RoovialkChina has been making aggressive and quite frankly warlike noises regarding relations with Japan. These Chinese threats existed long before China declared this ADIZ of theirs
I am sure that you are aware of the veiled threats China has made towards Japan. And those street riots from a few months ago in Chinese cities to where Japanese cars were smashed and businesses selling Japanese products were burned, just re-enforce the perception from the Japanese point of view that China is looking for trouble with Japan.
Since you call yourself a China watcher you should be aware that the PLA is actively training for a war against Japan
http://news.usni.org/2014/02/18/navy-official-china-training-short-sharp-war-japan
So against this background doesn’t it seem prudent that Japanese F-15s would patrol armed for combat? The message the Japanese are sending to China is that Japan has sharp teeth and claws too.
RoovialkWhen you see these missile armed Japanese F-15s, common sense tells you that they are only reacting to Chinese aggression in the East and South China seas. With China acting as it has been lately it makes good sense to patrol the airspace armed.
RoovialkCarrier operations are inherently dangerous. This incident shows that the Indian pilots are training hard and seeking to build their carrier aviation skills.
RoovialkThey will fight alright. And it will be for one or all of the following reasons:
“…China is picking fights with everyone to distract the locals from the laundry list of problems at home — air pollution, dirty water, contaminated food, counterfeit drugs, rampant corruption, inadequate food/water supplies, imploding shadow banking system, teetering real estate market, overcapacity in every industry you can name, serious gender imbalance, aging population, inadequate healthcare system, non-existent social safety net, a more demanding middle class, rising terrorist insurgencies, etc.”
Whenever a country like China has so many problems it always attempts to deflect attention from its internal problems by playing the external enemy card. What China is doing is classic.
RoovialkStay tuned. The game is young
RoovialkAs before you are entitled to your opinion regarding this developing technology. However it is clear that the railgun is going to sea and has several years of open development behind it. The US Navy feels confident that this technology shows good promise in countering the threat of DF-21D type systems. I see no reason to doubt this confidence.
I agree with the US Navy’s assessment that railgun technology represents a game changer in modern war at sea. And as far as I can see this game changing technology is most advanced in the United States.
I look forward to the upcoming series of tests and to the deployment of this advanced technology in an operational context.
Roovialkthat isn’t interesting. Any gun can switch from defense to offense, and those with a fuse can do it just as easily.
Ah but there lies the advantage of the rail gun. Instead of messy fuses and propellants pure kinetic energy is the destructive force of the round. You can also store more rounds and they are easier to handle. The bonus is less likely chance of a magazine explosion in case of battle damage.
Err even the most optimistic range estimate for rail guns doesn’t go anywhere near the kind of range that a freaking IRBM has. A few hundred kilometers at most versus a few thousand kilometers.
A two stage round to where the railgun serves as the first stage can greatly extend the reach of a rail gun slug. Check out the “Vulcano,” a fin-stabilized, sub-caliber, extended range projectile which does not use rocket boost. Something like that developed for the rail gun system can give ships great flexibility in engaging long range targets http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNIT_5-64_LW.htm
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A rail gun firing a shell that can release a cloud of steel pellets will be similar to a an AHEAD round. Not exactly cheap. Kinetic rail gun rounds will be cheap. fused rounds generally are not.
Beehive / grapeshot rounds have been used at sea since the time of sail. Updating it to a railgun would not not be very hard to do.
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The point of DF-21D was that it provided a means to get around USN fighter interceptors and layered SAMs — the arguable strong point of a CSG’s defences and strike them at long range. Obviously AShBMs will still have BMD missiles to contend with, and whatever future ABM measures that are developed, as well as vulnerabilities in the kill chain.
Rail guns will give DF-21D planners another headache to overcome. Another layer on the defensive cake
I’m more interested about how fast a rate of fire this thing can achieve. From what I’ve read about rail guns, it seems like barrel damage is one of the biggest limitations in achieving a higher rate of fire from the heat generated. I imagine it won’t be able to out do a Mk-45 5″ gun by much, especially if the gun is larger.
In that sense, what they’re building is basically a really massive single barrel Oerlikon gun with a much reduced rate of fire. Maybe a larger warhead will make a railgun based gun a more realistic air defence weapon and make up for a low rate of fire?
Of course, railguns will still be immensely powerful at engaging surface and land based targets where a high rate of fire isn’t as important. But I’m skeptical about their claims of it as an anti air weapon.
The Pulse Forming Network (PFN) already available today is a pulse-forming network that stores electrical power for the gun and converts it to the pulse that fires the projectile. The Navy apparently wants to take the system a step further and develop a high-average-power pulsed power system able to store up to 200MJ of energy and deliver this energy to the launcher at a rate of once every 6 seconds (10 rounds per/minute), for bursts of 100’s of shots.
And never forget today’s carriers are nuclear powered. This gives them deep energy reserves to call upon. All American navy surface combatants on the drawing boards including the recently launched DDG-1000 are being designed to accept rail guns and beam weapons.
Regarding cooling the railgun a demonstration of “Combined Spray and Evaporative Cooling of an Electromagnetic Railgun” method has delivered promising results. This will be tested on the prototype scheduled to go to sea in 2015
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Oh and roovliak, consumer beware, yeah? Be vigilant about enthusiastic marketing.
Those same words could be applied to the untested DF-21D and the claims that have been made regarding that weapons system as a game changer for engaging carriers.
RoovialkThe most interesting part of this shipboard solution is how the rail gun can quickly switch from defense to offense. Anti carrier ballistic missile systems like the much discussed DF-21D can be neutralized by rail gun fired clouds of steel pellets and then rail gun fired kinetic rounds engaging the firing site even before the incoming missile warhead has been eliminated. With the low cost of rail gun slugs, DF-21D warheads stand to meet a wall of steel as they attempt to penetrate the carrier defenses.
If the Chinese thought that the DF-21D was the magic weapon that spelled the end of the super carrier I wonder how they will view rail gun equipped carrier battlegroups sailing off their coasts.
Thanks for the link Jinan!
RoovialkRailgun deployment on ships will render the Chinese DF-21D anti-carrier ballistic missile obsolete.
http://media.ga.com/video-library/land-based-mobile-railgun/
RoovialkIt’d be nice if people based their conclusions of the J-20 on actual measurements instead of eyeballing. There is a way to be precise about these sorts of things.
Well the Mark 1 eyeball does not lie. And as I said before and I say again: J-20 looks like a dachshund, one of those short-legged, long-bodied wiener dogs. See for yourself
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Had the Chinese designers done something like this below they would have had a prettier fighter
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RoovialkJ-20 is still an ugly plane in my opinion. Russian T-50 is prettier. The J-20 looks long and clunky like a dachshund. Wonder if it can dogfight in close?
RoovialkThis is a great discussion going on here. While the comparison between F-22 v T-50 is very interesting I would like to know how T-50 compares with the Chinese J-20. Has there been any discussion as to how T-50 would fare against J-20? Stealth, agility, sensors, estimated performance… anything?
RoovialkThat’s the problem: They are saying. China should show the pictures of their J-11’s flying along side the F-15Js to remove all doubt
RoovialkSo where are the photos of the aircraft they intercepted? All I see are Chinese aircraft.
RoovialkIf stealth planes really want to be stealth for modern last generation IADS, then they have to turn off all radars, communications, radio navigation and altimeters, data links, etc, what could IADS ELINT complexes detect and triangulate and they could still be detected through visual observation posts.
This technology could make a fresh come back in a more updated form. The passive acoustic detector. Remember this?
“Prior to World War II and the invention of radar, acoustic mirrors were built as early warning devices around the coasts of Great Britain, with the aim of detecting incoming enemy aircraft by the sound of their engines.
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