Okay, so defensenews just put up a rather cra**y article regarding J-15... I'm going to post it and pick at all its inaccuracies because this write up will find its way onto sdf sooner or later.
Chinese Media Takes Aim at J-15 Fighter
Sep. 28, 2013 - 01:49PM |
By WENDELL MINNICK
TAIPEI — In an unusual departure for mainland Chinese-language media, the Beijing-based Sina Military Network (SMN) criticized the capabilities of the carrier-borne J-15 Flying Shark as nothing more than a “flopping fish.”
On Sept. 22, the state-controlled China Daily Times reported the new aircraft carrier Liaoning had just finished a three-month voyage and conducted over 100 sorties of “various aircraft,” of which the J-15 “took off and landed on the carrier with maximum load and various weapons.” This report was also carried on the official Liberation Army Daily.
Contradicting any report by official military or government media is unusual in China given state control of the media.
What sounded more like a rant than analysis, SMN, on Sept. 23, reported the new J-15 was incapable of flying from the Liaoning with heavy weapons, “effectively crippling its attack range and firepower.”
Exactly. SMN isn't exactly a state media outlet and like most of us, are under the impression J-15 cannot take off with a full fuel load.
The fighter can take off and land on the carrier with two YJ-83K anti-ship missiles, two PL-8 air-to-air missiles, and four 500-kilogram bombs. But a weapons “load exceeding 12 tons will not get it off the carrier’s ski jump ramp.” This might prohibit it from carrying heavier munitions such as PL-12 medium-range air-to-air missiles.
The article will later address the fact that PL-12 is actually more than half as light as YJ-83K, so I'll leave this inaccuracy out.
BUT -- no flanker in existence can fly off with 12 tons of weapons, not even Su-34. Su-33 was actually designed with something like 6.5 tons max weapons load.
To further complicate things, the J-15 can carry only two tons of weapons while fully fueled. “This would equip it with no more than two YJ-83K and two PL-8 missiles,” thus the “range of the YJ-83K prepared for the fighter will be shorter than comparable YJ-83K missiles launched from larger PLAN [People’s Liberation Army Navy] vessels. The J-15 will be boxed into less than 120 [kilometers] of attack range.”
Wait, that's not right. A J-15 fully fuelled has a combat radius well over a thousand kilometers, so it's more like 120km + 1000+ km.
Also, air launched AShMs typically have either equal or greater range than its surface launched counterparts, so the 120km number is simply incorrect, given the YJ-83 has a surface launch range of at least 180km.
Losing the ability to carry the PL-12 medium-range air-to-air missiles will make the J-15 an “unlikely match” against other foreign carrier-based fighters.
“Even the Vietnam People’s Air Force can outmatch the PL-8 short-range missile. Without space for an electronic countermeasure pod, a huge number of J-15s must be mobilized for even simple missions, a waste for the PLA Navy in using the precious space aboard its sole aircraft carrier in service.”
I feel like this sina rant is indeed just that -- a rant (just like what I'm writing is a rant).
Built by the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, the J-15 is a copy of the Russian-made Su-33. China acquired an Su-33 prototype from the Ukraine in 2001. Avionics are most likely the same as the J-11B (Su-27). In 2006, Russia accused China of reverse engineering the Su-27 and canceled a production license to build 200 Su-27s after only 95 aircraft had been built.
Vasily Kashin, a China military specialist at the Moscow-based Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, suggests the J-15 might be a better aircraft than the Su-33. “I think that there might be some improvements because electronic equipment now weighs less than in the 1990s,” he said. It could also be lighter due to new composites that China is using on the J-11B that were not available on the original Su-33.
Nothing to pick at here.
Despite improvements, Kashin wonders why the Chinese bothered with the Su-33 given the fact that Russia gave up on it. Weight problems and other issues forced the Russians to develop the MiG-29K, which has better power-to-weight ratio and can carry more weapons.
Whoa, wait what?
Physics works the same for everyone.
Mig-29K and Su-33 have a similar thrust to weight ratio. But Mig-29K is a smaller aircraft so it can carry an absolute smaller load of weapons... That is to say, considering everything else equal (headwind, fuel fraction, etc), Su-33 will always be able to take off with a greater payload, simply because it's a larger aircraft with more powerful engines.
Being a smaller aircraft doesn't automatically mean you can somehow carry more weapons, because being a smaller aircraft means your engines are automatically less powerful as well, and your structure is weaker, etc.
It's like saying a B-24 should be able to carry more bombs than a B-29, it's completely counter to logic.
The russians gave up on Su-33 because its 24 or so fleet was decrepit, and went for Mig-29K because the Indians had more or less funded the modernized Mig-29K development and ordered a hefty number to boot, lowering production costs.
If PLAN had decided to buy modernized Su-33 from irkut then the Russians could have gone for Su-33 as well.
The very reason china went for Su-33 rather than Mig-29K (and the very reason they wanted Su-27 instead of Mig-29 back at the end of the cold war), is the great range and payload of the flanker airframe.
“Of course, when the Chinese get their future carriers equipped with catapults, that limitation will not apply and they will be able to fully realize Su-33/J-15 potential — huge range and good payload,” Kashin said.
The Liaoning is the problem. The carrier is small — 53,000 tons — and uses a ski jump. From Russia’s experience, “taking off from the carrier with takeoff weight exceeding some 26 tons is very difficult,” Kashin said.
Roger Cliff, a China defense specialist for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, said this is “one of the reasons why sky-jump carriers can’t be considered to be equivalent to full-size carriers with catapults.”
I would like to put all these so called analysts into a room and show them the numbers I've posted over and over again, yet which no site has seemed to pick up on yet (given there's so many of them frequenting here and CDF)
And the kuznetsov is commonly cited with a max displacement of 65,000 tons, so there's that.
A number of unanswered questions are raised by the SMN report, Kashin said, including the amount of fuel on board, carrier speed, wind speed and direction.
Better. Some critical thinking. The entire premise of J-15/Su-33 taking off is that it would be able to do MTOW reliably from the two bow positions at 25 knots headwind.
Cliff also raises issues with SMN’s conclusions. “It doesn’t make sense to me that the J-15 can take off with YJ-83s but not PL-12s, since the YJ-83 weighs about 1,800 pounds and the PL-12 weighs about 400 pounds.”
Correct.
I'm more surprised they're taking SMN seriously. It's like us taking china defense mashup as gospel.
They should be coming onto here if they want some half decent analysis.
A possible answer is that it was unable to take off with both. “The article says that it can only carry ‘two tons’ of missiles and munitions when fully fueled, which is 4,400 pounds, and two YJ-83s plus two PL-8s would weigh over 4,000 pounds, leaving no margin for any PL-12s. But I don’t see why it couldn’t take off with PL-12s if it wasn’t carrying YJ-83s.” Cliff concludes that the J-15 should be capable of carrying PL-12s when it is flying purely air-to-air missions and that “it probably just can’t carry PL-12s when it is flying a strike mission.”
Even considering the possibility that J-15
can only carry two tons of weapons while fully fuelled... why don't they just shave off 360 kg of fuel for two PL-12s??
The flanker has such a long range on internal fuel anyway, most of the time you probably won't even need to fly fully wet.
Kashin said the J-15, unlike the Su-33, should have a “potent” internal countermeasures suite, thus allowing for more space for weapons. The SMN report suggests it has an external electronic countermeasures (ECM) pod.
The SMN "report" was probably just being over eager and saying J-15 supposedly won't be able to carry ECM pods like EF-18 or JH-7A
Weight issues should also not be too much of a problem for the J-15, he said, since the Su-33 did fly from the same type of carrier carrying “6-8 air-to-air missiles and Sorbtsia ECM pods carrying something like 6 to 6.5 tons of fuel.”
So if weight isn't much of an issue, then why exactly was this article written? It just makes the host site look stupid for taking a sina fanboy rant seriously and it makes the so called analysts look silly by bothering to unravel the rant.
For any potential analysts of various institutes or think tanks that may be frequenting SDF and seek to write a somewhat technical article regarding the liaoning and J-15's weapons load, please may I direct your attention here:
http://www.sinodefenceforum.com/nav...-programme-news-views-44-6479.html#post247737
