PLA Navy and Naval Air Force

Since the beginning of the year, the PLA Navy has included nine project 056 corvettes

Isos wrote:16 VLS in the front and in the back for 32 in total ? Or 64 in total ?

What VLs did they put ? HQ 6 ?

GarryB wrote:A good idea to keep the guns... they will be very useful supporting landings and with new technology in guided shells they could become rather versatile weapons... if they choose to buy of develop something similar themselves.

Have heard they had issues with the propulsion... hope that is sorted out too.

Isos wrote:Chinese Sovs are improved versions compared to soviet ones. I don't know about the propulsion but IMO they put their own engines during the upgrade.

Also, the last two are smaller and the guns in the back were removed.

Too bad Russia didn't upgrade its own Sovs with shtill launchers and replace the moskit with newer missiles like 16 kh35U.

GarryB wrote:Kh-35 is older than Moskit and are designed for totally different jobs.

At the time the AEGIS cruisers were equipped with the Standard SAM system to defend carriers and themselves. The system was not designed to hit sea skimming missiles so missiles flying below 7m were safe.

The Moskit is a 4.5 ton missile that climbs to 300m just after launch to locate its target by radar and then drops down to about 3.5m all the way to impact.

They are a combined rocket ramjet powered missile that accelerates to about mach 2 by the time it reaches its target 120km away.

In comparison the Kh-35 was designed as a light anti ship missile that could be used on export ships and was designated SS-N-25... it is essentially a small Harpoon like missile but uses a sophisticated MMW radar guidance system that is rather hard to fool or jam.

It is subsonic and in its first models had a flight range of about 120km but in later models extra fuel and a new engine meant range was doubled to about 240km.

Too bad Russia didn't upgrade its own Sovs with shtill launchers and replace the moskit with newer missiles like 16 kh35U.

The engines are Ukrainian, so it is not really cost effective to first develop production capacity and then correct the design faults essentially for a cold war ship.

Makes rather more sense to upgrade the Udaloys and start work on new propulsion solutions for their future destroyers and cruisers...

GarryB wrote:

Kh-35 can fly just as low but is also a smaller target with a smaller rcs. Moskit is faster but you can pack more kh-35 and the kh-35 goes also further woth a 260km range compared to 120km in low-low trajectory for Moskit.

The difference is that if you fire a Moskit and a Uran at an AEGIS class cruiser in the 1980s, the AEGIS cruisers can only defend itself using its Phalanx gatling guns, which fire a 50 cal DU slug at a rate of about 3,000 rpm but in short bursts... it is effective at ranges between 1.8km and about 500m... which is a distance of about 1.3km.

With the Moskit that means it would only have time for a couple of bursts, but with Uran it could fire significantly more and would be much more likely to get a kill.

The Speed of the Moskit means even if it got solid hits at 800m or less the missile would still likely hit the ship intact and destroy it... so the Phalanx will have about three seconds to shoot it down... and it is not that accurate...

The Moskit would more often than not sink the ship, while the Uran would more often than not get shot down.... which is why Sovremmeny class ships carried 8 Moskits instead of Urans.

The enemy navy has lots of different types of ships and not all need Moskits or bigger missiles... Uran is just fine against most small vessels or larger vessels like cargo and tankers...

GarryB wrote:

And you would compare the Moskit against the Chinese replacement the YJ-12?

Looking at numbers the YJ-12 has longer range, higher top speed and is capable of carrying a larger warhead.

Not really a shock... first of all the Chinese are not idiots, and second they got export Moskits sold to the more than 20 years ago... which are basically missiles that entered Russian service in 1980... the missile code is 3M80...

You are telling me they improved the performance of a downgraded export missile that is now 40 years old... yeah, I believe that...

The Israelis took Soviet 122mm rockets and put them into production for themselves... they made the warheads slightly heavier and more powerful which slightly reduced their range and speed, but I suspect they don't care so much about the range and more about the effect on target...