Sorry…..No clue…..Don’t thing thats a weapon…..some sorta pod….Google (or any of our folks here) should be able shed some light on that…

actually, come to think of it, that pod has been seen before on the JH7A mockup. but i seem to have lost the pic after my computer crashed last week.

The kh-55 only flys at medium altitude for the first part of its flight. Why do you think the Iranians are stupid? They are hardly going to build a weapon to fly at 10,000m all the way to the target.

no, just point out the rather simplistic view you were taking on how hard it is to build a modren cruise missile.

Yes, and basic computer maps used for navigation can be compiled from information bought from most countries with operational satellite systems… the Russians for a start. With the odd inflight navigation fix periodically throughout its flight would be good enough for a 3,000km flight. A simple low powered altimeter radio system it could avoid the ground quite easily.

and do you know how long it took for the americans and russians to develop sensor and computing packages that would allow a missile’s onboard computer to match those maps with the real world its flying in?

no simple radio is going to give you anything like the details your missile will need to know to be able to figure out where it is and where it should go next.

Perhaps more to do with their priorities? I mean an invasion of Taiwan would make anti shipping weapons more useful than cruise weapons. Ballisitic weapons like scud based missiles would be much harder for Taiwan to stop and a low flying sub sonic missile flying over water with no hills to hide behind across the straits.

cruise missiles are actually far better first strike weapons. not only are the far more accurate compared to BMs, they are much more difficult for SAMs and other air defences to even target never mind attempt to engage. then of course, there is the matter of the price tag.

the only way to effectively deal with cruise missiles is to use AWACS to guide in fighters. even then its hard for the fighters’ AAMs to engage the missiles. add in some of your own fighters at high altitude with BVRAAMs and you would quickly find that trying to intercept cruise missiles over water is a pretty bad idea for the defending side.

On the contrary, it is very simple and as long as it is not used in a vehicle that requires rapid or repeated throttle changes it is very reliable and very fuel efficient… and cheap enough to mass produce in the millions. For long range subsonic flight it is actually hard to beat.

and funnily enough, no one had been using pulsejets on their cruise missiles for decades.

only med/high altitude cruising doesnt require rapid throttle changes. when flying nap of the earth very close to mountains, a little throttle control becomes pretty neccessary.

Really? Try computer programming. All the parts of Windows probably worked when they were submitted, but when put together all of a sudden there are problems… millions of problems. Obviously they are tested missiles… they worked or they wouldn’t have been built, but how does Iran know the FSB didn’t have a hand in making sure some parts were left out or were faulty?

except these are missiles and not computer programmes.

weapons systems like cruise missiles are designed to be simple for the obvious reasons of cost saving and reduced melfunction probablity since there are fewer places where things can go wrong.

you can easily break a cruise missile down to its functional components and test each. if the sensors work, the engines run, the computer checks out and all the wiring is in order, there’s not a great many other places where a problem might arise. and all of those can be easily checked as well.

as for FSB tempering. well considering the fact that the break up of the USSR wasnt exactly a planned event, and the small issue that ukrian has been an independent country ever since, there’s not much of a chance of that happening.

had the FSB, or any other russian orginisation had any idea of what was going to happen during the last days and weeks of the USSR, the KH55s and all the other military hardware scattered all over the former soviet republics would not have been there to start with.

and afte the break up, its not like the ukrainians are just going to let the russias walts in and disable all their weapons.

When I say testing I don’t mean attacking real targets… I mean flying it over a flight range at a fake target. The US is hardly likely to invade over a missile test. They didn’t invade Pakistan when they tested their nukes, and they already have Iran under sanctions so what else can they do.

one of the main reasons the US is taking its time with iran is its presumption that iran is not yet in any position to pose a threat to the US (and probably more importantly, israel). but a 3000km cruise missile test kinda changes things a little.

also, iran cant be compared with pakistan! pakistan is a US ally for god’s sake. and look all the crap even they got from the americans. then of course, there’s also the ‘slight’ difference in that the government in pakistan doesnt refer to the US as the ‘great satin’. 😉

Quite true, but then they were far too focused on ballistic missiles after DS. If Saddam really did have WMDs they really would have been in trouble.

i dont think it was just a case of ‘lucky we were wrong’. doesnt quite make sense to not give all your troops proper NBC protective kit if you think they are likely to get gassed does it? but i think we already have enough on our plate already. 😉

I think you over estimate the effect 200kgs or so of material could make.

not when you put it in the middle of a city, or a troop barricks considering the US’ zero tolerance for body bags.

In comparison to the Israeli or US nuclear reply this will be pssing in the wind and the Iranians know it.

well the iranians would have good reason to believe that when weighed against the loss of hundreds of troops or a city, the americans and israelis will deem any benefits they precieve from invading iran as not being worth the risk.

its just the same game as in the cold war. you raise the stakes for your opponent until he folds and go pick on someone else.

Making the material is actually much less difficult than using it effectively. One drop of nerve gas on the skin can kill but as the Japanese subway attack shows that dispersing even a large amount in a confined space is not hugely successful.

that was actually kind of a bad case, since the attacks actually had mixed results because most of the attackers had second thoughts and only ‘competely’ their tasks half heartedly.

then of course, they only punched holes in bags to realease the chemical, so only a tiny amount got out (and none in some cases since the bags werent punctured). but as we have seen, even such small amounts of nerve agent released had pretty nasty effects. imagine the effect of 100~200kg of the stuff airbursting over a city in the middle of the day. 😮

chemical agents are actually fairly easy to release via exlposions (well some are at least), its the bio weapons that are hard to release since the explosion tend to kill the bio agents.

When you haven’t been paid for six months and an armourer comes to you at the gate and offers you 100 US dollars to have a nap for 20 minutes what do you say? TOW missiles and other weapons have disappeared from US bases. It is very easy to hid too. No body measures how much HE you use… you take out 20kgs and they don’t expect you to bring any back. Who is to say that explosion seemed like 15kgs instead of 20?
Obviously a cruise missile is a little different, but not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. Equally “finding a fault” with the engine of a cruise missile would require a new engine or guidance component etc etc whatever you need.

well, i think ‘i’ would be getting a little suspicious if they came with trucks instead of a briefcase.

gaurds only take bribes when they think they arent going to get caught. and i doubt anyone will be studpid enough to imagine the quater master will not notice a couple truck loads of things going AWOL.

as tempting couple hundred dollars would be to a person in the situation as you have described, i doubt they will think it worth going to prison over.

then of course, there is the issue of one not just keeping this kind of weaponry in any old weapons dump, and security around bases where strategic weapons are kept will obviously be much tougher then you average AK storehouse.

This is not a supersonic fighter. Without the need for manouver capability or supersonic performance a high thrust to weight ratio would only be needed if it didn’t have any wings and used thrust to keep it in the air. Needless to say that the MLRS rockets might extend their range by adding wings to the missiles, and of course the addition of wings to unpowered bombs greatly extends their range. There is even some projects to add pulse jet engines and wings to dumb bombs to create cheap simple standoff weapons.

as i said before, the missile will very likely need to exacute sharp turns in low level flight.

the simple fact of the matter is that designers design the biggest missile they can around the engine they have available. so there will not be much more untapped potential in the engines of any missile. so, you cant expect to fit the engines of a small missile into a large one and expect the new missile to be able to fly. there just wont be enough thrust, with or without wings.

I don’t know of any Iranian nuclear weapons programs… so why are the Americans so worried… They aren’t stupid. Worse comes to worse they could simply buy a radar guided weapon that has land attack capability and produce a few extra of those systems.

and how many radar guided ground attack missiles are there with thousand mile ranges on the market today?

Really? Why do you think that? A jammer is an emitter. A few weapons to attack the jammers in the first wave should sort that out. Equally with a modern ring laser gyro a flight of 3,000km or less would probably not need any updates. The occasional radar update of the terrain used to compare with an onboard map should offer sufficient accuracy to get close enough to the target to recognise and attack it.

i dont think the americans would resort to iraqi style GPS jamming tactics. they’d just flood the air with radio signals of the same frequency as the one your GPS sat is using.

as for modern laser gyros. well do you have even good reason to beleive iran has access to these?

Plus to jam you need to know it is coming. In such a case F-15s with AMRAAMs would probably be better than jamming.

why not both?

Russian computing technology was good enough in the late 70s for Tercom. Buy a playstation 2 today and that is like a supercomputer in comparison. The models don’t need to be 100% accurate or show every building and tree… a simple relief map would do.

its not just computing power, its the ability to feed the computer enough detailed data to compute in the first place.

Nope, that is not fair… when was the last time you heard Russia or China or any non western country jump up and down because someone has gotten nukes?

well thats probably because they feel that the US is doing enough jumping for everyone. 😉

remeber the active role china nd russia are playing in trying to defuse the NK nuclear stand off. part of that is aimed at stopping a war in their back yard, but another part in due to their preference for no one else to have nukes.

also, thus far, none of the world’s new nuclear aspriants are considered to be a potential threat to either china or russia. if japan was to try and go nuclear, you’d be seeing alot of jumping on the part of mosco and beijing. 😀

But that has more to do with unreliable powerplants/fuel systems, lack of any real guidance system except a primitive gyro and inefficient engines. With more modern (and I mean 1960s) guidance systems and a more modern jet engine performance can be greatly improved very easily.

many modern SAMs have probably got better range then the V1s. doesnt make them good cruise missiles if you change the seeker.

remeber that in the modern day battlefeild, a cruise missile’s job is much more then just flying in a strait line, miles above the ground to their targets. with the intergrated air defences many nations (the ones iran will be trying to penetrate), the only way a slow missile can get through is to fly low.

nap of the earth navagation capacity is just as much a trademark of modern crusie missiles as is range and accuracy.

china has been making turbofan/turbojet powered AShMs for decades. its not incompotence which resulted in them only feilding cruise missiles (pretty short legged ones at that) only a couple of years ago. their newest cruise missile is only now entering service.

The important bit… the engine, he built himself. It was a pulse jet engine like the V1 which is why so many comparisons were made with this missile.

interesting, must have missed that bit in the original report. cheeks.

but a pulsejet is both unrealiable (by modern standards) and very fuel thursty, which is bad for range. the only way to even approach the range of modern crusie missiles without making BM sized vehicals in through turbojet/turbofan engines.

They don’t even know if they work or not… I doubt they would just store them for war time. We are talking about 6 missiles. Fly one to test performance, take one to bits for materials testing and you have four left. Considering the air defences of Israel and Irans other neighbours you’d need more than four subsonic missiles to penetrate their defences reliably.

well i think they can check all the components seperately. if all the aprts work on their own, then the whole should function well as well.

after all, not only will testing a missile be wasteful, it will also effectively tell the americans that iran has a got the missiles. while this might work as a deterrance, its equally likely to backfire and trigger a US response.

if the US starts to really go after iran like they did with iraq, then iran will probably ‘test fire’ one of these missiles. otherwise its in iran’s best interest to keep their options open.

as for the ability of the Kh55s to penetrate US and israeli defencs. well considering the fact that iraq managed to fly some of their ancient silkworms past the US air defences so easily, it doesnt really fill you with confidence about them being able to shoot down far more modern weapons.

If they have bio or chem weapons I haven’t heard about it. Iraq had them because the US supplied the original cultures for bio weapons. Anthrax spores of the type useful to weaponise don’t actually fall from the sky naturally.

some deadly chemicals are not hard to cook up. industry makes tonnes of the stuff as by products every hour, its really just a case of th iranians choosing the most suitable.

bio weapons are harder to make, but as the US mail incidents showed, its not that hard either.

then there’s also the option of filling part of the warhead with radioactive waste from their nuclear reactors, airbursting the things and rendering major cities uninhabitable.

weapons grade, kill on contact chemical and biological agents are extremely hard to cook up, but something that can kill people and can speard easily is far simpler to whip up.

We know about these six… what about the hundreds of other missiles we don’t know about. Things go missing in airbases around the world. The KGB/FSB held the warheads so they will be safe but the missiles are something else.

nuts and bults easily go missing, landmines and SAMs can go missing, but 20 foot cruise missiles dont disappear so easily.

you cant just walk into a high security weapons depo with emplty trucks and come out with full ones without being noticed, no matter how highly placed you may be.

IIRC, the missiles in question were redirected en route to russia. that was how their absence was not noticed for so long. the ukrain side would not have noticed any missing missiles since they were struck off the inventory lists, and some bribs and fancy accounting would ensure that the russia side thought they got the right number as well.

but seeing how the things arent transported that often, its not like there were that many opportunities to pull similar switches.

also, im sure that all sides would have carried out detailed inventory checks after the claims came to light, and if there were more missiles missing anywhere else, we would hav heard about it already.

The weapon itself is less than 2 tons. It is the wings that hold it up, and if needed a rocket booster could get it airborne from a truck or it can be air launched.

Maybe if it was a VTOL missile. The engine power to fly at mach 0.7 at 100m is not that great and is not related to aircraft weight directly but to drag and wing loading. The worst case situation they could make it truck launched and give it bigger fixed wings that generate more lift than the originals.

the wings can help to creat lift, but they can only do so much. the increases in weight will still need to be accounted for my similar increases in thrust to keep the missile flying (C802 missiles also have wings, albert smaller ones, but its not that great a change).

adding bigger wings will also add to weight, so the benefits are not that great.

That depends upon the radar. If it is a radar from an anti shippin missile that looks at flat oceans for ships on their own then it will be no good for land atack but radar is used by many aircraft to map the ground and find targets. A ground mapping radar with a moving target indicator could allow it to take out moving targets and would easily have the resolution to target specific buildings or instalations.

the only iranian experience with radar seeker production i know of is for the seekers of the C802 AShMs.

GLONASS.

easily jammed.

The optical camera in the Iskander-E and Tochka-U give CEPs of less than 20m using built in target comparison logic to find its actual target and fly towards it. The Iranians have Mavericks with IIR seekers. Combining the two technologies (Iskander-E and Tochka-U are replacements for the Scud and FROG-7 respectively and have ranges of 280km and 120km respectively and are therefore exportable to anyone) could give all weather excellent CEPs for low flying slow missiles. (The Iskander-E comes in at about mach 6).

its getting the missile within seeker range that is the hard part. without proper low level navagational aids, the missile will need to fly high to avoid terran (which will make it a easy target), or somehow be guided all the way via a TV link.

neither look that appealing.

tough talk on japanese economy when in reality, Japan heavily invested much needed capitol into China during the 70’s and 80’s, just go ask your everyday person in Liaoning how much the investment has helped them, and please none of your nationalistic sunshine 🙂

i came from liaoning province, and there is little love for the japanese there amounst the vast majority of the people. and there is no reason why there should be any to start with.

what, you think the likes of sony and panasonic invested in china out of charity? :rolleyes: they invested for the same reason as anyone else – because there is money, big money to be made in china.

to suggest that the chinese should somehow feel greatful for japanese investment is about the same as suggesting that you should feel greatful for being paid by your boss. :rolleyes: japanese investment in china is business, plain and simple.

however, the economic aid japan has been giving china over the years is out of charity (or remorse for the war, or both), and there has not been enough reconisation of that on the chinese side, and you would have made a better point had you used that instead of investment.

He’s no neo-con. Really, he’s a very intelligent and reasonable man. I had a couple of discussions with him. :diablo: “Well said, Ben” I have seen few professors/intellectuals who actually wanted to spend their time talking to students.

I don’t agree on everything he says, especially the fact that he also uses the term old and new europe. But I got to know American mind better writing a paper for him. There’s some truth in it, and then there’s some BS. On both sides of the pond.

well im sure he is a nice guy, i just dont care much for many of the views he is hinting at in that article. but i agree with you on the fact that all polititions talk out of their backsides most of the time (or get intellectuals to do it for them). 😉

PS, is it just me or are all the attached images coming up as links? :confused:

might have guessed that the arther was american. :rolleyes:

the article started off reasonally well, but then just nose dived. probably as a result of the arther trying too hard to find ‘evidence’ of the maracilous change of heart europe is supposed to have had after bush got re-elected.

he has a completely wrong sense of ‘balance’ of reality; draws confusing and illogical conclutions from trvial matters while missing other important issues altogether, and is obviously a neo-con on a mission.

the basic line of the article is that europe is weak, devided and in big trouble now that the US is not obliged to look after it. the EU’s economy is doom while th US is going to be just dandy (he insists the US economy will better then the EU’s even though the EU has a bigger internal market and is making more exports then the US. his conclusion that the US economy is doing better is based almost exclusively on the fact that the US has manage slightly better GDP growth without a word on the reckless approach the US has taken to achieve that growth and the costs of it for the future.).

he then goes on and on about how the EU is going to need more immagrents and seems to suggest that that is somehow a bad thing, while conveniently forgetting how america got to where it is today – did they manage it by staying home and having babybooms or immagration? :rolleyes:

then of course there’s the drumming up of the phantum ‘islamic’ threat, and his ‘hints’ that somehow all islamic followers are Al-Q associates.

then at the end, he breifly sums up some ‘positives’ of the EU so that his work can pass off as ‘fair and unbiased’.

really hope people dont all think like that across the pond. :rolleyes:

There have been speculations that the Agusta A129 technology had been sold to China. It seems to me that the picture somehow resembles the A129, especially when you look at the rear wheel assembly. But there are major differences: A129 has 4-blade main rotor and 2-blade tail rotor, but the one in the picture has 5-blade main rotor and asymmetrical 4-blade tail rotor, which indicates that it is bigger and heavier than A129.

its pretty unlikely to the true though. just doesnt make sence for china to buy an obsolete design, espcially when the EU arms embargo is still in place.

if the chinese wanted to buy an attack helo to RE, they could have just turned to the russians and got something far better without the need to sneak around and all the problems and risks that brings.