Discussion

Inside China / Business

lejalv: Something that reduces the sense of impunity of the US and Israel is maybe good news.

srean: What seems to be the problem with their S300 clones? Anyone knows ? Easy to jam I suppose.

ranger_danger: If they're that cheap they can probably afford to cry wolf with them. Get people used to seeing unarmed missles flown in to random places, where the possible damage doesn't justify trying to shoot them down, then suddenly start putting explosives onboard.

code_biologist: Chat, is this real? I've seen this guy pop up on youtube. I assume he's a Chinese state mouthpiece as he's a westerner in the mainland with a very pro-China spin (substack recommended the other posts below), but I'm curious how strong the factual basis for this reporting is.China's factories are in another world - Mar 23, 2025Chinese factories build fire trucks for under $400,000 in six weeks. In the US, it's $2 million in 4 years - Apr 19, 2025Iran is blowing up $500 million radars. China's export bans mean they are gone forever. - Mar 16, 2026

nclin_: You don't have to assume: He seems to provide ample detailed western sources to back up his claims in every video.Perhaps it'd be more difficult for him to broadcast if he had an anti-china perspective, but the content itself seems legitimate.

DetroitThrow: S300 is very good AA, but in practice modern SEAD with a sizeable number of planes can outrange them and they're not great at protecting themselves. We saw this in India-Pakistan and seeing this again in Iran-USA. You can see more of a stale mate when they aren't getting outranged in Ukraine-Russia.

anon7000: Good question. I think China is undoubtedly far better than the US at advanced, cheap mass-production. So wouldn’t be surprising they could do that for the military too. Not to say the US couldn’t get better.

exabrial: Real or not, this is probably the future. Lockheed execs want combat to be a distant exchange of multi-million dollar missiles. People actually fighting for their lives will wreck a $300million radar with a slingshot.

creantum: If they’re half as good as the robot I saw today in china slapping that kid id get a few

DetroitThrow: There's a few of these guys that make posts about technology that doesn't materialize after a few years, they can be ignored. There are plenty of pro-China observers that offer grounded analysis of Chinese military-industrial base out there that don't make claims that China has unobtainium technology. /r/LessCredibleDefence has a shortlist of these propagandists.

TacticalCoder: Iran destroyed two radars, one in Jordan, one in Qatar. The US is spending something like $2 billion per day destroying infrastructure from the islamists.> People actually fighting for their lives ...People actually fighting for their right to publicly hang athletes, kill 30 000+ of their own, and fund Hezbollah and Hamas so that the oath they took to erase Israel from the map can one day be fullfilled.The people in Iran who actually do want the islamist regime to fall are fighting for their lives, but not from targetted missiles strikes (even if there are collateral damages): they're fighting for their lives if they dare to protest to criticize islamism. Nobody should forget that the islamists in Iran killed more of their own in a few days than collateral strikes did.

kube-system: China does keep close tabs on foreign bloggers in their country (especially over the past decade or so), and anything remotely nonpositive does get people visits from police or worse. There is a huge chilling effect, even for people who mostly do have positive things to say.

esseph: [delayed]

0x4e: Amazing! Yet another life destroying invention. What could go wrong?

sailfast: [delayed]

fooker: Yeah it's certainly unimaginable that the civilization that invented gunpowder, cannons, guns, rockets a thousand years ago can make it for cheap now :)'Hypersonic' missile makes it sound like it's alien technology, no it's solid boosters that do not follow the usual ballistic trajectory with a computer from 1970.The raw materials cost less than half of a standard car.

justin66: [delayed]

FpUser: >"Do they hit their targets?"Are you sure you want to find out?

Loughla: According to the Google search I just did, an average American hypersonic missile costs between 13 and 41 million dollars.So that is between 131 and 410 of these. At that rate, and with enough disdain for my enemy and apathy for their people, I can just launch a shit load of them in the right direction and cross my fingers.

FpUser: >"A Chinese company is in production of a hypersonic missile, with a sticker price comparable to that of a luxury sedan"Well they've perfected manufacturing at scale. I see no surprise here.

srean: I am talking about the Chinese clones, not the original (is there a difference ?).As you mention they did not fare very well in the India-Pakistan conflict.

magicalist: > He seems to provide ample detailed western sources to back up his claims in every videoDoes he? The only sources seem to be a CNSpaceflight tweet from last november of a promo animation from the missile company, and a South China Morning Post article that is just quoting commentators on Chinese state TV talking about the the possible capabilities of the missiles.The other sources (someone else's substack that's sourced from a December article[1] from The Independent, and two articles on "interestingengineering") all just quote the same animation and commentators.[1] https://www.the-independent.com/asia/china/china-hypersonic-...

indubioprorubik: Pakistan invests in chinese air -defenses- gets steamrolled by india. Iran buys chinese air-defenses- gets steamrolled by Israel and the Us. Russia claimed the s400 was all the rage- and its going nowhere in ukraine. If propaganda claims where a currency, could you buy anything with all this?

magicalist: This is blogspam based on a tweet of the company's promo video[1] in November and some speculation by a guy on Chinese state TV[2]. As far as I can find there's no evidence since then that these have entered production, mass or otherwise. It was doubted at the time they could hit these costs in production, and there hasn't been any news since.[1] https://xcancel.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1993158707056984359[2] https://archive.is/VLO7U

jollyllama: So, a return to cold-war style missile races, except there are actual slugfests from time to time because the nuclear threat no longer has gravity.

epistasis: I think it's led to a huge advantage for defenders. Nuclear weapons favor attackers, or deterrence. But massive drone waves allow defense of large areas with a very small number of people. It's not a race to build bigger missiles that go longer distances and are harder to shoot down, it's largely a coordination, communication, logistics, and information management problem.

bamboozled: This is basically what made the USA a military super power in the first place? At least it's what made them so powerful during WW2 and I guess beyond.

ck2: when China take Taiwan there's not a single thing the world is going to be able to do about itthey use thousands of fishing boats to practice blockadesthey are building massive oil reserves and getting most of population into electric vehicleslet's just hope they wait to next decade and not like 2028

yogibear678142: People thought the same on Iran, untouchable. China has the same air defense and tech as Iran, not effective in real world situations.Blockades go both ways. China is energy dependant so very vulnerable to blockade response by the US and Japan. A few choke points make it easy, the ocean is not open ended.

janalsncm: This is what people should keep in mind when the statistic about US defense spending being higher than the next N nations combined or whatever it is now. If I buy a 30k Prius, and you spend 300k on a different car,1) that doesn’t mean you can drive 10x as fast and2) maybe you just bought an overpriced Prius, perhaps a gold plated oneThis is a more general problem in politics, where the overall budget being allocated is reported rather than the practical result.

epistasis: > wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot.I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. There is a big change towards intelligent, small, and cheap drones. If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.The drone manufacturing has gone so exponential that they now have a shortage of drone operators. It's completely changed the war in the past few months, with Russia now losing ground, at basically zero additional Ukrainian casualties, and with Russia continuing to have massive ground casualties from sending poorly trained troops to die while hiding in a 30 mile wide kill zone ruled by drones.The quantity of drones allows new tactics, reminiscent of rolling wave artillery. And deployment of a wide variety of types of drones has led to the depletion of Russian anti-air defense in both occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself, allowing the destruction of much of Russia's oil infrastructure. The recent Baltic port hit will be felt for a long long time, and nearly completely neutralizes the lifting of sanctions on Russia. All from novel weapons, which are decidedly more sophisticated than slingshots both in their construction and application. And the US is way behind, and too proud to let Ukraine share their knowledge and capabilities.

wahern: Not hypersonic, but there are upstart defense companies building and selling these types of low-cost weapons. See, e.g., Anduril's $200,000 Barracuda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracuda-MBig firms like Lockheed nominally have similar products in the pipeline. See, e.g., https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2025/cmmt... Though given how long they've been in development one wonders if they're slow walking these things until competition forces them to commit.I don't really follow the defense industry, but I imagine building cheap missiles isn't that hard. Rather, the difficult and expensive aspect would likely be the systems integrations (targeting, tracking, C&C, etc), especially in a way that let's the military rapidly cycle in new weapons without having to upgrade everything else. OTOH, if and when that gets truly fleshed out, firms like Lockheed might start to lose their moat, so there's probably alot of incentive to drag their feet and limit integration flexibility, the same way social media companies abhor federated APIs and data mobility. And if integration is truly the difficult part, I'm not sure what to make of weapons like the YKJ-1000 or Barracuda. Without the integration are they really much better than $100 drones?

beloch: Whether these claims are real or not, they do illustrate one of the crazy things about technological progress. Capabilities that are difficult for states to develop eventually become something corporations can easily implement, and from there they become affordable for private citizens, first to buy, and then to DIY.Two obvious and concerning corollaries are that state capabilities eventually become easy to obtain for non-state terrorist groups and, later on, unbalanced individuals. Consider what ISIS would have done with these, and then think about what the unabomber would have done.I'd fully expect this particular company to face multiple hurdles in actually exporting any of these missiles. They might not be able to actually deliver at the quoted price-point. China might not permit it, due to the political blow-back. Israel and the U.S. obviously have an interest in making sure none of these missiles wind up in Iranian hands. The execs of this company are probably feeling a bit like a target has been painted on their heads right now.However, controlling technology like this is ultimately a game of whack-a-mole. If this company fails, gets regulated, decapitated, sucked up by the Chinese military, etc., ten other companies will pop up all over the place that can produce the same thing or better, cheaper. There's also a supply chain of components behind this company that can now export critical parts to those building their own. We've simply reached (or are about to reach) the point where missiles of this sort can be made very cheaply.Here's hoping missile defence gets better and cheaper fast.

fasterik: Relevant philosophy paper: "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis" by Nick Bostrom [0].In that paper, Bostrom floats the idea that it might be in humanity's best interest to have a strong global authoritarian government with mass surveillance to prevent technological catastrophes. Now, I don't believe he takes that argument completely seriously, but it's worth thinking hard about why we wouldn't want that and what alternatives there are for maintaining global stability.[0] https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

bigiain: > I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here.I think it's perfect - a very valid "David vs Goliath" reference.

torginus: Yeah, there's the Flamingo, Ukraine's cruise missile that uses old turbofan engines near the end of the service lives. But Ukrainians mentioned, that they're looking to mass produce low-cost engines using steel for their blades instead of exotic alloys, as used on most aircraft engines. Of course even advanced steel alloys cant survive the close to 1000C temps for long, but a cruise missile needs to fly for like 3-4 hours, not thousands. Probably a lot else can be simplified in the design, as turbofans are conceptually very simple, much simpler than ICE.

andriy_koval: air defense is much more complicated and difficult to build.Iranian cheap drones/cruise missiles are efficient from another hand.

sgc: That's pretty much the entire point of what people are calling hypersonic missiles. All ballistic missiles fly at hypersonic speeds. The advance is being able to do so at low altitude with maneuverability.

Barrin92: Cheap hypersonics don't threaten global stability, they threaten global hegemony. Which is really what I suspect irks most people afraid of them.We've seen a shift towards cheap offensive capacity that gives middle powers or even smaller actors the capacity to hit hegemons where it hurts, very visible in Ukraine and the Middle East now. This leads to instability only temporarily until you end up in a new equilibrium where smaller players will have significantly more say and capacity to retaliate, effectively a MAD strategy on a budget for everyone.

mpweiher: I see your $99,000 missile and I raise you a $10 intercept.Time for those laser-defenses to come up to speed.

torginus: Lasers have very limited applications, they have an inherent line of sight limits, and even the most powerful ship mounted lasers that can do like 50kW, take a minute to boil a kettle of water away, more if you wrap it in tinfoil.And a shot might cost $10, the laser itself cost $$$, fits only in a cargo container, and requires crazy amounts of juice.Meanwhile a simple AA gun needs none of those things and can kill things just fine.

supermdguy: > Nobody knows yet the true capabilities of the missile, but it doesn’t matter. The accuracy doesn’t matter very much, the payload doesn’t matter very much. If it’s launched at a certain target in Tel Aviv, it still is going to hit something in Tel Aviv. The Israelis have no choice but to attempt an intercept, and will spend millions to do soSounds like the massive price disparity more than makes up for any accuracy issues

irishcoffee: Clearly accuracy does matter. I just tried to throw a rock from my back yard to Tel Aviv, I missed terribly.

epistasis: Ah, I hadn't thought of that sort of slingshot! I was thinking more "primitive rock throwing."

zer00eyz: There is also a cost aspect of it as well.The long range drones that are being shot down are the "expensive products" of a military industrial complex.The US solution to this problem is even more expensive.For the cost the Ukraine's solution might as well be a rock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_(drone)

wiseowise: > If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.I'm all for good guys winning, but what are your sources? And why do you think Russia can't match Ukraine in this regard?

torginus: Yeah, you often read stories on the internet about how the SR-71 could easily outrun the MIG-25, proving US technological superiority, but those don't really take into account that there was like a dozen made of the former, with titanium hulls and exotic engineering. While there were more than a thousand made of the cheap, steel hulled MIG 25

serf: It's a false comparison.How many MIG-25s flew over the borders of the United States mainland during the cold war?Yes the MIG-25 was a cheaper and more practical plane, but that wasn't the MO of the sr71.

zer00eyz: You're talking about the hardware. That is critical.But what's evolving even faster is the software. And in real world use cases.They arent paying for tank models and people to run around and try to chase to "test". They are very literally doing it live, with live fire testing day in and day out.Furthermore they are rewarding results on both ends. Successful operators get to buy gear for kills in an amazon like store (talk about gamification). And there are paths for "innovation" to make its way to the front quickly: see https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/how-a-ukrainian-gam... for an example.

tartoran: I think whatever advantage Russia has (size and resources) is being squandered by corruption and incompetence.

eunos: > China has the same air defense and tech as IranLmao, quantitatively and qualitatively China is more than an order of magnitude bigger

papa0101: absolute drivel, zero-substantiated, zero-value.

vsgherzi: These don’t seem comparable to me. The sr 71 was never meant to be mass produced or to head to head against a mig. The sr71 didn’t even have any guns it’s a spy plane. The sr 71 accomplished its goal with flying colors and spotted nuclear test sites and information on the Cuban missle crisis.The star fighter, or f15 or f22 would be more apt.TLDR special purpose tool vs general fighter cannot be compared

nxm: During the Cuban Missle Crisis it was the U2, not the sr-71

givemeethekeys: Perhaps this will be a larger peace between hypersonic powers than the one we've had between nuclear powers.

blipvert: If it’s not five nines then I’m not interested.

larkost: You are correct, but I should point out that Russia has described its Kinzhal missiles as hypersonic, when they are really more of a traditional ballistic missile fired horizontally. So very fast (Mach 10), but not as maneuverable as what the U.S. has been calling hypersonic.Since the original story here does not provide many details, we can't know which side of that fence this falls on (assuming it is real).

mikkupikku: There were 32 SR-71s, 13 A-12s and 2 M-21s. That's 47 total I believe, making your figure off by about 300%, which incidentally is how much cooler the SR-71 is relative to the Mig, on account of it looking incredibly exotic and elegant instead of like a pointy sky tractor. Being faster is just icing on the cake.

blitzar: Your figure of 300% is off by orders of magnitude for how much cooler the SR-71 is at 60 years of age than practically anything else that exists.

epistasis: There's no single source, it's basically all the war reporting. My claims are not contentious. Even Russia's war bloggers are repeating the same now.Russia could, in theory, use it's greater number of people towards producing drones. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, train its new recruits properly before throwing them into hopeless situations. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, operate by rewarding production contracts to the most capable teams rather than the ones with the best connections. But it hasn't. And even if Russia does, they'll have to catch up. They could!Even the US could, in theory, start learning from Ukraine or even following in its footsteps, independently, but it hasn't.Ukraine is fighting for its life, it's on Death Ground, in the terms of Sun Tzu. In Russia, perhaps only Putin is on Death Ground, and even then, there's many ways Putin could give up on the war and still stay in power. That produces far different results in people. And the cultures of Ukraine and Russia are fundamentally incompatible, which also produces very different results from people.

dragonelite: Well to this day China is getting Iranian energy. This naval blockade is a relic of a past long gone. When you have eyes in the sky and pin point accurate missiles. The US can't even block or free the straight of Hormuz.Also China is friendly with Russia they have land border so they can build pipelines.

jollyllama: Hypersonics would not appear to be definitively offensive or defensive.