J-20 5th Gen Fighter Thread VIII

Deino

Deino

Lieutenant General
Staff member
Super Moderator
Registered Member
winto said:
11:55
A ltalian travel YouTuber serendipitously shot j-20 in Guilin
Click to expand...


Great finding and indeed surely by chance and certainly unintentionally.

Guilin means, it is (almost for sure) from the 5th Air Brigade based at Guilin Qifengling Airport, Nanning Base, STC and even if this unit operates J-20s at least since January 2022, we know only four individual aircraft by serial number, however with no. 27 the highest number.
 
I

Index

Senior Member
Registered Member
plawolf said:
Super-manoeuvrability is literally one of the core design requirements for the J20.

It does not carry a gun because of the need to prioritise airframe performance with sub-optimal engines. But it has a gun bay in the designs, and there have been at least one prototype that tested the gun, meaning the J20 was always meant to have a gun and designed to have it.

With the WS15, the J20 finally has its full spec engines, but there has also been a significant evolution in how the PLAAF seeing air combat to go with 5th gens based on its own operational experience and DACT results with the J20. If they still do not fit the gun on the J20, then that would be due to an informed choice, and not because the J20 couldn’t dogfight.

The reason for why is quite simple, in most scenarios where it’s multiple J20s vs enemies, getting into a gun fight is too risky. You might score a kill with the gun, but is likely to leave yourself exposed to the enemy wingman in order to get the shot. In such scenarios, the J20s would get better results taking advantage of its super cruise and stealth to break contact to come at the enemy again from an unexpected direction than try to brute force dogfight to victory. The J20 can do that if it needs to, but it would suffer a worse K/D ratio as a result so it is a suboptimal strategy.

The J20 is like a sniper, it is supposed to shoot you from afar before you even know you are being shot at and not get into pistol duals or knife fights.
Click to expand...
Guns are just for ground strafing and shooting down slow drones... Manned fighter gun kills is about as uncommon among 4th gen as submerged submarine on submarine kills were in ww2.

The J-20 dogfights with its high off boresight SRAAM. It is essentially optimized for defeating enemy 5th gen, cracking open high value target escorts, leaving them undefended and easily destroyed. Strafing vehicles and shooting down drones isn't what it should be used at.
tamsen_ikard said:
I don't think this answer is satisfactory. As I said before, "no pound for air-to-ground" approach of the F-22 is no longer valid in the modern battlefield. look at ukraine war, how many actual plane-vs-planes fights have occured? Very little. Planes are mostly getting shot down by air defense missiles. Russia did not shoot down too many Ukrainian jets which are still flying in numbers. Russia has failed achieve air-superiority due to Air-defense missiles. Air to Ground is now the main mission of fighters these days.

Air-to-Ground missions against important targets such as SAMs, Factories, Ships will be the main mission of all combat air crafts. J-20's ability to use stealth to evade Air Defense Radars should be a huge asset. So, I do hope PLA is taking this into account. If all J-20 does is carrying 4 Pl-15 then it feels like a waste. Right now the only capability we have seen out of J-20 is carrying 4 PL-15. We haven't seen it carrying anti-radiation missiles for SEAD. We haven't seen it perform anti-shipping roles. It should be able to carry different types of missiles and different mission sets.
Click to expand...
Ukraine would greatly have wanted an air superiority focused 5th gen. It would be able to deny the skies to the Russians, which would make supporting ground (in China's case, surface) operations impossible.

The idea is the same for China, which is facing the threat of a defensive war today against America. America has no shortage of fighters, but they must use these fighters to escort their high value platforms (awacs, tankers, bombers), without which they cannot support offensives. Forces they would have used to attack instead become sitting targets for air and artillery.
 
BoraTas

BoraTas

Major
Registered Member
plawolf said:
Super-manoeuvrability is literally one of the core design requirements for the J20.

It does not carry a gun because of the need to prioritise airframe performance with sub-optimal engines. But it has a gun bay in the designs, and there have been at least one prototype that tested the gun, meaning the J20 was always meant to have a gun and designed to have it.

With the WS15, the J20 finally has its full spec engines, but there has also been a significant evolution in how the PLAAF seeing air combat to go with 5th gens based on its own operational experience and DACT results with the J20. If they still do not fit the gun on the J20, then that would be due to an informed choice, and not because the J20 couldn’t dogfight.

The reason for why is quite simple, in most scenarios where it’s multiple J20s vs enemies, getting into a gun fight is too risky. You might score a kill with the gun, but is likely to leave yourself exposed to the enemy wingman in order to get the shot. In such scenarios, the J20s would get better results taking advantage of its super cruise and stealth to break contact to come at the enemy again from an unexpected direction than try to brute force dogfight to victory. The J20 can do that if it needs to, but it would suffer a worse K/D ratio as a result so it is a suboptimal strategy.

The J20 is like a sniper, it is supposed to shoot you from afar before you even know you are being shot at and not get into pistol duals or knife fights.
Click to expand...
The J-20 wasn't designed with gun fights in mind. Kinematics are useful for BVR too. The fact that they saw no problems with deleting the gun tells a lot. Whatever they used the said space for, they deemed that more important. And I don't think it was to save weight. The gun on the F-35 (A 25 mm very-high-velocity multi-barrel gun with an external power source) weighs 230 kg, 180 rounds and the feed system included. With the hatch and the supporting structure, it likely is still below 400 kg. So deleting the gun from the J-20 would save like 1% of the weight.

Besides all of this, we know what PLAAF and several other air forces think about WVR, let alone gun fights. Pilots are trained to avoid close engagements because of SRAAM lethality.
 
Last edited:
A

Andy1974

Senior Member
Registered Member
Haven’t we just seen F-15’s shooting down many dozens of drones during operation True Promise? Surely they used guns.

A J-20 with a gun could shoot down 100 drones, but without a gun it can only do a max of 8.
 
A

Andy1974

Senior Member
Registered Member
vincent said:
Why would you use J-20 to shoot down drones?
Click to expand...
Because maybe that is all you have at the time? Especially as drones start catching up with J-20 in performance. Moreover, if you want to have guns in the air to shoot down drones, surely you would pick your best A2A platform?

Maybe we should think about what kind of gun the J-20 would get? because I am imagining a smart gun with smart rounds that can maneuver and explode with various warheads.

If you have that gun, and those rounds, then it’s almost like micro-missiles, with a nice magazine depth.
 
A

ACuriousPLAFan

Brigadier
Registered Member
Andy1974 said:
Because maybe that is all you have at the time? Especially as drones start catching up with J-20 in performance. Moreover, if you want to have guns in the air to shoot down drones, surely you would pick your best A2A platform?

Maybe we should think about what kind of gun the J-20 would get? because I am imagining a smart gun with smart rounds that can maneuver and explode with various warheads.

If you have that gun, and those rounds, then it’s almost like micro-missiles, with a nice magazine depth.
Click to expand...

Speaking of drones that are catching up with the J-20 in performance (since there are many types of drones out there), that's even fewer reasons to rely on guns.

This hasn't include the fact where drones that are catching up to the J-20's performance will inevitability become more complex to engineer, more challenging to make and more expensive to procure than your typical Shahed-type loitering munitions. This means that naturally, they will only be available in considerably lower numbers that what many would associate with the "Shahed drone swarms in the dozens or hundreds" scenario at any given time.

Moreover, attempting to turn the gun rounds into micro-missiles would most likely cost more effort and money, such that it would be better to just go with smaller-sized SRAAMs that are already present in the market, e.g. Stinger and TY-90 AAMs.

If anything, have the MALE/HALE UAVs carry these SRAAMs in the quantity of several tens each, and have them conduct round-the-clock, rotational patrol around those need-to-be-guarded sites and defend against massed drone swarms would be a much better investment than trying to mold the J-20s into performing such tasks.

And China isn't the one suffering from issues related to the mass production of larger-sized drones, either. There're also the ground-based SHORADs guarding these sites as the last lines of defense against drone swarms.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top