John
Your estimates are quite plainly wrong. A very basic mental arithmetic exercise proves that quite well.
We know the J10 is about 15.5-16m long. If there is only 3m either side of the landing gear, and we allow a clearly disproportionately long 2m for the landing gear and doors, you have 8m. Does the nose of the J10 looks like it's half the length of the whole plane?
If you go with 4.5m either side, with the landing gear 2m again and the nose 3m and allow 1.5-2m for the engine nozzle and pilot tube the proportions start looking far more reasonable.
Your logic is also highly self contradictory. You acknowledge that the Gripen is 1/3 small, and the Al31 is 125kn compared to the GE404's 85kn. So if the designers of the J10 are worried about the impact of a bump on performance, what do you think the effects of that bump on the Gripen with far less thrust?
In addition, the load you suggest the Gripen can carry is going to have a far more detrimental effect on the Gripen's performance than a J10 carrying the same load.
The Gripen might theoretically be able to carry more weapons, but it pays for that with a big hit to it's performance even when it is flying clean. It's the same thing with the F16 becoming a far less agile bird as it was rigged to carry more and heavier loads and more fuel, even with a much more powerful engine. That is a design compromise, not a superior solution.
And you example of an F18 with 10 AAMs is exactly the kind of airshow load you would seldomly, if ever, see in real life combat deployments. I have seen F18Es flying with 12AMRAAMs at airshows, and it handles like a truck. Unless you shoot all 8 AMRAAMs in your configuration in the short time you have in BVR, you are lugging them around when you merg or you are jettisoning them. Pretty bad choice either way.
And before you bring multi engagement in BVR into it, you have to remember that the more targets you engage the same time, the less range you have on your radar. You also need to keep all targets painted with your radar for most of the time and your radar only has a small scanning cone. If the targets you are engaging, say 4 bogies with 2 missile each, split and head in different directions, you would be extremely lucky to be able to keep even 2 of them locked till the active seeker can kick in. So you just wasted at least half your missile load. And that's just an example with one of the most basic countermeasures in BVR. When you factor in advanced BVR counter tactics, you are only realisticly only to be engaging 1or2 targets max with any confidence in BVR against even modestly competent opponents. So for small or light fighters to be carrying a huge BVR load into combat is a waste at best and stupid and dangerous at worst.
It's your heavy fighters who really care about weapons load, as they can happily carry 4-6'BVRAAMs in addition to 2-4 WVRAAMs into a dogfight and not only have the pure thrust to not have to worry about a big hit to performance, but also have the fuel left after a merg to go into another engagement.
Your dismissal of all the evidence that the J10 can carry PGMs also greatly dimishes your credibility. There have been many pictures of J10s at offical events with targeting pods and PGMs displayed. The lack of photographic evidence is not conclusive in itself. There are no pictures of PLAAF J11s with R77s, by your logic, they cannot carry R77s. But we know from contract disclosures by the Russians that the J11s have been upgreated to carry R77s. And the Typhoon is a poor if not downright sill example to use.
The main reason it is taking so long with weapons integration is because of funding difficulty and politics between the partners and companies. It is also an outlier example since no other projects took anywhere close to that long for weapons integration. The Rafale or Gripen would have been better examples to used as a benchmark.
Your obsession with air show weapons load and using that as a criticism of the J10 is just superficial and shallow.
