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First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter
Frosty Piss writes "The first clear pictures of what appears to be a Chinese stealth fighter prototype have been published online. The photographs, published on several unofficial Chinese and foreign defense-related websites, appear to show a J-20 prototype making a high-speed taxi test — usually one of the last steps before an aircraft makes its first flight — according to experts on aviation and China's military. Several experts said the prototype's body appeared to borrow from the F-22 and other US stealth aircraft. The US cut funding for the F-22 in 2009 in favor of the F-35, a smaller, cheaper stealth fighter that made its first test flight in 2006 and is expected to be fully deployed by around 2014."
Pictures of a stealth fighter.
If I can get pictures of it, is it really all that stealthy?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
The article says it would be a contender for the F-22, and calls it the world's only fully operational stealth fighter. Why don't the f-117 or even the f-35's count?
The F-117 has been retired, and the F-35 isn't operational yet. Indeed, there's a growing scandal about the lack of progress in flight testing (as well as the emergence of weight and exhaust heat problems) for the F-35, and it's likely at that at least one version... probably the STOVL "B" version... will be canceled. And it's possible that the whole project will be canceled.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Next time there's a rally in Tiananmen Square, the world won't see an iconic image of a protester standing in front of a row of tanks. The protester will instead be standing in front a stealth fighter jet, but the stealth fighter jet will be invisible to cameras, making the photo uninteresting.
Not really, IIRC there are about 6 Soviet/Russian aircraft that look damn near identical to the "loser's" design. The most recent example being Sukhoi PAK FA and the YF-23 (which lost to the f-22)
F-35 is a fighter but it isn't an air superiority aircraft.
China's power is there is no individual, there is only the state. Need a new bridge? Seize houses. New factory? Take land. We need to realize what we are up against and adjust our outdated ideals about business.
How long can China realistically keep that up? Manufacturing in the U.S. is so damned expensive because you can't just dump your industrial waste into the nearby stream. China is enjoying a 1st world economy with 3rd world living conditions. It'll catch up with them eventually.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
Except the Chinese and American economies are too interlocked to repeat something like the that. Its hard to say what Sino-American relations will look like in the future, but I don't think the Cold War is a particularly good model.
You're playing semantics. If plans were taken without the owner's permission then it was theft. Just because IP laws have been taken to an absurd level doesn't mean that there's no reason at all to protect intellectual property.
Hmmm, I guess we should start taking Chinese espionage seriously?
No, we should be taking the Chinese seriously. Every time one of these articles come out, there's a large contingent of people who dismiss it as "They're just copying", "It's still not a challenge to what we have" and, my favorite "These commies will never catch up to us."
Can we realize that the Chinese are on a nice technology curve that is bound to intersect with ours within our lifetime? And that their plans include putting China back into the center of the world, where they believe it rightfully belongs? Maybe the F-35 will be enough to counter any threat from the Chinese for the next 20 years. But after that, we better make sure we have the technology edge, because we sure as hell won't have the manpower or economy edge.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Despite the F designation, the F-117 is an attack aircraft, not a fighter. The F-35 is a multi-role aircraft, ala the F-16. The F-22 is a true air superiority fighter, ala the original F-15. That' why we've scaled back F-22 production and ramped up F-35 production. Hasn't been much need for a U.S. air superiority fighter in the last 20 years. On other hand, we've needed lots of attack aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They may be just copying, but the implications of "just copying" apparently haven't sunk in yet.
If they are able to acquire that much of our technology, then they've acquired the rest of it too, as has every other country to which we've outsourced our technology manufacturing. 10 years ago, I ranted about how outsourcing was not just an economic problem for geeks, but a major national security risk. At that time, I was still naive enough to believe that the folks who owned defemse technology companies gave a damn about the United States.
Well, the national security risk is there in the photo, and it's clear that those executives who were willing to sell out their country for next quarter's earnings and a bigger bonus didn't, and don't, give a rat's patoot about the USA. They can live quite comfortably in any country, after all. Why should they care? Let the peasants get bombed.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I think the Soviets once said "Sell the Chinese a fighter and 5 years later they have a fighter factory". The Chinese are determined to become the next super power and they have a huge pool of science and engineering talent to pull from. Some of whom were trained in Europe and the US. They have a good feel for the US and and Europe's capabilities and want to surpass that. I personally do not underestimate them.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Considering the limited ordinance and limited cockpit visibility the F-117 is neither a fighter nor a bomber it is an assassination aircraft. It can sneak in and take out a single air or ground target then it sneaks out again. What it lacks in versatility it makes up for in ability.
... to validate a combat-worthy modern fighter.
A nation that puts plastic in its baby food to fake protein levels has quality control issues that will fail a phony fighter at fifty thousand feet. Remember the failure of the counterfeit aerospace bolts it ships to the west.
You can't overcome the demanding laws of physics by proclamation, family privilege, or deceit. Consequently, China's reverse-engineered Russian fighter engines don't match up. (And Russia has refused to sell them it's F22 class power plants because they're tired of getting ripped off. )
Don't even get me started on mastering the voodoo of stealth...
In short, we'll see what they have when it's super-cruising at altitude with working combat systems: Not when its taxi-ing at seal level.
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
Cobra maneuver:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgHoBDW56CI
Draken (01.55 02.05 02.13):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgHoBDW56CI
No such thing in the JAS 39 promotional video :/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNWpK9Qe4vk
37 Viggen going backwards:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fye_2AipFTA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11-osaKapEI
I don't know why it was odd that a Swedish one happen to be able to do it. Just because it's not Russian or what? =P
Regarding Viggen development (en.wikipedia):
"In 1960, the U.S. National Security Council, led by President Eisenhower, formulated a military security guarantee for Sweden. The U.S. promised to help the Swedish militarily in the event of a Soviet attack against Sweden; both countries signed a military-technology agreement. In what was known as the "37-annex", Sweden was allowed access to advanced U.S. aeronautical technology which made it possible to design and produce the Saab 37 Viggen much faster and cheaper than would otherwise have been possible.[5]
According to the doctoral research of Nils Bruzelius at the Swedish National Defence College, the reason for this officially unexplained U.S. support was the need to protect U.S. Polaris submarines deployed just outside the Swedish west coast against the threat of Soviet anti-submarine aircraft.[5]"
Except the Chinese and American economies are too interlocked to repeat something like the that. Its hard to say what Sino-American relations will look like in the future, but I don't think the Cold War is a particularly good model.
How about a hot war? In the early 20th c., it was widely and loudly proclaimed that the economies of the great European powers were far too dependent on each other for any serious conflict to take place. They might play ego games with each other by building lots of battleships, sure, but anything worse than the occasional naval skirmish, or brief land war in some far-away colony, was unthinkable And, um, we know how that worked out.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Because missiles are extremely bad at patrolling airspace. War isn't about blowing everything up - it's about blowing the right things up, at the right time.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Meh. India is the ones who should be worried. When China gets more control of all those headwaters in the Himalayas, it's gonna get *real* ugly for India.
Diversion of the Brahmaputra... the Ganges... etc.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
In the financially strapped 1960s/70s the Soviet Mig 25 Foxbat appeared and it's rumored capabilities saved the US F14 and F15 projects from significant budget cutbacks or cancellation. Perhaps the savior of the F22 and F35 projects has arrived.
I've thought about this, and the Foxbat comparison might be apt here. This will sound conspiracy theory-ish, but Lockheed is probably going to milk this for all it's worth in order to drive their own sales. "Look, ooooh, a scary Chinese stealth fighter! Better buy more of ours!".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The U.S. is in decline because a lot of people think the problem is overspending on the military. It's not. Don't get me wrong; yes there's lots of pork in the U.S. military budget which could be cut. But it doesn't comprise most of U.S. government spending, nor is it the cause of the U.S.'s budgetary woes. And a good part of the reason we're in the buget mess we're in now is because people like you who think that it is implement solutions which don't address the real problem.
U.S. military spending is actually one of the few parts of government spending which has been more or less steadily declining since WWII, both as a % of the budget and as a % of GDP. It started climbing after 9/11, but it's still close to the lowest it's been since WWII.
What's killing the budget (indeed, where most of the money is spent) are the social programs; specifically, medicare and medicaid. They're projected to grow so quickly that even if you stopped all military spending, dropped it to zero , all the money that saved would be eaten up by growth in medicare and medicaid within 20-25 years. In other words, in 20-25 years we would have no military, no military spending, and our budgetary problems would be the same as they are now.
The first step in fixing a problem is to correctly identify what is causing it. The Congressional Budget Office hires a lot of really smart people to do nothing but identify the causes of the budget problems, and publishes a nifty report on it about every 2 years. Please go read it. Put aside any moralistic preconceptions you may have about which parts of the budget are good or bad. Look at it purely from an accounting standpoint - which parts are decreasing and which parts are ballooning out of control? The parts that are ballooning out of control are what we need to address to fix the problem, the parts that are decreasing are a much lower priority.
Good idea - then we'll only have to dig half as far to get there.
It has been at least 50 years since heat-seeking missiles were invented. They can hunt down a fighter with far more accuracy than a human pilot can, they can withstand much higher accelerations, they are much cheaper than a manned fighter plane.
Why do they insist on manned fighter aircraft?
Because to date, every attempt to replace manned, and in fact gun-armed and dogfight-capable, fighters with missiles or "missile truck" aircraft has failed miserably. At some point a combination of SAMs and UCAVs may replace fighters, and manned combat planes generally, but we're not there yet -- or more precisely, we have no evidence that we're there yet. There's only one way to really put it to the test, of course, and nobody wants to go there.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Now, excusing the obvious fact that you don't seem to know the difference between unsecured U.S. Treasury Bonds (debt sold to others) and Secured Debt (a house mortgage etc), 75% of our debt is held in America, 25% by foreign countries. China owns about 20.8% (of that 25%) of all foreign held U.S. Debt. Japan also holds a little over 20%. So you could just say China owns 5% of our debt. Even if we completely forfeited on china's Bonds, they can't simply come over and take California from us (which is too bad). They don't OWN anything but a promise with no security. Its like you borrowing $5 from your daddy and you tell him you will pay it back next week, put that debt on paper and give it to him and its a bond. There are legal ramifications, fees, fines, etc that the debt holder may be eligible for in international court, but they don't in fact own jack shit.
I think that's a very basic assessment of a very complex situation, and one which isn't necessarily correct.
The way I see it, if a war is obviously started by China or as a mutual, gradual escalation, without it being obviously and/or openly about the debt currently owed to China by the US, the US is going to have no problem gathering allies, nullifying said debt, and beating the crap out of China in any sort of war. That'd free up the US economy and cause significant growth, while not impacting the US credit rating.
If, on the other hand, the US is an aggressor, or the war is openly about the debt, then the Chinese have the upper hand, and would surely win - if not in the actual war, in the economic effects of the US having a plunging credit rating.
...For what it's worth, the USA doesn't have the resources to build F-22s either ;)
Yurt, actually, I'm in complete agreement with you. I've been in the aviation field for a long time now, both for fun and for paychecks. And there was a great article written more than 25 years ago.... Lord, I wish I could find it.... where the writer predicted that the US would eventually come to a point where it could "build a fighter with all of the electronics of the Starship Enterprise, but what good will it do us if we can only afford two of them?"
I think we hit that point starting with the B-2, and have continued it with the F-22 and F-35. Instead of following the American model of WWII... buy the best weapon that you can get in large numbers affordably... we've adopted the German model of WWII, which is to design the finest, most exotic weapons and make do with limited quantities of them (most people would be absolutely shocked if they knew, for instance, just how few tanks the Germans produced in comparison to the Allies. The Germans produced less than 1350 of the legendary Tiger tank, and less than 500 of the King Tiger). I think we saw how that turned out for the Germans. Americans and Russians just kept churning out Shermans and T-34's, and simply overwhelmed them. I'm very much afraid that in any future war with a peer foe (which, for the record, I think is a LONG way off), we might get smeared simply because we don't have enough fighters and ships and tanks and will be outlasted in the field. I think we desperately need large numbers of easy to use and maintain weapons, not 187 F-22's. That's not even enough to guarantee security of US borders, let alone deployment in a Korean or Eurasian war. But not even the greatest economy in the world can afford $183 million per fighter, flyaway (the CBO's estimate of the eventual cost of the F-35). That's simply insane.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Are they looking at different photos than what were published? The side-view photo certainly doesn't appear to be a high-speed test. Hard to tell with all the grain, but I would expect some blurring of the background and/or jet exhaust if it was traveling at high speed, but you see neither in those two photos. For all I can tell it could be a mockup sitting still on the tarmac. Not to say the Chinese haven't conducted high-speed tests of it, I just disagree with the claim that these photos show any evidence of it.
Other Photos seem to have the same issues - that might be some heat waving in the Guardian photo, but tough to tell.
Claiming that this could be a prototype fighter that challenges the F-22 based on these photos is just ridiculous, and one would think a writer for Jane's would know better. It is quite possible, as China has really made no secret of the fact that they are pursuing aviation technology very aggressively (and I do seem to recall reports of large portions of engineering data for the F-22 being stolen a while back. My mistake - apparently it was the F-35), and no doubt they are working on bringing their high-tech fabrication technology up to speed. But there is a very big jump between putting together a stealthy-looking mockup (all that can really be determined from the photos) and producing an effective combat system, from airframe to FCS to weapons systems and avionics. Like I said, I don't doubt that this is their goal, and I don't doubt that they will be fully capable of it within a relatively short time, but a couple of photos really doesn't prove (or even really suggest) much of anything.
>>Can we realize that the Chinese are on a nice technology curve that is bound to intersect with ours within our lifetime?
Well, their strategy in this regard is quite smart. They are sitting on a long pile of dollars, which, you know, some companies would like to get. So they will buy stuff from western companies with the following deal: we'll buy the first few outright, the next few we'll buy from you but assemble in China, and the next few you'll turn the plans over to us, and we'll build it ourselves but pay you a royalty. They've done this with high speed trains, nuclear reactors, and so forth. Very very cheap way of bypassing the need for doing the R&D themselves.
And the West loves it, though it's essentially shooting itself in the foot.
Given the amount the US owes to China, I am reminded of the Ankh-Morpork anthem, which goes, in part:
Let others boast of martial dash
For we have boldly fought with cash
We own all your helmets, we own all your shoes.
We own all your generals - touch us and you'll lose
See also this version
"And it's possible that the whole project will be canceled."
Not likely, the F22 project was cut back because it was not deemed acceptably exportable technology, the F-35 is and already has a bunch of export customers set up, and even helping to fund the project such as Australia and Britain.
It may well be scaled back in capabilities but it will not be cancelled because it's just too important to US defence exports, cancelling it would not only be devastating financially for US defence contractors involved but it would also massively harm the US' image as a trustworthy defence exporter- why trust your military equipment future on a country that just can't deliver and ends up leaving you defenceless and out of pocket? The US just can't afford to cancel the F-35.
I'm glad you mention the Su-27, but lets make it clear, the Russians basically invented these beautiful manoeuvres, they really knocked the US back on their asses at the time these were shown.
I love this story from the Australian International Air Show, for 1995:
"The 1995 Avalon airshow was held on March 21-26. The show was largely stolen by the visiting Russian contingent of Anatoly Kvochur, his specially modified SU-27P Flanker and Il-76 tanker aircraft. Aerial inflight refueling was displayed as well as Kvochur's world famous flying routine with the Flanker which involved the "Cobra", knife edge and extremely low level passes. The final display on the Sunday show saw the Flanker cruise down the Avalon runway at approximately 15 feet AGL. The RAAF and USAF were reluctant to compete with the Flanker and there was no solo F/A-18 Hornet aerobatic display this year. The USAF flew the F-16 Falcon with external drop tanks fitted which they said limited the aircraft to a "3g max" display. Kvochur won the award for best flying display this year."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_International_Airshow#1995
Uncle Sam was too scared to even show up! Ha!
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The F-35 is not an air superiority aircraft, because it is a versatile airframe that can take on many roles, one of which is air superiority. In its air superiority role, it would prove more than adequate against anything known today except the F-22.
The F-35 trades off not being quite as potent as the F-22 in air-to-air combat for being useful after the first two days of combat.
The enemies of Democracy are
The US can live without the Chinese, since manufacturing can (and eventually will) move from China (to India, Brazil etc) once it is more economical to do so. The Chinese depend on the US and the West, if these countries stopped buying Chinese made stuff then the domestic upheaval of unemployment would be extremely disruptive to China. The Chinese know this, so they are doing things slowly and cautiously without challenging the US directly. The US also has generally good relations with other countries to the extent that many countries vie for US bases. China has some bases but pretty much no country of much standing wants Chinese bases. China might have more people than the US alone (although will soon have fewer than India) but is very much smaller in every category compared to the US and likely allies. A confrontational approach would work badly for China (their image is considerably tarnished as a bully with recent events), fortunately most of the Chinese administration know it.
That $183 M covers the R&D so it not the series production cost. In wartime, things have historically cost around 1/3 once the R&D has been paid back and economies of scale achieved. This makes the F-22 very affordable (one reason the USAF was pushing for more of them is that it gets cheaper when you get more).
If a future war lasted long enough the US would still outproduce and out muscle anyone else (I'm not from the US and this is obvious even to me). Out of the biggest countries it still has the biggest economy; most internal natural resources; biggest, most advanced, best equipped and led military; best educated population (on average); most allies; and relatively attractive ideology to most of the World (meaning its allies would stick with it). Despite all the hand-wringing about it's fall (and it is interesting to see even the USAF release classified studies in an attempt to get even more F-22s, when the USAF is so much stronger than all the other countries combined) it is very unlikely that the US will not still be extremely influential into the future. The Chinese are not contenders at this point and no one apart from themselves and pariah states wants to see them dominate the rest of the World in the future.
About half of the discretionary budget is spent on the military.
http://www.warresisters.org/files/FY2011piechart.pdf
The reason the United States is dying is because we aren't collecting enough taxes to pay for our infrastructure. We started two wars and then dropped taxes. That shit doesn't work.
When our way of life actually was in danger during WII, we immediately raised taxes to pay for the cost of saving our country, and those rates lasted throughout the 50s, which was one of our best economic periods in history. Our national debt dropped, and continued to do so through 1980. Then an actor named Ronald Reagan decided to hand the nation's wealth to the wealthy, and hope they wouldn't blow it all on coke and hookers and stupid investments. He was wrong. Then he passed deregulation that led to the S&L crisis, just like Clinton passed the regulation that would eventually lead to the derivatives crisis that's still boning our economy. Reagan also raised military spending but dropped taxes, and that shit didn't work back then either. Bush I and II continued the same idiot policies, and people complain that Obama hasn't fixed the economy yet. Well, when you've had some fucking frat brats with sledgehammers renting a place for the better part of 30 years, it tends to take more than 20 months to fix.
Anyway, Bush II got kicked out for doing the sensible thing and raising taxes to cover our debt. Clinton raised the top rate again to 39.6%, reduced military spending, and our national debt dropped. McCain even ran in 2000 on protecting Social Security to fulfill our promise to "the greatest generation" with the extra money we had lying around. But that sad sack of shit has sold out along with the rest of the Republican party, pandering to some illiterate backwoods fuckwits called "Evangelical Christians" who believe that Obama is a Nazi Socialist Muslim born in Kenya.
But you need a certain type of idiot to vote against their own interests and ignore common sense and hard data for thirty years running. They're the same idiots who give Jesus $5 hoping for a $10 return. They think the GOP will give them the same deal, and they don't know how fucking right they are.
It's not scalpels that are expensive. It's MRI's and PET scans, and more to the point, that when you're dying, and your doctor is, in essence, working on commission, you and your doctor both are very willing to try any and every high-tech, high-cost diagnostic and treatment, to put off dying in the hopes that you'll be that 1-in-100 miracle cure. Here's a good article about this problem written by an oncology surgeon in The New Yorker a couple months ago, where he talks about how 25% of Medicare's current budget is being spent by people who are in their last couple of months of life, and that money provides an average of less than two months' delay in death.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Wait, what? The U.S. is in decline because people think that we're overspending on the military? That doesn't jibe w/ the numbers I've seen.
Medicare & Medicaid expenditures are big -- as big as defense. But you seem to suggest that they either dwarf defense spending, or are less important than defense spending ("The U.S. is in decline because..."). One of those points is factually incorrect, and the other, I suppose, depends upon your income, age, and sadly your political leaning.
My particular perspective is that spending on social programs should dwarf military spending - but unfortunately, it doesn't.
Using WW2 spending as the mean is deceptive to say the least.
Death panels, you mean?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.