Does the West have a defense against China's PL17 air-air missile?
07.06.2025 19:44
Once you are launching in that speed vs. height band, getting a FL900, Mach 7, 600km semiballistic performance is no big deal.
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Shrug, again, you have to know the packaging design decisions to make this assertion as more than a WAG and if you did, you would not be talking about it.
ARGUMENT:
Uhhh, no. The IRIAF loved the AIM-54, they didn't have enough to go around. The Sparrow requires an artist's touch and even then is not really Pyrhhic safe (AIM-7E4) vs. an all aspect heater threat. The point here is that the Phoenix can beat any R-23/24 or R-40 the Iraqis might have, even if you fire it at 20nm nose-hot, for a flight time in which it will largely be under power all the way.
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'AWACS killer' is more of an implied target class than an actual designator. Meaning high, slow, with limited self defense capability and a fixed mission requirement to serve as a vectoring (support) agency for other assets.
Modern AESA seekers can sweep a range of PRFs and scan-mode waveforms, so fast that they generate 'speed on antenna' with virtually no notch. And the Chinese already have an AESA seeker on the 8" PL-15 seeker so why not the 11.8" PL-17?
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The questions which still need to be answered are then as follows: Is it just a really long, relightable, motor? Is it a separate KKV style terminal system? Is it an expanded battery/oil reservoir system to provide heat and power in the very cold air at high level? Or is it something exotic, like an L-band wraparound antenna with lookdown SARH capabilities, designed to make use of that distant illuminator?
The F-35 is a dead end. It was always was a dead end and it always will be. Too few high payload stations. The F-22 may suffer similar problems, but will likely at least manage 2+2 with JATM and AIM-120D3 paired up.
And while these latter could also be hit, by sub launched cruise missiles for instance, as out of area representative homelands of the U.S. and Australia, they would represent a very large escalation of any fight over say, Taiwan.
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Not least because these Chinese 'naval' interceptors may also be orbiting an AAW escort.
And nobody has ever said it's not able to hit fighter sized targets, even out to 400km.
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Due to the lower maneuverability of the PL-17, it requires a greater speed to still remain dangerous and thus has a shorter effective range against maneuvering targets than a missile with an equivalent amount of energy but with a tighter turn circle.
Admittedly the few available pictures do not suggest a staged weapon, ala AAAM (GDW) or Israel's David's Sling or even the likely LREW, if you cruise at high altitude the long keeling area and moment arm of the tail controls will keep the pointy end forward, and tip over of the weapon could signal a staging event which shortens the missile body to limit tail-wags-dog effects of that light (burned out) motor pipe headed downhill behind a massive forebody weight.
They can generate an FL600, Mach 2, shooter and even the AWACS is going to be hard pressed to generate vectorable bearings on a 5m2 J-16 at 600km and likely will never see a 1m2 J-20 at this range, even with external carriage. While itself being a highly unique, lighthouse-at-the-40Block signature, all the way to the radio horizon.
In the case of stealth fighters, close to within range of their own missiles without being detected and engaged by the fighter carrying the PL-17
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Great! Since the PLAAF are not playing our game but their own...
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It's also unlikely that a throttleable, 350lb, rocket will have much better performance than a straight up AIM-120D3 with an 'all the way up' motor extension, ala ERAAM. As was proposed for the BVRAAM/Meteor alternative. Short of a D-Section or boostered system, there is just not enough of a total propellant volume difference to matter.
These heavy missiles are usually less maneuverable due to the higher wing loading, and whereas other designs like the R-37, R-33, and AIM-54 have strakes or static fins to increase their lifting area, the PL-17 only has the four small maneuvering fins at the back. This reduces drag and increases the range of the missile when travelling in a straight line but also increases its turning turn radius considerably.
The defence against this missile is the same as any other BVR missile.
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We're the ones lagging here. Not the Chinese.
The missile does all of this without comitting to a step or snap down bleed of speed. It comes right on in, narrowing the X/Y/Z slant range offsets incrementally, running the target out of options.
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Bluntly, the missile leads the target by a considerable distance, cuts back into it to cut it off, acquires and corrects itself, pointing at the target and then gets just close enough to detonate a warhead through the zero'd aimpoint to kill the target with an entrained warhead blast which fires through the seeker, FORWARDS, like a shotgun. And kills it. This is not new. The SA-2 was doing it, in the 1960s.
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If you can target the B-21s from their topside = hotside (intakes, cockpit, exhaust channels) RCS vulnerability, using VHF/UHF radars with mesobounce OTH-B (over the horizon backscatter) capabilities, or the orbiting radar satellite, you can deny the Raider force the safety of even a standoff launch.
And the result is that, instead of a 19nm snap down and 59nm straight line capability, the R-37 had a range so long (nominally 309km/167nm) that a separate Su-30 (SU-27PU) had to be used as the midcourse guidance system because the GIANT, 1.1m, 43", Zaslon radar could not provide the necessary illumination energy.
Comms/Nav/Sensor integrated system function says the missile knows exactly where it is, courtesy of integrated IMU/GPS navigator while the comms system informs the autopilot were to point the seeker based on live target updates as 3D volume coordinates.
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Wrong. The PL-15 is listed, in it's export model, as being a 145km weapon. It has similar (8", 12ft, 520lbs) dimensions and weight to an AIM-7 Sparrow which had an official top end of 56-62nm, in it's last MH/P versions.
Okay this “AWACS killer” nonsense needs to stop. During the early 2000s, Russian arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey, in common with other Russian arms companies, was facing serious funding issues and was advertising various paper designs that never made it into production. These included the KS-172, a long-range missile with a 300km range. All these designs had various fantastical descriptions, and the KS-172 was called an “AWACS killer.” The term for long-range missiles stuck. When KTRV, the other primary manufacturer of Russian anti-aircraft missiles, developed and actually produced the R-37, some journalists were quick to reuse the old title of “AWACS killer.” You’ll find this term thrown around a lot on news outlets that either don’t specialize in reporting military hardware or just have poor reporting standards in general, as well as certain die-hard Russia fans like Carlos Kopp. However, this description shouldn’t be taken seriously and doesn’t translate well to the real world.
The AIM-54 derives from the GAR-9/AIM-47 which was a product of 1950s engineering. As such it did not have the micro-servo drive packages as wraparound tail control actuators that modern missiles do. This meant putting the fins ahead of a very heavy tail to balance CG across an acceptable range of Mach and altitude numbers.
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You don't know enough about the missile internals to say that.
If possible, maneuver to try and notch the radar guiding the missile
Decrease altitude to force the missile through the exponentially thicker air at lower altitudes and bleed off energy even faster.
Why. Is. That. ???
The Chinese likely didn't invent it for that. So how multi-spec IIR, L-Band SARH or AESA X-band vulnerable to top attack is the B-21 Raider?
They are closing on your J-20 because they don't know you're there. They are likely in small clustered cells of 3-6 aicraft so that just a few fighters or even a missile trap AAW platform can cover the approach corridor on what are generally very dispersed routes, designed to complicate random stealth CAP intercept, but at the same time, this thins the numbers of F-22/NGAD which are going to be available to sweep out ahead of each cell, 100-200nm, to find the J-16/J-20 ambush threat, before it launches launch.
Using one-shot tanking that is kept equally distant-based.
Grim Reaper B-21 Vs. Shanghai Raid
The Chinese are not going to give the Americans a freebie approach to missile release. But unlike the tactical platforms which can be removed from the chessboard by killing their basing modes at the edges of the combat theater (Kadena, Naha, North Field, Andersen, Butterworth), the B-21 and C-17 can come from as far as Hickam, NAF Midway, JBER or Tyndal and Darwin.
Thus, against a maneuvering target, the effective range is how far the missile can travel while still maintaining enough energy to be able to reliably hit its target.
This may not be a game changer, because really, it's just an extension of their existing 'No Boundaries' engagement rules. But it certainly implies that they are not playing our game and thus do not have to follow our rules.
Here’s the issue with being an “AWACS killer.” A missile like the PL-17, for a head-on target at high altitude and launched at high speed by a high-flying jet, might be able to reach out and hit a target initially 400km away at launch. Because the target is flying toward the missile, the missile doesn’t actually need to fly 400km from its launch point. This bit of disingenuous range reporting is actually standard for just about any anti-aircraft missile. If the target is flying away, the missile now not only needs to fly further than the initial distance to the target but also must maintain an airspeed greater than that of its target in order to catch up. If the target dives down to low altitude where the air is much thicker, the range for the missile goes down even further. Since the PL-17 is too large to fit inside the weapons bays of the J-20, any aircraft carrying it can potentially be spotted from a long distance away. This means that an AWACS will have plenty of warning that an enemy fighter is approaching and can fly defensively well in advance, forcing the fighter carrying the PL-17 to get even closer. An E-3C flying away from the missile carrier while diving to low altitude will probably need to be within 100km of the enemy fighter to be at risk of being hit. That’s an incredibly short distance, close enough to be swarmed with enemy fighters. So to get that close, the fighters the AWACS is directing must already be dealt with. However, if there is no fighter opposition left, not only will the AWACS be long gone, but it will rarely matter what missile you try to shoot it down with, since the AWACS is defenceless you don’t need to outrange defensive armaments. I.e. longer-range missiles aren’t long-range enough to have practical advantages over medium-range missiles like the PL-15 or AIM-120 against AWACS.
Let's also consider a J-16 with WS-10C or J-20 with WS-15B engines as having a considerable reserve of high altitude thrust capacity, inherent to a much larger fuel load and generally approaching modern, Western, engine design capability in the dark arts of fluid/thermodynamics as a measure of the efficiency of flows, temps and fuel mixes, as TITS/TETS in engines.
We have known, for quite awhile, the 'AWACS killers' were so numerous that the mission had lost a lot of it's meaning, simply because the standoff they needed made them unable to keep up with the Big Picture analysis, faster than the F-22A with it's ALR-94 and 20kw APG-77.
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Add to this the complete inadequacy of an F-22 without EFT or tanking, trying to escort a B-21 over a 450nm radius. Presumably having launched from an already shattered Kadena airbase, hit by multiple salvos of DF-21C or DF-26 MRBM with submunition and hard target MIRVs (to kill the HAS farms).
Grim Reaper PL-17 E-3C Engagement Scenario
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If they sink the carriers and shoot up second island chain threats with DF-21/26 and submarine launched YJ-18 and ship launched YJ-21, they don't need to worry about E-2D because the Hawkeye doesn't have the lookup nor the clutter resolution to be useful in BMD or to pull sea skimmers out of the wave troughs at BTH ranges.
The Russian-developed Novator KS-172 (K-100) is a weapon that can reach a range of over 400km. This is considered the longest range air-to-air missile in the world. The KS-172 ultra-long-range air-to-air missile (product 172, 172S-1, K-100) was developed by the Novator Design Bureau since 1984.
Let’s dispel the idea that this missile is somehow some kind of game changer.
God knows you don't want to copy the Americans, even if they are right and you are a perfect clone-of-a-clone-not-a-clown, you will only end up with self-cancelling mirrored systems. Which is important because the Chinese are not stupid and have no intention of flying a massive ASUW strike package out to 'do battle' with a carrier air wing, in it's deep-blue operational briar patch.
Again, this has been commented upon, many times by many F-22 pilots.
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There is also an Anglo-Japanese effort to develop a new variant of the Meteor that can fit inside the F-35’s weapons bays and adopts an AESA seeker derived from the Japanese AAM-4B.
What does this even mean? The YJ-83 weighs, depending on source: 600/850/980kg or 2,156lbs. The P-800 Oniks weighs, 3,000kg/6,614lbs. The Kh-47 weighs 4,300kg/9,500lbs.
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Unlike the Russians, the Chinese are quite good at avionics packaging. We should not assume that their stuff is a generation back anymore.
The Eurofigther Typhoon with CAPTOR-M radar has tracked the F-22 at 40nm. In 2012. Up in Alaska in a Red Flag exercise.
The AIM-7 Sparrow is a similar example of 'why moving wing controls in the middle' because the packagin just wasn't there. The R-37 did not follow this route. Nor does the R-37M.
The Soviets, on the other hand, were worried about American bombers launching AGM-86 and AGM-69 missiles that could neutralize air defence sites before the bombers penetrated Soviet airspace to deliver nuclear weapons into the Soviet heartlands. The AGM-69 in particular, like the Kh-22, was very fast and had a long-range, and thus the Soviets wanted their MiG-31s to be able to launch on American bombers as early as possible. The AGM-86 was a low-altitude terrain-hugging missile, and so the MiG-31 would detect it at reduced ranges, possibly after the cruise missile was already over Soviet soil. It was imperative that the missile be shot down before it reached its target, necessitating a fast missile, and higher speeds translate to higher kinematic range. Thus, the R-33 was born, and it was eventually replaced in Russian service by the R-37.
The Chinese ARE NOT interested in our AWACS. They AWACS is not a fires capable delivery platform. They do not want to fight 'our game' our way. PL-17 is a HVP/HVT sniper rifle to counter B-21 Raider, Gen-6 Stealth, from above.
This is not the year 2000.
Read the above. Why would the missile do this if it's MODERN and thus not flying a seeker calculated lead pursuit angle but something like an inertial slide, smart-AI driven, intercept?
This has long been the case, even with the S-300/400 and with the S-500 capability taking this out to 600km it's just not practical to try and bring the capability closer.
Importantly, the missile doesn't fly dumb it updates it's own TOF position and sends it to the fighter and the fighter sends updates on target course alterations, _even though_ the missile seeker is not looking at it. The missile steers to an adjusted way autonomy point and goes active 'ahead of' the target flight path predictor.
The Chinese now have their own carrier battle groups and face a much larger conventional warhead-armed, air-launched cruise missile threat than the Soviets did during the Cold War (when almost every land-attack cruise missile was nuclear-tipped). Thus, they likewise want to hit American bombers and strike fighters before they can launch cruise missiles against their carriers or against targets on Chinese soil. That is the primary role of the PL-17.
As the A-50U double kill incident highlights.
And the enabler of this massive range change was much stronger, stiffer, integral fuselage system without a separate motor tube that allowed full diameter, full length, motor all the way back to between the tails. Along with 30 years of improved longchain polymer motor propellant, this made the Axehead missle MASSIVELY (as in Mach 6.5) more powerful than the Mach 3.5 Amos.
Modern Missiles, as a class, can defeat a fighter on it's best day. Partly as a function of raw performance and structural hardening. Partly due to the way AI driven intercept routines work. That is why we have gone to stealth, digital stealth and increasingly complex decoys as both TRD and Free Flight as well as power like MALD and ARMs.
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Long-range missiles can of course be used against fighters, but there are downsides to doing so, and if nothing else, they are expensive to make and can’t be carried by lighter fighters. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran got most of its air-to-air kills with the AIM-54, probably because active radar-seeking missiles were very rare and the Iraqi aircrews didn’t know to fly defensively even without the RWR tone from a continuous wave radar lock that they expected from semi-active radar missiles like the AIM-7. Since active-radar seekers are now ubiquitous, modern pilots are trained to defend preemptively, and future combat usage of long range missiles won’t be so lopsided. The Russians probably still have the majority of their aerial victories in Ukraine with R-37s, but that’s more out of necessity since the Russians don’t have any other missile they can effectively use outside the range of Ukrainian SAMs, and don’t have the proper SEAD capability to neutralize those SAMs. If the PLAAF and PLAN duke it out with the USAF and USN in the South China Sea or Yellow Sea, it probably won’t go the same way as the air war over Ukraine, and engagements won’t consist purely of fighters lobbing long-range missiles and then immediately turning around.
No Specific weight for the PL-17 is listed but the AIM-54 is roughly .66 as long and the PL-17 is roughly .8 as wide in body diameter. So you take 2X1,016lbs and come up with 2,032lbs and multiple that by .66 and then .8 and 'for class', it comes out to be 1,072lbs. Which is considerably less than say an Exocet (1,900lbs) or even Harpoon (1,188lbs).
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Once you know the general area where the threat track is, you can launch a PL-17 to nab it, from just a few orbit locations. And suddenly the cost and performance issues of a 600km ULRAAM start to make sense. Because why shoot down 8-12-16 AGM-158D, fired from 1,500km/900nm out if you can shoot down one B-21 and destroy them, still inside the bomber.
Especially vs. Gen-1 VLO, it is likely the AEW&C will see the shooter in time to vector the fighters. Which will be operating at the limits of their IFDL spacing of say 20-30nm.
And the answer has to be 'that's not what the PLAAF are there for. PLAAF and PLAN have a three zone ICD/A2AD approach to controlling the littoral verge. The outer zone is naval AAW and ASBM/ASCM. The midzone is landbased fighters and bomber missiles. And the inner zone is SAMs and ASCMs.
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You play 'dodge this' games with a modern missile and it's above minimum turn speed of say Mach 1.2, it's probably going to kill you.
Since the air at 20,000ft ASL is half as dense as sea level and 40,000ft is half as dense as 20,000ft, by the time you are semi-ballistic at FL900, the drag is nearly zero which means you can tilt over while ontop of or even ahead of the target and watch it _fly to you_, as you descend, gradually entering the seeker scan limit.
Myself, JATM is likely going to look more like SIAW/AARGM-ER with a much bigger throw weight in the 800-900lb range and 10-12" body diameter class with integral strakes as avionics ducts and a massive motor.
Whereas shooting down America's top Gen-6 bombers, on Ingress, using high end missiles is an exercise in 10 million dollar ULRAAM vs. 850 million dollar B-21. And nobody will ever know the difference. Because the wreckage will be 5 miles down on the bottom of the Pacific.
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The reason the Americans developed the AIM-54, the Soviets developed the R-33, the Russians developed the R-37, and the Chinese developed the PL-17 is to counter missile carriers and their missiles, not AWACS. The largest threat to the U.S. Navy’s carrier groups during the Cold War was arguably the Soviet Tu-22M Backfire force firing Kh-22 missiles. These missiles burn out at nearly Mach 5 and travel along very high ballistic arcs, peaking at over 130 000 ft in altitude. The air is so thin at this height that a missile needs to travel very fast to have enough airflow over its control surfaces to effectively maneuver. The Backfires could fire as soon as they crest the horizon and acquire the carrier with their lookdown radars from 300km away. It was thus imperative that American carrier fighters be able to launch as early as possible to hit the Soviet bombers before they fired, and failing that, be able to hit the missiles. Thus, the AIM-54 Phoenix was developed which had a long range of over 160km, could reach speeds of Mach 5 and was thus fast enough to hit the missiles even at high altitudes (their kill probability at the peak of the Kh-22’s trajectory was low but the Phoenix could still reach them as the missiles dived down). Since the bombers and their missiles would be flying towards the defending F-14s shooting the Phoenix missiles, the maximum range of the Phoenix could be utilized.
Of course it's not an 'AWACS killer'.
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Crank to force the missile to turn and bleed off even more energy
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Which again brings us back to 'why are you devoting so much effort to kill even shorter ranging E-2D assets with APY-9/ADS-18 apertures that are unlikely to detect even normal signature threats outside 250km/135nm and stealth outside 150km/82nm?
A trick the R-33 also used because it's motor was also ahead of a high density tail control package with the motor exhausting down a narrow blast tube through the middle, rather than being a through-shot, full length, system, extending to the midbody.
In addition, the PL-17 looks to have roughly the same volume as a medium-weight anti-ship missile like the Kh-31, and so is probably in the same weight class which will incur a noticeable penalty in the aircraft’s acceleration while the missile is still on board. The large cross-section of the missile will also produce a significant amount of drag as well. As a result, it is unlikely that this missile will be widely fielded, and doesn’t pose a large threat to enemy fighters when equipped.
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The Chinese have caught up.
How many other BVR missiles arrive with a top attack profile height advantage of 50-70,000ft and Mach 3+?
To further elaborate on this, air-to-air missiles burn out relatively quickly, and against a beyond-visual-range (BVR) target actually glide for most of the way to the target, losing speed as a function of distance travelled. As long as the missile is sufficiently fast, it can still cut inside an aircraft’s turn radius by simply flying too fast for the aircraft’s turn to significantly displace it.
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So close but no cookie for you...
Oh goodie. Now we can watch a Mach 2.5 missile run allllll the way out to 40-50nm before going turbo mode to Mach 3-3.5 for terminals. How long is that TOF again? 130-140 seconds?
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FWIW, the MiG-31K, albeit with some structural gusseting, can carry the Kh-47 to Mach 2+ and 60,000ft. It's not a shortage of launch airframe power.
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The far bigger threat is the PL-15, a longer-range missile not that much bigger than the AIM-120, which still outranges the American medium-range missile, and will be widely fielded across all of its latest and upgraded fighters.
The Chinese already have the CSG pretty well bottled up and shoved off, with missile rather than bomber centric ASUW strike. WE are the ones who continue to be long-slow-torturous obsessed with conventional airpower sortie generation in a missile and satellite targeting age. So if this is not (yet another) 'change up _your game_ or prepare to get whooped' indicator, it is so because we choose to ignore the reality that the Chinese are going to be swinging on our thrown ball and we're not sending AWACS anywhere near contested/denied zone in an uncontrolled airspace environment.
As a quick illustration: the R-37M is about 13.4ft long, 15" in body diameter with a 39" wheel span and a 27" wingspan as well as a 40G turn capability (5:1 the missile will defeat a target 8G evasion). Those strakes are well forward and of low aspect ratio, which means that they provide symmetric lift across the cruise phase whereas the delta planform Phoenix and Amos tail fins are designed, again, to compensate for that ass-heavy tail actuator group.
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The American answer to this is to continue replacing their legacy fighters with newer F-35s and eventually the 6th generation NGAD when it enters service and to field the AIM-260, a longer range missile in the same weight class as the AIM-120 but with the range to match the PL-15.
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The answer to the PL-17 riddle is the B-21 Raider and perhaps the Luditance L-SAR4-01 Geosynchronous radar satellite. While it is not a perfect geosynch (it has a north-south wobble as figure-8 pattern) it can basically cover all of the Chinese littoral sea-space and may have the resolution to hot-side pull stealth bomber signatures from above the harmonic wave clutter.
You'd better hope and pray that happens over-water, because you will never be able to stay nose-on, overland.
Note: The Artificiality Of 'Closing to 60nm' with an AGM-158B/D equipped JASSM-ER or XR when you could as easily use SATELLITES or an RQ-180 UAV to image the carrier location, if they even chose to move it around the port of Shanghai (which is unlikely, given the number of piers that can handle a 1,000ft long hull are going to be limited).
If you want to dominate a 60-80nm FPole threat, then you need a 140-150nm weapon which means an 8" motor pipe of your own and a much better motor chemistry long-chain molecule propellant. And when you do this, you are talking about changes to the carriage box which will mess with the door mount and likely the Sidekick loading.
As the result it cannot be carried internally by the 4th generation fighters such as J-20 but is expected to be carried externally by 3.5th generation long-range fighters/interceptors such as J-16. However it may still be carried externally by J-20 underneath its wings. The missile appears to be propelled by a dual pulse rocket motor in favor of a ramjet engine, which has a smaller drag and a slimmer size. It is also speculated to fly a semi-ballistic trajectory similar to American AIM-54 in order to achieve an extra long range (range>500km, speed>Mach 4, cruising altitude 30km). PL-17 is believed to feature an advanced guidance system including a two-way datalink and a new active AESA seeker with enhanced ECCM capability.
The PL-17, visible on the inboard pylon on the port wing of the J-11 above, is a very large and very long-range air-to-air missile. While it has a very long range, likely comparable to the Russian R-37M in a straight line, it comes at the cost of terminal performance.
Now look at the 48N6: It's 27ft long, 19" in diameter with a 44" wheelspan and weighs 3,966lbs.
Use decoys, jamming, and hard turns to defeat the missile in the terminal stage if it closes to within a few kilometres
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This is so old-school, GCS-vs-CNS, logic. Guidance and Control Section says the missile flies a dumb strapdown heading and altitude referent, with an analog sideband tether to tell it when to turn on and start looking. It doesn't really know where it is, nor even where the target is, it's just flying on a bearing for X seconds until it opens it's eyes and starts looking on a given heading referent for the target.
AWACS is more of a (very distant) Orchestra Conductor with some passive ELS modes not readily available to all assets but employed to direct the flow of friendly assets into and out of a mission area, where SCAR and ABM fighter assets actually tasked them.
This means that the PL-17 has incredibly poor maneuverability, so the increase in effective range against a maneuvering target versus the smaller PL-12 and PL-15 is proportionally smaller than the increase in range against an ideal, non-maneuvering target. Thus, against enemy fighters, the PL-17 doesn’t have as large a range advantage over smaller missiles as it does against non-maneuvering threats. There’s a reason that there are videos of Russian Su-35s launching R-77s in Ukraine despite the Su-35’s ability to launch the longer-range R-37M. In the Gulf War, American F-14s preferred having AIM-7 Sparrows over the AIM-54 since the AIM-54’s advantages over the AIM-7 against fighter-sized targets did not fully compensate for the massive penalty in acceleration, maneuverability, and fuel consumption.
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If the U.S. goes big-time into Rapid Dragon palletized launch from C-17s, then it gets even easier.
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Maybe a decoy. If it was something like Bright Cloud or ALE-70. But not maneuvering. Especially if the PL-17 uses a secondary IIR seeker which looks at that hot Sentry rotodome or finback Wedgetail antenna.
The only real reason for a USAF strike package to go feet dry on a Chinese mainland target would be to release their missiles from an unexpected aspect as a defense penetration strategy. Meaning they would penetrate Chinese airspace well up or down coast from the target and launch missiles BEHIND the mission area HiMADS coverage.
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Point being there is no 'there I was' moment of dancing knife-hands, illustrating some clever bit of aspect for fuzing error nonsense.
First off, just because we now say that the Ks-172 and the PL-17 are 'only' capable of 400km, does not mean that this was always so. Originally, they were classed as 600km weapons. And they likely still are capable of those ranges, because, golly wally, you don't ever tell the other side the cutoff point where they become ineffective.
Why is this? The difference between GCS and CNS. A Gudance Control Section depends on being in the envelope of a seeker point-angle to receive SARH or ARH returns for much of it's midcourse, as the missile swtiches from strapdown to homing. A Comms/Nav/Sensor system knows the missiles own-position in space through GPS aided IMU reference on speed and time plus bearing. It can steer the missile to a point in space where it is positioned optimally to kill the target, kinematically, using a sensor which is prepointed to snap-acquire the target so late in the endgame that the target only has seconds (4-5-6) to live and thus cannot generate the new heading + fps distance along same to beat the missile.
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Only the Super 530D, which it is rumored the French sent a few of, to equip Mirage F1EQ4/5 could match the Phoenix and that was largely because the Super 530D is a genuine Mach 5 weapon whereas the AIM-54 is not called 'The Buffalo' because it's a speed king (Think Charles Bronson and 'The White Buffalo' of the move of same name...).
Now overlay the PL-17 engagement envelope and realize how much more the safety of the S-400/HQ-9B envelope covers the air defenders when they can fire, 'center out' towards a more likely B-21 JASSM release point, some 200-300nm out to sea.
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