052C/052D Class Destroyers

Max Demian said:

Unfortunately, there is little information available in the public domain on military radar systems.

One source useful for coarse comparisons, is the CMANO simulator database. China watchers will immediately spot quite a few errors, but that's mostly because the devs base their information on publicly available sources only.

The Type 346A is classified as comparable to Western 90's era radar technology, despite being an AESA:

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At the same time, the SPY-1D is classified as early 2000's technology, so somewhat better:

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SPY-6 is modeled as several generations more advanced than both:

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CMANO is a very impressive engine and relatively intuitive for simulations all things considered.

However the pitfall it suffers -- as with basically all wargaming simulators or even discussing conflict scenarios in words -- is the performance and relative performance of the systems it seeks to simulate, which naturally we do not know. Unfortunately that makes CMANO next to useless for simulating scenarios involving systems whose performance cannot be agreed upon by differing groups.

Bltizo said:

CMANO is a very impressive engine and relatively intuitive for simulations all things considered.

However the pitfall it suffers -- as with basically all wargaming simulators or even discussing conflict scenarios in words -- is the performance and relative performance of the systems it seeks to simulate, which naturally we do not know. Unfortunately that makes CMANO next to useless for simulating scenarios involving systems whose performance cannot be agreed upon by differing groups.

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That's pretty wordy for saying CMANO can be full of sh*t.

Tam said:

That's pretty wordy for saying CMANO can be full of sh*t.

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Well, yes, but they are still able to manage the way the various pieces of equipment act in a way that is fairly impressive.

Bltizo said:

Well, yes, but they are still able to manage the way the various pieces of equipment act in a way that is fairly impressive.

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Let's look at the Type 346A entry and see why it absolutely does not make any sense.





LDSD? LDSD stands for Look Down Shoot Down. What does LDSD have anything to do with naval radar? That's for aircraft radars. That's a major face palm over there.

What does the Type 346A have anything to do with Kvant? Did Kvant, a Ukrainian firm, did anything resembling like the Type 346A? They specialize mostly in ECM and ELINT equipment, their radar product, Delta M, is a mechanically rotating antenna for surface boat navigation. Another false Ukrainian connection.



ICWI implies that Type 346A is a fire control radar, which will have to operate in the C or X-band but it does not, it works on the S-band. ICWI is not a new technology, but Europeans only implemented this as an FCR approach in the Thales APAR, which is more of a mid 2000s technology product. So how could this be early 1990s technology? Furthermore the Type 346A is namely a search and track radar only, there is no identifiable provision for separate CWI arrays, and if the HHQ-9 use active homing seekers, then the technological level is similar to the Type 45 with its SAMPSON/Aster combination or the Kronos/EMPAR/Aster combination, and that puts it in the mid 2000s.

Obviously because it can look down and lock onto submarines /jk

The Type 346 should be from the early 90s though? It started design in early 80s.

That Thales and others took until mid 2000s to match it is not really relevant to when the 346 was made is it?

Tam said:

What does the Type 346A have anything to do with Kvant? Did Kvant, a Ukrainian firm, did anything resembling like the Type 346A? They specialize mostly in ECM and ELINT equipment, their radar product, Delta M, is a mechanically rotating antenna for surface boat navigation. Another false Ukrainian connection.

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I think they may have used this as the source. The conjecture there was that the Type 346 is a C-band or X-band radar.

Biscuits said:

Obviously because it can look down and lock onto submarines /jk

The Type 346 should be from the early 90s though? It started design in early 80s.

That Thales and others took until mid 2000s to match it is not really relevant to when the 346 was made is it?

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Just because the project started long ago, does not mean the technology inside it is the same. Otherwise I would say that your current Macbook Pro is 1980's technology because that's when the first Macintosh came out.

Genesis is completely irrelevant to what is ultimately placed into the system. Is your 2019 gaming PC 1980's technology because the PC was born in the '80s?

By the same token, SPY-1 is early 1970's technology because that's where it first came out, and it was developed prior to that.

Tam said:

By the same token, SPY-1 is early 1970's technology because that's where it first came out, and it was developed prior to that.

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I believe that in-game, the sensor generation is a crude measure of how susceptible the sensors are to OECM and/or EMP. Some info can be found here:

SPY-1D(v5) is considerably more evolved than the first iterations of the radar.

CMANO database is quite full of shit. Still a good game, tho.
You guys could go to their forums and ask the devs to update their Chinese entries with our assembled knowledge here. Might or might not work.

Max Demian said:

I think they may have used this

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as the source. The conjecture there was that the Type 346 is a C-band or X-band radar.

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I don't understand the grounds for their conjecture. Its harder to make an element smaller than it is bigger, due to the need to miniaturize the components within the element. That's why the first AESAs had longer bands, such as the L-band OPS-24 on the Murasame class.

The higher the frequency, the smaller the element has to be. If you see metric wave AESA, expect metric wave size elements, which is why each element takes the form of an entire Yagi antenna. An S-band elements would have to be at least half the size of its bandwidth. A C-band element would have to be smaller, and an X-band element even smaller. You cannot make an S-band element smaller than it needs to be and still be an S-band element. For a large array, if you go with a C or X-band, that's a huge amount of elements you are packing, the sheer density would seriously raise the cost of the system its power and its cooling requirements. A C or X band array of the Type 346's size would even be more technologically challenging than an S-band.

There is no reason to contradict Chinese sources, given their track record when it comes to versus Western conjecture about the prophesied accuracy of Chinese military developments.

Worth to read the Wiki entry for the radar, the grammar construction of the article reads like it came from a Chinese source. The 325km range being quoted on the CMANO article actually came from for the S-band proposal from 14 institute --- itself won't be the final range of the final product, much less evolved a version ahead like the 346A --- and not the C-band proposal of 23 Institute. Again, the CMANO entry is self contradictory taking the S-band radar's range and then claiming its a C-band.



And for the KVANT phase array? It looks like this. Has no physical resemblance to the Type 346 other than being a four faced array. Its also for a corvette.