Did somebody say they were? That doesn't change previously agreed upon and documented definitions.
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Chinese Hypersonic Developments (HGVs/HCMs)
- Thread starter A.Man
- Start date
Those are your definitions in the context of American agreements with the USSR/Russia. That has nothing to do with how we use the terms in the context of China's nuclear forces.
No, they're not mine. They're the way the rest of the world defines them.
And where is these "everywhere"?
What i said is text book. I dont give a damn about how you & your little bandwagon of euros take it.
There is no problem in having tactical payload on strategic weapon. Didnt lil US whine about using nukes against cyber attacks?
No, Rest of the world has better things to do than learning american word salad. Dont speak for the "Rest of the world"
The weapon is the DF-100. Unrelated to the University stuff - Xiamen Uni's dual waverider test and Tsinghua Uni's propulsion test.
The in service weapon (again it's unrelated to the University projects) is the DF-100 and it is a HCM.
There are engines for HCM in China - scramjet, sodramjet, combined cycle, and whatever the Tsinghua Uni's recent engine test type of engine is.
The US has DARPA's HAWC as HCM (assumed) and ARRW as HGV (boost glide). They also have other projects and flown the X-51A successfully back in 2013 or so. It is fairly basic scramjet powered but that in itself is extremely difficult already. It flew for about three minutes which is still a fair achievement although by 2012 era, China has been flying hypersonics for longer, further, and faster if at the moment, 10 years later, the US is still in test flight phase of HAWC and ARRW while China's had at least one HCM and one HGV in service for over three years already and performed a global ranged hypersonic glide vehicle flight for over 2 hours averaging nearly mach 20 within the atmosphere. If it ain't powered air breathing, then China's truly "broken the laws of physics" by sustaining a glide close to mach 20 for about 2 hours. Some of the professional comments (either defence, gov, or academics in the field) seem to suggest the Chinese flight had to be powered because sustaining glide only at that speed is ... well close to impossible.
US hypersonics is far from a shitshow. The amount of resources they have at their disposal is not much lesser than China's, if at all. It is Russia that is squeezing the most out of very limited resources if they have scramjet powered Zircon and HGV Avangard already in service for years. Truly an impressive feat if so and certainly Russia has every need, desire and determination to perfect and field boost glide hypersonics for nuclear delivery, unlike India.
With the US' apparent lag in this field, they have equal, similar or superior funding, access to talent, infrastructure, computing power, and hypersonic wind tunnel. The lag must therefore be more due to simply ignoring this field since it doesn't quite fit into their military posture and doctrine as well as China's or Russia's where A2AD and nuclear delivery are pressing matters back in the 1990s to 2000s when US BMD technology and platforms were improving and proliferating. While all three pursue and continue fielding some seriously capable BMD, the ability to use HGV as part of nuclear second strike will far improve penetration and survivability of warheads. With China, they've simply moved a step further than Russia with propelled HGV "aircraft" tests and may be developing boost glide HGV and HCM or propelled HGV as part of conventional weapons arsenal. The Chinese openly stated that they have resolved production cost issues with hypersonic weapons that previously sort of limited their use to nuclear only or at least for extremely high value medium ranged targets (or further).
The US didn't really have much point in similar weapons and after a desire to perfect the tech (for the sake of future weapons developments) they've been publicly saying hypersonic weapons are proving a little too expensive to justify. Naturally there are always advantages to having the ability and weapons at your disposal and the US is not happy to fall far behind in this field even if it is simply completing the tech for token platforms that have less usefulness for their military postures and doctrine.
The US and UK have both been involved in hypersonic aviation with UK's Reaction Engines that I think have been purchased by some US gov organisation? And plenty of skunk works like projects for hypersonic commercial aviation although no one has gotten far not even with the engines.
If China has been test flying several forms of engines that are suitable or useable for hypersonic aircraft and indeed tested and landed a hypersonic aircraft back in 2020 or 2021 (I can't remember which perhaps some member can bother to find those articles and post them they are in Chinese though and leaked presentations), then the race is on. China as usual will only show it once it's completed like DF-ZF and WZ-8 but US and UK would show pretty much every step of advance they make unless it is a military project.
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Actually the US has worse wind tunnels for hypersonic testing than either Russia or China. Back in the late Cold War period the Soviets had the most advanced wind tunnels and they were all in the territory of the current Russian Federation. You have to see the Russians got their SST operational and the US never achieved that. The Russians never stopped investing in ramjets and the US company which worked on that, Marquardt, basically stopped development in the mid 1960s. The Soviets had people working on ramjets even before WW2. The US has had loads of on and off projects over the years with regards to hypersonics or supersonics which never went anywhere. The Rapier, Valkyrie, NASP, etc. In recent years the US also lost quite a lot of its solid rocket expertise thanks to industry consolidation among an increasingly smaller number of players. Thiokol basically has a monopoly on propellant production and they are now part of Northrop Grumman.
The US does have an advantage in terms of computer modeling right now though I think.
The US does have an advantage in terms of computer modeling right now though I think.
Yeah the US had heaps of fancy acronyms and program names for various hypersonic programs that all led ... nowhere EXCEPT to build a fairly solid foundation and a very broad range of expertise in this general field. They also resulted in X-51A which while simply for testing and studying, there's no doubt HAWC and ARRW benefit from those flight tests and studies.
Several Chinese ex-military and current public domain (state moderated no doubt) commentators have said that the Russians were the first to get their scramjets working to the level required. But the Russians seem to have put all their far more limited resources (relative to US and PRC) into scramjets and the two hypersonic weapons platforms they have - Zircon and Avangard. Kinzhal doesn't count since it is neither a HCM or HGV, very barely hypersonic (claims of mach 5 speed but obviously depends on launch speed and altitude) and just not in the class of the HCM and HGV.
This is just the stuff the Russians admit to and reveal. Since we know China has several other engine programs running for exotic aircraft like hypersonics, and the fact that Russians are generally a science and tech culture, they probably have their own propulsion programs running in the dark, not too different to China's and the US. However they sure would have far more limited funding and available resources. The US have the enviable position of being able to attract foreign talents much more so than China and Russia and has even more money for programs than China. The US also seem to make use of both state institution/military backed, academia backed, and market backed driving forces while China seems to be so far lacking the market mobilised forces. Russia only a fraction of what those other two enjoy. China has a lot of work left to complete development in full and around two generations until basically a totally educated, wealthy, and developed society not dissimilar to OECD. This means the Chinese cannot quite afford to spend as much in this domain as the Americans unless military doctrines calls for it as a necessity. No doubt plenty of that necessity drove the Chinese towards these types of A2AD weapons and nuclear second strike due to a smaller fleet of SSBNs and nuclear warheads compared to the other two giants. And of course, because Qian Xuesen basically being the pioneer of the concept for HGVs.
Several Chinese ex-military and current public domain (state moderated no doubt) commentators have said that the Russians were the first to get their scramjets working to the level required. But the Russians seem to have put all their far more limited resources (relative to US and PRC) into scramjets and the two hypersonic weapons platforms they have - Zircon and Avangard. Kinzhal doesn't count since it is neither a HCM or HGV, very barely hypersonic (claims of mach 5 speed but obviously depends on launch speed and altitude) and just not in the class of the HCM and HGV.
This is just the stuff the Russians admit to and reveal. Since we know China has several other engine programs running for exotic aircraft like hypersonics, and the fact that Russians are generally a science and tech culture, they probably have their own propulsion programs running in the dark, not too different to China's and the US. However they sure would have far more limited funding and available resources. The US have the enviable position of being able to attract foreign talents much more so than China and Russia and has even more money for programs than China. The US also seem to make use of both state institution/military backed, academia backed, and market backed driving forces while China seems to be so far lacking the market mobilised forces. Russia only a fraction of what those other two enjoy. China has a lot of work left to complete development in full and around two generations until basically a totally educated, wealthy, and developed society not dissimilar to OECD. This means the Chinese cannot quite afford to spend as much in this domain as the Americans unless military doctrines calls for it as a necessity. No doubt plenty of that necessity drove the Chinese towards these types of A2AD weapons and nuclear second strike due to a smaller fleet of SSBNs and nuclear warheads compared to the other two giants. And of course, because Qian Xuesen basically being the pioneer of the concept for HGVs.
US hypersonics is littered with failure and lack of commitment. The only almost "successful" X-51 flight just about didn't happen at all. The people in charge are on record saying, "we were afraid what it would mean if we failed". Yeah, pathetic. Also it barely could be called a success. It was supposed to cruise at Mach 6. It reached Mach 5.1. Given the speed at booster burnout was Mach 4.8 it barely even showed the ability to accelerate under scramjet power. Then there was the HTV-2. Showed the ability to glide and manuever at Mach 20 for several minutes but because it wasn't a complete success after only two flights they quit. HyFly was another hypersonic failure. After three failures (none of them related to the propulsion system actually being tested) including dropping one in the ocean who's booster failed to fire after release, they quit. "Too risky". ARRW is three for three in the failure department. HCM got cancelled I think. HAWC? Who knows?
The real sad thing about the current state of affairs is that it's not like the US has never had success. ASALM flew at Mach 5.4 with a RAMJET back in 1980. THAT would have been a game changer. Think SRAM with double the range and speed. (Today's mentality is such that ASALM was to form the basis of LRASM-B but they cancelled it almost the same time they announced it - "too risky". This after they'd actually flown the goddamn thing 35 years prior.) Then there was the BGRV, all the way back in the 60s, that glided for thousands of miles at 100,000 feet at Mach 10+, performing crossrange manuevers of thousands of miles. It all comes down to commitment and not quitting at the first sign of failure. Sure, you have to have funding, but that comes back to the commitment part. Here in the US we've spent the last several decades quitting at the first sign of failure. Too many corrupt politicians grabbing the spotlight and ripping on failure because it gets them headlines. Most of them don't even realize failure is part of the learning process. The rest don't care. They'll spin it for the attention. So yeah, shit show.
DF-100 is not waverider . So which missile with waveriders is in service . Sodramjet is just a theoretical concept as of now. It will take more time for it to even begin testing in the open.