PLA Ground Forces news, pics and videos

Aniah said:

Wasn't there a podcast early this year that mentioned this? It was mentioned the unguided rockets are only for show and they rarely show any of the guided missiles or more advanced weapons to the public. I'm not sure where this distrust is coming from, while there have been fuck ups and sometimes questionable actions specifically the Wuhan government's early action and Shanghai, the Chinese people have done more than enough to prove they are more than competent in handling extreme changes. I wouldn't let some screw-ups every now and then cover up the mostly good track record.

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Yes I remember, that was when Yankee told the story about that one PLAAF pilot that went to Russia for joint exercise. After being told no they won't be dropping any PGM in the exercise when he raised the question his Russian colleague asked back how many PGM he gets to drop home and he gave them the number so far for that year, and the said "great, you dropped more PGM this year than the entire RuAF".

He also told a second story where a Russian manufacturer of PGM came to China and said "from our experience maintaining the munitions with our other big customer who has a very very wet and very very hot climate (so I'm guessing that's Tactical Missiles Corporation maker of KAB-500, used by Su-30) it's high time your stockpiles gets a refurbishment. They were shown the climate controlled ammo dumps PLAAF used for stockpiling these rounds and were impressed and satisfied that there's still plenty of shelf life in them.

plawolf said:

I think this would be a feature that future anti-drone operations would use. I can see it being fairly straightforward to design an anti commercial UAV drone that flies at commercial UAVs, and selectively jams its operating frequency such that command link to the operator is disabled but GPS is not. Add in a tiny bit of hacking code to enable the return home feature even if disabled to add additional utility.

This would prompt the commercial drone to return to launch position, meaning if your anti-drone drone simply follows the commercial drone, you will have the rough location of the enemy drone operator. A little explosive payload on your drone and bye bye enemy drone operator. Far more effective than just trying to take out enemy drones.

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Not necessary. Commercial drone RC signals are trivial to track, no reason to rely on a overly complex method of tracking a drone returning to home to find the operator.

PeoplesPoster said:

Not necessary. Commercial drone RC signals are trivial to track, no reason to rely on a overly complex method of tracking a drone returning to home to find the operator.

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I don’t think it’s as trivial as you suggest.

Are these tower 155mm still in use?

Broccoli said:

Are these tower 155mm still in use?

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I wondered as well, this towed howitzer has an APU similiar to the G5, which gives it semi-autonomous mobility , the website states that the APU can only travel for 80 km with 18km/h which is very slow and short ranged for modern warfare.

One thing got my attention:

China has been further developing its mountain cat platform, which is known to carry 120mm howitzers (from the attached pictures, it looks like at least L/45, so 5.4m barrel length)

I do hope they can upscale it to carry a 155mm, up to L/39 (6m barrel) maybe which would be 5t category (1 ton vehicle weight + sub 4 ton howitzer, M777 weighs 4.2 tons with all its associated stuff in comparison) and thus suitable for air assault troops (Z-8L transportable even).

Giving organic heavy long range (40km range at least possible, in fact in 2019 South African Denel and German Rheinmetall shot 54km far with 155mm L/39 and I am more than certain China can/has surpassed this number already) fire support for air assault troops, which otherwise would have had to rely on army artillery for fire support. And in a Taiwan Scenario the army are not there with PZL-05 in the very opening of the landings when the air assaults and marines arrive.

Mountain Cat ATV gives the incremental benefit that it is an actual ATV which offers substantially more mobility with several hundreds of kilometeres in range, up 90km/h speed and better off road mobility compared to systems like G5 or PLL1.
Also, due to its smaller size and weight, it gets to firing positions a tracked tank sized SPG or the PCL-181 can only dream of.

The pictures show that the chassis of the mountain cat is very well air transportable by mi-17 and Z-8L.
Shown in the pictures is also the 120mm howitzer variant, the same chassis or a slightly lengthend one can surely accomodate a 155mm!


And PLA does offer enough 155mm howitzers in the sub 4 ton range with L/39 to fulfill that mission.

how useful are those ATV howitzer anyway? You'd need like 3 or more ATVs just to carry the ammunition and transport the personel.

I'd imagine airborne troops would prefer somekind of mortar

pakje said:

how useful are those ATV howitzer anyway? You'd need like 3 or more ATVs just to carry the ammunition and transport the personel.

I'd imagine airborne troops would prefer somekind of mortar

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The US 82nd Airborne division fields howitzers, but they aren’t as mobile as those ATV’s:

So I’d say those ATV’s can definitely enhance the combat effectiveness of an airborne force that is far away from friendly artillery batteries.

pakje said:

how useful are those ATV howitzer anyway? You'd need like 3 or more ATVs just to carry the ammunition and transport the personel.

I'd imagine airborne troops would prefer somekind of mortar

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Mortars do not give depth of fire, 120mm mortar has like 7km range, even rocket assisted ones end at 13km.
Plus a 120mm Mortar has only a fraction of the destructiveness of a 155mm shell.

A NATO 120mm HE mortar bomb weighs 13.2kg
And has 2.3 kg eplosive mass.

The L15A1 155mm HE shell weighs 43.3 Kg of it are 11.3 kg of explosives.

So alot more kinetic force, fragments and explosive mass of an 155mm shell compared to a 120mm mortar bomb.

In a Taiwan Scenario a Battalion of these gives equivalent fires to an PCL-181 Battalion in terms of range (40km+) and RoF (6 rounds a minute).

Although it is true that it need dedicated ammo carriers, but so do towed howitzers.

Finally a dismounted mortar takes time to position and reposition, if you ever get the chance to speak to mortarmen, they'll tell you its on hell of a job, you could also have an SPM but given the added weight you can also get a true howitzer.


In the end SPG and SPM dont exclude but complement each other.

Bridging a river.

Chinese talking about Intelligent Thermal camouflage

After years of exploration and innovation, scientists have used intelligent algorithms to design and manufacture a "one-dimensional photonic crystal structure" that can suppress long-wave thermal radiation while achieving stealth to infrared laser radar, greatly enhancing the camouflage diversity of thermal camouflage technology . On this basis, by integrating intelligent algorithms, advanced stealth materials, and mechanical design and manufacturing technologies, an advanced intelligent thermal camouflage technology is ready to emerge, which is expected to become a new generation of camouflage applied to fighters and weapons on the battlefield in the future. technology.