yuxiaochen
Junior Member
Yea something like that.
PLAN close in weapon
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
Probably 730B. Something that is fitted on the 053H3 refit and maybe the F22P. It is a pair of 730s on a budget. Instead of putting a radar and an EO on top of each CIWS, the CIWS comes with no radar and EO, but instead, a couple of them share a single radar and EO set between the two CIWS.
by78
General
30mm discarding sabot rounds... The second image shows petal separation.
Another image possibly showing the petal separation on the 30mm discarding sabot rounds.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Because the PLAN has supersonic and hypersonic AShMs to pitch it’s defence systems against.
Against a supersonic or hypersonic missile, at CIWS ranges of 1-2km, airburst isn’t going to cut the mustard, as the damaged missile is still going to almost certainly strike your ship due to its velocity and momentum, and hit hard enough to cause massive damage, even if you do pepper it full of shrapnel.
PLAN CIWS philosophy is to hit incoming missiles with so much force so quickly that the missile is literally shredded into confetti, and any debris that does strike ships is so small as to unlikely to cause much in the way of damage. Hence their choice of 30mm over the American 20mm Phalanx, and the frankly incredible RoF of 10k+ rounds per minute.
Its a similar approach as what the Russians have gone with BTW, and since those are the only two nations with operational supersonic AShMs and enough domestic know-how to develop anything they want, I would be inclined to trust their judgement on this.
While i do see the point of PLAN upping from 7 barrels to 11 barrels to increase ROF, also the change of Soviet explosive rounds to tungsten sabots. The airburst still has alot of merits against UAV or anything not Super/hypersonic.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
PLAN warship main guns all have airburst AA capabilities.
The AHEAD rounds are mainly to deal with saturation attack, whereby you can shoot a handful of rounds at a target and move onto the next with high kill probability so you can deal with lots of incoming in a very short time window.
The high ROF of 1135s already give the PLAN that ability as they can send sufficiently big bursts at targets in a fraction of a second when dealing with subsonic saturation attack.
The only area where airburst might be better is in dealing with drone swarms. But I think the PLAN plans to hit those with air bursting main gun rounds while they are still in tight formation flight mode miles from the ships, and also heavy EW.
In the medium to longer term, I think the PLAN will transition to directed energy weapons for those.
The Chinese already have plenty of operational anti-drone laser weapons for key infrastructure defence, as well as a plethora of hand held soft-kill anti-drone systems. If and when drone swarms become a concern for naval forces, it’s a comparatively simple upgrade to install more powerful anti-drone softkill jammers and hardkill lasers to its warships. Assuming they have not upgraded to railguns and lasers already for general AAW.
