PLA Anti-Air Missile (SAM) systems

Blitzo

Lieutenant General
Staff member
Super Moderator
Registered Member
I have never heard of normal air combusting under pressure before. Unless they are using pure oxygen or hydrogen as their compressed gas, it's hard to see how the physics of normal air combusting without any fuel source would work.

If you watch that video Tyloe posted above, the combustion effect seem quite long and is clearly noticeable in the video. So it's not like those was a 1 in a million shot catching the missile at the the precise microsecond that flame effect happened.

Taxiya's photo is one that I had found online (from PDF whose image hosting seems to have had issues recently) which shows an S-300 with a similar artefact.
 

Tyloe

Junior Member
Very useful video, but those are not S300s.
So they're HQ-9s?
ocGFcDl.png
Also if you slow down the video, the ejection cycle produces two distinct visible fire effects before missile ignition.

kx1vCpK.gif



ocGFcDl.png
 

plawolf

Lieutenant General
Ok, so looking over all the revealed facts, I can see two obvious possibilities.

1) both Russian and Chinese Cold launchers uses some form of compressed gas+combustion launch method

2) the flame effects seen are a coneseqence and not design feature of cold launch.

By that I mean that the flames could be from lubricants or other oils/liquids in the launch tub combusting from the huge pressure of the launch gases being released.

Air gunners can experience phenomena like this when firing their air guns if there are excess gun oil in the barrel or freshly applied lubricants on the pellet.
 

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
Ok, so looking over all the revealed facts, I can see two obvious possibilities.

1) both Russian and Chinese Cold launchers uses some form of compressed gas+combustion launch method

2) the flame effects seen are a coneseqence and not design feature of cold launch.

By that I mean that the flames could be from lubricants or other oils/liquids in the launch tub combusting from the huge pressure of the launch gases being released.

Air gunners can experience phenomena like this when firing their air guns if there are excess gun oil in the barrel or freshly applied lubricants on the pellet.
From #102 by Tyloe
The flame at the opening of the canister after the missile left the canister seems to be caused by the rocket motors flame. I guess this is your possibility 2?

It could be that the gas from the generator or vessel is not ordinary air, but some chemically generated gas that contains some substances that is flammable under very high temperature (rocket exhaust) but not itself being used as fuel or explosive.

I read that early air bag in cars use sodium azide (NaN3) to release nitrogen. There is Na which is very inflammable even in room temperature.
 

Mike North

New Member
Registered Member
Ok, so looking over all the revealed facts, I can see two obvious possibilities.

1) both Russian and Chinese Cold launchers uses some form of compressed gas+combustion launch method

2) the flame effects seen are a coneseqence and not design feature of cold launch.

By that I mean that the flames could be from lubricants or other oils/liquids in the launch tub combusting from the huge pressure of the launch gases being released.

Air gunners can experience phenomena like this when firing their air guns if there are excess gun oil in the barrel or freshly applied lubricants on the pellet.
I think your second possibility is most likely. The missile must be held in place in the launch tube. Whatever holds it in place must "let go" when the missile fires. Explosives are often used for this purpose. The rush of compressed "air" pushes the flames out the top of the tube. I would expect supports to hold it at the top and bottom, both needing to be blasted, which is consistent with the video posted. Thats my best guess for what its worth
 

FORBIN

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
Suppossedly HQ-9B.

And the words on the BBS is that it might have anything between 230 - 260km range.
250 km here normaly...
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200 for initial missile BUT initialy and again some datas to 125 km for HQ-9 as HHQ-9 .. and ofc the new don't do 1 - 2 m more with much more fuel so a doubt...

HQ-9 do 6.8 m long the last missiles used by S-300 do 7.5 m range 195 km.

So the new do 7.5 m ? better engine consumes less ??
 
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