AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
I found this pic of a model of a supposed Chinese Destroyer. I hope there are better pics out there if anyone can post them.
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More like future Chinese frigate. Count the number of missiles aimed to one side.
Well actually aside 052C and 051C, most of the chinese DDGs have 16 missiles. But the number of SSMs is hardly the factor which determines wheter one ship is either frigate or destroyer. For example the standart numbers of SSMs onboard western ships seems to be 8 wheter its a missile FAC or cruiser or anything between.
Tough chinese have used 16 missiles per DDGs earlier, there are serious factors which speaks against them in this sort of arragment as seen in the model.
Reason why chinese ships have 16 missiles is becouse there is room for them. All chinese destroyers are despite their modern hull lines, from layout point of view rather conventional. In otherwords all have the superstructures arranged in the ways as old WWII era destroyers (adopting this from Luda) where the were caps between the superstructures to hold heavy torbedobanks...and before you start yelling "there goes golly again bashing chinese ships", remember I'm talking simply about layouts, which has nothing to do with capabilities.
Now altough the shipdesigns have envolved in china, the layout has remained somewhat similar with 052s and in 051B/C classes. As there is no longer torbedoes (or the tripple SSM launchers that substituted torpedoes in the Ludas) there is quite alot of room relatively low in the top-weight point of view. This gives the designs ability to incorporate far more SSMs than in somewhat more modern (layout point of view) DDGs.
But this new model reperesents bit different type of thinking. Actually its leap of generations ahead in the layout thinking. The most modern warships nowadays tend to have large superstructures continuing smoothly from the hull and taking about 2/3 of the whole ship lenght. In this type of layout there is no longer any room for larger caps to field large ammount of SSMs. Couped with the fact that the caps needs to be wrapped inside the superstructual covering, the room for tradditional SSMs is even smaller. And on the top of all, the chinese SSMs, YJ83 and YJ63 are larger and more volume intensive than lets say Harpoons. So thus even if the model is DDG, it isen't any wonder that it carries only 8 SSMs but in countery it doesen't make it anyway inferior to any counterpory DDGs however.
VLS is ideal to any modern type of large warships but at the moment only Russian/Soviets have developted VLS SSMs. But thats due the fact that russians have been investing SSMs far greater efforts than western navies and china is just started its career in the modern militarypower league.
Could be anything from Visby size corvette to destroyer...But I'm sure interesting to see the full image of this model and knowing where the model comes from.
Assuming first that this is not a hoax made with a Visby plastic model, I would say the size of the YJ-83s and being situated across and staggered like that means there is substantial width on the hull that would not suggest a small corvette, but at least a frigate or a destroyer.