Thursday, October 20, 2016

Is China Ahead Of The U.S. In Developing Hypersonic Weapons?

Lockheed's hypersonic missile concept. Lockheed Martin

Scout Warrior: US vs China: Is China In Front of the US in Developing Hypersonic Weapons?

The US wants to say in front of China with hypersonic weapons able to travel at five-times the speed of sound and destroy targets with a "kinetic energy" warhead.

The Air Force will likely have high-speed, long-range and deadly hypersonic weapons by the 2020s, providing kinetic energy destructive power able to travel thousands of miles toward enemy targets at five-times the speed of sound.

“Air speed makes them much more survivable and hard to shoot down. If you can put enough fuel in them that gets them a good long range. You are going roughly a mile a second so if you put in 1,000 seconds of fuel you can go 1,000 miles - so that gives you lots of standoff capability,” Air Force Chief Scientist Greg Zacharias told Scout Warrior in an interview.

Read more ....

Update: The Future of Hypersonic Weapons (Daniel Norton, Cipher Brief)

WNU Editor: The Chinese and the Americans are not the only ones who are trying to develop hypersonic weapons .... Russia has made progress on materials for hypersonic planes that could launch nuclear attacks from SPACE (Daily Mail).

4 comments:

Jac said...

I adore that. The "good time" is back. During cold war I couldn't count the "literature" telling us we was backward for this or for that. This give us the opportunity to have budget for "catching up" on our foes.
Good work for good jobs and good economy. Please, keep it up!

Jay Farquharson said...

It's actually kinda funny. I was reading a thread on a mil.blog site earlier today where a vid of an Iraqi Mil-28 was chewing up a ISIS lagger with laser guided missiles.

The Russian's took an unguided 2.5 cm unguided rocket, and stuck a "beam riding" guidance package on it.

Rather than a sensor head that reads the backscatter from a high power laser beam painting the target, the missile has a sensor tail that just follows where ever the low power beam is pointing.

In addition to being 1/8th the cost of a "semi active sensor head", the targetting is much more accurate, and the low lower laser doesn't set off "laser painting" alarms and counter measures.

RRH said...

It'd nice to see this technology directed to civilian applications.

Imagne hypersonic courier service for instance.

Stephen Davenport said...

lol..umm they steal our technology so no they are not.