Shenyang FC-31 / J-31 Fighter Demonstrator

GTI said:

A

And no special attention paid to corrosion resistance as well? - or would those weight and cost savings be negligible?

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The J-XY for carrier will have corrosion resistance measures put in.

I think the land based J-XY may or may not retain the same level of corrosion resistance depending on the cost and weight of it.

The aforementioned differences I described are ones that I consider to be the most definitive and likely.

Bltizo said:

J-XY for the carrier based variant will almost certainly will have folding wings.

Rafale M is an outlier in that regard, partly as a reflection of its relatively smaller wingspan given its configuration of being more of a delta wing than J-XY is expected to be, but its lack of folding wings has proven to be a detriment for other carriers outside of CdG where folding wings could have allowed it to be stationed elsewhere, namely India's Vikrant carrier.

It would be a remarkably stupid decision to pursue a carrier based J-XY without folding wings.


Any difference between a carrier based J-XY and land based J-XY would likely only be the presence or lack of folding wings, catapult mode gear, reinforced landing gear and tailhook.

I expect virtually everything else to be the same.

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I would like to think even PLAAF should procure carrier-based version, preserving all special treatment for carrier operations including reinforced landing gear, folding wings and tailhook, just like F/A-18s bought by foreign countries.

One advantage would be simplify the procurement, it might even be cheaper if SAC kept manufacturing only one model;
Another would be that in the future war if navy fighters encounter heavy lost in the sea battle they could just acquire AF fighters to carry on.

Just my two cents.

Tiberium said:

I would like to think even PLAAF should procure carrier-based version, preserving all special treatment for carrier operations including reinforced landing gear, folding wings and tailhook, just like F/A-18s bought by foreign countries.

One advantage would be simplify the procurement, it might even be cheaper if SAC kept manufacturing only one model;
Another would be that in the future war if navy fighters encounter heavy lost in the sea battle they could just acquire AF fighters to carry on.

Just my two cents.

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Folding wings have close to no added value to land based PLAAF units. They add complexity, higher would be failure rate, increased maintenance work required, and greater manufacturing costs of all kinds.

Heavier landing gears also erode performance parameters while again offering no real extra value save for very odd circumstances that if present, would probably still present no advantage for having more rugged landing gears i.e. no matter how "rugged" your landing gear designed for carrier deck and carrier landing forces, you still cannot land on cratered airfields.

The only real point is navy losses being able to be quickly replaced by airforce units but is that really a net advantage? Absolutely NOT because you are taking away airforce units and they are left with numbers gap. You may as well have simply built that many for navy as reserve or whatever place you can put in storage. It would be more ideal to cut the false overlap dual use illusion. This point that seems the most reasonable is actually the least purposeful out of all three.

Corrosion resistance makes sense for the PLANAF land based units as well.
Being near the sea environment on the coast typically increases corrosion damage.

You know, something that has been bugging me is how Shenyang corp is located at Shenyang, right beside Korea and Japan. Feels like it would be a much easier target to disable compared to Chengdu or Xian

ougoah said:

Folding wings have close to no added value to land based PLAAF units. They add complexity, higher would be failure rate, increased maintenance work required, and greater manufacturing costs of all kinds.

Heavier landing gears also erode performance parameters while again offering no real extra value save for very odd circumstances that if present, would probably still present no advantage for having more rugged landing gears i.e. no matter how "rugged" your landing gear designed for carrier deck and carrier landing forces, you still cannot land on cratered airfields.

The only real point is navy losses being able to be quickly replaced by airforce units but is that really a net advantage? Absolutely NOT because you are taking away airforce units and they are left with numbers gap. You may as well have simply built that many for navy as reserve or whatever place you can put in storage. It would be more ideal to cut the false overlap dual use illusion. This point that seems the most reasonable is actually the least purposeful out of all three.

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The real issue is that this is not something "added" to the navy version, is that SAC need to take additional steps to "delete" these features from naval version considering the naval version would be the default. That means you need to R&D two different model, establish different production line, build different parts, etc. All of these cost additional money.
Take the R&D, procurement and manufacture process into consideration, it is hard to say which is cheaper, to produce a slightly less expensive and slightly more kinetic land based model, or just produce a single model in a much larger quantity? I don't know, I don't think anyone on this forum know.

Tiberium said:

The real issue is that this is not something "added" to the navy version, is that SAC need to take additional steps to "delete" these features from naval version considering the naval version would be the default. That means you need to R&D two different model, establish different production line, build different parts, etc. All of these cost additional money.
Take the R&D, procurement and manufacture process into consideration, it is hard to say which is cheaper, to produce a slightly less expensive and slightly more kinetic land based model, or just produce a single model in a much larger quantity? I don't know, I don't think anyone on this forum know.

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Any additional development work for any aircraft seeking a new variant will of course require money and time.

However, in the case of J-XY, assuming they use a carrier based variant to develop a land based variant -- like you said, through the "deletion" of various "extra" features present on the carrier based variant -- that would actually be simpler and likely easier to do than the reverse (i.e.: developing a carrier based variant from a land based variant).


The rationale for developing a dedicated land based variant entirely depends on how many aircraft of each type they would look to procure -- again, if the discussion goes down this track, continue the discussion here: Future PLA combat aircraft composition



The benefits of having a dedicated land based variant without the extra complexities and weight of the carrier based variant, of course would be lower weight (and improved kinematic performance by deletion of carrier strengthening and related mechanisms like folding wings etc) -- however removing things like folding wings will also simplify maintenance and operational cost of a land based aircraft compared to a carrier based aircraft.
Those sort of benefits in maintenance in cost between a dedicated land based variant relative to a carrier based variant, again, entirely depends on how many aircraft of each type ends up getting built.

Every deliverable nuke is worth more than 100 J-20s. J-20s and whatnot are great and necessary to close the conventional gap let alone consideration for advancing your own industry and technology. It's also good for smaller skirmish level stuff and of course most useful against lower military adversaries that do not pose existential threats. A higher military power does NOT want to escalate to nuclear. It's up to the inferior military power to ensure it has the ultimate answer to superior firepower. It makes it that much less possible to approach with intentions of attack.

The Americans would only want to keep any hypothetical US China war totally conventional. Tactical nukes may be considered by them unless China makes it abundantly clear it has enough to retaliate many times over and will do so just like Russia said to them, if you attack with tactical yields, I retaliate with megaton dildos. US scurries away like a mouse to work on the next thing where they will come back with that counters what you've got. They won't take risks but they will work hard to make sure they have a sure win before acting and they sure won't tell you when and if. Upping China's own stockpile is a start and probably long been done. These days I would imagine the actual levels of existential weapons are things of wonder and terror beyond what's been discussed in the open. F-22s, F-35s, J-20s, and Su-57s while the leading edge in respective industries and certainly represent the best they can do, are the lowest tiers of the escalation ladder and do not represent an accurate measure of military capability. Russia can defend herself much better from the US than China could even without a single fighter and this is just taking into account what we know about existential level weapons. Hopefully China's got plenty there as well.

Tiberium said:

The real issue is that this is not something "added" to the navy version, is that SAC need to take additional steps to "delete" these features from naval version considering the naval version would be the default. That means you need to R&D two different model, establish different production line, build different parts, etc. All of these cost additional money.
Take the R&D, procurement and manufacture process into consideration, it is hard to say which is cheaper, to produce a slightly less expensive and slightly more kinetic land based model, or just produce a single model in a much larger quantity? I don't know, I don't think anyone on this forum know.

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Deleting complexity requires a lot less work and money than adding complexity.

latenlazy said:

Deleting complexity requires a lot less work and money than adding complexity.

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Plus they could leverage the work done for the PLAAF for exporting it to other airforces.

Obviously the export variant will be based of the PLAAF not the PLAN variant. So the export orders could be used to recover the costs for the R&D required for the PLAAF variant.

So, better to use external customers to pay for the PLAAF R&D costs because most of the improvements made for the PLAAF will obviously translate to the export variant