That’s like saying J-16 is an optimized version of J-11BS.
J-20 5th Gen Fighter Thread VIII
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
The J-20A is designed based on the WS-15 as its baseline engine, and we know that the WS-15's power generation will certainly be significantly increased.
This means that designers can have more freedom in redesigning the architecture.
You know, it's almost alarming to see how the flagship Western fighter (The F-35) still flying with GaA radars and struggling to adopt even GaN-on-Si whereas Chinese stealth jets are flying en masse with GaN-SiCs and are probably gonna switch to Diamond substrates post-2030 too. This is more than a generation's gap and no matter how I look at it I cannot for the life of me understand how this even happened. Now, to be fair the actual backend processing and signal tech is still probably on par with the Chinese counterparts (or maybe not? I'm not entirely sure since obviously no one would ever know this and those who'd know will never say it), but that still doesn't erase the fact that they're behind in such a key area and struggling to advance. Does anyone know how this happened? I mean we hear the major stories for the Chinese aviation industry about how they went from struggling with the WS-10s in the 2000s to now mass-producing WS-15s and WS-19s but we've never (at least to my knowledge) heard about how they advanced so much in these less "fancy" but arguably just as important areas of technology especially when it comes to flagship fighters like the J-20 (I still remember when the prototype was first shown in 2011 I believe, and the Western media hacks calling it a "3rd gen" aircraft with a fancy body or some even going as far as saying that it couldn't even fly).
The first signs of how advanced Chinese avionics tech was, is the cockpit of the JF-17 B1. A cockpit with 3 Large full color LCD screens back in 2006 was even more advanced than that of the F-22. And that for an export fighter. From that moment on, no one should've doubted Chinese electronics and avionics.
Well, it’s not about how effective onboard radars are but how the aircraft integrates with force multipliers… Oh wait!!!
Maybe i missed that piece of news, but what credible source (interview with PLA or manufacturer personnel, promo materials, awards for specific tech given to specific people, etc) said or suggested that j20 or any Chinese fighter jet radar uses GaN SiCs, or any other GaN elements? And when was that?
How else would there be such a massive difference?
Customers aren't actually using it to defend the country; they just need the people to feel protected. Since it's about the feeling, then you just need to provide that feeling.
They don't care what materials are used in the radar; they just love to hear vague advertising slogans like "first to lock on" and "advanced EW self-defense system comparable to stealth." It feels good.
When you heavily advertising the fighter jets, define it as 5.5 or 5.9 gen and offer a hefty kickback, able to sell it and the feeling for $300 million per unit, is it really necessary to be so obsessed with genuine technological breakthroughs?
If an unfortunate client does suffer losses in the war, will they hold you responsible? No, that would make them look like fools all along, izzat would motivate them to keep doubling down.
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you missed tons of news and information.
its been months already and thoroughly discussed on different threads like Semi/Radar/Air force and J-20.
and i don't think so China need to announce officially, they are the global leader in 3rd/4th generation semiconductor material.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
It happened to America and the west the same way it always happens. Through nepotism/complacency, greed and stupid ideology nonsense overriding objective reality.
The fundamental underlying factors that allowed the west to win the Cold War against the Soviets was economics and technological superiority.
On the economics front, access to more resources was certainly a major factor, but also the west also used its resources better than the Soviet’s centrally planned economy. The western economic superiority entered into a positive feedback loop with its technologically advancement and superiority where better tech allowed them to make more and better quality goods using the same resources, which allowed them to invest more resources into R&D.
The western MSM and political leaders attributed all of their successes to false ideological reasons like democracy, religion, racial superiority, free markets and personal freedoms and doubled down on more of all of that. But they totally ignored the central role of government in winning the Cold War.
The most powerful illustration is that during the 10 year anniversary of the launch of the iPhone, a magazine ran an article on the 10 core technologies that made the iPhone possible, and wouldn’t you know it, every single one of those technologies were pioneered and developed as part of Cold War government funded military research programmes. This underlines the often ignored reality that western commercial dominance was built upon superior western technologies funded by government research programmes. Programmes the west gladly gutted as soon as the Cold War was won.
Worse than that, America has allowed special interests to capture and weaponise its patent application process to turn it from a form of protection to encourage more innovation to a system that now creates massive barriers to entry by allowing companies to patent fundamental universal principles and generic concepts as a way to charge massive fees to rent seek and prevent competitors from even competing. The result is that western companies now spend the bulk of their R&D re-inventing the wheel to get around ridiculous patents instead of advancing the technological frontier.
The key reason that China has been able to catch up is because the Chinese state invests massively in R&D and Chinese private companies are prevented from gatekeeping key new technological breakthroughs to prevent competitors from using it.
China’s domestic market is hyper competitive forcing everyone to always push further harder instead of resting back on past accomplishments.
This is a trend that has been building for decades. Its only become apparent now due to the fact that China started from such a low base and America had such a huge inheritance that the gap between them was vast despite the fact China was making exponentially faster progress. But this isn’t a race to see who crosses an arbitrary finish line first. The board does not reset just because China has now surpassed America, both sides will still need to continue with the race with the same momentum and trajectories. Meaning that as time goes by, China will just pull further and further ahead faster.
On the American side, not only are they not advancing remotely as fast as China, there are increasing signs that they are in fact declining in technological capabilities where they are starting to struggle to build what they used to be able to. Obvious examples being the F15EX and the catastrophe Boeing has made of the civilian airline business.
This is down to many complex factors such as experienced workers retiring or dying off and getting replaced with the frat kids of the connected rather than the truly skilled and deserving. Wall Street leeching the best and brightest talents America produces to create fancy derivative financial products that only serves to confuse the market in terms of how many times you can sell the same debt to magic money out of thin air. That’s great to turbocharge profits when things are good, but when the market panics and calls in the assets all that debt is supposed to be secured against, you will suddenly find there isn’t remotely enough to go around aka 2008 Wall Street crash.
The true depths of decay and decline of the west is actually pretty breathtakingly bad, and you can fill literal libraries with all the ways they have managed to fuck things up. Right now, they are still kinda holding up the facade because they still have a lot of inheritance left in the form of raw military hardware and inertia from all those decades on top that for now the vast majority of the world simply refuse to believe how far they have truly fallen. But they are one major shock away and military defeat from a near total collapse. And the main thing holding China back from delivering that death blow is the risk that America might just decide to throw its nukes out of the pram to take everyone down with them.