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Google Maps Shows Chinese Nuclear Sub Prototype
mytrip writes "An image of what could be one of China's new nuclear ballistic missile submarines is available on the Google Maps and Google Earth satellite-image site, a defense blogger claimed Tuesday. The satellite picture was discovered by Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, and announced Tuesday on his blog. Kristensen believes the picture, taken by the Quickbird satellite late last year, reveals China's new Jin-class, or Type 094, nuclear ballistic missile sub. The new sub class is approximately 35 feet longer than its predecessor, the Xia-class, also known as Type 092, according to two images Kristensen compares on the blog. The Jin-class sub has an extended midsection that houses 12 missile tubes and part of the reactor compartment, Kristensen explains."
The have the Xia and the Jin class submarines. As long as they don't go Super-XiaJin, we should be ok. /who needs karma..
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So is it true that they have screen doors?
having google maps during the cuban missle crisis or the cold war would've been bad ass...
"dude....call JFK...I think I see a launcher!"
*goes back to playing pong*
I think it would be more likely that the next headlines would read: Google maps satellite suddenly stop working over China.
Um...
Having a deterrent is pretty pointless unless everyone knows that you have it. I'm sure they wouldn't have left this boat out in the open unless it was their intention for people to see it.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
...but the article doesn't seem to have an actual link to the map. It's here.
If I owned that many Treasury bonds AND a nuclear submarine I'd unfurl a big legible banner in English across the top of it:
PAY UP
Parent is correct. The cost of the 9mm round is distributed amongst all the proletariat.
*ducks* *runs*
Doubt it. China basically builds their nuke subs for the same reason we do: to tell the world, "Hey, don't fuck with us. We can dump a nuke in your swimming pool."
There is no point in having them if other people don't know you have them. If they really gave a damn about secrecy they'd never leave it docked out in the open. It'd be under cover.
This is interesting in the same way that a lot of google maps stuff is interesting, but it's not any great intelligence coup.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Actually, yes it is. Advanced adaptive optics *might* correct for some or most of the atmospheric distortion, but they can't overcome the diffraction limit. A 3m lens at 300km altitude can only resolve down to about 9cm resolution. That's way way better than Google Maps, but you can't identify a face that only takes up 4 "pixels".
how quiet will this boat be submerged? SSBN's are the chickens of the sea - they run away from the slightest noise in order to stay undetected; the attack boats like to trail them in order to kill them if needed. Unless these new ones are extra quiet they'll be less a strategic threat than a symbol of power. They could, for example, be used to try to forestall a US response to move against the Republic of China, depending how credible the US viewed such a threat. For China, it means they've added a new threat to many of their neighbors - it could get a bit busy with Russian, Taiwanese, and Japanese subs and ASW forces looking to track them.
That said, I'd love to be on the first boat to track one...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I don't really find this to be a disturbing trend. The only reason why such a trend would be disturbing is if we try and apply old ways of thinking to the new reality.
Imagine a world where everything that happens in public space is recorded. We are close to that now with cell phone and security cameras, but as some point it will be even more true as people mount cameras on their bodies and run them non-stop. It is easy to imagine such a world as a nightmare where the most petty of laws are enforced with near perfection and anyone deviating from social norms is ostracized. There is an alternative though.
Imagine if we could catch every single person who has violated the law. What would happen? Every single one of us would be up to our necks in fines and well over half of the population would be in jail. Faced with such a threat, one would hope that a democracy would respond by rethinking laws. In such a world would you really want marijuana laws that we demand tossing half of the nation in jail? Would a $250,000 fine for downloading copywrite material really make sense if it sent the major of people in the nation into bankruptcy? Would a no drinking before 21 law really make sense if it meant drumming the vast majority of college students out of college?
There are a lot of dumb laws out there that are tolerated because we fail to catch even a small fraction of the violators. If you could catch everyone who violated the law, many laws would have to be abolished or we would need set up prison states to dump all the guilty.
So yeah, I can imagine the evil horrible dystopia where everyone follows the massive piles of inane laws that exist to the letter and people get thrown in jail at random for violating obscure laws... but I can also envision a utopia where worthless laws have been tossed, corruption is close to non-existent, hippies don't get their heads busted in for smoking weed in the park, copyright is seriously reworked, and police find something more productive to do with their time then busting under aged parties.
That the the family of the guy in charge of security just got a bill for a single 9mm round?
You are completely ignorant if you believe that. The Chinese don't do that at all. They use 7.92mm.
Yup. Leave them out in the open for all to see, until they put to sea. Then they disappear, nobody knows where they are, and everybody gets nervous. The British did this during the Falklands War: they made lots of noise about subs heading for the South Atlantic, then shut up. The mere fact that subs might be in the vicinity made the Argentine Navy a lot less effective. Knowing that you might get hit by a torpedo at any time, with no warning, would rattle anybody...
If you look in other places you will find lots of subs tied up at docks in plain view. Try the Russian naval bases north of Murmansk, for example.
...laura
Don't be so hasty in your optimism. The only reason We The People can see google maps is because the government is allowing it; all the govt has to do is make it illegal for the public to access it, and poof the alleged hedge against tyranny evaporates.
Consider the extensive network of cameras in England. Can anyone see their contents? Nope. Just the government. Wanna bet who'll be able to access the views of the extensive camera network planned for Manhattan?
And pay attention: police in this country are increasingly trying their hand at suppressing/confiscating/outlawing citizen camera operation. Note the numerous stories about permits being required for operating cameras, about "illegal wiretap" laws being used to incarcerate people using cameras, and on and on.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
You can see the sailors running around on deck, almost like they're having a fire drill.
However, I suspect it was the fact that one of the subs actually sank a ship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARA_General_Belgrano ) that really drove the point home.
The speed of sound in air is ~760mph.
The speed of sound in water is ~3,355mph.
What was that you were saying? Something about blathering about things you don't know about?
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
You mean, someones going to go ballistic?
Then I suggest you check again, because over here, 0.3<0.33<1
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
having google maps during the cuban missle crisis or the cold war would've been bad ass...
Check out this one which is about a mile or so from the South side check point of the coastal DMZ.
Thats a building, but its been painted to match the terrain. I suspect they are afraid of DPRK flying around their border. If you scroll through to the north, you can see the trench fences (the last parking lot) and then opposing that the North Korean side. If you keep scrolling west you can follow the trench fence system to the west coast. There are a lot of interesting things such as trenches and border forts and hidden nooks and cranies you can only see from the air.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Why is there such a big fuss over China launching a new boomer?
China is already in possession of an outdated ballistic missile sub, they are simply building a replacement class. Yet news sites and the 'omg China' crowd seem to be thinking it's a sign of aggression, and similar nonsense. Here in the UK the govenment has recnetly raised a bill for ~£20 Billion for a replacement SSBN system.
As to it's secrecy, I've seen models and diagrams of it for years on various blogs and military tech sites, the fact they were building a new submarine was not secret. It was also know that it would look (unsurprisingly) just like the current russian boats. All China has managed to do is keep it's construction somewhat secret. China can track satellites, and it's not hard to hide a sub (most facilities have hangers for them) - this is not an intelligence coup, it's simply China showing the West their new toy. We do it via public launches and bottle smashing, China simply parks theirs outside and waits for someone to notice.
You, good sir, need to buy a clue! I know better, I've seen CSI!!! Don't you know that they're able to zoom-in, enhance, zoom-in, enhance, and zoom-in, enhance anything? They're able to zoom in (and enhance) on the inverted reflection on the concave of a spoon, which is on a reflection of someone's sunglasses, who is in near-total darkness, and underwater. I've heard they're almost able to do facial biometrics and genetic tests from that same picture!
Surely if they can do that, they can zoom-in enough to recognize people from a high-tech satellite!
The British captain choose not to use his reportedly trouble prone wire guided homing torpedoes (Mark 24 Tigerfish), and preferred to get close and use the old dependable design instead.
...China is testing anti-satellite laser weapons.
That's the line I've been giving people too. The Hubble Space Telescope with a 2.4 meter mirror was designed to maximize the mirror size for the Shuttle's cargo bay, and this is the same Shuttle which has launched a KH-12 for the NRO. So the KH-12 probably has a mirror about the same diameter as the HST.
But then it occurred to me. You only need a big mirror if you're looking at dim objects in space. Stuff on Earth is pretty well-lit, so the only real problem is resolution. If you want resolution, you don't need all that surface area. All you need are two or more smaller scopes separated by a large distance to create an interferometer. The design is tricky since the individual mirrors have to be aligned to within a wavelength of light. But it's been done many times here on Earth. When done successfully, you get a scope with the light-gathering power of just the sum of the mirrors, but the resolving power is that of a mirror whose diameter is the distance between the individual mirrors.
The Webb Space Telescope will have a 6.5 meter mirror by designing it in separate cells which will fold and stack for launch. Again, since astronomy is primarily concerned with light-gathering ability, and a circle represents the most surface area for a given perimeter, astronomical scopes tend to have roundish mirrors. But a spy satellite wouldn't need light-gathering ability. They could arrange the cells differently, creating a mirror which is wide but narrow. Like the interferometer, resolution along the wide axis would be much higher.
I am not the conspiracy theory type, but the publicity over HST / JWST strikes me as similar to Asimov's short story, The Dead Past. In that story, [spoiler] the government is covering up a chronoscope, a machine which can view the past, by publicizing it as studying ancient history - ancient Greeks, ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, etc. The deader the better. It turns out that the machine can't view more than several decades into the past. But what the public doesn't realize is that while the chronoscope is useless for studying ancient history, it is the perfect spying machine, able to remotely view events which happened just a few hours or even a few seconds ago.[/spoiler]
I suspect this is part of the reason for the success (and problems) of Hubble. How the mirror wasn't tested before launch resulting in a near-fatal flaw. (How many KH-11 and KH-12 mirrors were manufactured before Hubble? Surely someone who had overseen construction of those mirrors was given some sort of advisory role in Hubble's manufacture.) How the pictures from HST are released to the public, spruced up in color and saturation so they're beautiful. How we let the gyros die until it was one failure away from uselessness. All this drama and publicity keeps Hubble in the eye of the public, and solidifies the stereotype in everyone's mind that a space telescope has got a big round mirror. Even the final maintenance mission for the HST being canceled, then restored, then funding being lost, and then restored again, serves to put the JWST in the public's mind. It too is a roundish mirror design (hexagonal cells). They even have technically knowledgeable people like us ridiculing movies which show spy satellites with extraordinary zooming capability.
My hunch is the NRO probably has at
Spending five years as a Lutheran in a Catholic school has made me one of the Devil's most hard-working advocates...
Yeah, because they didn't seem heartless regarding Tianemen,
If a host of minority political movements flooded Washington D.C., shut down its legislative branch, and demanded that, not only the administration, but the form of government be changed, I'd expect some heads to get busted. And, I'd also expect a considerable number of dead, even though we, unlike the troops involved in Tiananmen, are properly equipped for riot control. In fact, I'd venture to guess that a large part of the country would support it enthusiatically. Though, whether "a large part" has good judgment in such matters is doubtful (and fairly irrelevant in a democratic republic).
Political individuals certainly don't have the same avenues for communication to their fellow citizens in China, but that doesn't make the problem any different. Or the solution.
or during the Tibet take over,
Alternately, "the liberation of a people under the heal of a backwards, feudal theocracy which used slavery and serfdom into the mid-Twentieth Century." Tibet's suffering through the Cultural Revolution was in many ways no worse than what fell Han China. The big difference is to whom the flotsam and jetsam of these countries appealed. The Nationalists could appeal to our foreign policy and our pocketbook, but, for the average person, they are just the losers in some far away conflict.
Tibet, on the other hand, has managed to reinvent itself into some kind of New Age Sugarcandy Mountain to the Western Left and as a victim par excellence in the eyes of the Western anti-Communist. According to them, they didn't just annex what had been part of the Chinese sphere of influence since before there was a Dalai Lama, they destroyed a harmonious mountaintop kingdom which had no greater desire than its own and the World's spiritual well-being. Tibet is no longer a physical place; it's an idea. An idea which was created in the image of Victorian pulp literature. The Tibet in exile we now have has turned into a circus which is fully prepared to lie to its strongest supporters about the annexation and the Cultural Revolution's impact on the region--not in a frantic effort to retake the country in which they once lived, but to keep the circus moving.
Tell me, as a theocrat, would you rather jet-set around the world to be venerated by wealthy Westerns who can be made to believe anything out of their naïve spiritualism, or resume the day-to-day rule of a mountain theocracy which governs the lives of people who've spent the last thirty years in comparative economic, if not political, liberalism.
or in killing Falun Gong members, or...
These people follow a man who claims to be "the god of gods," fly, and become invisible at will, yet he doesn't dare return to the Mainland. Can you imagine what kind of person it takes to believe in a religion like that without it being deeply rooted in their culture and daily lives? I don't think we're losing any the great minds of our time with this action, regardless of its heartlessness.