There is evidence that China is in the early stages of building a positively enormous missile cruiser—one that could be bigger and potentially more powerful than any equivalent American or Japanese vessel.

On April 6, China Defense Blog—an Internet forum for close observers of Chinese military developments—republished a series of photographs that recently circulated on China’s firewalled national Internet.

The photos, reportedly snapped at the Wuhan Technical College of Communication, depict what appears to be a mock-up of a large surface warship—the kind of mock-up used for testing radars and other sensors. China Defense Blog described Wuhan as a military “facility for crew training and electromagnetic interference testing.”

China and other warship-building countries habitually experiment with land-based mock-ups before manufacturing actual seaworthy prototype vessels. As China renovated its former Soviet aircraft carrier Liaoning a few years ago, it built a mock-up at Wuhan. That massive shape is visible in at least one of the photos of the apparent new cruiser.