Couldn't you say the same about Chinese cruise missiles and thus the 1/10 ratio is still in effect?
055 DDG Large Destroyer Thread
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I don't know. Although turbojet and turbofan engines are complicated machines. Doubt China can get the costs down much.
The ones used on missiles are tiny, and they are only rated for a one time flight. You're not building a 2000 hour before overhaul engine here, you're building a disposable engine. China managed to develop such engines even back in the nineties with examples like the YJ-82 and YJ-63 antiship missiles, and putting a turbojet on a Seersucker.
Ramjet engines can be cheaper because they have no moving parts. It's nothing more than a glorified air tunnel.
Ballistic missiles are for busting the gate open while cruise missiles are for flooding through the gate after its busted open. Both are complementary.
China can also produce cheaper cruise missiles by converting them from obsolete or older antiship missiles. For example YJ-83s.
The Kirov-class battlecruiser had 20 "shipwreck"missiles each weighing 7,000 kg or 140,000 kg worth of AShM.
If we assume the YJ-21 missile weighs 4,000 kg then it would take 35 of them to equal 20 "shipwreck" missiles at least in regards to mass equivalent. I assume it is possible for a Type 055 destroyer to carry 35 YJ-21 missiles. How's that for "busting the gate open", Is this reasonable?
How much does a YJ-21 missile weigh?
I don't know what kind of balance issues 055 might have by having too many hypersonic missiles. However, I think @Patchwork_Chimera and Shilao's podcast both mentioned the importance in having a variety of different missiles with different flight profiles. As such, if you have something with as many large VLS as 055. You could have it carry for example:
32 hypersonic anti-ship missile
32 YJ-18
16 LRASM type of anti-ship missile
16 YJ-18A (for land attack)
64 555 (quad packed)
Now in reality, I doubt they will pack it with this much fire power, but that's the flexibility they will have. That's tremendous amount of breadth in striking power when compared against even PLARF brigade and H-6K brigades. 055 in every way is like a Kirov on steroid. The ability to launch many missiles at the same time is what's really scary about 055. Now, if you have 4 of these guys looking to attack a carrier group and being provided coordination by WZ-8 and receiving AAW/ASW cover from rest of the CSG.
Even USN is not setup to defend against 100 hypersonic AShm type of saturation attacks.
So I think one thing about having multiple attack vectors that hasn’t been brought up yet is that the point isn’t to strain an air defense system enough to land a guarantee kill shot, but to ensure that you get at least one hit somewhere, whether it’s a ship killer or not. Because even if you can’t sink a ship with one hit, you really only need one hit to degrade or even cripple a ship’s ability to contribute to a flotilla’s overall defensive net. Taking out even some of the radars or some of the VLCs or enough of the crew on one destroyer to impede effective operations will reduce efficacy of the flotilla by some multiplicative factor. And that makes the overall system more vulnerable to further hits. So single point failures can cascade very quickly to total failure, which means the side that can inflict damage to the other’s defensive system soonest will tend to build irreversible momentum faster. Systems based combat is an exponential, not linear, dynamic. What this means in a practical sense is that an AshBM or a hypersonic missile that fits into the 055’s VLC doesn’t need to have the same destructive power as a YJ-18. It just needs to make it more likely that any one missile can penetrate the defensive net.
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I'm not sure how useful of a comparison this is. Missiles aren't darts you throw at people at the hopes of using the kinetic force to damage them. The punch of the missiles comes in the explosives and its efficacy comes from its ability to hit the target whilst evading or bypassing countermeasures. I don't think there's a single vessel that has ever existed that would stay afloat after being hit with 20 shipwreck missiles from the Kirov, but those missiles do have to make it to the vessels and detonate close enough to inflict considerable damage. I would imagine, at the very least, that the considerable more mature Chinese AI and microprocessor industry should make their missile tech much more capable than their Russian equivalents and therefore any comparison that draws on the weight of the missiles, of all things, would be largely meaningless.
I'm also really not sure about this particular salvo order. The primary benefit of sea-skimming missiles is the fact that they can get really, really close to ships (in naval terms, so several dozen kilometers) before they can be cued by radar suites but they are relatively easy to intercept when they have been detected. Ballistic missiles, on the other hand, are really hard to intercept but easy to detect (since they fly so high). I don't know why the Chinese navy would launch the easy to detect missile first and then follow up with the more easily intercepted but better concealed missile. It would make much more sense to open with the stealthier missiles to attempt system degradation and then follow up with a ballistic missile than the other way round. Launching ballistic missiles at the opening would just tell the defending fleet that they are being attack and cause them to jump to battle-stations, giving them a longer period of time to attempt to intercept the sea-skimmers.
There's also the cost. As I recall, China can make sea skimmers for several million and their DFs for around a hundred million. It just makes more economic sense, assuming you don't want to open up a synchronized salvo to attempt to overwhelm air defenses, to start with the cheaper missiles to probe the system and only follow up with the more expensive one if the cruise missiles don't achieve their objectives.
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