Chinese UCAV/CCA/flying wing drones (ISR, A2A, A2G)

I imagine because no one sees a runway it’s not so easily spotted from above especially because it’s mobile. The current suicide drones don’t have a lot of explosive power. Look at what Israel did in Gaza. You know they wanted to use the big bombs to level entire multi-story buildings. You want that kind of power in a suicide drone.

Update. There are now 4 cars, and the cars have logos on their doors. The logos say 北京理工大学 (Beijing Institute of Technology)

Also, are these different cars?! I cannot tell if they are or if it's just the shading that's a bit different.

AssassinsMace said:

I imagine because no one sees a runway it’s not so easily spotted from above especially because it’s mobile. The current suicide drones don’t have a lot of explosive power. Look at what Israel did in Gaza. You know they wanted to use the big bombs to level entire multi-story buildings. You want that kind of power in a suicide drone.

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A two ton "suicide drone" would certainly be an interesting proposition although at that weight I would put it closer towards a proper cruise missile (Honestly the distinction was never that big in the first place). If we assume the same warhead/mass ratio as a shaheed we are looking at a 500kg warhead, which as shown by the legendary FAB is easily enough to destroy a large building.

The nice part about a launching system like this is that you can use full size wings, that gets you a lot more range and fuel compared to something like a tomahawk that has to fit in a VLS cell. I imagine it wouldn't be infeasible to get 4000km out of a scaled up shaheed type design, plenty to Guam and other 2IC targets.

Is it feasible to have a similar truck type layout for arrest-landing? Maybe more than one rows if necessary?

no_name said:

Is it feasible to have a similar truck type layout for arrest-landing? Maybe more than one rows if necessary?

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If we ignore the "guide the drone to the correct heading and glide slope" part, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible from an engineering PoV. Hell since imo you can pretty easily integrate guidance antennas (not necessarily the same as systems currently in-use but say something similar to ACLS just tailored to truck-use) I don't think even that part is particularly troublesome. Of course the system would have a hard time deploying with any significant slopes and it'd probably need flat terrain around it to make sure drones don't just fly into a mountain when on a landing course (normal airfields you have more or less fixed terrain is around the runway; carriers operate in the ocean but these deployable systems would need to be more careful with what's around it) but even with those limitations it would be super useful,

no_name said:

Is it feasible to have a similar truck type layout for arrest-landing? Maybe more than one rows if necessary?

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They were talks about a truck mounted net for use on highways which in China are all spec'd to allow for easy conversion to runways.

AssassinsMace said:

I imagine because no one sees a runway it’s not so easily spotted from above especially because it’s mobile. The current suicide drones don’t have a lot of explosive power. Look at what Israel did in Gaza. You know they wanted to use the big bombs to level entire multi-story buildings. You want that kind of power in a suicide drone.

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There are a lot of soft targets where a small warhead is fine.

The Geran 2 is being listed as:

2500 km with a 52 kg warhead
1000 km with a 90 kg warhead

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Also, remember that Israel wants to get rid of the Palestinians, one way or another, and then take their land.
You have serving Israeli government ministers openly and publicly saying they want to perpetrate an actual genocide, yet they have not been removed.
So we can see that Israel does want to destroy every building in Gaza, and that the US was actively supplying weapons to Israel to do this.

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In comparison, for China, it only makes sense to destroy multi-storey buildings when faced with urban warfare, which effectively means Taiwan. But the goal is not outright destruction because:

1. There will be other higher priority targets than every single building
2. Afterwards, China expects to incorporate Taiwan, so there's no point inflicting unnecessary destruction
3. There are a lot of personal and business relations between China and Taiwan, so again, there's no point inflicting unnecessary deaths.

So there should be a lot less demand for heavy munitions to destroy every building.

And for missions to carry heavy missions, using spare, second-line, 4th-gen aircraft to deliver heavy glide bombs is likely the most cost-effective option.

So why don't you guys start discussing this mysterious little cruise missile that has already been seen in the 9/3 parade?

Squadson said:

So why don't you guys start discussing this mysterious little cruise missile that has already been seen in the 9/3 parade?

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I was actually wondering about this even. Was anyone able to ever find out which specific cruise missile model this is?

They loaded that mobile catapults and the CCA (mockup?) onto the container ship! Those CCAs might not necessarily be solely intended for 076.