Length wise it is not too big of a difference but volume wise you are talking about medium fighter vs heavy fighter.
2024 Zhuhai Airshow main thread, Air Systems
- Thread starter Deino
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Length wise it is not too big of a difference but volume wise you are talking about medium fighter vs heavy fighter.
Literal wall-climbers of the airshow.
Westoid mass media agencies about to absolutely twist this into deep negative news in three... (Admittedly, the organizational management was bad)
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In all fairness, the airshow itself is pretty poorly organized and there's been a lot of complaints
What was the major complaint? Crowd management?
Has a high resolution standalone image of j35 on the right been posted in the j35 thread here?
Gotta say, if this is accurate then the weapon bay doors of the J35A is quite significantly shorter. That doesn’t necessarily mean this comparison is incorrect or that the actual length of the bay itself is shorter, but honestly I would pay handsomely to know the exact size of the J35A, or better yet have it open its bay
According to your photo, the J-35A is 83.0% the length of a J-20. If we are to assume the J-20 is 21.2m long from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail, that would make the J-35A approximately 17.6m long. That would be very close to the supposed 17.3m length of the FC-31 from many years ago.
If your photo is indeed accurate, the J-20 weapons bay is 7% longer than the J-35A weapons bay.
If we are to assume the weapons bays are supposed to be of identical lengths, that would mean your photo is inaccurate. We would have to resize your J-35A photo by +7% to ensure its weapons bay is identical in length to the J-20 weapons bay. In this scenario, the entire J-35A would have increased to a length of 18.8m. That would be much longer than the rumored specs for the FC-31, which usually sat between 16.9m and 17.3m.
Could the J-35A really have grown that much bigger compared to the FC-31 prototype?
I haven't even spoken of the widths of the weapons bays. If the J-35A photo is resized by +7%, its weapons bay length will indeed match the J-20's weapons bay length. But even in this resized version, the J-20 weapons bay remains 5% wider than the J-35A weapon bay.
I realize that comparing between photos is very prone to errors, especially when we don't have the actual specs of the J-35A as a frame of reference. But right now, I'm questioning the longstanding assumption that the J-35A weapons bay would be identical to a J-20 weapons bay.
Considering that they plan to let J-35 carry 6 AMRAAMs, it would be weird if the weapon bay is too narrow.
Enjoyed the airshow, both the static and flying displays. However, if you are considering attending future iterations but don't like crowds perhaps you should avoid it. So many people, supposedly 80,000, and I believe it. Makes for long waits in lines. Significant patience is required.