The Chinese military is making steady progress in the development of smart ammunition technology, the PLA Daily reported yesterday, which could prove especially threatening to Taiwan’s armored vehicles.
The Baicheng Weapon Test Center announced on Friday that it had made “a significant breakthrough” in the development of technology known as terminal sensing ammunition, adding that the People’s Liberation Army had completed the theoretical work, including design, analysis, simulation, tests and evaluation of the new projectile.
Terminal-sensing ammunition, also known as sensor-detonated ammunition or “smart ammunition,” are projectiles that can identify the presence of a target at the end of its ballistic trajectory and automatically direct submunitions, similar to cluster bomblets, to explode in the target’s direction.
During a recent demonstration at the test center, a terminal-sensing projectile flew over the target site and discharged a series of terminal-sensing submunitions, which deployed mini-parachutes and searched for their target.
Terminal-sensing projectiles, which are relatively cheap to produce, can be fired or launched from cannons, long-range surface-to-surface missiles, air-to-ground missiles and bombs.
They are regarded as an especially promising weapon to attack the roof section of vehicles such as tanks and armored personnel carriers.
A Red Cross Society rescuer on Friday recalled the scene of a train crash in Hualien County, saying he could not believe what he saw: scattered body parts and the sounds of people crying in a crumpled train carriage. “It was a living hell,” said Lin Chi-feng (林啟豐), who led an 11-member rescue team that was among the first to arrive at the scene at 11:03am on Friday, carrying rescue and demolition gear. The fatal incident occurred at 9:28am when Taroko Express No. 408 crashed inside the Cingshuei Tunnel (清水隧道) after slamming into a crane truck near the tunnel’s entrance. The truck had
A survey of young Taiwanese showed that only 36.5 percent of men and 19.6 percent of women believe marriage is important, a trend that academics say is key to the nation’s low birthrate. Yang Wen-shan (楊文山), an adjunct research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology, yesterday announced the 12th round of results from a longitudinal survey of attitudes among young Taiwanese toward markers of adulthood. While few of the respondents, who were aged 28 to 32 when surveyed in 2017, found marriage to be important, 95.8 percent believed that being responsible for oneself should take precedence, data showed. Economic independence came in
SHRINKING FEMALE POPULATION: Last year, 107.74 boys were born for every 100 girls in Taiwan, which is a greater gender imbalance than in Japan and South Korea The Ministry of the Interior recorded 9,601 births in January, the first time the nation has produced fewer than 10,000 newborns in a single month, while different indicators showed that Taiwan might also be facing a population with increasingly fewer births, women and marriages. It comes after the ministry reported a record low 165,249 births last year, which was lower than the 173,156 deaths recorded last year. The nation experienced negative population growth for the first time last year, ministry data found. The number of births in January also dropped from a year earlier, when there were 12,510 births. In February, there were
The Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office has listed six people as suspects in a judicial investigation into a fatal train crash on Friday last week. Fifty people were killed and more than 200 were injured when the Taroko Express No. 408 train slammed into a crane truck that had slid onto the tracks near the entrance of Cingshuei Tunnel (清水隧道) in Hualien’s Sioulin Township (秀林). The office also summoned six officials at the Taiwan Railways Administration’s (TRA) Hualien Engineering Section for questioning about alleged illegal business operations and unsafe work conditions by Yi Hsiang Industry Co and Tung Hsin Construction Co, the two
RSS