ANI |
Updated: May 03, 2022 07:01 IST
Hong Kong, May 3 (ANI): China continues to astound, and steal a march on its Western counterparts, with new types of weapons and missiles. The latest example of this occurred on April 19 when the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) released a video clip depicting a hitherto unknown missile being fired from a Type 055 guided-missile cruiser.
The new weapon is presumed by most commentators to be an anti-ship ballistic missile, which analysts refer to under the nomenclature of YJ-21. If the initial analysis of this YJ-21 is correct, then China becomes the first country in the world to operationally field such a missile from a naval vessel.
The YJ-21 was fired from the warship Wuxi, a Type 055 cruiser that had been commissioned in Qingdao just a month earlier, in March. Its launch from an active-duty ship indicates the missile is almost certainly now in PLA service.
From what can be seen in the video clip, the new Chinese weapon has small fins and a bi-conic nose. The missile’s small control surfaces suggest it is not a surface-to-air missile (SAM), a class that needs to be extremely manoeuvrable in order to hit fast-moving aircraft.
The YJ-21 was cold-launched from Wuxi’s stern vertical launch system (VLS), meaning it was expelled from the launcher cell by gas, before the missile’s own engine ignited once it was in the air and clear of the ship. Chinese VLS cells can accommodate missiles up to 9 metres long and with an 850 mm diameter, so the YJ-21 must be within these parameters.
No performance specifications are yet known of the YJ-21, but its range could speculatively be anywhere from 1,000 km to 1,500 km. The South China Morning Post, which is not always accurate in its reporting on the PLA, credits the YJ-21 with a terminal velocity of Mach 10, or ten times the speed of sound.
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