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

[ACuriousPLAFan]

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.

In contrary, I do believe that the DF-17 is meant to engage mobile targets. Otherwise, they wouldn't bother setting up target platform-on-rails in the middle of nowhere in Western China.

However, the key distinction would be said mobile targets would be larger-sized, such as a warship that is at least FFG-sized. This means that if the DF-17's CEP is - Let's say, 5 meters instead of 1 or 2 meters - A damaging hit is still going to be guaranteed, as long as the missile is aimed largely at the central regions of the warship.

I mean, technically you could also use a DF-17 to target, say, the Wanwanese rebel leader's motorcade. But why bother with that 1 or 2-meter CEP, when the warhead is big enough to generate a large enough fireball and shockwave that would engulf and devastate the key segments of the motorcate, as long as the missile strikes in the immediate vicinity of the VVIP cars carrying the targets? Let alone the fact where there are plenty of better options available at the PLA's disposal jobs like this.

I think that while everyone wants the best possible parameters and solutions for everything, but reality rarely enables that.

 

[Blitzo]

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.

Considering most of the upfront development was already done, of course it is a case that there is not much reason to actively try and limit the DF-17 now, however it is logical to look back on the development of DF-17 and realize that if they perhaps committed less upfront money to certain components, subsystems or tests, then they could have resulted in a missile that still met their requirements while being a bit more affordable than what they have now.

That is to say, this isn't a cost issue per se, but rather something to feed back into future project development to better match performance with requirements.

In this case, DF-17 seemingly exceeding its requirements has not been greatly detrimental to the program or the military service as a whole because they've still been able to procure it at relatively good scale. But one can also easily imagine if they'd developed it in too ambitious a manner, that they ended up with a product which per unit may be a highly capable system and greatly exceed their requirements, but is too expensive to be procured at the scale that they want, and where "engineering innovation" and "scaling" is unable to practically bring the cost down to an acceptable margin within the bounds of what was allocated to fund the project as is.