I heard that they call themselves "Pan Green"?
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
- Start date
Like the Incredible Hulk they are green all over. No wonder they are so angry all the time.
How expensive could it be? It's still an artillery gun after all, so wouldn't be anywhere near as expensive as a Destroyer for example.
I think it makes more sense to mount this on a ship. So the ship uses its mobility to prevent being hit and the gun can be aimed via the ship itself. It could start out in Wuhan for example, or be moved to heavily defended Shanghai, which should allow targets in Japan to be reached.
China already has lots of affordable strike options for Taiwan in volume, whereas options for Japan are far more limited. A similar calculation would apply to the Philippines
A fix mount on a ship? Like a Lord-Clive class monitor?
That would be a very narrow use case. If it's ship-mounted then a Shilao-class BB/BC would be the most flexible platform. 400mm is 16 inch and slapping three 16" guns in a turret is certainly doable.
This was the point that Shilao was trying to make with his scenario as well. He was saying thanks to Trump-class if we're doing this BB thing again then China has the technology ready to go to to make a much more convincing modern day BB than Trump-class, which he considers an insult to the "battleship" name.
A fix mount on a ship? Like a Lord-Clive class monitor?
That would be a very narrow use case. If it's ship-mounted then a Shilao-class BB/BC would be the most flexible platform. 400mm is 16 inch and slapping three 16" guns in a turret is certainly doable.
This was the point that Shilao was trying to make with his scenario as well. He was saying thanks to Trump-class if we're doing this BB thing again then China has the technology ready to go to to make a much more convincing modern day BB than Trump-class, which he considers an insult to the "battleship" name.
It's an artillery gun with a 1200km range, so I don't understand how it would suffer from narrow use cases.
Just draw a 1200km range circle from the Chinese coastline...
If it could actually deliver accurate strikes to 1000km+ range, I could see this replacing some of the SRBMs especially for mass strikes. Bonus if it comes on a ship so you could do this basically anywhere.
Though I somehow feel like a whole BB/BBG built around one platform seems rather expensive and is known to lead to questionable results, *cough* *cough* Zumwalt...
Fully agreed. Monitor certainly is suitable for only very narrow use cases, as they are only useful for shore bombardments. Besides, if Taiwan (or even the Ryukyus) is/are concered, China wouldn't even need a monitor-based supergun. A land-based supergun would've been sufficient.
If there should be a need to base the supergun on a surface platform, then it would be far better to just base it on a proper sea-going warship.
In the meantime, if it was up to me - Then having 2x turrets with 3x superguns each, 64-80x 850mm UVLS cells (in 4x2 groupings) and 12-24x 1200mm LVLS cells (in 3x2 groupings) could be ideal for a ~40000-ton platform.
There's no need for the platform to be a battleship.
If it's just a single gun and ammunition system, could you fit this onto a small, low-cost commercial hull?
Such a ship would be operating under land-based SAM and air cover for most of the time anyway, given a 1200km range.
Again, how can a 400mm gun with a 1200km range with affordable ammunition have very narrow use cases?
It can range over all sorts of targets over the 1st Island Chain. Seaports, runways, factories, power plants, military bases, etc etc
There's literally hundreds of thousands of potential targets.