At least it’s all on the surface now instead of happening out of sight.
J-20 5th Generation Fighter VII
- Thread starter siegecrossbow
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A lot of Chinese military fans are protesting on Weibo. “That god damned German already posted this to Twitter. What’s the point of keeping it secret on Weibo?”
If that picture is real are we *sure* that it isn’t just the WS-10 with TVC?
We can't be sure of anything IMO.
We just have to let it simmer a bit and wait it out.
Personally I am just pleasantly surprised that there's been any news about J-20 and a new engine to begin with (whether it's WS-15, or at this stage seemingly less likely WS-10 w/ TVC).
But I won't be surprised if it takes months if not longer for pictures to emerge, not dissimilar to Y-20 with WS-20.
One thing I will say about whether this is J-20 w/ WS-10 and TVC, is that back in the 2018 Zhuhai, Yang Wei answered a reporter's question about whether J-20 may use J-10B's TVC technology with a question of his own, along the lines of "how do you know it's not already using it" -- which to me was strongly alluding to the idea that J-20 at that time had already been testing WS-10 with TVC (single engine or two, we do not know).
I factor that into my assessment of the current rumours.
I don’t know if that specific picture is real, but from the looks of it the new TVC engine (according to witnesses) uses the same petal design as the WS-10 TVC demonstrator. We can’t be sure of anything at this point.
Yeah I think an identical nozzle different engine situation is possible too. But that will put pressure for alternative forms of confirmation.
I think it may be "identical" in the sense that obvious abnormalities may not be visible with the quality of imagery that we are likely to get.
But I would be a bit surprised if it were literally identical down to the details.
Agreed. But it might be very difficult to ascertain these differences if we only get a drip of photos, and we also wouldn’t be able to rule out progressive revisions being made to the nozzle design for a WS-10 with TVC.
To me the use of WS-10 TVC style nozzles make perfect sense. It has already flown with a test demonstrator for several years and since it is unlikely that they’ll integrate it with the J-10s, all that acquired knowledge would go to waste if they don’t integrate it with the J-20. Going for F-22 style TVC nozzles seems like reinventing the wheel when China has neither the time nor funding to play around with new designs.
Right.
My position, imo, as always -- is that rumours lead the way, and pictures only exist to verify.
Obviously, in the case of engines, we treat things with greater caution as is appropriate.
But I am saying it's very likely that we may not get any sort of smoking gun "definitive" confirmation of WS-15 engines powering J-20 from this recent news, even if/when we get a relatively clear picture of the nozzles.
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