China Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Arms Thread

[Temstar]

I doubt there is any technology in foreseeable time to counter this ASBM They have been fiddling with laser gun for 30 years now and all that they can show is laser gun to shoot small tugboat from 5000 feet.
In December 2014, the US Navy made a great show of their test of a laser weapon in what it called the “realistic threat environment” of the Persian Gulf.

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, made available to the press, showed the USS Ponce firing the Laser Weapon System to burn some holes through the sides of some speedboats, causing the boats’ contents to explode. Other tests apparently shot some drone replicas out of the sky.

In the USS Ponce tests, the distance of engagement appeared to be short—less than a mile. The sides of their speedboat target were thin, and the target drone aircraft appeared to be small. So, it was possible to accomplish a so-called “successful” test with a relatively low power, in the 10 to 20 kilowatt range. In addition, the short distances meant that a low-quality beam could be used, which tipped the scales because high-quality has long been the

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The same EM gun after spending close to 500 million dollars and 15 years nothing to show up

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By all account China is now ahead of US on railgun development. That 500 million USD sure didn't buy much. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years time a Type 055A show up and beat Zumwalt at its own game (and also totally dominating Zumwalt in all the other areas that it sucks in).

But what I'm getting at is by keeping the details of AShBM test low profile you reduce the risk of causing a "Sputnik Moment" in the US and let them continue to languish in their own supposed superiority.

Even if there's no counter to AShBM there's still things you can do to adjust to it strategically, like say not sink so much money in building Ford-Class. If DF-21D and DF-26 really are as good as the test suggest China just invalidated all the money invested into 11 super carriers in the same revolutionary manner as HMS Dreadnought.

 

[ougoah]

AShBM definitely work well in a perfect environment. It's not really as impossible as western armchair generals wanted to make it seem when the Chinese first revealed the idea. Now there are at least two AShBM riding on at least two MR and IR rocket types with at least a second generation of AShBM being fielded by China over 10 years after the initial reveal.

The Americans don't pursue it not because they can't develop their own AShBM but because their entire doctrine relies more on their carrier fighters doing all the offensive work. They don't have any real need for AShBM to sink PLAN capital ships and carriers because there aren't all that many of them anyway. Seawolf and Virginia + F-35, EA-18, F-18E/F supported by AEWC and AWACS. That's decades and billions of dollars of commitment to one set of strategies. Also the USN is usually an offensive force, positioned very far from from the US. Japan, South Korea, and Philippines have not in the past expressed any willingness to allow the US to station ballistic missiles. Japan and South Korea are considering these options only recently (according to the US) but they do not want to become targets of PLA ballistic and cruise missiles themselves. Allowing the US to station missiles is yet further escalation in an era when they're actually beginning to hedge. So the US has never really considered a similar AShBM option because it would need a regional nation's cooperation to place missiles there and then at least a decade to develop it once it gets a guarantee of cooperation.

If Chinese AShBM didn't work so well, we wouldn't have observed continuous development into second generations of it and such proliferation into so many variants. The US is working on countering with newer interceptors so there will come a time when AShBM become much less effective. Same applies with HGVs.

 

[Quickie]

The DF-21D and DF-26 landed quite far apart. Surely if a tugboat took a direct hit from one it wouldn't have stayed afloat and even keep sailing for some distance to take another hit. Perhaps it was dragging a target ship?

If this test is not just firing missiles into the sea and if two actual targets at sea were hit one after another it would be an astonishing achievement.

It doesn't need to be a direct hit. With a large enough conventional warhead, serious damage could be inflicted on aircraft, equipment, and structures on the deck of the aircraft carrier within 100 m of the blast radius.

 

[Temstar]

It doesn't need to be a direct hit. With a large enough conventional warhead, serious damage could be inflicted on aircraft, equipment, and structures on the deck of the aircraft carrier within 100 m of the blast radius.

Actually the diagram might not be accurate, the two missiles might in fact have hit the same target simultaneously. I have seen other graphs that show both flights terminating at the same point. It would be logical as it would demonstrate coordination of a saturation attack from multiple rocket force formations.

 

[galvatron]

Actually the diagram might not be accurate, the two missiles might in fact have hit the same target simultaneously. I have seen other graphs that show both flights terminating at the same point. It would be logical as it would demonstrate coordination of a saturation attack from multiple rocket force formations.

That means two missiles launched from different distances hit the same target at the same time after flying thousands of km/miles? That would be amazing and for sure a big slap on the clown.

 

[Temstar]

That means two missiles launched from different distances hit the same target at the same time after flying thousands of km/miles? That would be amazing and for sure a big slap on the clown.

Here's the flight path from someone on Weibo. Lots of rumours on what the circles and rectangles are. One theory is this is related to why some media are reporting the test as four missiles, in fact what might be happening is to get around the re-entry radio blackout due to plasma sheath each missile deploys a high drag sensor package behind the warhead. This sensor package rapidly slows down and so is not surrounded by a plasma sheath, it looks for the target then sends the telemetry data to the warhead from its rear where there's no plasma sheath. The warhead then performs terminal guidance based on this data, before it's slowed down enough that it emerges from plasma sheath and then relies on its own onboard sensor. The sensor package also serves as a decoy warhead to confuse missile interceptors.

 

[SimaQian]

It doesn't need to be a direct hit. With a large enough conventional warhead, serious damage could be inflicted on aircraft, equipment, and structures on the deck of the aircraft carrier within 100 m of the blast radius.

Actually hitting a moving object on the surface on earth like a warship, is much more difficult than hitting a satellite in low earth orbit.
In space there is nothing, very thin air to none. The air is more dense at sea level.

Since DF-21D and DF-26 are ballistic missiles, so there must be some limited maneuverability of the warhead in the terminal phase of the ballistic trajectory. Hitting a moving target requires continuous position update of the target.
If the target position is updated to the warhead until 1 minute before impact at mach 10,
the ship can only move max 18 meters (at 35 knots), so the larger the ship, the greater chance it
will get hit even without explosives.

So the US navy is right, the only chance to counter this in the mid flight phase - the war head is still attached to the missile.
Once in terminal phase, their ship will be hit before they can finish praying "Hail Mary".

 

[SimaQian]

Actually no. the position of the target needs to be updated until the last second of the ballistic flight to get a 18 meter accuracy at mach 10. i reviewed my math.

So this is really an incredible feat of engineering if true.

 

[plawolf]

Here's the flight path from someone on Weibo. Lots of rumours on what the circles and rectangles are. One theory is this is related to why some media are reporting the test as four missiles, in fact what might be happening is to get around the re-entry radio blackout due to plasma sheath each missile deploys a high drag sensor package behind the warhead. This sensor package rapidly slows down and so is not surrounded by a plasma sheath, it looks for the target then sends the telemetry data to the warhead from its rear where there's no plasma sheath. The warhead then performs terminal guidance based on this data, before it's slowed down enough that it emerges from plasma sheath and then relies on its own onboard sensor. The sensor package also serves as a decoy warhead to confuse missile interceptors.

Good analysis, but I would suggest that the sensor package would be much easier and effectively deployed as a mini-satellite. Because if it is deployed in atmosphere, it would already be past the plasma sheath phase of re-entry, and would have to have its own heat shield and slowing and stabilising mechanisms, and would be very little time to sort itself out, find the target and that would leave very little time for the warhead to do any meaningful course corrections.

Deploying the sensor package (as well as other decoys) once the AShBM has left the atmosphere would then serve the stated purpose of decoying (only mid-course intercept would have any realistic chance of success, so I don’t think they would even bother with terminal phase decoys); and also provide much more timely course updates for the warhead before it starts it’s re-entry phase.

During the re-entry phase, the mini-satellite would be able to see both the warhead and its target and thus can provide high precision, lag-free course update data to the warhead to guide it such that once it clears the plasma sheath, it’s own sensors would be perfectly aligned to acquire the target.

This is an excellent practical engineering solution that exemplifies Chinese problem solving at its best. Rather than trying to brute force an impossible seeming challenge, they neatly sidestep it instead to delivery practical solutions without ridiculous budget and time investments.

 

[SimaQian]

This is beyond the control systems I learned at school. Of course it is stroke of a genius, include the sensor in the warhead! and separate at reentry. This is really incredible.