Being able to threaten bases along the second island chain is an even bigger capability than threatening carrier groups. Because if you take out those bases you take out the legs for those carrier groups to operate in distantly projected geography.
H-20 bomber (with H-X, JH-XX)
- Thread starter Deino
- Start date
They can build up initial combat capability with a few planes, before revealing them in some test flights.
I suspect that they will want to keep visibility on the plane very low until potential adversaries (mainly the US) have spotted and collected intelligence on the plane, to delay development of countermeasures for as long as possible. We might be able to get some low resolution grainy images but I wouldn't expect anything better than that.
It’s just an option after all on China arensel. Also idk how long you can keep bases suppressed to completely stop them from supporting carrier groups for a good period of time. A good shot can knock out a carrier for some time as it undergoes repairs.
If you can do a full munitions dump on a base with large bombers, that base is harder and will take longer to repair than a carrier, especially when it's in a distant forward position. When you take out the base to the extent that a large sized bomber can, you are taking out the ability to maintain basic logistics capabilities like ship repair. What damage ballistic missile batteries do to base operational capacity is one to two order of magnitudes smaller than what large bombing raids can do. These are not the same levels of attack capability. Both capabilities being able to hit the base is not the same as both capabilities doing equivalent damage.
A VLO bomber would be able to deliver tons of cruise missiles to targets with little warning from odd angles at moderate speeds when contesting/losing and can deliver tons of gravity bombs when winning.
If we assume for a second it's not the H-20, what else could it potentially be exactly? The only thing I can think of is some sort of spaceplane or SR-72/RQ-180 equivalent.
Well, the thumbnail literally has an H-20 on it
Ok , how come it's possible?? If the thing is a heavy bomber .The thing should have come out of hanger for ground testing before conducting flight test. If such a huge airframe would have come out of the hanger it would have easily been spotted by satellites in ground testing facilities. But there were absolutely no alleged image clicked.
But here we will face the flight test of a bomber. I wonder if it is H-20 where it rolled out for ground testing that there is not a single sat image !!
The comments I see on the Chinese internet all think it is the J-15 catapult variant.