J-20 5th Generation Fighter VII

plawolf · Dec 23, 2022

A bit of an outside of the box idea, but what if there are two parallel development paths for the J20?

WS15 is ideal, but how long will it take to fully certify, set up mass production, iron out the inevitable teething issues and than ramp up production to hundreds of units per year just to satisfy the engine needs of the current ~100 J20 per year production rate?

Most optimistically we are looking at 3 years, so that’s up to 300 more J20s produced using WS10s.

That’s a number large enough to warrant some investments in an upgraded model to me. Especially since they already did the bulk of the hard work developing the J20S, which is consistently mentioned as a massive overall upgrade and not just about adding a second seat.

So, what if the PLAAF said, we like the big improvements made with the J20S, but we don’t need that many twin seaters, so why don’t you take all the improvements made on the J20S and put it in a single seat package for us to become the new standard for J20 mass production until the WS15 is available in the volumes needed to finally go to the ‘Final Form’ J20?

Blitzo · Dec 23, 2022

TK3600 said:
This design kinda reminds me of J-35. J-35 also has the canopy shrinked under the the chasis. Either that or the back is raised. I remember asking about J-35 prototypes unable to look behind it. This is rather unusual. Usually airframe don't get changes like these.

The similarity of this J-20's variant's changes to J-XY/35 has already been noted quite a few times now, and the rationale for it is likely similar to that of J-XY/35 for reducing drag primarily with likely secondary benefits of increasing internal volume.

Blitzo · Dec 23, 2022

plawolf said:
A bit of an outside of the box idea, but what if there are two parallel development paths for the J20?

WS15 is ideal, but how long will it take to fully certify, set up mass production, iron out the inevitable teething issues and than ramp up production to hundreds of units per year just to satisfy the engine needs of the current ~100 J20 per year production rate?

Most optimistically we are looking at 3 years, so that’s up to 300 more J20s produced using WS10s.

That’s a number large enough to warrant some investments in an upgraded model to me. Especially since they already did the bulk of the hard work developing the J20S, which is consistently mentioned as a massive overall upgrade and not just about adding a second seat.

So, what if the PLAAF said, we like the big improvements made with the J20S, but we don’t need that many twin seaters, so why don’t you take all the improvements made on the J20S and put it in a single seat package for us to become the new standard for J20 mass production until the WS15 is available in the volumes needed to finally go to the ‘Final Form’ J20?

That's a very reasonable idea, and I don't think it's too outside of the box at all, and I think has been alluded to on the last few pages in one way or another.

So -- I think everyone expects this J-20 variant (I'm going to call it "J-20B" in quotation marks from here on out) to be equipped with WS-15 as its intended engine down the line.

What we do not know is what engine "J-20B" will be equipped with when it first enters production -- i.e.: WS-10 or WS-15.

Clearly "J-20B" can operate with WS-10s otherwise this first example s/n 2051 wouldn't be powered by it.

But whether "J-20B's" first production powerplant will be WS-10 or WS-15 will likely depend on the pace of WS-15's testing aboard J-20 and the ability to scale up WS-15 production, and how the timing of that works out with "J-20B's" own testing and development.

Basically, as it stands, we have multiple permutations for how "J-20B's" commencing of production could occur in terms of powerplant and in terms of relationship with J-20A (below only talking about single seater J-20 variants of course):
- "J-20B" production begins with WS-15, fully succeeding J-20A production
- "J-20B" production begins with WS-10, fully succeeding J-20A production
- "J-20B" production begins with part of production powered by WS-15, and part of production powered by WS-10, fully succeeding J-20A production
And the above three options can also occur but replacing "fully succeeding J-20A production" with "partially succeeding J-20A production" instead (i.e.: "J-20B" and J-20A production could both occur in parallel for a while)

I can already tell tracking and verifying which of the above options ends up happening, is going to cause lots of headaches for us in the next few years.

kurutoga · Dec 23, 2022

Since we are all just speculating, my guess is the redesign of DSI bump is a sign of a major change in the target engine characteristics. Maybe the current prototype is still using WS-10 for testing, but this particular revision might not be eventually induced until it uses WS-15.

Of course it is a pure guess without any evidence.

latenlazy · Dec 23, 2022

plawolf said:
A bit of an outside of the box idea, but what if there are two parallel development paths for the J20?

WS15 is ideal, but how long will it take to fully certify, set up mass production, iron out the inevitable teething issues and than ramp up production to hundreds of units per year just to satisfy the engine needs of the current ~100 J20 per year production rate?

Most optimistically we are looking at 3 years, so that’s up to 300 more J20s produced using WS10s.

That’s a number large enough to warrant some investments in an upgraded model to me. Especially since they already did the bulk of the hard work developing the J20S, which is consistently mentioned as a massive overall upgrade and not just about adding a second seat.

So, what if the PLAAF said, we like the big improvements made with the J20S, but we don’t need that many twin seaters, so why don’t you take all the improvements made on the J20S and put it in a single seat package for us to become the new standard for J20 mass production until the WS15 is available in the volumes needed to finally go to the ‘Final Form’ J20?

My sense of things is that the WS-15 won’t have the same teething issues as the WS-10. There’s a reason they’ve spent this much time on testing, their testing methods are probably much more advanced than twenty years ago, their materials are probably a lot more fault tolerant, and they almost certainly now have a much better understanding of what they’re doing from their last two decades of development experience.

Blitzo said:
That's a very reasonable idea, and I don't think it's too outside of the box at all, and I think has been alluded to on the last few pages in one way or another.

So -- I think everyone expects this J-20 variant (I'm going to call it "J-20B" in quotation marks from here on out) to be equipped with WS-15 as its intended engine down the line.

What we do not know is what engine "J-20B" will be equipped with when it first enters production -- i.e.: WS-10 or WS-15.

Clearly "J-20B" can operate with WS-10s otherwise this first example s/n 2051 wouldn't be powered by it.

But whether "J-20B's" first production powerplant will be WS-10 or WS-15 will likely depend on the pace of WS-15's testing aboard J-20 and the ability to scale up WS-15 production, and how the timing of that works out with "J-20B's" own testing and development.

Basically, as it stands, we have multiple permutations for how "J-20B's" commencing of production could occur in terms of powerplant and in terms of relationship with J-20A (below only talking about single seater J-20 variants of course):
- "J-20B" production begins with WS-15, fully succeeding J-20A production
- "J-20B" production begins with WS-10, fully succeeding J-20A production
- "J-20B" production begins with part of production powered by WS-15, and part of production powered by WS-10, fully succeeding J-20A production
And the above three options can also occur but replacing "fully succeeding J-20A production" with "partially succeeding J-20A production" instead (i.e.: "J-20B" and J-20A production could both occur in parallel for a while)

I can already tell tracking and verifying which of the above options ends up happening, is going to cause lots of headaches for us in the next few years.

I think fielded capabilities are now mature enough that the primary reason they would move along with such a drastic redesign of the airframe is if they intend on bringing in the new engines with it from outset. I think the timing between when we’re seeing this new airframe revision and updates with where the WS-15 seems to be in development (presumably integration testing) should be very suggestive. But as always we will see soon enough.

caohailiang · Dec 23, 2022

latenlazy said:
But why would they make two different prototype series if they’re just going to be merged in the end? Seems like a very unnecessary and wasteful extra step. Frankly since we’ve *never* heard of a 204X until now and there’s no confirmation of its existence that I’ve seen, only interpolation based on test serial, and since we’ve seen CAC skip 4 multiple times before (2004 and 2014 have never been spotted as far as I can recall) I think we’d need a lot more solid evidence before we can conclude there even is a 2041.

i think you are right, we should wait for more evidence on 2041 before any conclusion. But at least in software enginering, it is common practice to have separate development tracks and merge before production release, benefit is the test process become more agile, tracks dont interfere with each other

Blitzo · Dec 23, 2022

latenlazy said:
I think fielded capabilities are now mature enough that the primary reason they would move along with such a drastic redesign of the airframe is if they intend on bringing in the new engines with it from outset. I think the timing between when we’re seeing this new airframe revision and updates with where the WS-15 seems to be in development (presumably integration testing) should be very suggestive. But as always we will see soon enough.

We've been doing this for a while lol, with so many false starts on the engine front over the years, which is why I never count my chickens until the eggs are hatched, and sometimes not even then where I need to make sure eggs will hatch over multiple years without any irregularities.

The reason why the J-10CY aircraft powered by Al-31 made me require to see further J-10C batches powered by WS-10s is exactly because of that reason -- even two and a half years of sustained J-10C production with WS-10s at that point was not enough to simply assume that there wasn't anything more suspect going on without photo evidence confirming the J-10CY was just a one off.

There are certainly a few milestones for J-20B and WS-15 to see, but the "final" milestone will probably be seeing at least 3 years of sustained full scale J-20B production powered only by WS-15s without any irregularities or unexplained backtracking to WS-10s.

siegecrossbow · Dec 23, 2022

Yang Wei did mention that a whole family of them will emerge. Not surprised if they have like 8 different variants.

latenlazy · Dec 23, 2022

caohailiang said:
i think you are right, we should wait for more evidence on 2041 before any conclusion. But at least in software enginering, it is common practice to have separate development tracks and merge before production release, benefit is the test process become more agile, tracks dont interfere with each other

Software can afford to have much more forking and merging in development than hardware. Hardware forking and merging can create a lot of risks that are hard to resolve because of greater integration dependencies and physical parameters you don’t have as much control over. Testing and problem solving for integration problems are also just inherently more time consuming for hardware because oftentimes you will need to spend time studying and characterizing the nature of a problem before you can resolve it (it’s not like debugging code where the primary mode of problem solving is checking argument logic). They have different risk profiles so they require different management strategies. Usually if you’re going to try forking and re-merging solutions you do it at component and subsystem levels for hardware before you assemble everything into your fully integrated build. I work on systems integration between hardware and software so I would know

latenlazy · Dec 23, 2022

Blitzo said:
We've been doing this for a while lol, with so many false starts on the engine front over the years, which is why I never count my chickens until the eggs are hatched, and sometimes not even then where I need to make sure eggs will hatch over multiple years without any irregularities.

The reason why the J-10CY aircraft powered by Al-31 made me require to see further J-10C batches powered by WS-10s is exactly because of that reason -- even two and a half years of sustained J-10C production with WS-10s at that point was not enough to simply assume that there wasn't anything more suspect going on without photo evidence confirming the J-10CY was just a one off.

There are certainly a few milestones for J-20B and WS-15 to see, but the "final" milestone will probably be seeing at least 3 years of sustained full scale J-20B production powered only by WS-15s without any irregularities or unexplained backtracking to WS-10s.

Yeah I know but I’m going to out on a limb on this one and be the guy insisting “No this time is different!” You can clown me afterwards if I’m wrong.

J-20 5th Generation Fighter VII

plawolf

Lieutenant General

Blitzo

Lieutenant General

Blitzo

Lieutenant General

kurutoga

Junior Member

latenlazy

Brigadier

caohailiang

Junior Member

Blitzo

Lieutenant General

siegecrossbow

General

latenlazy

Brigadier

latenlazy

Brigadier