MIGleader said:
China's missle of the future, the s-400, shall be superior to the sm-3. The s-400 can handle cruise missles and ballistic missles like hte sm-3, but the s-400has a much greater range of 400km. These missles have 9m96 interceptors with them, incresing kill ability against low flying targets. The missle can be intergrated with china's s-300 radar and transport vehicle complexes, so the transition shall be fast, cheap, and smooth.
The s-400 is also claimed to be able to home on stealth bombers.
The SM-3 can range farther than 500 Km from almost every open-source database out there. And an altitude of greater than 160 Km. They as a ship-deployed system are much more mobile and are already fielded. They are in testing as a fielded system now. They can be salvo fired with a number of missiles (I don't know how many can be controlled though) and have
proven to be reliable against systems using decoys and jammers. They have been
proven against seperated ballistic warheads. It's primary use is for ballistic missiles only. It's not designed to be used against aircraft or cruise missiles, so S-400 and SM-3 couldn't even compare. They are totally different in philosophy. Just wait until SM-6 ERAM is out also. It is intended to go beyond 600 Km utilizing usable datalinks and an onboard radar for active radar guidance. This is the future in regards to killing cruise missiles from long distances. It should also be noted that SM-6 could easily be converted into an anti-ship missile. Nothing out there will match it. SM-2 is currently fielded against cruise missiles and aircraft now also at significant range. It's currently a world class system. I think Standard's as a coordinated system may be one up on any future S-400. We'll have to see how it would stack up against Patriot's as well. We don't know. Plus, not even S-300 has seen any combat. I don't expect that S-300 to exceed Patriot in capability. With the use of stealth systems, low-observable cruise missiles, and advanced electronic warfare techniques, S-300 may show less effectiveness than Patriot. And we'll have to just wait and see about S-400. As far as we know, S-400 is not even a deployed system yet.
And the "stealth" homing claims are rather suspect. Alot of Russian claims have proven to be untrue. And no, Russia
does not have any comparable stealth aircraft.
To try and steer this thing back on topic "Chinese SAM", Let me ask about the HQ-18 system. I've seen some reference to it in some forums as a successor to what was planned for HQ-9/9A. Is that true? Also, it is a version of S-300......as S-300V. I think the range was listed at a little over 100Km.
