J-20 5th Gen Fighter Thread VI

[Deino]

Guys ... the next with one more back-and-forth post, a historical or political comment will get a free vacation for two weeks !!

There was a clear request to stop with this OFF-TOPIC.

Nothing more to say.

 

[Inst]

Without going into any detail, the latest Pentagon report says that China is (predictably) having trouble with engines for J-20 and FC-31, but also the AESA radars. All that said, if you throw enough money and engineering talent at problem it will get sorted. China has no shortage of bright, young engineers.

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The third ingredient needed is time, however. That said, I'm having trouble imagining how, if the Chinese can already achieve radar ranges on par with the F-22's, they'd be having trouble getting AESA working. Is it a question of LPI? Or is it a matter of module reliability?

 

[latenlazy]

The third ingredient needed is time, however. That said, I'm having trouble imagining how, if the Chinese can already achieve radar ranges on par with the F-22's, they'd be having trouble getting AESA working. Is it a question of LPI? Or is it a matter of module reliability?

Until we know how that information was sourced we have no way of knowing how accurate it actually is. Having seen a bit of the process behind how these kinds of reports are compiled (and who works on them) I wouldn’t be surprised if this came out of some mistranslation or misinterpretation of the same public sources we read here. There is a deficit of good Chinese translators working in the DC Natsec space, and even more negligence in sourcing good translators for parsing primary information, especially for reports that focus on generic overviews and summaries for public consumption. There’s a chance the writers of the DoD report know something we don’t, but public facing reports usually aren’t put together by top of the line experts or specialists. Instead they’re authored by paper pushers within the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, though experts and specialists are typically consulted as part of the research process. Nor is intelligence collected by any of the major intelligence agencies usually used or even seen by those who work on these sorts of reports (not high enough to have access). There probably are reports in the Natsec bureaucracy that do use information sourced directly from gathered intelligence and authored by people with hard expertise, but that is a wholly different track of work completely detached from these kinds of general public information documents.

 

[plawolf]

Doesn’t Deino have some personal experience with how hopeless (to the point of feeling like it was deliberately misleading) the authors of such reports could be, when they completely misrepresented his words, and then effectively told him to go away when he got in touch to let them know they got it wrong?

 

[latenlazy]

Doesn’t Deino have some personal experience with how hopeless (to the point of feeling like it was deliberately misleading) the authors of such reports could be, when they completely misrepresented his words, and then effectively told him to go away when he got in touch to let them know they got it wrong?

I think that’s for news outlets and maybe think tanks, and not government reports.

 

[by78]

High-resolution scans of a previously released lower-resolution photo. J-20 with Taihang...

(2048 x 1475)

(1600 x 1067)

 

[Deino]

a bit different ?!

 

[by78]

a bit different ?!

View attachment 48396

I don't see it. What's different?

 

[Blitzo]

I don't see it. What's different?

Deino's post is a little less blown out, a little less noise.

if both pictures are opened up in their own tabs and switch between them, the difference becomes more obvious.


that said we can't see any extra details or anything.

 

[Tirdent]

Now, let's see that airframe at Zhuhai, fully painted in splinter camo...