MarmiteLover123

All animals want to keep living, that's literally why animals evolved brains in the first place, to keep their bodies alive for as long as possible. How can you, who is not the pet, say for sure they would prefer to die than keep living? You can't ask them, and you can't get in their mind to determine how much they still appreciate being alive. Even the oldest, sickest pet will still make an effort to keep themselves alive however they can: eating, drinking water, moving out of the way of danger, etc. As far as I know, no animal (at least the animals we keep as pets) have an instinct to just give up and stop going through the motions of life past a certain age.

While it's not an instinct, I've known friends and family members who have had dogs and cats who stopped putting in the effort to eat and drink at the very end. At that stage, you know that it's over...

If we learned one thing from Ukraine it's that the US is structurally incapable of ramping up mass industry.

Does China want to fight that kind of war though, a drawn out multi year attritional war where a city with a pre war population of 60 000 takes 15+ months to capture, a war in Ukraine that has gone on for longer than the US campaign against Japan in the Pacific during WW2. I doubt China wants to fight that kind of war over Taiwan for instance. If China wants to seize Taiwan, they would want to be quick and decisive, and to deter any US intervention either out of fear of Chinese capabilities, or by quickly sinking an aircraft carrier or destroying US airbases if the US does intervene, in a forcible display of Chinese military capabilities. That's what my read is right now.

I can see use for both expensive hypersonics and dirt cheap systems like this which will still be expensive to shoot down

Some sort of Hi-Lo mix could be useful, I can see the value in that. There are always lots of targets to prosecute in war, and not everything needs a high end system to hit it. In that case, it just needs to be more difficult to shoot down than a cruise missile, and probably won't be fired at highly defended targets. In Ukraine, Russia does this a lot, firing ballistic missiles at areas with no or minimal systems to defend against ballistic strikes. Something like this, cheaper than an Iskander-M or Kinzhal, but still very capable, would be very useful for Russia right now. But that brings me back to the first question: is China interested in fighting or preparing to fight that kind of war? Are they going to structure their rocket forces like this? I have doubts.

Yemen already has this kind of technology , due to co-operation with Iran. What do you think all those missiles fired at Israel and the US Navy were?

Fattah-1 debris ended up in Israel from missiles launched from Yemen

I highly doubt that China wants to use Iranian missile strikes as a model. Iranian missiles displayed poor accuracy, which made counterforce targeting via conventional warheads infeasible. Iranian missile strikes had practically no impact on Israeli military operations. Israeli airbases still functioned, the Israeli chain of command was unaffected. Yemeni missile strikes using Iranian designed missiles aimed at US aircraft carriers complicated operations, even resulted in aircraft going overboard due to evasive maneuvers, but at the end of the day did not land a hit. China does not want to enter into a war with the US with that. China wants to destroy air bases and sink aircraft carriers. China, as a state actor which is a global superpower, wants their weapons to have high end strategic and tactical effects. China has little care for trying to use up interceptor stocks, they want to sink Nimitz class aircraft carriers and destroy Guam and US airbases in Japan within the first few hours of a conflict, or at least have a credible capability to do so, to establish deterrence.

It's definitely not impacting the target at Mach 7, that's given as the maximum or peak velocity.

This seems to be part of the marketing campaign for the PLA (Chinese military) to buy the missile. I have significant doubts that the PLA will purchase it. There's a big difference between a glide vehicle or maneuverable re-entry vehicle that can hit hypersonic speeds for a brief moment before significantly slowing down and maneuvering at a big cost to speed and energy, vs sustained hypersonic speeds for the majority of its flight. The PLA (and the US military) are looking for the latter. And they have both demonstrated the latter in testing already, with the DF-ZF glide vehicle for the DF-17, and X-51 Waverider respectively. The X-51 achieved 240 seconds of powered flight, 200+ seconds of that being hypersonic flight utilising a scramjet. Those are the kind of figures that the US and China are interested in. The US is looking to minituarise the X-51 design for a tactical weapon carried by fighter jets.

Unlike traditional ballistic systems that follow predictable paths, the YKJ-1000’s glide phase introduces dynamic manoeuvrability, permitting altitude shifts, lateral displacement, and abrupt course changes designed to degrade missile-defence radar tracking and intercept algorithms.

The more advanced ballistic missiles with maneuverable re-entry vehicles have been doing this for over 40 years. Look at the Hera Moving Target Vehicle, based on the Pershing-II, for example:

The YKJ-1000’s avionics suite integrates consumer drone cameras, automotive-grade processors, and mass-produced BeiDou navigation chips, enabling unprecedented cost savings while still maintaining functional target-acquisition capability.

So definitely not flying at hypersonic speeds in the terminal phase if a consumer grade camera is able to make out a target. (Plasma sheath, how is the camera seeing through that?). Also consumer grade navigation chips for satellite navigation? Don't see that fairing well with the mess of electronic warfare and jamming that will arise once a shooting war starts. Accuracy is quite important.

Lingkong Tianxing’s publicity officer noted that online claims of exactly 700,000 yuan (~US$99,000 / RM463,000) per unit were “not true”, yet confirmed that the missile indeed relies on standard industrial components mass-produced at low cost to replace bespoke aerospace-grade alternatives.

Of course it's not true, you aren't putting a payload into orbit at that price. I'm sure that this new missile is significantly cheaper than the DF-17, but the question is if China even wants cheap missiles like this, vs high end hypersonic systems that they already have. That's a question about PLA force structure more than anything. At the moment they don't seem interested.

This mirrors the lessons of Ukraine, where low-cost drones consistently force expensive air-defence systems to engage, draining budgets at unsustainable rates.

This hasn't been happening for a while now. There are dedicated short range air defence systems and counter UAS (unmanned aerial systems) systems in place to deal with the UAVs.

States such as Iran, Venezuela, or Myanmar—or even non-state actors such as Yemen’s Houthis—could transform their anti-ship and anti-infrastructure strike capabilities, altering local power balances and complicating US or Western military intervention.

Why would Iran or Yemen be interested in this, they already have ballistic missiles with powered maneuverable re-entry vehicles in Fattah-1 and it's derivatives. We already saw how these kinds of weapons stack up vs a US intervention, what their strengths and weaknesses are.

The argument that it's stateless rests upon the argument that the vessel is sailing under a false flag and name, thus it's registration is invalid. The vessel on ship trackers is named SKIPPER and is under the Guyanese flag. However, on the US OFAC sanctions website, it's listed under the name ADISA and under the Panamanian flag, and is linked to a shell company in the Marshall Islands called Triton Navigation Corp that facilitates this (false flag and name) for Iranian and Russian oil trading.

That would be this vessel, under a 300+m long crude oil tanker operating under the Guyanese flag, and sanctioned by the US

Also known as ADISA. Sanctions are related to transporting Iranian oil according to the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

Apparently it was a sanctioned oil tanker. There have been tensions in recent weeks between the US Navy, Coast Guard and sanctioned oil tankers, with the US telling them to turn back or attempting to interfere. Now they've actually seized one.

Thanks for this. I'm going to try watch the movie now, it sounds really interesting.

Tesla was coming out with a cool electric car using a Lotus chassis back then (the original Tesla roadster) and the original SpaceX Falcon rocket was the first privately owned rocket to reach orbit, this was around 2008 I think so Musk was definitely making waves back then in nerdier circles.

No shit sherlock. It was incredibly obvious when watching the movies.