Not a lot of fins on that missile for manoeuvring, maybe steering with thrust ? But a very long range missile with slow manoeuvring look like an AWAC/TANKER killer. Diameter give more place for a large sensor array or a large warhead.
China Flanker Thread III (land based, exclude J-15)
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
Agreed, I read something about since 2020, but I think now we can be quite sure it is.
Most likely it is the same like the „missing“ J-20 units … we are always late with a confirmation by at least one, maybe even up to several years.
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The range of this thing is of course oriented significantly for force multipliers, but there's nothing that inherently prevents it from targeting fast moving jets either. It's an energy and sensors game after all, and though this missile is respectively sized it's not much bigger than other long range high performance SAMs in the world which are also intended to target high performance combat aircraft at long ranges.
And PL-17 has the benefit of being launched from an aerial platform rather than ground.
Furthermore if it has attitude thrusters as has been rumoured in the past, that would also give it even more maneuverability.
Then there's also one of the original papers that described a concept suspected to lead to PL-17, which depicted a target set for the weapon... and well, see for yourself:
2nd place should be R-37.
Russians are quite sure both it (and 40n6) were delivered to PLAAF with their respective orders, so i meant it.
The PLA sure isn't beating around the bush.
Interesting that in this paper the missile discussed used a solid-fueled SCRAMJET (I presume the current PL-17 has a solid fuel rocket engine) which makes me wonder if this paper is linked to a seperate project
