J-20... The New Generation Fighter III

Big and agile fighter jets are always flexible platforms for the airforce. Look at the F18, which is no where near as big as the J-20, but was still used in numerous roles. The best example would be Su27, which is absolutely huge but the most agile plane of its time. It was modified into so many different platforms, one of them, a bomber, able to carry much more bombs than F111.
Big airplanes are like big warships, the bigger you are the more stuff you can carry, and therefore very flexible to modify.

i.e. said:

I get a kick everytime Carl drags F-111 in the story to claim something is a "strike platform".
F-111 originally was designed to be a mach-2 mssile interceptor taking off from carriers forchristsake.
which MacNamara wants to save a buck so it became a multi-mission pig which can do low level penetration bombings, thus saddled with a heavy swing wing which penalized its range and true potential.

Click to expand...

This is what Carl wrote. Still on his page:

This first-of-type aircraft presents with a large dihedral canard-delta wing configuration; with a pair of outward/rearward canted all moving combined vertical/horizontal tails; and, similarly large, outward canted ventral fins/strakes which, if all moving like the tails and retained on any production version, will make for some quite advanced capability options in the areas of controllability and manoeuvrability. There is little doubt this configuration is intended to provide good sustained supersonic cruise performance with a suitable engine type, and good manoeuvre performance in transonic and supersonic regimes.

Click to expand...

Any notion that an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or F/A-18E/F Super Hornet will be capable of competing against this Chengdu design in air combat, let alone penetrate airspace defended by this fighter, would be simply absurd. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet are both aerodynamically and kinematically quite inferior to the as presented J-XX/J-20 design, and even the shape based VLO capability in the J-XX/J-20, as presented, will effectively neutralise any sensor advantage either type might possess against earlier Russian and Chinese fighter designs.

Click to expand...

siegecrossbow said:

This is what Carl wrote. Still on his page:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

Yes, Carl Didn't say J-20 is a striker like F-111.

But he does like F-111 for its range and payload

His beef with F-18 and F-35 is mainly range and payload based.

What happened to the guys on keypub. They've been awfully quiet for two days since the videos came out.

siegecrossbow said:

What happened to the guys on keypub. They've been awfully quiet for two days since the videos came out.

Click to expand...

MAKS and PAK FA has taken their attention
And besides there are few "pro PLA" people on that forum so the most they'd do with new pictures is look at in passing, maybe throw in a compliment or jibe now and then.

CottageLV said:

Big and agile fighter jets are always flexible platforms for the airforce. Look at the F18, which is no where near as big as the J-20, but was still used in numerous roles. The best example would be Su27, which is absolutely huge but the most agile plane of its time. It was modified into so many different platforms, one of them, a bomber, able to carry much more bombs than F111.
Big airplanes are like big warships, the bigger you are the more stuff you can carry, and therefore very flexible to modify.

Click to expand...

true to an extent,
But there is an inertial penalty bigger airplanes pay.
agility also means gs which means big wings that is stressed to take 9 gs in operations.
you can save tons of weight if you can lower max g number. and make that into fuel.

F-16 (the A/B atleast) is designed with the reverse of what you described, it has a tightly controled wetted area (volumn) and stress was put into lower drag and make it as light as possible. total opposite of the premier multi-role big fighter of the time F-4.

it turned out the opposite approach was ok for a multi-role aircraft too.

personally I like like light, clean fighter.

ehhh....JSF could have been such a strong "light" fighter.

Bltizo said:

MAKS and PAK FA has taken their attention
And besides there are few "pro PLA" people on that forum so the most they'd do with new pictures is look at in passing, maybe throw in a compliment or jibe now and then.

Click to expand...

I think at this point many of them are just scared to own up to their previous statements...

Remember the article that me and my friends translated? Some the claims don't seem so insane now do they.

siegecrossbow said:

What happened to the guys on keypub. They've been awfully quiet for two days since the videos came out.

Click to expand...

Some have resorted to their childishness in other recent event threads. The mods must sleeping over there because they're certainly allowing Pakistan bashing and crying the US and Russia should gang up on China. It always happens when some positive military event happens in China. I especially like the one who thinks somehow it's wrong for China to throw money on the J-20 or the Varyag without any accountability.

siegecrossbow said:

I think at this point many of them are just scared to own up to their previous statements...

Remember the article that me and my friends translated? Some the claims don't seem so insane now do they.

Click to expand...

To be fair I dont' think many folks on that forum bought the idea J-20 was a striker or interceptor in the first place.
And the problem many of the PAK FA crowd had with that translated article was how J-20 was claimed to have better performance in some aspects, and that T-50 showed "american influence".

Bltizo said:

To be fair I dont' think many folks on that forum bought the idea J-20 was a striker or interceptor in the first place.
And the problem many of the PAK FA crowd had with that translated article was how J-20 was claimed to have better performance in some aspects, and that T-50 showed "american influence".

Click to expand...

How is that a big deal? The J-20 certainly had American influence too. When it comes down to stealth shaping the general philosophy is the same. The article just said that the T-50 imitated the "conventional configuration" of the American fighter. It isn't like it said that the T-50 ripped off the F-22 through espionage or anything (something I always see in Western reports about the J-20).

As for the claims that the J-20 could have better performance in some aspects... the author ripped a lot of those comparisons from Dr. Song's paper, which compared the new canard design with conventional designs. The author of the article added in the J-20 besting T-50 part just to keep the paper "interesting". Don't tell me that you don't see blatant patriotic chest thumping on other Western amateur articles as well. The ones I've seen so far are 90% chest thumping and 10% technical analysis ripped from smart people like Sweetman.