Broad direction of development - in most countries, but China is one of them, - is ironically the opposite.
Aka, less and less fine/risky aerodynamics, more and more gains via investment into engine power/efficiency.
Fine refinements do help, but overall J-35 is still a rather heavy(deck) medium aircraft of a rather conservative layout, with substantial parasitic internal volume (weapon bays and serpentine ducts), which take as much volume as a 3rd engine. Furthermore, it really appears that major design intent for both airframe and engines was achieving supercruise(don't know how applicable it is to naval J-35*) rather than range.
Flanker, on the other hand, is effectively a kite with 3 nacelles.
*making an interesting theory; can WS-21 be higher bypass when compared to WS-19?
This, btw, isn't all that high as for an aircraft without access to external fuel; or 3.5t per engine.
F-35A carries 8.2t with (likely) substantially lower sfc(F-35C almost 9). Su-33(J-15) does 9.5t, Su-35(proxy for an advanced flanker) 11.5t.
I would beg to differ on how much advances in CFD and simulations contribute to aircraft performance, better/more optimized aerodynamics doesn’t equal more outlandish and radical designs. Small, hardly visible changes to the aerodynamics — a slight modification to leading edge, tweaking the spread of wing twist, changing the contours of the fuselage at select places, etc.— add up to very noticeable gains in efficiency. All of this is impossible (or at least extremely time-consuming and hard) a few decades earlier, when CAD was in its primitive stages, high fidelity CFD for complex shapes is conceptual at best, and the most reliable way to figure out how a design works is to build one and fuck around to find out. Aircraft design has come a long way.
I also feel like I have to correct the mindset that “aerodynamic performance is judge-able by eye”. Not meant as an attack to anyone in any way, it’s just that doing so is highly unreliable at best and can lead to people being very wrong very confidently at worst, not to mention the definition of “good aerodynamics” and “bad aerodynamics” which is a whole other can of worms. A modern design with a weapons bay, VLO features and a “boxy” fuselage doesn’t necessarily have “worse” aerodynamics than a 40-year-old design that looks streamline. Take the flanker as an example: yes it’s well-designed but the “kite with 3 nacelles” isn’t all good: it has to invest extra weight to bulk up its force-bearing frames compared to a box-ish fuselage, the relatively large surface-to-volume ratio creates higher parasitic drag, to name but a few issues. Ultimately aircraft design is about trade off and it’s generally bad practice to intuitively judge such things.
The assumption that having a weapons bay is detrimental to the aerodynamic performance is also not entirely correct. Yes it’s extra weight and volume, but it’s only really a pure detriment when nothing is carried internally, which is not usually how people use fighter jets. When you need to carry, say 4 ~200kg missiles, the drag benefit from not having to carry unoptimized bodies externally adds up really quick, and may actually even out the penalties or even provide an advantage in certain scenarios. Remember that drag isn’t additive, a fighter jet carrying a missile externally has more drag than that of the fighter and that of the missile simply added together. There’s vortices, changed flow fields & pressure distributions, shockwaves forming and reflecting between stuff, all of which is basically a very big middle finger to the design team.
Range-wise the Guancha trio also touched on this on many occasions with the general concerns us being that the J35/J35A has surprisingly good range, partly due to how stealth fighters work (no/little external storage, large internal fuel, less reliance low level flying to avoid detection, etc.) As I said fuel quantity is only one of several factors determining range, a large fuel quantity doesn’t necessarily mean proportionally more range and vice versa.
also I need to correct myself: having located the podcast in question, the internal fuel is apparently 8.X (hinted at at least 8.1 and possibly higher ) ton for the Air Force J35A (no mention of naval J35 but it should at the very least not be significantly smaller). Apologies for not looking this up for the original post.
Time stamp is around 18:00 for this link
