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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Nah, your gonna have to take my word for it.

Any source I post would be bullshit anyway.

It all boils down to:

Chinas missiles had sea trials, and testing was returned to land trials. We don't know why, but the most likely reason is they failed to hit a moving target. They are probably ahead of us, but that is at least partially because we are investing into the raider instead; and lockheed is working on the US hypersonic at a reasonable rate. Russia's missile is fake, it's an air launched missile that will hit mach five but it doesn't maneuver and it doesn't use scram jets or anything post 1980's. If we count that as a hypersonic missle, we've had them for 40 years.

The J-20 uses rip off russian engines from like, the su-30. No bueno. They are developing indigenous engines, but they aren't ready for service yet, apparently . Their stealth is ass, and their radars are atleast 1/2 of an ass, as seen by the fat nose on the j-20. Sexy plane though. Canarads for days. Thus, china's BVR missle: It has range on an aim (theoretically), but it doesn't mean anything if they are using avionics and stealth tech from the 80's.

Re. ship building: yeah that one is true. You can't beat having a civilian shipbuilding industry for having a military ship building capacity. We'll see their fleet get to local parity/dominance within a couple years, probably.

The new WS-10C engines are in service as of last year.

https://twitter.com/rupprechtdeino/status/1405777441252020229

The Russians have Kinzhal but also Avangard, which is a truer hypersonic missile. They're even working on that nuclear cruise missile that was irradiating parts of Northern Russia during the development process. That's pretty new stuff, even if it's an old idea.

I don't even think the US has any fielded air launched ballistic missiles, unless you count the Minuteman coming off the back of that C-5 in the 70s. They're making Prompt Conventional Strike but it's not finished yet.

The US is making the B-21 but the Chinese are also making a flying wing stealth bomber. And we know the Chinese are making their own NGAD. US NGAD isn't exactly a secret.

Furthermore, I can prove that the Chinese aren't using stealth tech from the 1980s, just from the fact that we know they were stealing stealth tech from the F-35! Claiming that China is 40 years behind the US in avionics and stealth is just ridiculous, it doesn't map to the facts. The fact that they decided they wanted less stealth and more range/payload/other features for the J-20 is reasonable. They plan to be fighting in the Pacific after all. The F-35 and F-22 seem to be designed for the Fulda Gap, for high-end air superiority over a short range. Not quite sure what they were thinking for the former case, hopefully it was Lockheed Martin bribery over a stroke of insanity.