2025 Victory Day parade thread (workup, 3rd Sept)

[bsdnf]

I wonder If they will finally unveil the DF100 successor (High Mach Hypersonic).

Meanwhile DF100 with another rare apperance.
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air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile program clearly exists. Perhaps it will be unveiled in a month, or perhaps during the 2029 military parade, but it won't be too far off.

 

[Blitzo]

Shilao: The Americans are working on Mako and C-HGB, trying to catch up with the PLA using not advanced methods & performance, and they haven't succeeded yet. After a month, they will see some crazy things that will make them realize that the gap is even widening.

Yankee: Americans say Russia's air-breathing and bi-conical hypersonic missiles are barbaric, so they have to develop HGV as a smart/civilized/elegant/whatever way of countermeasure. The PLA's bi-conical and HGV hypersonic missiles are barbaric, so they're developing HACM as a countermeasure. What if the PLA just show air-breathing hypersonic a month later? Then Who's barbaric? Who's civilized?

It would be a very PLA move to not actually show us what the missiles look like and only display the TELs and missile tubes.

That said if the new systems are that significant and the PLA do want to send a message, there are ways of deliberately showing what the missiles look like, if they really want to show them.

 

[bebops]

Speaking of which, Mako is meant to be deployable on smaller aerial platforms (i.e. fighters).

Hopefully, we can see what China's counterpart(s) to the Mako is/are like. The PLAAF and PLANAF would have vastly expanded hypersonic strike options available to them (J-16, J-15, J-20, J-35/A, 6th-gens and UCAVs), instead of having to rely solely on the H-6K/J/Ns.

The strike range and speed penalties compared to larger, more "proper" hypersonic missiles are, of course, pretty evident and to be expected (<<1000 kilometers, low-hypersonic speeds). Despite the shortcomings, the deployment flexibility and versatility of such missiles cannot be overstated.



The DF-17 (or specifically, the DF-ZF HGV) would've had its overall design largely frozen no latter than the early-2010s, given its purported first flight in 2014. There has been about a decade or more of further development works taking place since then.

With this in mind, we shouldn't be surprised if there's already a successor to the DF-17 that's well in the works, if not about to enter service with the PLARF. Personally, I do kinda anticipate/hope for this to realise within the next few years.

(And if the DF-27 utilizes the same HGV as the DF-17, then similar developments can be anticipated too.)

One possible avenue would be for the new HGV design to effectively merge the advantages of the presently-deployed waverider and dual-conical HGV designs, while also negating their respective disadvantages.

Pl15 and Pl16 can travel hypersonic speed at 5+mach. Is that considered China's Mako counterpart? or What can Mako do differently that Pl15 cannot.

 

[Blitzo]

Pl15 and Pl16 can travel hypersonic speed at 5+mach. Is that considered China's Mako counterpart? or What can Mako do differently that Pl15 cannot.

PL-15/16 are air to air missiles while Mako is an air to surface missile.

 

[ZeEa5KPul]

Basically tonight they again reinforced the message from previous stream: DF-27 will not be the only hypersonic weapon on display this time
They said things are advancing so fast that DF-17 is now considered to be no longer worthy of being included in parades.

Yankee told an amusing story that after DF-17 went into service, the brass looked at its stats and concluded that it was "too accurate" for its own good. Their logic was this degree of accuracy isn't really needed and if that criteria was loosened then perhaps a less accurate but cheaper alternative DF-17 could have resulted and be even more suitable for even larger scale production.

See, this right here is the problem with the PLA: level 100 tech with zero imagination. What kind of general looks at a hypersonic missile accurate enough to hit a specific vehicle in a moving convoy and thinks "too accurate" instead of "decapitation strike"? All they can think is spam.

 

[LawLeadsToPeace]

See, this right here is the problem with the PLA: level 100 tech with zero imagination. What kind of general looks at a hypersonic missile accurate enough to hit a specific vehicle in a moving convoy and thinks "too accurate" instead of "decapitation strike"? All they can think is spam.

Playing Devil’s Advocate, the PLA officers must be thinking about logistics, and they aren’t wrong. Yes, during live fire exercises, the DF-17 can hit a “paper target” very accurately and reliably. However, in wartime, the missile will be facing anti-ballistic missile defenses, and one can only hypothesize what are the true stats of those defenses. Plus, they may be factoring in the worst case scenario of the US military managing to contest mainland China‘s airspace. For example, the Houthis have almost completely depleted the US of their ballistic missile defenses. However, they couldn’t follow up and destroy the US fleet due to the lack of reserve missiles, drones, and launchers. The same thing happened to Iran who lacked such weaponry not only due to production limitations, but also Israeli ISR and air strikes.

 

[Blitzo]

See, this right here is the problem with the PLA: level 100 tech with zero imagination. What kind of general looks at a hypersonic missile accurate enough to hit a specific vehicle in a moving convoy and thinks "too accurate" instead of "decapitation strike"? All they can think is spam.

It actually makes sense -- one doesn't want to maximize all desirable statistics and performance regimes to the extreme if they are already able to meet requirements, especially if being able to match performance with target requirements can reduce costs and increase procurement scale or use the freed up money for other purposes.

Having too much of a good thing is not always desirable especially if it has a cost to it

 

[REautomaton]

See, this right here is the problem with the PLA: level 100 tech with zero imagination. What kind of general looks at a hypersonic missile accurate enough to hit a specific vehicle in a moving convoy and thinks "too accurate" instead of "decapitation strike"? All they can think is spam.

That Yankee mentioned during the livestream that when it comes to hitting Taiwanese military infrastructure, there's practically no difference between 5m and 1m precision. I kinda get the logic—maybe the DF-17 wasn't designed for mobile/high-precision targets in the first place, so even if it has that level of accuracy, it wouldn't really impact its combat effectiveness. If you want the kind of results you're talking about, then the PLARF probably has a whole different system specifically built for that role, rather than trying to force the DF-17—which wasn't optimized for it—into the mission. That kind of design would be way too "middle-of-the-road"—not cheap enough, not efficient enough.

 

[zyklon]

See, this right here is the problem with the PLA: level 100 tech with zero imagination. What kind of general looks at a hypersonic missile accurate enough to hit a specific vehicle in a moving convoy and thinks "too accurate" instead of "decapitation strike"? All they can think is spam.

It actually makes sense -- one doesn't want to maximize all desirable statistics and performance regimes to the extreme if they are already able to meet requirements, especially if being able to match performance with target requirements can reduce costs and increase procurement scale or use the freed up money for other purposes.

Having too much of a good thing is not always desirable especially if it has a cost to it

Thanks to the law of diminishing marginal returns — sometimes or at some point — a 20% or even 10% gain in performance for a specific parameter can increase the cost of certain relevant subsystems by 80% or 90%.

Sometimes such a tradeoff is worth it, sometimes it isn't.

 

[ZeEa5KPul]

It actually makes sense -- one doesn't want to maximize all desirable statistics and performance regimes to the extreme if they are already able to meet requirements, especially if being able to match performance with target requirements can reduce costs and increase procurement scale or use the freed up money for other purposes.

Having too much of a good thing is not always desirable especially if it has a cost to it

That Yankee mentioned during the livestream that when it comes to hitting Taiwanese military infrastructure, there's practically no difference between 5m and 1m precision. I kinda get the logic—maybe the DF-17 wasn't designed for mobile/high-precision targets in the first place, so even if it has that level of accuracy, it wouldn't really impact its combat effectiveness. If you want the kind of results you're talking about, then the PLARF probably has a whole different system specifically built for that role, rather than trying to force the DF-17—which wasn't optimized for it—into the mission. That kind of design would be way too "middle-of-the-road"—not cheap enough, not efficient enough.

The right way to handle cost is through engineering innovation and manufacturing scaling rather than gimping the system. The improved capabilities of the weapon expands its mission set from hitting large, fixed installations to targeting mobile/small time sensitive targets. This makes it a much bigger problem to enemy planners than a more limited system would be.

It also seems to me that most of the cost is paid up front to develop the sensors and flight control laws to steer an HGV; once that's paid, it's just a matter of printing the sensor electronics and loading the FCS. There would be very little savings now in limiting the DF-17.