What started as a Western April Fools’ prank has somehow become a full-blown online obsession among Chinese military nationalists, who are now passionately designing a fictional super battleship in comment sections across Tencent News.
The chain of events began when Naval News, a well-known Western military publication, posted a satirical article on April 1st, 2026. The piece claimed China was constructing an 80,000-ton battleship in Dalian, stretching 310 meters long, equipped with 200 vertical launch cells and three rail g*ns. For good measure, NATO assigned it the code name “Balls.”
The site even placed a disclaimer at the very top reading: “This is our traditional April Fool’s joke.” The West laughed and moved on. Chinese military enthusiasts, however, picked it up on April 25th and treated it as verified intelligence.
Fueled further by a PowerPoint presentation from the Trump administration announcing a US Navy battleship program, Chinese nationalists decided that if America was building one, China needed something bigger, more powerful, and more visible. The only problem is that no official project exists. There is no approved design, no defense budget allocation, and no shipyard assigned to build it.
That did not stop the online architects. Writing on platforms like Tencent News and Netease, enthusiasts began assembling their dream vessel from whatever scraps they could find. They pointed to a 155mm howitzer installed on the trial ship Hangu as proof of advanced naval firepower, ignoring that the vessel is a 6,000-ton floating test platform, not a commissioned warship.
They celebrated academic papers referencing a 1.2-meter vertical launch system, reasoning that bigger tubes must mean more powerful missiles. They circulated blurry satellite images of a land-based electromagnetic test platform at a shipyard, declaring it the foundation of a 30,000-ton battleship.
Each piece of “evidence” fell apart under basic scrutiny. A radar operating at sea level cannot detect surface targets beyond roughly 40 km due to Earth’s curvature, making a 200 km artillery range effectively useless without guidance systems that would essentially reclassify the projectile as a full missile. Scaling launch tube diameter from 0.85 meters to 1.2 meters doubles the cross-sectional area and introduces catastrophic safety risks. The US Navy already learned this lesson through the Zumwalt-class destroyer program, where guided 155mm shells reached nearly $1 million per round before the entire gun system was removed in 2024.
The irony runs even deeper. For two decades, China’s own military propaganda has promoted anti-ship missiles like the DF-21D and DF-26 with the explicit message that large surface warships are expensive, exposed targets that can be neutralized cheaply.
China’s official military establishment has no record of this project. Budget documents, shipyard reports, and defense procurement filings contain no mention of a missile battleship.
