PF-98

The PF-98, also called the Type 98 and nicknamed Queen Bee, is a Chinese 120 mm unguided anti-tank rocket launcher developed by Norinco for the People's Liberation Army. It was meant to succeed the Type 65 and Type 78 recoilless guns, whose 1950s-era designs were showing their age by the 1990s. The weapon was shown with a garrison unit in Macao in 1999 and reached some elite units after 2000. The launcher is a fibreglass-wrapped smoothbore tube weighing under 10 kg, fired from the shoulder or a tripod by one or two soldiers. A battalion version carries a laser rangefinder and ballistic computer fire control with a night-vision scope, while the company version uses a plain 4x daylight sight. The ammunition family includes a tandem-warhead high-explosive anti-tank round credited with about 800 mm of armour penetration, a multipurpose high-explosive incendiary round, a thermobaric round and, with the lighter PF-98A of 2006, a bunker-busting round. Later fire control upgrades added airburst programming, and as heavier missiles reached higher units the launchers passed down to infantry squads.