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Title: China's new super missile targets U.S. carriers
Category: Military
Posted By: Canadian_Mind
Date: 2009-04-02 14:28:00

   

This is not good...

   

While this is troubling, it's not the first nor the last missle to be designed to take out US carriers.

In actuallity it's one thing to target a Carrier.

It's another to get the missle through to the target.

   

Which is what this missle was designed to do. I dunno if the american anti-ballistic missle system is able to defeat em or not.

A better question is what kind of wrhead is going to be leathal to a 70 000 tonne ship. It takes a conventional missle about 10 minutes to half an hour to sink a 5 000 tonne ship after a single, direct hit.

   

I think a conventional warhead would have to be in the order of 10,000 pounds of explosives (i.e. not including the weight of the armour penetration covering) to have a hope in hell of sinking a carrier. It would probably result in an operational kill but I'm not sure if that's the goal or not. A tactical nuclear warhead would be much more effective for the weapon's purpose (if China is going to attack the U.S. carriers it might as well break out the tactical nukes because we're all screwed anyway). A conventional missile would have to be the size of an ICBM in order to travel 1,200 miles at Mach 10 (!) with that sized conventional warhead plus guidance systems, fuel, etc. The Chinese are claiming the missile has high manoeverability and a low RCS, so my money would be on tactical nuclear warhead.

   

My bet would be that in a real war-time operation it doesn't work like they claim it will. A weapons system of this type NEVER lives up to the hype. Anyone remember the first generation Patriot missle? If it hit anything it was almost blind luck!

   

You would probably need a few missle strikes to adequately damage a carrier.

I'll bet they Chinese took the plans from the Russian AS-4 Kitchen,with some obvious improvements of course.

   

The Patriot was pretty good at smoking RAF Tornado's however...

   

It wouldn't surprise me but I never heard of that particular incident.

   

The Patriot somehow classified a RAF Tornado GR4 as an ARM, it was a major screw up by the guys and gals down at Raytheon.

The Tornado was also flying with its IFF off, for some reason.

Pariot also nailed a Hornet.

   

Gulf War Part 1?

   

Part 2

   

Oh I have very little faith in Chinese weapon engineers to construct something reliable. I have all the confidence in the world they can reverse engineer something, but to actually come up with something unique and workable? Well, let's just say their track record speaks for itself. However I suppose the fear of something that could be capable of what they claim can be enough for them to be taken seriously (seeing how no one else has ever built something that can do what they claim it can do).

   

So let's say the missile works, the major flaw to this is that they'd probably be big enough that either the missiles or launch sites/bases are known, like coasted naval bases, and if World War III starts, the Chinese might sink the one carrier in the area before these weapons are knocked out by B-2s

   

Has anyone seen this missile in action?

   

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