Chengdu next gen combat aircraft (?J-36) thread

[dingyibvs]

If you want low cost suicide drones which are able to be deployed in sizable numbers via a transport aircraft and with decent range, that's certainly doable with current technology.

But if you want it to be fast as well, while also being not too expensive, like a "WZ-8 on steroids" then those are contradictory demands which current technology cannot meet.

Low cost suicide drones aimed at aircrafts sound like just another word for missiles.

 

[tphuang]

Thanks for the pointer. I had to dig up their radio talk show (on a mobile app called Qingting Radio). It's a talk show for the fans, not official source. They seem to think J-36 was designed differently.

• The entire plane is a vehicle of energy management. There are energy source (engines), energy consumption, thermal management etc. They compared J-36 as if it is a Plug-in Hybrid Car which is designed primarily as a electric car with gas as energy source. They also compared it to traditional propulsion in warship vs new IEP solutions
• The traditional fighter jet wasted too much energy in propulsion without thinking about using it. In J-36 and the new plane design methodology, the type and model of the engines are still important, but they no longer define the plane.
• Just like Plug-in Hybrid cars or IEP ships, I suspect the plane contains much larger energy storage (battery or some sort of system) than traditional jets

After listening to it, my immediate thought was to compare J-36 to a flying Type 055. Then, a few more little points I can remember:

• CAC and SCA each have an entire system, not just one jet (remember the tea pot/tea cup analogy)
• What they showed so far is part of each system
• They believed the CCA/UCAV in both systems had flown two years ago

It's been more than 100 years since electrification as human's way of using energy. Finally we are seeing it goes into mainstream weapon systems. Seems so natural for China's industry base.

Just to explain how import power generation and consumption is.
We use it in all our electronics devices.
This is Guobo's RF module MMIC.

You can see the digital processor on the left. Digital-to-analog and then power amplifier -> goes out
From right, signal comes in, using low noise amplifier to amplify the signal, use low power filter to ignore signal not in the expected band and then convert back to digital.

So this is actually needed for all the radar, RF applications including communication with satellites and each other. just imagine all the transmission of sensor data between aircraft.

So this means not only can you send signals out 60x with your PA, you can also process and amplify weaker incoming signals. That means you can process your own radar signal when it bounces back

+ your RWR can amplify any signal the adversaries radar is sending. Here is the RWR setup for F-35. Now imagine these all had 60x more power


And then you need a very good low heat consumption base band/modem to actually process all the incoming data and sort out where the signals all came from.

And that of course requires also CPU to process later and GPUs to put them in a model to determine the adversarial positions and come up with a response.

 

[Blitzo]

Low cost suicide drones aimed at aircrafts sound like just another word for missiles.

I'm not going to speak for siege, as his overall description was rather infeasible to begin with... but I don't think he mentioned anything about his idea being suicide drones intended to be aimed at aircraft.

If anything in context of the prior posts, I assumed he meant they would be used in a SEAD/A2G/ISR role

 

[taxiya]

Ain't the J58 combined cycled though? That's not a "traditional gas turbine engine" by any means.

From my understanding of J58's wikipage, which I agree, J58 is just a turbojet with some twist. Some compressor air is bapassed to afterburner for cooling and prevent surge, that is too much air in front of combustion chamber to choke it. There are two combustions in a turbojet, the combustion chamber just behind the compressor and the afterburner. J58's combustion happens primarily in combustion chamber, the bypassed air skipping the compressor contributes to almost nothing in combustion in afterburne. So it is still a turbojet. It is that bypassed air flow confusing people to regard J58 having ram mode.

A ramjet on the other hand has all combustion in the combustion chamber just behind the compression cone (equivalent to compressor). J58 has no such combustion mode.

 

[Blitzo]

I'm not sure if anyone has posted this recently, but on the topic of future trends of air to air combat, CSBA back in 2015 did a paper speculating about future air to air warfare trends in historical context. Reading this paper back then played a role to inform my own views about the most valuable trends and characteristics of future air combat.
The future speculated part begins at page 41, and naturally there is a focus on CCA/UCAVs, networking, sensing, a large manned aircraft (they depict a generic flying wing manned LO bomber sized airframe in this instance)

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I encourage people to have a read of it, if they aren't aware of it. It is a decade old now, but I feel many of its predictions and recommendations have largely been borne out with the emergence and maturation of various technologies, including the characteristics of J-36.

CSBA have of course done some other papers along this trend since then about overall USAF recommendations that are not quite as targeted as that 2015 paper, but still make some recommendations towards PCA/NGAD.

 

[siegecrossbow]

If you want low cost suicide drones which are able to be deployed in sizable numbers via a transport aircraft and with decent range, that's certainly doable with current technology.

But if you want it to be fast as well, while also being not too expensive, like a "WZ-8 on steroids" then those are contradictory demands which current technology cannot meet.

I meant the delivery vehicle is WZ-8 on steroids, not the suicide drones themselves.

 

[Blitzo]

I meant the delivery vehicle is WZ-8 on steroids, not the suicide drones themselves.

Then such a concept would be very different to rapid dragon, unless you want a strategic transport sized high speed stealthy transporter... in which case that's another major (in fact, massive) technological and industry challenge.

 

[Nx4eu]

??

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1874111840193831422

I don't see what this has anything to do with the J-36. Whatever this aircraft is, the J-36 will not be hypersonic capable. That is something I can say with absolute certainty.

 

[tphuang]

I wrote up a thread quoting Deino's tweet

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1874255001046184042

Check last post in thread. By my calculation, if we have a constant 1MW electric generator, it would need 400L of jet fuel per hour! F-35 only carries 10500L of jet fuel. So if you want an aircraft that can operate 10 hours in the air (4000L of jet fuel), you need to carry huge amount of internal fuel.

Obviously, if you are aircraft is just cruising to destination, you don't need to use that much electric generation. This is just to put things in perspective.

 

[MortyandRick]

Very amateurish question, but there are some acute angles and the bottom of the craft, wouldn't that increase its RCS signature? Could they have make it's smoother?
I heard way back that the F35 used a single piece carapace to decrease the RCS signature, I wonder if this craft has the same features ?