Thread: Why no China?
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Old 10-03-2018, 03:22 PM
Olefin Olefin is offline
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One thing to keep in mind with the canon is that it was written in the mid-1980's and many of the Chinese missiles they were familiar with were deployed in small numbers - or they may have only known about the liquid fuel ones - and they have a crucial vulnerability

i.e. the DF-4 only had four missiles operational in 1984 - but they can definitely bust a city if they get off the ground - 3,300 kt explosive yield - but they have to be fueled prior to launch

the DF-5 of which they had around 15-20 took as long as two hours to fuel which had to be done in the open - giving the Soviets a pretty good chance to nail them on the pad - that is for the ones in the tunnels

the ones in the silos can be maintained at ready to fire - but they had a very limited number in silos

the DF-3 has a range of 3,300 km - not enough to reach Moscow but they could really screw up cities closer - there were 50 of them in 1993 but they also had to be fueled prior to firing - so they could be caught on the ground

the DF-11 is solid fuel and is the one that could be launched under attack with no prep time - but it has much shorter range - only around 300 km - but there are a lot of them - the question is would China have used them conventionally first and how many were left to put nukes on

you also have the DF-21A which went into service in 1996 which the canon authors would have had no information at all - its road mobile and has good range and a 300kt warhead - but who knows how many were ever made before the Soviets hammered China

as for bombers the canon writers would only have known about the 120 H-6 bombers they had that were a variant of the Tu-16

the Xian JH-7 Flying Leopard that has a range and payload exceeding that of the F-111 wasnt deployed until 1992 - those planes had a real chance of making it to target versus the H-6 bombers

So the real question is given the existence of ABM's in the timeline how many would have gotten off the ground (you figure the Soviets would go all out to get as many as possible) and how many would have been shot down?
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