too close to home. Similarly, the DF21 sufficiently acheives this psychological bottle neck.

The reverse is also true, If you know Chinese and been to China, the public opionion is that the USA is exploiting Chinese manufacturing. Destroying the Chinese enviroment for the betterment of Americans.

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Kurt said:

The case for gastraphetes is consider watertight from historians' perspective. It was a Syracusean development in order to take the Carthaginian fortress of Motya and part of a whole new batch of weapons.
The Macedonians before going on their great tour of conquest discussed using some type of gastraphetes/ballista (that would have made them similar to contemporary Chinese armies), but settled for pikes and for unknown reasons there's no reference to China among the initial Macedonian conquest. Contact starts later with Greek and Buddhist influence merging in China while the Greek West doesn't become Buddhist.
We do have many sources of direct contacts between Rome, Byzantine and China, but we lack for example torsion artillery in China and while the Muslims refered to saltpeter as Chinese snow, crossbows were called Frankish bows. The technology transfer seems to have been selective for reasons not yet fully understood, but it seems to have to do with production and engineering knowledge (proportion formulas for best performance). Another reason can be that former militaries like their modern counterparts were convinced of their own weapon systems and had biases to adopt some practices. The Byzantines for example were fond of bows and late to adopt crossbows. The Late Roman army might have had some Chinese influence on missile warfare via their Persian connection, but where is the conclusive evidence? Persian armour shows both Roman and Chinese influence, but they don't use crossbows in the depictions.

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From western historian standpoint yeah, watertight, not from eastern historian standpoint.

Greece was a back water nation back in the day; China had official contact with Persia.

Naming convetions are strange, Chinese called trebuchets "arab catapults" but infact it was a chinese traction catapult with weights.

Persian armor.. u mean Arab? Persia was in the same time frame as the Greeks, post romans really were the arabic muslims.

Do you need evidence to draw conclusions? frankly, the China scare is mostly baseless. it is like infering that since a turkish army defeate a chinese one an brought paper to europe, so did the cross bow. <- it doesn't even make sense, but is half true. yet people will readily believe it. Just like you have no evidence that China stole and used some western high tech; yet you say they do.

Bltizo said:

So I put forward this idea in the end of carrier age thread, and after thinking about it a little bit more I want to give it a slightly higher profile.

Assume DF-21D has the necessary CEP to hit a carrier full on (while it's moving etc of course). If you wanted to do the most damage below decks, what kind of warhead would you use? I've always thought an armour piercing HE warhead would be best -- the warhead going at Mach 10 would penetrate below decks and let loose its ~2000kg HE. But what if we replaced those two tons of explosives with an explosively formed penetrator along the lines of anti tank weapons? The principle has been sound with tanks, using the massive pressure to form what is basically a bolt of liquid metal. Modern ATGMs have warheads of some 10 kg. Times that by two hundred and put it on AShBM (basically the world's largest top attack ATGM lol) -- feasibility? Potential damage? This is based on the idea that the decks below the flight deck are far weaker/unarmoured/relatively soft. Would a EFP be able to cut a hole through that soft core once it's past the hard surface?

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Interesting idea, but I think such a warhead would be ridiculous overkill.

Modern HEAT rounds can easily punch through, what? 1m+ of steel armor with 10kg of HE? 2000kg of shape charge (if the concept can be scaled up that big) would penetrate a carrier through and through several times over.

If you want to mission kill the carrier, HE would do just fine, with a very short fuse, so that the HE goes off inside the hanger bany and incinerate all the aircraft.

If you want to sink a carrier, the biggest issue is getting past all the standard damage limitation and control measures - water-tight bulkheads.

You can do this by trying to punch lots of holes in something and breach enough compartments to sink it, or you make 1 giant hole.

The biggest problem I can see with conventional HE is that the force of the blast will follow the path of least resistence, so much of the energy would be lost as it blasts back up the hole which the weapon has penetrated through and erupt up and outwards like a vulcano.

With a M10 weapon, you have another option - a solid tungsten/DU penetrator core surrounded by HE. You could also take a page out of small cal firearms and design the HE sleave like a hollow point so that it flattens and expands upon impact, convaying more KE to the target, and slowing the HE element down while the penetrator core punches ahead and straight through the entire carrier into water. Time the HE to detonate after the penetrator core has punched through, and you have a vulcano effect both upwards and downwards. With luck, the blast may even rip the carrier clean in two.

Even if the ship stays in one piece, the combined effects of the penetrator punching through the ship, the warping and structural weakening caused by a 2ton M10 mass hitting the ship, and the explosive force of the HE going off should maximise the number of compartments compromised. And because you have punched through into water, all of those compromised compartments will flood very quickly, and should be enough to sink a carrier with a high degree of confidence, and fair quickly to boot. Do not expect may survivors from such a weapon.

But personally, I perfer a less lethal and 'all-in' approach.

I also thought that packing the warhead with standard tank penetrator sabots and a dispersal system would be a better solution.

If you have 1kg sabots, and a very generous 500kg for sensor and disperson device, you can pack up to 1500 sabots into each missile. At M10, these will be hitting with several times the KE that current tank main guns can fire them. These will punch through the flight deck with no problems, and will cause massive damage to the aircraft parked below. For fun, you can also sub some of the tank sabots for 20-30mm cannon sabots to increase the likely number of hits and shot density. Ideally, the small cal sabots would not be able to punch through the flight deck. So you have hundreds or throusands of sabots half protruding out of the flight deck.

All of them would need to be cut or removed before flight ops can resume, and that could take a carrier out of the fight for quite some time.

The best features of such a weapon is that
a) It would be all by impossible to intercept after the missile has dispursed the sabots
b) It would not require a direct hit, so much lower CEP and terminal maneurvoring requirements make this weapon much easier and cheaper to develop
c) It can be used effectively against carriers and escorts. So you can disable an entire CSG with a few of these before your other assets move in and finish the job with cheaper AShMs. This way, you take out the entire CSG instead of just the carrier, dealing a far heavier blow, and making sure those escorts do not come back later with LACMs.

A warhead with 1500 sabot/tank rounds from a mach 10 warhead sounds devastating. I do like that approach, especially the part about using the missile to disable/destroy escorts too. A fragmentation warhead of sabots would more than make up for the missile's CEP... It reminds me of the USN railgun, how it uses kinetic energy to deliver the damage of a cruise missile with a single hit to kill round. Kinetic rounds in the numbers we're talking about could easily disable a carrier or LHD simply because of the speeds they're travelling at, if we're talking a smaller ship like a destroyer or cruiser it may near sink it.

And yeah, putting it into perspective, if EFP can be scaled that large, a two ton warhead will be overkill... and might not even sink a carrier depending on where it hits. I do like the idea however. It sounds like something you would use against a star destroyer rather than a supercarrier.

You don't really need tank rounds, any round sphere of DU or tungsten will penetrate a lot of things. if you can shot gun the flight deck (or any deck) with 100,000 tungsten 1/2" dia balls (~2 tons) going at mach 15, that carrier will be something like swiss cheese -> basically if it doesn't sink, I feel sorry for those trying to patch the millions of little holes going through the entire ship; and the corp's men trying to pick up body parts.

Not to mention it most likely taking out the fuel lines, the flight deck, electrical systems, propulsion units.

Do anyone have any idea what the USA will do if lets say an attack on one of her carriers, manage to create a catastrophic melt down of the reactor?

Yeah I don't think 1500 "sabots" are enough to escape possible interception. It would have to defrag almost on top of the target.

Does anyone know what a mach 10 object the size of an ASBM warhead at impact will do? If it's like a larger version of a sabot, does it do exactly what a sabot round does to a tank? During the first Gulf War, I remember a news story that said what happens is just a hole the width of the sabot punches through and it's the massive pressure changes that occurs as a result that does all the damage. They said anyone inside would literally be sucked out that tiny hole the sabot round created. Are these things true? Will a mach 10 object just punch a hole right through the top and out the bottom or would it explode?

AssassinsMace said:

Yeah I don't think 1500 "sabots" are enough to escape possible interception. It would have to defrag almost on top of the target.

Does anyone know what a mach 10 object the size of an ASBM warhead at impact will do? If it's like a larger version of a sabot, does it do exactly what a sabot round does to a tank? During the first Gulf War, I remember a news story that said what happens is just a hole the width of the sabot punches through and it's the massive pressure changes that occurs as a result that does all the damage. They said anyone inside would literally be sucked out that tiny hole the sabot round created. Are these things true? Will a mach 10 object just punch a hole right through the top and out the bottom or would it explode?

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sounds outlandish to me, more like someone mixing up a thermobaric weapon explosion with anti tank properties of a KE penetrator

a sabot penetration will not cause a pressure differentiation unlike a chemical explosion, most of the energy went to friction and ablation between sabot material and tank hull/armor materials, the reaction will still be highly harmful or deadly though

feel free to cmiiw

Lezt said:

You don't really need tank rounds, any round sphere of DU or tungsten will penetrate a lot of things. if you can shot gun the flight deck (or any deck) with 100,000 tungsten 1/2" dia balls (~2 tons) going at mach 15, that carrier will be something like swiss cheese -> basically if it doesn't sink, I feel sorry for those trying to patch the millions of little holes going through the entire ship; and the corp's men trying to pick up body parts.

Not to mention it most likely taking out the fuel lines, the flight deck, electrical systems, propulsion units.

Do anyone have any idea what the USA will do if lets say an attack on one of her carriers, manage to create a catastrophic melt down of the reactor?

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Actually no. The problem with really small balls moving really fast is that they're actually easier to protect against. NASA uses what's called a whippy shield for their space ships, because that's literally all you need (thin pieces of aluminum and kevlar spaced apart) to stop extremely fast moving, yet small diameter micrometeroids from penetrating the hull. The hull of say, a Nimitz classed ship, is basically that, except thicker.

@plawolf, that idea is stupid. You can't just stack APFSDS rounds together and hope they hit something. They have fins for a reason. If you were to stack them together, release them, they'd simple start doing dance moves mid-air and have a high probability of missing the target and even hitting the target with the wrong end of the penetrator. Not to mention that the DF-21D gets the majority of it's terminal velocity from either it's engines or simple gravity. Once you release submunitions, those submunitions will slow down because they don't have the mass or the shape of the DF-21D, not to mention the rocket engines, to go that fast. So if such a proposal were to even be utilized, it'd end in a total humorous failure.