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Australia to Get Nuclear Submarines


Adam_S

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16 hours ago, TrustMe said:

It will be a decade before the US fields a Mach 5 missile. The fastest current cruise missile is the joint Indian - Russian Brahmos which has a top 'cruise' speed of Mach 2.5 (their's a Mach 5 version in R&D). The Russians are well ahead of the US in propulsion systems, both Strategic and tactical.
 

 The Military Balance states that Chyna has 4 ground based phased array tracking systems but you're right they don't have satellite based detection systems. Only the US and Russia has them.

 

So you think that the LRHW, AGM-183, and CPS programs are all going to fail in the next couple years and that the HACM program will be bogged down for a decade after one of two different weapons  demonstrators successfully hit Mach 5 with a 3D printed JP-7 fueled scramjet? The US successfully tested mach 4+ ASALM prototypes forty years ago (six times successfully, the seventh 'failed' and hit Mach 6 with a runaway throttle) and literally invented hypersonic aircraft and hypersonic glide vehicles in the 60's.* I find your lack of faith disturbing.

The Russians have a better PR department and until recently had better follow through.

Also I believe Brahmos speed is only that slow at sea skimming altitude; doesn't it have a high altitude mode that is much faster?

Mea culpa on the Chinese ABM radars, I hadn't heard of them. I will do more research.


*EDIT: also as far as I know, the X-43 hydrogen powered scramjet holds the world record for airbreathing aircraft top speed, though admittedly the experiment was only ten seconds of powered flight. But it it remained under aerodynamic control until it hit its stall speed.

**Additional EDIT: There is also the RATTLRS program, which did successfully make an SR-71/D-21-esque turbine (again, old '60s hat for the US) that could ramp up to near hypersonic from a high subsonic start. Either nothing came from it or it went black, but the test program achieved all its goals.

Edited by Josh
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On 10/16/2021 at 4:48 AM, RETAC21 said:

That is true, but they outnumber USians across all age groups

https://statisticstimes.com/demographics/china-vs-us-population.php

A very quick Google look up gives retirement age in China as 60 vs 66 in the US, so assuming they don't change that, they will lose 200 Million workers in the next 10 years as 165 million adolescents joint the work force for a net loss of 40 million give or take, for a population of working age of 630 miliion, ie, twice the US total population. Lower life expectancy also  means older Chinese will "burden" the state for less time than older USians.

By that metric, the US should have always prioritized China over Russia and should prioritize India over China now.

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11 hours ago, glenn239 said:

The US military reaction was, "we don't have any idea how the fuck they got a hypersonic missile to circle the world", and your reaction is that you think 24 miles from the recovery point is too far from the mark for the space capsule it carried?  

Where did you get your information that the DF-21 guidance system can't pick up a carrier 24 miles away?  I'm curious, because the posters that I associate with the largest degree of rank jingoism seem to be picking up very eagerly on this detail.  To them, it seems proof that they can stop thinking about this.  To me, they are clutching at straws.  What's your take?  Do you think that the Chinese are too stupid to be able to design a radar/optical guidance package that can overcome that 24 mile error rate we just heard about?

 

 I was under the impression that this hypersonic system is much cheaper than an ICBM.  

If the Chinese sink the US navy and the US navy sinks the Chinese navy, then the US will be thrown out of Asia and back to the Americas, China will then completely dominate Asia, and Taiwan will still be sitting right off the Chinese coast ready to be annexed.  

I can't speak for the US military. Getting something to orbit the world and then deorbit suddenly, with the use of a 3rd stage, was something the Russians deployed in '67. The fact that the re-entry vehicle is a glider is novel, but doesn't do anything to change the strategic balance - its a lower yield ICBM with a longer travel time and more cross range. It will have exactly the same launch signature as any other Long March 2C launch. Perhaps people were caught off guard by the scale of where the Chinese are pushing hypersonic gliders, but I fail to see what the panic is about outside justifying budgets.

Where did you get your information that the hypersonic glider they tested shares the same guidance system with the DF-21? The hypersonic glider would be under aerodynamic forces and temperatures completely different from the DF-21. And if it *was* carrying the same guidance package, well then it was a developed piece of tech that failed. You're doing that thing where you grab one situation and translate it immediately to another when it doesn't apply; it just kinda feels the same. "If you like the movie 'Twister', you'll *love* 'Gone With The WInd'!"

I don't see how this system is much cheaper to an ICBM when it is literally strapped to an ICBM?

If the Chinese sink the US *surface* navy, US\ nuke boats and bombers still range where ever they want to and the Chinese are bottled up where they live, where as the US merely has to avoid the WestPAC. If that's the world Xi wants, I'm fine with it - they can have land wars in their own backyard and leave the rest of the world alone.

Edited by Josh
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6 hours ago, Josh said:

So you think that the LRHW, AGM-183, and CPS programs are all going to fail in the next couple years and that the HACM program will be bogged down for a decade after one of two different weapons  demonstrators successfully hit Mach 5 with a 3D printed JP-7 fueled scramjet? The US successfully tested mach 4+ ASALM prototypes forty years ago (six times successfully, the seventh 'failed' and hit Mach 6 with a runaway throttle) and literally invented hypersonic aircraft and hypersonic glide vehicles in the 60's.* I find your lack of faith disturbing.

The Russians have a better PR department and until recently had better follow through.

Also I believe Brahmos speed is only that slow at sea skimming altitude; doesn't it have a high altitude mode that is much faster?

Mea culpa on the Chinese ABM radars, I hadn't heard of them. I will do more research.


*EDIT: also as far as I know, the X-43 hydrogen powered scramjet holds the world record for airbreathing aircraft top speed, though admittedly the experiment was only ten seconds of powered flight. But it it remained under aerodynamic control until it hit its stall speed.

**Additional EDIT: There is also the RATTLRS program, which did successfully make an SR-71/D-21-esque turbine (again, old '60s hat for the US) that could ramp up to near hypersonic from a high subsonic start. Either nothing came from it or it went black, but the test program achieved all its goals.

Even an X15 qualifies as a hypersonic, albeit one with a man in it.

There is at least one engine under development in Britain that could guarantee very long hypersonic range without even using a scramjet.

https://www.reactionengines.co.uk/beyond-possible/sabre

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1 hour ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Even an X15 qualifies as a hypersonic, albeit one with a man in it.

There is at least one engine under development in Britain that could guarantee very long hypersonic range without even using a scramjet.

https://www.reactionengines.co.uk/beyond-possible/sabre

Well the X-15 was rather one of my points: the US broke the sound barrier and the hypersonic barrier before anyone else. And if you refer to a previous post, the US also managed to send a glider RV on an Atlas missile half a century ago.

I think the reason the US is playing catch up right now is because for all its various high speed research projects, at the end of the day someone asked "what does this buy us that a Trident can't?". And the answer was nothing. So all of the projects that I've listed really amounted to nothing (in terms of operational platforms we know of) and are largely victims of Trident D5 success: what are you going to do for me that Trident II can't do already? And for all nuclear purposes, the answer is nothing. So while the US has always been in the forefront of highspeed tech and literally invented most of it before the countries we're talking about now, it dropped most of its shit as being not cost effective for any role that could be covered with subsonic conventional bombs and D5s on the nuclear level. So it invented a lot of shit that went no where. Whitness the SWERVE glider that was literally just dusted off from the early 80's and suddenly rushed to service...it's a design bordering on four decades old. It just wasn't useful in its day. ASALM is another great example: it was practically the Zircon of its day, in 1980. So the idea that the US "can't do hypersonic" is to ignore a lot of history. The US slacked off and never pursued its successful, very supersonic designs and now is paying for it. But the research was done and records were made; its just no one made a weapon out of any of it.

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12 minutes ago, Josh said:

We used to have a lot more engineers on this board.

Now you could count them with the fingers of two hands, and actually practicing engineering, with one hand.

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10 minutes ago, sunday said:

Now you could count them with the fingers of two hands, and actually practicing engineering, with one hand.

Honestly, between that and the politics, its why I only frequent a couple threads here now. I find secret projects to be more what tank used to be in the early oughts. No politics, hard moderation, and people who know aeronautics far better than me. Me getting into the military and political practicality of a FOBS system almost constitutes a personality clash there.

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7 hours ago, Josh said:

By that metric, the US should have always prioritized China over Russia and should prioritize India over China now.

Why? where they also trying to pressure/invade/destroy US allies and US forces and did they have that capability? There is more than one metric, but population is the main metric driving the economy and that drives capability.

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14 hours ago, Josh said:

So you think that the LRHW, AGM-183, and CPS programs are all going to fail in the next couple years and that the HACM program will be bogged down for a decade after one of two different weapons  demonstrators successfully hit Mach 5 with a 3D printed JP-7 fueled scramjet? The US successfully tested mach 4+ ASALM prototypes forty years ago (six times successfully, the seventh 'failed' and hit Mach 6 with a runaway throttle) and literally invented hypersonic aircraft and hypersonic glide vehicles in the 60's.* I find your lack of faith disturbing.

The Russians have a better PR department and until recently had better follow through.

 

To say that Russia does not have a technical advantage in hypersonics reminds me of anti-vax’s denial of covid 19. You’ve got your head in the sand if you do that. Russian technology is not always inferior to American technology, I’ll still state that Russia has a massive lead on hypersonics. It all goes back to the club anti ship missile from the 1990’s which had a supersonic final sprint mode. The Russian’s have improved on this missile wiliest the west didn't keep up in technology.

Until the US or other western countries field a production hypersonic missile rather than blue sky research like the CPS program. Only then will I eat my hat.

Latest US Hypersonic glide missile test failure

 

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/rocket-failure-delays-us-hypersonic-weapon-test-sources-2021-10-21/

Edited by TrustMe
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Once again, its dependent on people to prove that. Yes, Iskander is a very significant weapon, but there are questions on its effectiveness in the Armenian war, whether it was actually used and whether it actually hit anything if it did. Yes, there are later developments that can manoeuvre in flight, but we have not seen them demonstrated. Yes, we have seen a very Iskander like shape hung from a Mig31 and apparently fired, no we dont know if it hit the target or not.

Im not of the 5 inches high mindset, but im not of the 50 foot high mindset either. The Russians have a history of extreme duplicity in their weapon programs, since before WW2, and one has to be cynical about them. Yes, they might have a lead, but they never seem to have used it or demonstrated it. So perhaps not.

 

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2 hours ago, TrustMe said:

 

To say that Russia does not have a technical advantage in hypersonics reminds me of anti-vax’s denial of covid 19. You’ve got your head in the sand if you do that. Russian technology is not always inferior to American technology, I’ll still state that Russia has a massive lead on hypersonics. It all goes back to the club anti ship missile from the 1990’s which had a supersonic final sprint mode. The Russian’s have improved on this missile wiliest the west didn't keep up in technology.

.

I think the Chinese might be ahead of the Russians in hypersonics as well.   Insufficient details on this Chinese system though to tell for sure.

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1 hour ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Once again, its dependent on people to prove that. Yes, Iskander is a very significant weapon, but there are questions on its effectiveness in the Armenian war, whether it was actually used and whether it actually hit anything if it did.

The big disadvantage with Iskander is the cost per round.   It's basically a short ranged ballistic missile to reproduce one air launched munition.

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11 hours ago, Josh said:

I can't speak for the US military. Getting something to orbit the world and then deorbit suddenly, with the use of a 3rd stage, was something the Russians deployed in '67.

Puts it in the same class as Russian Avengard at the very least.  

Quote

Where did you get your information that the hypersonic glider they tested shares the same guidance system with the DF-21? 

I asked a question in response to the comments about the 24 mile miss of the intended target meaning that carriers yet have nothing to sweat.  The question is, do you think the Chinese are too stupid to be able to put a guidance package on this missile that can detect a carrier at 24 miles?   That's either a 'yes', you think they are too stupid to do that, or a 'no', you think they can probably make that work.
 

Quote

If the Chinese sink the US *surface* navy, US\ nuke boats and bombers still range where ever they want to and the Chinese are bottled up where they live, where as the US merely has to avoid the WestPAC. If that's the world Xi wants, I'm fine with it - they can have land wars in their own backyard and leave the rest of the world alone.

Sounds like an interesting script you have playing in your head.  Let me know if Hollywood takes you up on it.   

As I just explained, if China and the US were to smash each other's navies, then the US has lost Asia because it no longer has power projection capacity.  I don't think that B-21 bombers and H-20's exchanging payloads at continental ranges can substitute for the current US security system, meaning, that the US will be out of Asia.

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24 minutes ago, glenn239 said:

Puts it in the same class as Russian Avengard at the very least.  

I asked a question in response to the comments about the 24 mile miss of the intended target meaning that carriers yet have nothing to sweat.  The question is, do you think the Chinese are too stupid to be able to put a guidance package on this missile that can detect a carrier at 24 miles?   That's either a 'yes', you think they are too stupid to do that, or a 'no', you think they can probably make that work.
 

Sounds like an interesting script you have playing in your head.  Let me know if Hollywood takes you up on it.   

As I just explained, if China and the US were to smash each other's navies, then the US has lost Asia because it no longer has power projection capacity.  I don't think that B-21 bombers and H-20's exchanging payloads at continental ranges can substitute for the current US security system, meaning, that the US will be out of Asia.

Such a thing will trigger Japan's collective self-defense. 

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3 hours ago, glenn239 said:

I asked a question in response to the comments about the 24 mile miss of the intended target meaning that carriers yet have nothing to sweat.  The question is, do you think the Chinese are too stupid to be able to put a guidance package on this missile that can detect a carrier at 24 miles?   That's either a 'yes', you think they are too stupid to do that, or a 'no', you think they can probably make that work.

There's also the option for a "No, but..."

Like, do you think the carrier attack will be done with a nuclear warhead, and what, other than a retaliatory nuclear strike on China will be the answer?

If you think that the hypersonic missile will attack ther carrier with kinetic energy, you're proposing to reduce the targeting error from a CEP of 24 miles to 24 meters or better. In which case the answer is "No, the Chinese aren't too stupid, but this is a very hard task that will take them a good while to solve."

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24 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

Like, do you think the carrier attack will be done with a nuclear warhead, and what, other than a retaliatory nuclear strike on China will be the answer.

I think the trend in warfare is disabling military capacity with as few causalities lost as possible.  

Quote

If you think that the hypersonic missile will attack ther carrier with kinetic energy, you're proposing to reduce the targeting error from a CEP of 24 miles to 24 meters or better. In which case the answer is "No, the Chinese aren't too stupid, but this is a very hard task that will take them a good while to solve."

Ah, so you're saying that they have not already solved this problem even though the DF-21 has been operational for quite some time.

 

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9 hours ago, RETAC21 said:

Why? where they also trying to pressure/invade/destroy US allies and US forces and did they have that capability? There is more than one metric, but population is the main metric driving the economy and that drives capability.

Well by that metric, they are about to hit a wall. They will have a declining population inside the next five years, and India will overtake them in about the same time frame.

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15 minutes ago, Josh said:

Well by that metric, they are about to hit a wall. They will have a declining population inside the next five years, and India will overtake them in about the same time frame.

But then India needs to raise its per capita income to China's levels to become a serious contender

Year    2020
Nominal GDP capita ($)    China    10,484; India    1,965
PPP GDP capita (Int. $)    China    17,192; India    6,461

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