I’ve yet to hear anyone explain how the DF-21D’s kill vehicle gets or performs terminal guidance.
No one who knows the answer would risk the jail time to divulge it. Fortunately, for me, I don’t know the answer, but I know enough about other naval weapons to spitball here. This is all open source, available on Wikipedia and other platforms.
Missiles have few possible guidance systems, falling into four broad categories:
- Active
- Semi-active
- Passive
- Location
Active seeking is an onboard RADAR transceiver.
Passive seeking relies on the target’s own electromagnetic radiation. This category contains heat (infrared) seeking missiles as well as seekers that home on RADAR and radio emissions. It also contains video guided missiles, although those are not historically very common.
Semi-active missiles contain a RADAR receiver, but no transmitter of their own. The transmitter is based on a friendly platform (usually the ship it was launched from), and is typically called a director or illuminator. The missile will either fly along the transmitted beam or the director will illuminate the target and the missile will seek it. The US’s Standard Missile series is an example of this type.
Location is either GPS (or equivalent) or Inertial Navigation (gyros and accelerometers). These aren’t useful for attacking ships, as they’re not stationary, but it can get a long range missile within range to turn on it’s seeker.
Capable anti ship missiles use a combination of the above.
An aircraft carrier is always in a strike group and surrounded by other ships.
Viewed from above, a carrier has a large, flat surface that can’t be coated with radar absorbant material, due to the extreme wear and tear flight operations put on the flight deck. That makes it an enormous RADAR reflector, especially compared to the surrounding ships, many of which are designed to have reduced radar cross sesctions. While the ocean is also a large reflector, the signal wouldn’t be nearly as strong due to the irregularity of the sea surface, especially in rough places like the South China Sea.
American super carriers are nuclear powered, which means they don’t have big exhaust stacks, so Infrared seekers are out.
Each type of ship has different radio emissions, based on the types of radars and communications that are onboard. This can be used to discriminate between classes of ships, and can even be used to identify specific ships (ships operate RADARS on slightly different frequencies to prevent interference. Also, each RADAR and radio transmitter has unique irregularities in it’s signal which can be analyzed and used to determine its source). With how the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the radio spefctrum works in the atmosphere, a passive receiver can detect and identify a transmitter at twice the RADAR’s effective range, so passive detection is an extemely effective way to locate a target. The downside is that it only gives you direction, not range.
A semi-active seeker is extremely unlikely.
GPS satellites would be very juicy targets in a war between the US and China. Both countries have demonstrated the capability to destroy satellites. I am not aware of a China based GPS-like system, and the US controls the GPS system, to the point where, in wartime, the system would shift to encrypted only, making it useless to all non-NATO receivers. But, an Inertial Navigation System (INS) is pretty simple and effective with modern components.
So, to conclude, the likely DF-21D guidance is:
- Inertial navigation to get in the area
- Passive EM seeking to get near the target and discriminate between targets
- Active RADAR seeker in the terminal phase
Sorry if you already know this stuff. To get into any further depth, I’ll have to find what else is freely available.
Satellites and over-the-horizon radar. China’s recent advancements in space exploration tech are all a handy mediatic smokescreen/testbed for their increasingly more technologically advanced satellites.
How does that information get processed and sent to the KV in real time as it is performing reentry and has a white-hot plasma shield in front of it? Sure, a network of satellites providing 24/7/365 coverage of the relevant parts of the Pacific could do this but whether that capability exists is unknown and also untested.
It’s certainly a credible threat but I think a lot of this “death of the carrier” rhetoric is coming way too soon, especially when midair refueling exists.
It’s funny that this makes the naval commanders nervous about sailing carrier groups in the South China Sea, but sadly that just makes them ask for yet more weapons that our government is all too happy to provide.
I’d imagine it works like any other ballistic missile, even the ones used by the west. The difference lies in the fact that a carrier is technically a moving target, unlike a city. My theory is that the KV-satellite acquires some sort of firing solution before re-entry then just beelines towards where the target is going to be. While carriers are surprisingly nimble for their size, they have little warning of the incoming munition, typology, and intended target, and may not be able to outmaneuver the projectile. Just baseless speculation on my part, btw.
The death of the carrier to me is probably somewhat overdue, precisely because of tech like midair refueling, but also due to the commanders’ own shyness about committing a carrier into open battle against a peer opponent with their own military and navy. Even without wunderwaffen like the DF-21, basic-bitch anti-ship missiles can simply saturate their targets and overwhelm their defenses for a fraction of the production and deployment costs of a carrier.
It’s funny that this makes the naval commanders nervous about sailing carrier groups in the South China Sea, but sadly that just makes them ask for yet more weapons that our government is all too happy to provide.
This has been the case for a while; it’s all theater, a farce put on by ghouls in the MIC and their former West Point buddies in the Navy and Pentagon to keep the cycle of grift going on in perpetuity. In reality these weapons were almost never meant to be fielded in anger, because if either A) The weapons are fielded and don’t work against a real opponent -or- B) Escalation of conflict harms the economy to the point they can’t continue the grift, then they lose out.
