Hm fair enough, so those trench exhaust are never coming back I guess, very unfortunate IMO.
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Chengdu next gen combat aircraft (?J-36)
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
Never say never. Still a very young program.
The original picture is so hard to analyze. I find the middle line to be really long but I'm not sure if that extends past what would be the 2D tvc nozzle. Would the "tail boom" reflections between the 3 main ones look plausible if you look at this image? 
At Weibo. The post by the original author of that drawing on Weibo was removed.
Presumably the first prototype’s trench nozzle was supposed to be a flexible flap to facilitate TVC. They probably found issues with this implementation in testing, hence the switch to a standard 2D TVC in later test units. What that tells us is TVC is more essential to the plane’s requirements than the trench nozzle.
I think we need a definitive good quality image of this new prototype (ideally being able to confirm that it is actually the newest prototype as opposed to say, newly released old footage of an earlier prototype) to see what the specific nozzle arrangement is.
It could be prototype 1's arrangement, or prototype 2+3's arrangement, or something in between/new for all we know.
The problem with tracking this J-36 project overall, unironically is the lack of clear prototype serials on each of the airframes. This is not a problem we had with J-20, FC-31 or J-35, or other previous fighter projects, so this is a bit of a new situation for us.
Not sure how it was originally phrased, but one way to make it plausible, is that it's the 4th flying prototype and the 5th overall prototype (i.e.: one of the 5 prototypes being a static load aircraft)