Behind the China Missile Hype

i.e. said:

But what is HE intended for? for imparting some KE into shrapnel so that those otherwise harmless peices of metal could do some damage.

but wait we already have KE. so why waste it in an explosion.

Click to expand...

To sink the ship perhaps. Laboratory testing on hypervelocity rounds in comparison to HE rounds at the same energy levels showed that hypervelocity rounds do more damage to the exterior of the target, but less damage in comparison to the HE round to the interior of the ship. If you launched a DF-21D with a giant DU slug as a warhead and it hits dead center of a USN CV, it's going to make a big hole, but the DF-21D is more than likely going to simply pass through. Though there's a giant hole in the ship, I doubt that would be enough to sink it. However, use a HE warhead, and have the DF-21D hit dead center of the USN CV, it'd make a similar sized hole (as it's still going at Mach 10 and carrying a sizable warhead anyways), but would instead detonate somewhere inside the ship, creating an evenly larger hole, displacing even more metal, etc etc. KE alone is powerful, but KE with HE is even better.

IronsightSniper said:

To sink the ship perhaps. Laboratory testing on hypervelocity rounds in comparison to HE rounds at the same energy levels showed that hypervelocity rounds do more damage to the exterior of the target, but less damage in comparison to the HE round to the interior of the ship. If you launched a DF-21D with a giant DU slug as a warhead and it hits dead center of a USN CV, it's going to make a big hole, but the DF-21D is more than likely going to simply pass through. Though there's a giant hole in the ship, I doubt that would be enough to sink it. However, use a HE warhead, and have the DF-21D hit dead center of the USN CV, it'd make a similar sized hole (as it's still going at Mach 10 and carrying a sizable warhead anyways), but would instead detonate somewhere inside the ship, creating an evenly larger hole, displacing even more metal, etc etc. KE alone is powerful, but KE with HE is even better.

Click to expand...

I actually think there is merit in using mutiple penertrators; if lets say you have 100 penetrators, which can penetrate the deck till the bottom of the hull; you will have alot of ~2" holes to let water in. That is not yet to say the amount of crew it will kill.... As midway have shown, Carriers are easily replaceable, but skilled crew is not. Just like it is more psychological to send B17 home riddled with bullets and alot of dead or wounded crewmen by the luffwaffle instead of downing the plane; Imagine the sight of lets say Enterprise being towed into San Francisco bay with a destroyer tied to it's side and the dead being removed are shredded and is being removed in pieces; while the living crew how had escaped the spalling and debre or set off munition from the impact, is being poisoned by the leaking reactors.

Pretty horrific isn't it?

My 2 cents worth on this thread is this.

The trouble with a ballistic missile trying to hit a carrier is knowing where to aim it accuraretly. However modern ships are not heavily armoured as they used to be. Releasing say two hundred sub munitions, each say 35mm diameter and 100mm long, there is more of a chance of hitting something. Would you knock out the ship, no way. However what you could do is disrupt their air operations for a few days or longer. Then without their aircraft able to deploy, then they are less able to defend themselves from alternate threads.

So sub munitions are not really ideal to take out a ship, but might be good to damage them for a short while. Note that modern ships are not as heavily armourned as they used to be. A lot more radars, communication equipment that is vulnerable to damage from smaller caliber weapons. Sub munitions would take adavtage of the modern way of designing a ship, which is to have sophisticated electonics but very little armour

However modern ships are not heavily armoured as they used to be.

Click to expand...

True but.. an USN CVN flight deck and hangar deck are 3.5in (9cm) thick. There is a belt of this steel (3.5in) on the hull from the hangar deck down to the keel. The nuclear power plant is surrounded by 16in (40cm) steel..which may be armored.

bd popeye said:

True but.. an USN CVN flight deck and hangar deck are 3.5in (9cm) thick. There is a belt of this steel (3.5in) on the hull from the hangar deck down to the keel. The nuclear power plant is surrounded by 16in (40cm) steel..which may be armored.

Click to expand...

But modern APFSDS rounds can penetrate 1000+ mm at mach 2-3, so at Mach 10, I'd expect it to easily go through 2,000 mm (~6 feet) of armor grade steel easily. I don't think from deck to keel is 6 feet worth of solid steel...

IronsightSniper said:

To sink the ship perhaps. Laboratory testing on hypervelocity rounds in comparison to HE rounds at the same energy levels showed that hypervelocity rounds do more damage to the exterior of the target, but less damage in comparison to the HE round to the interior of the ship. If you launched a DF-21D with a giant DU slug as a warhead and it hits dead center of a USN CV, it's going to make a big hole, but the DF-21D is more than likely going to simply pass through. Though there's a giant hole in the ship, I doubt that would be enough to sink it. However, use a HE warhead, and have the DF-21D hit dead center of the USN CV, it'd make a similar sized hole (as it's still going at Mach 10 and carrying a sizable warhead anyways), but would instead detonate somewhere inside the ship, creating an evenly larger hole, displacing even more metal, etc etc. KE alone is powerful, but KE with HE is even better.

Click to expand...

if the HE war head is one big round mass of TNT then I suspect that it wouldn't do much damage. as big part of that explosive energy would be expended to terminate the KE of the warhead itself.

onething it would be more effective is make it into a big shape charge, as every other warhead on missiles does.

The best is prob a combination of sensored submunition .

submunition don't hae to be dumb. take sensor fuse weapons for example. If we use DF-21's Warhead as a giant dispensor of Sensor Fused Munition, each let's say a 100x10 kg fused munition each with a shapedcharge warhead.

I don't think from deck to keel is 6 feet worth of solid steel..

Click to expand...

no it's not.. I was just stating how the ship is constructed. Anyway whatever sort of weapon is fired at an CVN has to find it first.

Is there merit to KE sub-munitions? Sure, but from a practical stand point is it worth it, in comparison to HE? Nope. Here's an example of why HE is superior to KE in some one prominent ways.

@Lezt - The best APFSDS in use right now, the M829A3, can penetrate about 680 mm of Steel (inclined at 0 degrees) and 790 mm of Steel (inclined at 60 degrees), and travels at 1,550 meters per second (Mach 4.5), and solely relies on it's pointy end to do it's job. Like I've said before, using modern APFSDS as cluster-munitions is a dumb idea. In fact, if you'd ask me, the best idea for any KE-based sub-munition attack would simply be larger balls. 6" diameter balls of DU would weigh about 34 kg each. At Mach 10, they'd hit with the energy of almost 200 mj, or about 45 kg of TNT equivalent, more than enough to penetrate the flight deck, while retaining enough mass and velocity afterwards to do damage to what's below it.

@I.E. 10 kg Sensor fuzed munitions wouldn't work. Even assuming the penetration of ATGM classed warheads (about 1200 mm), that's not a lot of the ship. Especially because they're coming down from above, you're going to need to penetrate more than that to actually create holes for water to seep through. In fact, you're probably not going to end up doing much damage save for the obvious runway damage.

bd popeye said:

no it's not.. I was just stating how the ship is constructed. Anyway whatever sort of weapon is fired at an CVN has to find it first.

Click to expand...

And finding the carrier becomes even harder when this technology and the associated tactics are used in defense.

The strategic implications of obscurants: history and the future.



---------- Post added at 08:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:23 PM ----------

Imagine the sensors of a DF-21D trying to home in on a carrier using modern obscurants designed to mask the carrier across a wide band of the spectrum. Today smoke screens against radar, IR, and optical. The US Navy used smoke to screen back in 1929 as CV-2 Lexington had her aircraft masking the ship

Imagine a DF-21 trying to decide where the carrier is while making its terminal dive. It would be next to impossible in the time allowed to make its decision.






And to complicate things further you would have other ships making smoke too.



Uploaded with

What more to say, "hello hear I am," than that. China just has to dazzle a surveilling military satellite which will alert carriers that a launch is underway and a Chinese satellite just has look for the plumes of smoke.