Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake
rating: 0+x

Basic Information

Originally comissioned as the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) in 1943, the Naval Air Weapons Station, the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake (NAWS China Lake) is the primary air weapons testing range for the US military and doubles as a military training range. Located in the Mojave Desert of California and bordered immediately by the towns of Ridgecrest and Inyokern on the South, NAWS China Lake is the US Navy's largest single holding of land, comprising 1.1 million acres (4500 kmĀ²), approximately one-third (1/3) of the US Navy's total land holdings in the world.

Inventions tested and refined at China Lake include the AIM-7 series of Sparrow missiles, the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile, the AGM-62 Walleye TV-guided glide bomb, the AGM-45 Shrike antiradar missile, the AIM-95 Agile missile, the AGM-122 Sidearm antiradar missile, the AGM-123 Skipper laser-guided missile, the lightstick, and the continuous-rod warhead.

Sources

Game and Story Use

  • Local lore paints NAWS as a place of conspiratorial intrigue. Imagine if all of those crackpot theories were true!
    • Rumors of Armitage Field at NAWS serving as a test strip for experimental aircraft are true.
      • NAWS is the real location of Area 51 and the Navy is flight testing aircraft based on alien technology.
    • B Mountain, a natural geographic feature of the base, is hollow and houses a secret bunker.
      • The bunker in B Mountain houses everything from alien technology to the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
    • NAWS was home to a secretive bio-warfare project during the 1980s and 1990s.
      • The hantavirus responsible for the widely publicized Hantavirus Cardiopulmonary Syndrome outbreaks of 1993 was engineered at NAWS and subsequently got washed out into the desert during one of the region's infrequent flash floods.
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License