Chinese Hypersonic Developments (HGVs/HCMs)

Mohsin77

Senior Member
Registered Member
This has been a solved problem since the early DSP times. Actually, weather has never been a real issue for Satellite Early Warning Systems......simply because you would need the ballistic missiles to fly under the weather to avoid lighting up the sats like a Christmas tree..

How have you reached this conclusion, friend? The technology for this is well understood and in use by multiple nations (including China) for 50 years now..

Fair enough, I'll withdraw that particular objection. However, I will question how the OPIR solves the dilemma caused by FOBS in particular. Even if you detect it early, the fact that it's attacking from a vector which circumvents the first layers of defense (e.g. sea based AEGIS portrayed in the marketing slide) still remains the actual problem.
 

Dante80

Junior Member
Registered Member
Fair enough, I'll withdraw that particular objection. However, I will question how the OPIR solves the dilemma caused by FOBS in particular. Even if you detect it early, the fact that it's attacking from a vector which circumvents the first layers of defense (e.g. sea based AEGIS portrayed in the marketing slide) still remains the actual problem.
Yes that is indeed a challenge, but one that OPIR itself is not actually designed to tackle. OPIR as the successor to SBIRS is simply a Space Based Early Warning System, designed to detect, characterize and track threats. Countering said threats starts with early missile detection.

But ends with intercepting the target, and that is the job of other systems.
 
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AndrewS

Brigadier
Registered Member
Something interesting here

The cost of US Hypersonic weapons is running at approximately $50M each with $14.5 Billion in development costs

But if I look at a CSBA estimate from a few years ago, they had a 4000km boost-glide antiship missile at $1.3 Billion in R&D costs plus $23M per missile

One wonders how much Chinese weapons cost

The Pentagon cost office estimates the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike program consists of $10.1 billion in development, $11 billion in production and $400 million for related military construction. The Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon program is estimated at $4.4 billion for development and $2.5 billion for production. The office’s internal assessment, made available to Bloomberg News, shows an expected total of 66 missiles for the Army, which includes 48 development models, and 240 missiles for the Navy.

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Michaelsinodef

Senior Member
Registered Member
One wonders how much Chinese weapons cost
Less than whatever similar counterpart the US have. If there is no actual counter, eh, still less than if the US were to develop such a counter lol.

Big part of this is partly due to less corruption/less profit motive (more control over the weapon companies than US over lockhead/boeing/raytheon etc.)
 

Temstar

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Tang left Nasa in 1999, a year when mistrust of ethnic Chinese scientists reached a new height in the US.
Next time you run into people on the internet that want to argue it was Xi who soured relation with the west that's causing Chinese scientist purge

As for why he remained in the US to do consulting instead of move to China like say Qian Xuesen:
Tang was born in Chongqing, China’s wartime capital, to Zi Chang Tang, a Nationalist Army general. At the end of the Chinese civil war, his family moved to Taiwan and Brazil before eventually settling in the United States in the 1950s.
 

Overbom

Brigadier
Registered Member
Advancements on infrared sensors for hypersonic missiles
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Heat sensing at hypersonic speed is not easy, but China has made “a series of core technology breakthroughs that were proven effective in tests”, lead scientist Professor Yi Shihe wrote in a paper published on December 15 in domestic peer-reviewed journal Air and Space Defence.
The country’s hypersonic infrared missiles had already been used in a number of test flights – work that won Yi’s team a top national award for military science and technology from the People’s Liberation Army, according to an editor’s note that introduced Yi’s work in domestic journal Modern Defence Technology last June.
“Precision guidance with infrared imaging technology is a force multiplier for hypersonic weapons,” Yi said in a paper published in the journal.
The Chinese scientists put an air-blowing device in front of the infrared window to generate a thin membrane of cold air, reducing the heat on the glass.
 
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