I don’t see why not.
PLA Anti-Air Missile (SAM) systems
- Thread starter FORBIN
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Does the PLA's arsenal contain any AD system other than the HQ-9C that is equipped with a GaN-based AESA seeker?
Whether the earliest HQ-9's active seeker was an AESA is still debatable, but it was definitely an AESA from the HQ-9B onwards.
Its was Aesa since the beginning
Active radar homing and AESA are two different things. One is the guidance method, and the other is the radar working principle.
I just realize that my bad
Not with clear respect to range but they mentioned it in last week's CHH where they claimed the overall performance of HHQ-9C is so good that the gap between HQ-9B is becoming quite narrow which was why there was further development done on the HHQ-9B line to become what we've seen sometimes ago
It's not that large, the booster is less than 400mm. I did some measurements last year based off pictures and it was definitely small enough to be quad packed. Frankly, the idea that PLAN would introduce a new SAM that's almost small enough to be quad packed but only able to be dual packed and waste 50% of the UVLS's space was stupid.
PLAAF did, though? Having two almost the same missiles is arguably not the best of plans either.
To be fair, in the case of the land based HQ-9 the standard HQ-9 canister is sized around the standard HQ-9 missile; a standard HQ-9 canister footprint may well not be able to accommodate a quad canister HQ-9C footprint if a baseline requirement was to use the same existing TEL and to be able to mix and match.
OTOH, the naval UVLS is not sized around the standard HQ-9 missile but it should be a fair bit larger (including in diameter).
That isn't too say I believe the HHQ-9C is quadpackable on the UVLS -- ultimately it depends on what a solid estimate of its dimensions are, and I'm not yet confident about that.