From PLXX
Chinese air to air missiles
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
This is hardly surprising to people in the know. China has had an advantage in solid propellant technology with explosives like CL-20.
This means their solid rockets including air to air missiles will have longer range than equivalent US ones using older propellants.
Russia also might be using boron doped solid propellant in Zircon similar to that in air breathing Meteor air to air missile. The US needs to catch up in solid rocket technology and that will be done with AIM-260 and other programs.
This means their solid rockets including air to air missiles will have longer range than equivalent US ones using older propellants.
Russia also might be using boron doped solid propellant in Zircon similar to that in air breathing Meteor air to air missile. The US needs to catch up in solid rocket technology and that will be done with AIM-260 and other programs.
The article doesn't tell us anything new, but saying "China has an advantage in solid propellant technology" is not something I'd venture with.
All we know is that the US has been concerned enough with weapons like PL-15 to fast track their own next generation weapons systems, but we do not actually know what margin of superiority (or even if there is superiority) that PL-15 has had over its contemporaries.
In fact, as far as I recall, the US military on the few occasions that it had spoken of PL-15, had never explicitly mentioned that it had greater range than their own weapons, only that it was a very capable missile that they wanted to be able to have something that could out compete it.
Not to mention that range is not the end all of AAM. How good the seeker is against EW interference, how good the data link is, how maneuverable it is are all important metrics.
Indeed.
Gelgoog specifically talked about solid fuel propellant/propulsion, so I kept my response directly related to solid fuel propellant and range where it has the most bearing.
But obviously the capability of an AAM is much more than range -- and even range itself is much more complex than merely solid fuel propellant. Missile control laws, guidance, materials, all have bearing on the range of a missile as well.
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But we can make some observations based on physics. The PL-15 is about 8% longer and with about 20% more volume than the AMRAAM which has a single rocket pulse.
Rocket burn time for the larger AIM-54 phoenix was 27 seconds. I see speculation that the AMRAAM rocket burns for 15-20 seconds.
In any case, this is far lower than a Mach 4 flight time of 75 seconds to just 105km for the AMRAAM C variant.
The AMRAAM D variant has a listed ranged of 160km , which would be 115 seconds.
Given that the PL-15 has a dual pulse rocket motor, it's logical for the first pulse to be a short high performance burn to get up to speed and a high altitude glide. It's unlikely that a target would start maneuvering and evading at that point.
After some glide time, the second pulse would be a slower and more sustained burn. That would extend range, increase the no escape zone and keep the PL-15 at the optimal speed for terminal high-G maneuvering (Mach 3? for the AMRAAM)
As long as a PL-15 can receive target track updates, we can infer effectiveness at longer ranges will be far better than an AMRAAM, because kinematic performance at mid-course and terminal intercept is the key driver of effectiveness.
According to this, the People's Liberation Army's new generation of air-to-air missile is confirmed to be named PL-17 (PL-17)
Is PL-17 the official name of the previously purported "PL-21"? Or both PL-21 and PL-17 are two completely different AAMs?
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