The J-XDS has not yet been confirmed as a carrier-based aircraft.
Chengdu next gen combat aircraft (?J-36)
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Counterpoint is that the two 6th gens seems meant to operate alongside each other in complement to each other rather than being two independent designs put in operation at the same time. So even a modest number of J36s could exponentially boost the overall combat effectiveness of the whole carrier air wing.
Yes, it will be a lot of additional cost and development, but it’s not like the F35C was particularly problematic for the whole JSF programme, so there is certainly precedent for how such a programme can be made to work.
You'll have to admit it's a way more realistic platform to be navalised than the J-36 though.
The lambda wing UCAV from victory parade did have folding mechanism.
I'm not so sure the 2 6th gens are meant to operate in tandem as you suggest and at any rate the doctrine for them are probably not fully developed yet. Further I'm not really convinced that J-XDS really needs a larger partner on carriers (assuming for the moment it does make it onto carriers) for strike when it is already pretty large. The PLAN could do it but then again PLAN could navalize J-20 yet it's pretty clear that's not happening. This decision doesn't seem to be driven by some insurmountable technical barrier but because they don't think it is worth it. I think J-36 will wind up being in basically the same situation.
I'm not sure about that.
What it seems to me is that these are two different proof-of-concept tests exploring different flight envelopes to see which one they will choose in an eventual final version.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Typically when you design something intended for mass production, you know what you want it to do and how it is supposed to function.
These are not the Chinese equivalent of X-planes where you play around with cool new tech and ideas. These are meant to be the future backbone for Chinese air power, so the Chinese will have very purposeful and deliberate design specifications that both the jets would have been build from the ground up to achieve.
To suggest they are not meant to operate together is frankly bizarre and flies in the face of logic and Chinese historical practices where they are extremely detailed and forward looking.
Sure both can function perfectly fine independently, but it’s when they are brought together than the whole vision of future air combat is brought to life and the new whole becomes far greater than the sum of its parts.
Again this is down to planning. It’s far easier to make a fighter carrier capable if it’s designed that way from the start, as opposed to being adapted to do so later. Of course it can be done, but it’s a whole lot smoother, quicker and more effective if it was designed that way from the start. You can just look at the J15 and J35 as examples of the contrast between the two.
When the J20 was in its initial design phase, Chinese carrier ambitions were still just that. The Chinese would also have known that they would have been limited to the Kuznetsov class baseline even if they were considering the applicability of navalising the J20, which is far too small a platform to make best use of J20s.
But now, the J36 not only benefits from having the knowledge that Chinese carriers are going to be a mainstay of the future, but also that future Chinese carriers can be clean sheet designs that also takes into consideration the size of the kind of combat aircraft it wants to deploy.
In short, it’s a completely different ball game, where instead of redesigning an existing fighter to shoehorn it into existing carriers that are manifestly ill suited to its use; the Chinese can design both the J36 and future carriers to facilitate best fit for each other if they so choose.
And it would make a hell of a lot of sense for them to choose to do that since the J36 looks very much to be shaping up to be the force multiplier of the future air combat philosophy, with the JXDS and future unmanned drones providing the bulk of the force element. In that sense, having J36s onboard carriers could easily prove to be as pivotal as having carrier AWAC and J15Ds combined. And just like KJ600s and J15Ds, you don’t need to bring that many of them to get the full benefit, which further mitigates the size issue.
I am not suggesting that the PLAAF does not have any ideas at all of how they might intend to employ these upcoming designs. But I don't think that prior to even commissioning prototypes they have all the operational and tactical details sorted out. GJ-11/21 has had a years long period for sorting out these operational and tactical employment details and it was at a much more advanced stage of development than the current J-36 prototypes during that period.
In addition FTTBs exist not only to confirm the technical performance of aircraft but also to develop tactics and best practices. So at this stage I think PLAAF might have a general idea of how they intend to employ J-36 but I don't think it's that specific yet. Yes PLAAF is forward looking and detailed but there is a limit to that and at some point attempting to plan everything too far in advance when many things like the exact tech available and subsystems performance is not entirely known is unwise and would lead to a lot of delays.
As for them being not meant to operate together, I don't think that there will be some rule that says they can't operate together or some system that would make them operating together worsen their individual performance, that would indeed be ridiculous. I merely assert that I don't think there is some requirement that they must operate together to achieve peak performance or that they were designed from the bottom up to rely on each other fundamentally.
I don't think this is bizarre at all or counter to Chinese historical practices. Right now we have the J-20 and the J-35A and while they are complimentary to each other to a degree it is no more than say J-10C and J-16. Certainly it doesn't seem like they must be deployed together to get peak performance. Maybe you can say that for the next generation being designed from the ground up simultaneously they will design them to be employed together fundamentally but it seems to me that it is much more likely such a role will be filled by UAVs like ones we saw during the recent parade than J-XDS. This is basically the whole idea of CCAs after all.
I don't really agree with your assessment that J-XDS is on the level of unmanned drones providing the bulk of the force element. I see J-XDS as very much an expensive high end 6th gen platform and not some cheap bulk filler UAV. It's not an attritable platform by any means and I think we will most likely see it operate with CCAs similar to how J-36 would and not J-36 with J-XDS as bulk filler. Perhaps it's not quite as revolutionary as J-36 but I don't think it's massively far behind.
I think this is probably the fundamental reason why we see odds of J-36 on carriers differently. If you think J-XDS is significantly inferior to J-36 and/or needs J-36 to achieve its full potential like upcoming CCAs or like current J-35 needs AWACs and J-15D then yes it would make sense for PLAN to put J-36 on carriers. Essentially in this view J-36 is more akin to an AWACs platform than the current J-20 vs J-35A. I just don't think that characterization is very likely given what we know of the programs currently.
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For operating together, I think Guancha folks specifically said CAC and SAC are working closely to ensure interoperability. And not just J-36 with J-50, but in fact both 6th gen are also designed to be able to operate with the other company's UADF. They even made a wife-swapping joke when this topic came up.