- The new US stealth bomber may be taken by surprise by ultra-fast missiles coming from near space with the unpredictable ‘Qian Xuesen trajectory’
- Beating the American bomber will be pivotal in any future conflict with China, as it has the potential to slip behind China’s core defence
Hypersonics don’t make any sense against an airborne target. A b21 isn’t going to have phalanx or anti missile missiles, so you might as well use a missile that costs 1% as much. But that’s all assuming you get a perfect missile lock on the most stealthy aircraft ever, which would take an incredible confluence of bad luck and bad planning.
Cheaper and slower missiles still need time to reach the target. At whatever mach the new bomber will fly at, there may not be enough time for a cheap missile to intercept the aircraft before it’s out of range again.
But yeah this article is bullshit. I don’t know what buzzwords they’re using to name the missile’s trajectory but I wouldn’t take anything from China seriously. They’re almost as bad as Russians when it comes to claims of their military hardware.
You don’t need to launch the missile from the same point as the detector, you can launch closer to the aircraft. And the b21 is a sub sonic bomber, probably flying about mach 0.8 or so. Even if you needed a lot more missile locations for non hypersonic missiles, it’d still be orders of magnitude cheaper. Seems like carrier groups are about the only target valuable enough to spend a hypersonic on.
I am aware. Good luck getting those installations close when you detect it after it’s already too late.
Doubt. Logistics, munitions stockpiles, and crew to station them would more than likely add up to a lot more than just the cost of the missile. Even then a cheaper SAHR or even a more modern AHR missile may miss due low RF reflectivity from the stealth aircraft. It would stand to reason that a new hypersonic missile would have different or upgraded sensors that may stand a chance to track a LO aircraft once it’s close enough. But all this is assuming they were even able to track it at all
This arms race with airplanes have failed before i was even born. It’s why B52s will outlive us all.
Why not? Aren’t all modern active counter measures dependent on reaction time? And isn’t there simply a lot less reaction time against a hypersonic inbound?
Hypersonic weapons go up way too high to be used on aircraft.
Is there some law of physics saying you can’t target and destroy a plane from above?
From a ground launched system that requires a ballistic path to hit a agile moving target, it wouldn’t be practical at Mach 6.
No, a bomber doesn’t really have any reaction time based countermeasures like hard maneuvering or accelerating. They might be able to latch a decoy, but I don’t know how likely it would be to carry one, and you’d be very vulnerable with the payload doors open. Stealth bombers countermeasures are all dependent on stealth, so if you know exactly where it is, most any missile should be able to take it down.
You made the general comment that hypersonics don’t make sense “against airborn targets”, so that’s whst I was asking about…not bombers specifically. Fighters are airborn targets also, and those are what I was immediately thinking about when you said hypersonics make no sense against airborn targets.
Oh okay, makes sense. Yeah, but the boost glide hypersonics that China has right now don’t necessarily have a quicker response time than direct missiles because they need to go most all the way to the karman line to get the potential energy to glide down. Future direct attack hypersonics would likely make sense, but the current ones seem pretty anti carrier optimized.