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.
Yes. I have no idea if this is technologically plausible at this point but it doesn’t make sense strategically. Why would China allow something this dangerous and IP-intensive to be commercialized? We don’t sell our nuclear weapons tech, for example. (I assume.) And the thought that they would want this in the hands of unstable actors, however they are currently aligned, is a little silly. This feels more like a mistake, possibly even a scam.
You underestimate both China's production capability and their desire to destabilize the south Asian region, so they can step in to take control. They have been arming Pakistan to the teeth against India. They even sold them the nuclear weapons tech. They don't care.
Real or not, this is probably the future. Lockheed execs want combat to be a distant exchange of multi-million dollar missiles. As shown in Ukraine, people actually fighting for their lives will wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot.
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-M
Big 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?
The point of low cost weapons is to give you options on high intensity warfare: namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets.
The other benefit is just complicating air defense: put a lot of incoming in the air that can't be ignored, and makes it harder to find the higher spec systems mixed in - e.g. stealth systems when there's a lot of unstealthy platforms or munitions also attacking are going to be much harder to find.
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.
> 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?
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.
Note that it is wrong to think that David was at a disadvantage. I know that is not how the story is taught today, but slingshot troops of that age we the snipers of their age: very deadly (not at the range of a modern sniper, but...).
If the fight between them was started at some distance, the David should have been the expected winner by pretty much everyone on the field. Think "bright a club to a gun fight" sort of vibes.
David had a sling, not a slingshot. They are very different tools. slings need more skill, but are easy for a shepard to learn. (I suspect more powerful as well but I'm not an expert)
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.
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.
Maybe I'm crazy but isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots and ATACMS not seen as highly valuable to them?
If anything, it's clear that a strategy of massing low-cost ballistic missiles and low-cost drones is a great way to provide hurt to neighbors (and maybe low-cost ICBMs will mean hurt to the world) but the US is proving in Iran and Ukraine, to a lesser extent, is proving in its defense that highly capable advanced systems are able to provide extreme offensive and defensive abilities.
Ukraine is also showing the value of low-cost drones in defense against drones! Something the US notably does not have and is suffering very real consequences for it.
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.
I don't quite follow, can you explain a little bit about how drone waves allow for defense of large areas? I can see how they help in offensive attacks, but as far as I can tell they don't seem to have helped defend Iran from the US and Israel; they're just helping Iran lash out after taking a beating.
(Not trying to be smarmy, just genuinely curious.)
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 and
2) maybe you just bought an overpriced Prius, perhaps a gold plated one
This is a more general problem in politics, where the overall budget being allocated is reported rather than the practical result.
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
The SR-71 wasn't trying to catch the MIG-25, it was trying to get away--and it worked. The U-2 proved vulnerable to filling the sky with cheap stuff--the missiles were ballistic by the time they got up there but when the sky was full of them the U-2 had no path to safety.
The SR-71 couldn't be defeated by the level of missile spam that Russia was capable of, the MIG-25 couldn't get close enough to catch it and they didn't have a missile that could actually work up there. (You need more control surface up there, but down lower more control surface costs you performance.)
I suggest you read the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich, to get reliable account about the SR-71 and its relation to Soviet air defenses from the horse's mouth. Besides, it's genuinely well-written and enjoyable book
Not sure about the comparison to the SR-71, but the more interesting comparison was with the US XB-70[1] which ended up cancelled but the MIG-25 was designed to intercept[2].
Ironically the XB-70 was also stainless steel - but it still was pretty exotic. It partly relied on compression-lift and highly corrosive fuel to cruise at Mach 3 (in 1961!).
Edit: Wikipedia diving after writing that led me to the Sukhoi T-4 which was the Russian response to the XB-70. Only a prototype, but this one was titanium and it is an amazing, drop-nose machine [3]
I am not the one making those. If you read an article about how a Lamborghini Aventador was faster than a Nissan GT-R, you would go 'well, duh, it costs 20x as much'.
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
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.
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?
Pakistan and Iran's imported missiles from China have worked as-advertised. To say nothing of the PL-15's recent success, China's land attack missiles have been a serious threat ever since the Silkworm ASCM hit the export market.
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.
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 government with mass surveillance to prevent technological catastrophes. It's more of a thought experiment than a "we should definitely do this" kind of argument, but it's worth taking the idea seriously and thinking hard about what alternatives we have for maintaining global stability.
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.
Yeah after seeing what tiny DIY "racing quadcopters" can do I am really amazed that we haven't seen a swarm of them used for a non-state-actor ("terrorist" or otherwise) attack.
These things are way faster and more maneuverable than in the slaughterbots video. Those were like birds. These are like hummingbirds on meth.
They are totally noncommercial hobbyist/DIY products -- there's no firmware lockdown or geofencing like on the commercial products. You can fab the PCBs yourself.
Firmware controls on drones were always a silly strategy anyways.
At this point no one is talking about using lasers to defend against hyper-sonic missiles (at least not anywhere near the target). All of the current laser systems require being focused on the targets for some amount of time to "burn though", which means they are only suitable for lower-speed targets (drones, cruise missiles, and some low-level ballistics).
You would need to have significantly stronger lasers to try and "burn through" on something moving that fast.
For completeness I should mention that there was quite some work on trying to get laser defenses against ballistic missiles on their "boost" phase (when they were launching, so slow enough to track a point in the missile), for example George Bush's "Star Wars" defense system. These would have been space based (some of the testing involved mounting on 747s, but I don't think that was ever an end-goal), but never made it near production.
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.
Lasers will probably only be used for point defenses against drones which isn't useless but they aren't the cheap future panacea everyone seems to think.
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.
the concept of 'The average hypersonic..' makes me laugh.
in actuality the concept of equating real life dollars to defense budgets makes me laugh, too. It's not really a money thing, it's a production thing; and even if it were to be considered as a money thing the values involved in no way reflect a real life value.
It's like the NASA hammer story/packard commission. They're not going to say no to a 435 dollar hammer versus a zillion dollar project, but it's not actually a 435 dollar hammer.. .
Similarly a 41 million dollar weapon only costs that much until a wartime powers clause forfeits your factory to state production..
> 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 so
Sounds like the massive price disparity more than makes up for any accuracy issues
iron dome is about $100k to intercept according to wikipedia. Millions is off by an order of magnatude. I suspect they can make it cheaper with scale as well.
There's no 'S-300' as such, there are sets of fire control, target acquisition and tracking radars, and various types of missiles, each of which can be upgraded, and mixed and matched to some degree, with some combinations being up to the S-300 standard or better.
The closest thing to a standardized variant is the one installed on ships.
It's a crazy variety of hardware out therem and one of the most dangerous things about SAMs, that a lot of the old Soviet missile stock is passively guided, so pairing a decades old missile sitting in storage with a state of the art radar makes it relevant even today.
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.
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.
Attacking and occupying a distant island in this age is getting more difficult, not easier. Look at the Black Sea, where Russia's remaining ships cower in fear in port, as they try to avoid super cheap marine drones. Massive missile attacks on a country can only do so much damage, and they harden the population against the aggressor.
If Taiwan has been paying attention, and I don't doubt they are in an age when it's becoming clear the US is a paper tiger that will never protect them, they are well prepared to handle a good chunk of their own defense, using the brain trust they have inside their nation. They have everything they need for their own defense now.
Tiawan politics is interesting. from what I can tell those in power a an alliance of those who want China to take over with those who don't think China will try because they are friends.
The president is worried but his party doesn't have power.
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.
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.
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, 2025
Chinese factories build fire trucks for under $400,000 in six weeks. In the US, it's $2 million in 4 years - Apr 19, 2025
Iran is blowing up $500 million radars. China's export bans mean they are gone forever. - Mar 16, 2026
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.
Better than the US at producing almost anything at this point. There are a few tiny islands of advantage left for the US in advanced engineering but they won’t last.
Prediction: China will win the new race to the moon for this very reason.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> He seems to provide ample detailed western sources to back up his claims in every video
Does 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.
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.
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
Yes. I have no idea if this is technologically plausible at this point but it doesn’t make sense strategically. Why would China allow something this dangerous and IP-intensive to be commercialized? We don’t sell our nuclear weapons tech, for example. (I assume.) And the thought that they would want this in the hands of unstable actors, however they are currently aligned, is a little silly. This feels more like a mistake, possibly even a scam.
You underestimate both China's production capability and their desire to destabilize the south Asian region, so they can step in to take control. They have been arming Pakistan to the teeth against India. They even sold them the nuclear weapons tech. They don't care.
Real or not, this is probably the future. Lockheed execs want combat to be a distant exchange of multi-million dollar missiles. As shown in Ukraine, people actually fighting for their lives will wreck a $300million weapon with a slingshot.
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-M
Big 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?
The point of low cost weapons is to give you options on high intensity warfare: namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets.
The other benefit is just complicating air defense: put a lot of incoming in the air that can't be ignored, and makes it harder to find the higher spec systems mixed in - e.g. stealth systems when there's a lot of unstealthy platforms or munitions also attacking are going to be much harder to find.
> 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.
> 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?
I think whatever advantage Russia has (size and resources) is being squandered by corruption and incompetence.
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.
> I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here.
I think it's perfect - a very valid "David vs Goliath" reference.
Note that it is wrong to think that David was at a disadvantage. I know that is not how the story is taught today, but slingshot troops of that age we the snipers of their age: very deadly (not at the range of a modern sniper, but...).
If the fight between them was started at some distance, the David should have been the expected winner by pretty much everyone on the field. Think "bright a club to a gun fight" sort of vibes.
David had a sling, not a slingshot. They are very different tools. slings need more skill, but are easy for a shepard to learn. (I suspect more powerful as well but I'm not an expert)
Ah, I hadn't thought of that sort of slingshot! I was thinking more "primitive rock throwing."
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)
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.
absolute drivel, zero-substantiated, zero-value.
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.
Maybe I'm crazy but isn't Ukraine also begging for the multi-million dollar weapons? Are Patriots and ATACMS not seen as highly valuable to them?
If anything, it's clear that a strategy of massing low-cost ballistic missiles and low-cost drones is a great way to provide hurt to neighbors (and maybe low-cost ICBMs will mean hurt to the world) but the US is proving in Iran and Ukraine, to a lesser extent, is proving in its defense that highly capable advanced systems are able to provide extreme offensive and defensive abilities.
Ukraine is also showing the value of low-cost drones in defense against drones! Something the US notably does not have and is suffering very real consequences for it.
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.
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.
I don't quite follow, can you explain a little bit about how drone waves allow for defense of large areas? I can see how they help in offensive attacks, but as far as I can tell they don't seem to have helped defend Iran from the US and Israel; they're just helping Iran lash out after taking a beating.
(Not trying to be smarmy, just genuinely curious.)
Hypersonics would not appear to be definitively offensive or defensive.
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 and
2) maybe you just bought an overpriced Prius, perhaps a gold plated one
This is a more general problem in politics, where the overall budget being allocated is reported rather than the practical result.
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
The SR-71 wasn't trying to catch the MIG-25, it was trying to get away--and it worked. The U-2 proved vulnerable to filling the sky with cheap stuff--the missiles were ballistic by the time they got up there but when the sky was full of them the U-2 had no path to safety.
The SR-71 couldn't be defeated by the level of missile spam that Russia was capable of, the MIG-25 couldn't get close enough to catch it and they didn't have a missile that could actually work up there. (You need more control surface up there, but down lower more control surface costs you performance.)
(And the MIG-25 was a maintenance nightmare.)
I suggest you read the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich, to get reliable account about the SR-71 and its relation to Soviet air defenses from the horse's mouth. Besides, it's genuinely well-written and enjoyable book
Not sure about the comparison to the SR-71, but the more interesting comparison was with the US XB-70[1] which ended up cancelled but the MIG-25 was designed to intercept[2].
Ironically the XB-70 was also stainless steel - but it still was pretty exotic. It partly relied on compression-lift and highly corrosive fuel to cruise at Mach 3 (in 1961!).
Edit: Wikipedia diving after writing that led me to the Sukhoi T-4 which was the Russian response to the XB-70. Only a prototype, but this one was titanium and it is an amazing, drop-nose machine [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Backgr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_T-4
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.
I am not the one making those. If you read an article about how a Lamborghini Aventador was faster than a Nissan GT-R, you would go 'well, duh, it costs 20x as much'.
A school bus costs 4-5x more than. GT-R, and I wouldn’t expect it to be faster.
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
During the Cuban Missle Crisis it was the U2, not the sr-71
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.
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.
Or they bought a lambo, which is amazing, and goes really fast... but when you are out of gas, the Prius will keep going. :)
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?
air defense is much more complicated and difficult to build.
Iranian cheap drones/cruise missiles are efficient from another hand.
Pakistan and Iran's imported missiles from China have worked as-advertised. To say nothing of the PL-15's recent success, China's land attack missiles have been a serious threat ever since the Silkworm ASCM hit the export market.
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.
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 government with mass surveillance to prevent technological catastrophes. It's more of a thought experiment than a "we should definitely do this" kind of argument, but it's worth taking the idea seriously and thinking hard about what alternatives we have for maintaining global stability.
[0] https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
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.
History would seem to show that hegemony is stability? Pax Romana etc
Nothing about that time period was stable for Rome's neighbours and targets.
Yeah after seeing what tiny DIY "racing quadcopters" can do I am really amazed that we haven't seen a swarm of them used for a non-state-actor ("terrorist" or otherwise) attack.
These things are way faster and more maneuverable than in the slaughterbots video. Those were like birds. These are like hummingbirds on meth.
They are totally noncommercial hobbyist/DIY products -- there's no firmware lockdown or geofencing like on the commercial products. You can fab the PCBs yourself.
Firmware controls on drones were always a silly strategy anyways.
I see your $99,000 missile and I raise you a $10 intercept.
Time for those laser-defenses to come up to speed.
At this point no one is talking about using lasers to defend against hyper-sonic missiles (at least not anywhere near the target). All of the current laser systems require being focused on the targets for some amount of time to "burn though", which means they are only suitable for lower-speed targets (drones, cruise missiles, and some low-level ballistics).
You would need to have significantly stronger lasers to try and "burn through" on something moving that fast.
For completeness I should mention that there was quite some work on trying to get laser defenses against ballistic missiles on their "boost" phase (when they were launching, so slow enough to track a point in the missile), for example George Bush's "Star Wars" defense system. These would have been space based (some of the testing involved mounting on 747s, but I don't think that was ever an end-goal), but never made it near production.
Or you could just shoot the missiles while it's raining, or in a dense fog.
Laser defense system is a very expensive paperweight in those conditions.
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.
You think of laser as in star wars cutting light saber.
Actual lasers don’t do shit at those distances: it is used not to cut something in half but to blind, damage sensors, and what have you
Lasers will probably only be used for point defenses against drones which isn't useless but they aren't the cheap future panacea everyone seems to think.
I also played Generals
Perhaps this will be a larger peace between hypersonic powers than the one we've had between nuclear powers.
Do they hit their targets? Eventually with enough of them it’s not super important but… it does matter a bit.
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.
the concept of 'The average hypersonic..' makes me laugh.
in actuality the concept of equating real life dollars to defense budgets makes me laugh, too. It's not really a money thing, it's a production thing; and even if it were to be considered as a money thing the values involved in no way reflect a real life value.
It's like the NASA hammer story/packard commission. They're not going to say no to a 435 dollar hammer versus a zillion dollar project, but it's not actually a 435 dollar hammer.. .
Similarly a 41 million dollar weapon only costs that much until a wartime powers clause forfeits your factory to state production..
> 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 so
Sounds like the massive price disparity more than makes up for any accuracy issues
iron dome is about $100k to intercept according to wikipedia. Millions is off by an order of magnatude. I suspect they can make it cheaper with scale as well.
Clearly accuracy does matter. I just tried to throw a rock from my back yard to Tel Aviv, I missed terribly.
>"Do they hit their targets?"
Are you sure you want to find out?
The future of almost all industries is smart software (costing billions to make, but infinitely copyable) and cheap hardware.
If it’s not five nines then I’m not interested.
What seems to be the problem with their S300 clones? Anyone knows ? Easy to jam I suppose.
There's no 'S-300' as such, there are sets of fire control, target acquisition and tracking radars, and various types of missiles, each of which can be upgraded, and mixed and matched to some degree, with some combinations being up to the S-300 standard or better.
The closest thing to a standardized variant is the one installed on ships.
It's a crazy variety of hardware out therem and one of the most dangerous things about SAMs, that a lot of the old Soviet missile stock is passively guided, so pairing a decades old missile sitting in storage with a state of the art radar makes it relevant even today.
Air defense works in layers where each layer often covers for another. S300 is good, but it's just one piece of a useful anti air defense strategy.
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.
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.
Damn, can you imagine how quickly Aliexpress orders are gonna arrive now?
They will just get stuck at the customs :(
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.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41305736
No idea why a story about a YC company was flagged.
>"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.
Amazing! Yet another life destroying invention. What could go wrong?
when China take Taiwan there's not a single thing the world is going to be able to do about it
they use thousands of fishing boats to practice blockades
they are building massive oil reserves and getting most of population into electric vehicles
let's just hope they wait to next decade and not like 2028
Attacking and occupying a distant island in this age is getting more difficult, not easier. Look at the Black Sea, where Russia's remaining ships cower in fear in port, as they try to avoid super cheap marine drones. Massive missile attacks on a country can only do so much damage, and they harden the population against the aggressor.
If Taiwan has been paying attention, and I don't doubt they are in an age when it's becoming clear the US is a paper tiger that will never protect them, they are well prepared to handle a good chunk of their own defense, using the brain trust they have inside their nation. They have everything they need for their own defense now.
Tiawan politics is interesting. from what I can tell those in power a an alliance of those who want China to take over with those who don't think China will try because they are friends. The president is worried but his party doesn't have power.
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.
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.
> China has the same air defense and tech as Iran
Lmao, quantitatively and qualitatively China is more than an order of magnitude bigger
If they’re half as good as the robot I saw today in china slapping that kid id get a few
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, 2025
Chinese factories build fire trucks for under $400,000 in six weeks. In the US, it's $2 million in 4 years - Apr 19, 2025
Iran is blowing up $500 million radars. China's export bans mean they are gone forever. - Mar 16, 2026
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.
Better than the US at producing almost anything at this point. There are a few tiny islands of advantage left for the US in advanced engineering but they won’t last.
Prediction: China will win the new race to the moon for this very reason.
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.
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.
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.
I've only read a few short blurbs about this. What makes you think the booster doesn't follow a normal ballistic trajectory?
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.
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).
Kinzhals being intercepted all the time could also be propaganda or missile defense having progressed more than publicly known.
It's not a great idea in war to assume your enemy is incompetent (even when they are).
"no it's solid boosters that do not follow the usual ballistic trajectory"
Hypersonics do not. They are extremely fast and extremely low flying.
No, hypersonic is a marketing term here that indicates 'difficult to intercept'.
It does not imply anything about speed, just automatic or controlled maneuvering later in the stage than normal missiles do.
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.
> He seems to provide ample detailed western sources to back up his claims in every video
Does 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-...
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.