If the rumors about no gun is true, it would seem like a major flaw. The J20 has what amounts to 2x 195kN class engines with TVC along with a canard design, so it’s slated to have insane maneuverability. Not having a gun would be a huge waste of dogfighting potential.
The main two ‘sub-optimal’ permanent design features (so ruling out engines as everyone knows the current engines are only interim) that detractors often cite to argue that compromised stealth are the canards and ventricular streaks.
The objections against canards come mainly from American fanboys who love to quote one designer.
But their credibility is massively undercut by facts.
One of the ATF contenders had canards, as does Boeing’s 6th gen early concept design. Funny how all the insistence that canards and stealth cannot possibility combine magically disappeared as soon as an American company proposed using them.
Currently, the J20s canards might, in theory, contribute to RCS spikes as they deflect to control the plane in flight, but with TVC, the canards could be locked into optimal stealth position by the FCS during stealth mode, with minor controls done via TVC instead.
The second grip about the streaks are just as ill funded.
The streaks would reflect radar the same way as the main vertical tails would. What more, they shield the engines from side view, to massively mitigate the RCS penalty from a round nozzle from the side.
Both the canards and streaks are primarily added to maximise agility.
So that brings us right back to the question of the gun.
For me, it is extremely clear that the J20 designers made very deliberate and specific design choices, choices with downsides and costs, to maximise the J20’s agility.
HMS and high off-boresight missiles were hardly new when the J20 was being designed, China itself had such technology operationally fielded.
As such, if the J20 was only designed to be a BVR missile shooter with self defence short range missiles, then there would have been no need to make all those design choices to maximise agility, sometimes at the cost of stealth.
It’s not like we never had high quality pictures of the J20’s back before, so I have no idea what the ‘no gun’ crowd are suddenly seeing now that they could not have seen on earlier pictures.
The only change was on the external panelling, but that could easily be explained as a simply change to improve RCS after tests with early prototypes.
Such surface changes does nothing to render the left shoulder port unsuitable for gun installation.
One needs to remember that the J20 main landing gear has two main sections, with a forward section that is usually closed until the year is retracting/lowering.
The position of those doors means it is entirely possible that they redesigned the internals to allow access to the gun via access panels behind those doors, for routine maintenance and reloading. Thus removing the need to open the panels on the back unless they want to remove the whole gun.
