I don't know where else to ask this but.... how exactly is China funding so many of these massive projects simultaneously? Building these ginormous radars ain't cheap at all, even if you have the advantage of China's economies of scale.
PLA AEW&C, SIGINT, EW and MPA thread
- Thread starter Sczepan
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You're aware that China has the largest economy in the world, right?
By PPP at least, yes. But even still, that's way too much money especially on R&D which seems to be showing no signs of slowing down in China
There's a huge glut (for want of a better word) of engineering talent that needs to be kept busy as well.
Tech was always there (though processing false positives got obviously better), it's just normally not the ideal band to work with.
Untill dark times of massed stealth, of course.
Huge PPP GDP, kept to a significant part away from speculation; fruits of make in China 2025.
Speaking cynically, also, it isn't really just how good China is, it's how low rest of traditional mic quality has fallen over decades.
Which is certainly far, far from being a bad thing. If anything, this is the perfect showcase of China's steadily surging prowess in human, capital and technological resources on the world stage.
Remember how many X-planes and Y-planes that the US had pumped out during the height of the Cold War? Yeah.
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right, that's what I was thinking. They just got so much better with processing and algo to get usable data for better resolution of the targets.
Also, for dual band solutions, maybe that's only something they figured out more recently and how to have receivers efficiently filter out signals that are not in the band it's sending. IDK, that seems possible.
I'm not sure how they implement this. Do you 1 set of antenna that have separate power amplifiers for 2 different bands and 1 layer that does filters and decide what to filter out and then process that.
Or do you have separate antennas? Not sure if that's how it works. Just thinking this through in my mind.
I also do think that based on what I've seen previously, you do need larger antenna for VHF band, so that could be the reason you can only do it on these back to back antenna.
Ask data questions quantitatively, not qualitatively. First, clarify how much you think it cost, then discuss how much is "too much"
It is different way of working and hypercompetition.
I talk from experience of working in a western company have big footprint in both Europe and North America. Here is an example, in company A there are two people assgined to a task, they take endless time to decide between solution A and B without actually producing anything in time span of X. In company B, two people cann't agree with solutions, so one went A, the other went B, they got two products of different performance for different applications in time span X. Costing same amount of money (norminal) and same menpower (PPP), company A got nothing, B got two products. US and many other countries are company A, China is company B.
To summerize, China is not spending much more resources than the west, it is just Chinese produce things in most of time while westerners wasting the time in circling around, reinventing wheels, insisting on "I know better" and blaming one another. And to be bluntly frank, American cooperate culture is worse than western Europeans in these behaviours.
610 radar is a good example. Model A and Model B were developed by two research institutes based on the same Air Force requirement for an anti-stealth, high-mobility radar.
Competition kept the two research institutes from neglecting their duties. The PLA's air defense system is large enough to accommodate two radars with close performance, different technical approaches and distinct characteristics, each serving the same purpose. This prevented the technical achievements from being shelved due to a failed bid.