The J-31 is NOT a Sino F-35. It is a YF-22 package in an F/A-18C airframe size and as such, I'm still not convinced, even with the stolen F135 engine technology for the WS-13, that the gallon can be stuffed into a quart jar in a useful (stealth PLUS supercruise PLUS height PLUS maneuver) composite mission capability (F-35 is a one course horse).
You want to have good EM graphs at altitude and you need a big wing. That means drag which takes you beyond the F404-GE-402 or even F414-GE-100 baselines for IRT.
Want to do 7G pulls at 800 knots? You need a very stiff and thus comparatively -short- fuselage which means pushing the CG and CL closer together so there is less pitch trim change across a rigid spine because the belly has been cut out for the weapons bays.
Want VLO as _serious_ suppression of IR as well as RF signatures? That's another 5-7,000lbs of structural baseline weight and now the whole vicious circle starts all over again. Except that the wing can't get any bigger without stretching the fuselage.
Now you know you're up into the F110-GE-132 or Pratt-232 EFE class /at least/. Which means that, unless you are going to do what the Japanese are with the ATDX and those huge Dolly Parton engine bay covers, you have to make some serious adjustments for mass and area rule by deepening the airframe and providing differential (vertical) profiling.
The shame of this is that the F-22 is a bit of overkill, IMO. You -could-, especially with modern missile technology, move away from the high end SSC and accept 2 fewer missiles as weapons bays to arrive at something closer to a Mach-1.3 SSC (just above the transonics range) with F-14 level 16-18K fuel loads. And if Shenyang did this, they would have a decent fighter with more development potential than the abortion which is the J-20 (stealth, aeros, weapons load, all _wrong_).
Perhaps the biggest risk of the J-31 program is that it will wilt in shadow of it's bigger brother and China will produce a 'close but no kewpie' F-20 equivalent which will struggle on the export market because the home force doesn't want it.
In this, China _desperately_ need to rationalize and neck down her fighter fleets. Soon to be four Flanker variants, the Sino-Lavi, the JH-7 Flounder and a whole passel of older J-7s and J-8s still to be replaced. China can go quality and skip the numbers game, go quantity and lose development funding for truly competitive stealth (the existing prototypes are more tech demonstrators than preproduction models). Or go with a mix.
One thing is certain and that's the reality that the Chinese have a lot of hinterland to maintain presence in and thus small-intermediate fighters will ultimately either have to have base infrastructure and tanking built around their limited radii. Or a much more capable, reliable, large fighter fleet be maintained with small Det-FOLs for routine deployment in rotation through necessary areas.
China is attempting to buy her way to a fast track developmental + foreign sourced technology base in Aerospace and that is just not how you get real institutional experience from the pipe smokers to the line and service side of things. It takes time as flight hours and numbered airframe blocks to identify the kinks and flight test the fixes before incorporating them in followon models which pilots can then recommend further changes in adapting to their mission roles.
Having a panoply of types but no real, solid, hours in any of them is a recipe for mediocrity not maximum understanding and competence in the field.
All of the PGMs are more or less clones of Western kit with no real understanding of the needs for swarm tech or miniature, long range, dual mode (cruise + terminal sprint) weapons. Nothing to see there.
...from Aviation Week, to The Boresight, to right here on Solomon's blog, to a rather..."passionate" blog that shall not be named here...
M&S - > MandS - > Mist & Shadows...
Us industry folks can be ingrained in the parlance...
By the frequency and longevity of your post I figure you are ex DOD or contracting... You don't seem to bear any company affiliation so perhaps you were on the evaluation side during the ATF program and maybe a few others... (got to watch the personal pronouns when making your points btw) or simply conditioned in non-disclosure.
I'd suggest 20-30 years in... Long since retired. You do enjoy building models. A career long enough to have notes on ACEVAL and AIMVAL... and the weaknesses of the AWG-9 and AIM-54...
Known for the long winded post... with concrete stuff I might add... but I'm surprised there are no blogs by you yourself...
Why?
Recurring points of yours:
1.) "Let the Droids do the fighting.", a 150kW SSL for point defense, "Shape, Shape, Shape, Materials", Hypersonic Strike platforms... a true technologist.
2.) You swear by IQ tests and suggest they heavily correlate to race and gender... Some would call it a "soft" belief in eugenics. Solomon doesn't tolerate it, neither do I, but free speech is free speech...
It's been about 2-3 years now... Just letting you know that there are others out there who are paying attention...
P.S: I agree with your assessment, but we shouldn't take the Chinese for granted here. They are "resourceful".
If they are going to wrest control over foreign interests from U.S., the Chinese need to couple defense politics with good foreign policy. The Shanghai Cooperative Organization is one means to do this but it lacks organization in the manner of an POTO equivalent, unified, defense theory to preemptively discourage Western and certainly U.S. 'interests' from entering what should be a Chinese SOI.
The vehicle for that political and trade exclusion zone is A2AD but the method, while principally oriented around long range surveillance and missile technology could easily, 'for morale purposes' include an F-16 type DOTC approach to unified presence (assisted maintenance, common training and exercises, like the TTTE and Red Flag as part of a single maintenance/performance guarantee training effort) which would help both raise the moral of surrounding Asian states _very_ unsure of their place in a rising hegemony of Chinese interests. And bring real competence to the region's armed forces as an all Asian military cooperative with varying levels of commitment and performance allowed.
In this, you need to understand that I believe we are sticking our long noses into an impossible narrow jam and daring less a threat than an demographic destiny to swing the door on us. I do not believe, for reasons of hypocrisy of policy (you guarantee your interests by respecting others in a fashion which is reliable) as well as ultimate technologic capacity we can or -should try- to win an ASB secured position in the oceanic void facing East Asia. The Russians attempted it off Cuba and got their **cks broke. The Germans tried it, twice, with U-Boats and ended up sinking less than 1% of global shipping for the loss of 38,000 lives as 70% of their sub forces.
We will lose because we are the weaker, dumber, less driven, techno state and any policy of containment similar to Russia will only result in interior trading, in non-USD (see: Peace Pipeline, the real reason we are 'mad at Iran'...), which we cannot shut down with maritime interdict as Doenitizian or Halseyian ASB warfare tactics.
Even as China can very easily shut down our dependence on her and the Three Tigers exports with ICD, subs and mine technology (see: WWII and what really ended the IJN ability to compete with U.S. forces therein).
For all these reasons and more, the Pacific Rebalance/Pivot is a _STUPID IDEA_ when we will not even defend our own borders against million man invasions and less than a quarter century after NATO really meant anything the Europeans are back to sponsoring regional wars with Bear Baiting in the Ukraine. We just don't have the street cred to be engaging in Keynesian stunts like this.
We should pull back and invest in our economy, regaining major portions of our industrial base as if it had been bombed flat by WWII standards and begin to technologically redefine the speed and scale of our interventionist needs because the current force model is **Economically Unaffordable**.
I will always advocate for this, even if it means giving the Chinese advice on how to turn a luke warm design into a world beater.
Unfortunately, standing against me is the entire MICC which has successfully spent hundreds of billions on a piece of junk 'strike fighter' that doesn't have the legs of an F-111 or even F-15E to be useful in the Deep Blue Void regions of the PacRim and is subsonic (slow sortie generation = fewer DMPIs per day than one-way missiles) besides. Two characteristics which should have rendered it utterly 'Operationally Unsuitable' to meeting U.S. adventurist needs, more than a decade ago.
The military, as the designated SMEs, doesn't speak out because they have adopted the 'useful tools get sharpened political ones get (their throats) cut' ideology of dependent survival as an apolitical entity. That too must change but it will not do so as long they can perceive a 'mission' capability which is essentially about sustainment and growth of the military as it's own enterprise rather than as a support agency for the health of a very sick nation.
I will not stand by and see my nation become a war-addicted adventurist state in the manner of Old Europe, solving it's problems by adding to the burdens of other nation _groups_. The latter should be it's own indicator of Building The Beast which defeats us. Spartans could not be taken as individuals but their combined arms capabilities were minimal compared to the other Greek city states which came to loath their 'leadership'.
Organization and cooperation will defeat and deny our entry to ever larger parts of the world, even if it means export of nuclear options (and it may come to that) by independent agencies. And since we are dependent upon a good-standing trade and national reputation, we have an awful lot of tarnished escutcheon to repolish.
The J-31 is NOT a Sino F-35. It is a YF-22 package in an F/A-18C airframe size and as such, I'm still not convinced, even with the stolen F135 engine technology for the WS-13, that the gallon can be stuffed into a quart jar in a useful (stealth PLUS supercruise PLUS height PLUS maneuver) composite mission capability (F-35 is a one course horse).
ReplyDeleteYou want to have good EM graphs at altitude and you need a big wing. That means drag which takes you beyond the F404-GE-402 or even F414-GE-100 baselines for IRT.
Want to do 7G pulls at 800 knots? You need a very stiff and thus comparatively -short- fuselage which means pushing the CG and CL closer together so there is less pitch trim change across a rigid spine because the belly has been cut out for the weapons bays.
Want VLO as _serious_ suppression of IR as well as RF signatures? That's another 5-7,000lbs of structural baseline weight and now the whole vicious circle starts all over again. Except that the wing can't get any bigger without stretching the fuselage.
Now you know you're up into the F110-GE-132 or Pratt-232 EFE class /at least/. Which means that, unless you are going to do what the Japanese are with the ATDX and those huge Dolly Parton engine bay covers, you have to make some serious adjustments for mass and area rule by deepening the airframe and providing differential (vertical) profiling.
The shame of this is that the F-22 is a bit of overkill, IMO. You -could-, especially with modern missile technology, move away from the high end SSC and accept 2 fewer missiles as weapons bays to arrive at something closer to a Mach-1.3 SSC (just above the transonics range) with F-14 level 16-18K fuel loads. And if Shenyang did this, they would have a decent fighter with more development potential than the abortion which is the J-20 (stealth, aeros, weapons load, all _wrong_).
Perhaps the biggest risk of the J-31 program is that it will wilt in shadow of it's bigger brother and China will produce a 'close but no kewpie' F-20 equivalent which will struggle on the export market because the home force doesn't want it.
In this, China _desperately_ need to rationalize and neck down her fighter fleets. Soon to be four Flanker variants, the Sino-Lavi, the JH-7 Flounder and a whole passel of older J-7s and J-8s still to be replaced. China can go quality and skip the numbers game, go quantity and lose development funding for truly competitive stealth (the existing prototypes are more tech demonstrators than preproduction models). Or go with a mix.
One thing is certain and that's the reality that the Chinese have a lot of hinterland to maintain presence in and thus small-intermediate fighters will ultimately either have to have base infrastructure and tanking built around their limited radii. Or a much more capable, reliable, large fighter fleet be maintained with small Det-FOLs for routine deployment in rotation through necessary areas.
China is attempting to buy her way to a fast track developmental + foreign sourced technology base in Aerospace and that is just not how you get real institutional experience from the pipe smokers to the line and service side of things. It takes time as flight hours and numbered airframe blocks to identify the kinks and flight test the fixes before incorporating them in followon models which pilots can then recommend further changes in adapting to their mission roles.
Having a panoply of types but no real, solid, hours in any of them is a recipe for mediocrity not maximum understanding and competence in the field.
All of the PGMs are more or less clones of Western kit with no real understanding of the needs for swarm tech or miniature, long range, dual mode (cruise + terminal sprint) weapons. Nothing to see there.
I've been following you for a quite a while...
Delete...from Aviation Week, to The Boresight, to right here on Solomon's blog, to a rather..."passionate" blog that shall not be named here...
M&S - > MandS - > Mist & Shadows...
Us industry folks can be ingrained in the parlance...
By the frequency and longevity of your post I figure you are ex DOD or contracting... You don't seem to bear any company affiliation so perhaps you were on the evaluation side during the ATF program and maybe a few others... (got to watch the personal pronouns when making your points btw) or simply conditioned in non-disclosure.
I'd suggest 20-30 years in... Long since retired. You do enjoy building models. A career long enough to have notes on ACEVAL and AIMVAL... and the weaknesses of the AWG-9 and AIM-54...
Known for the long winded post... with concrete stuff I might add... but I'm surprised there are no blogs by you yourself...
Why?
Recurring points of yours:
1.) "Let the Droids do the fighting.", a 150kW SSL for point defense, "Shape, Shape, Shape, Materials", Hypersonic Strike platforms... a true technologist.
2.) You swear by IQ tests and suggest they heavily correlate to race and gender... Some would call it a "soft" belief in eugenics. Solomon doesn't tolerate it, neither do I, but free speech is free speech...
It's been about 2-3 years now... Just letting you know that there are others out there who are paying attention...
P.S: I agree with your assessment, but we shouldn't take the Chinese for granted here. They are "resourceful".
If they are going to wrest control over foreign interests from U.S., the Chinese need to couple defense politics with good foreign policy. The Shanghai Cooperative Organization is one means to do this but it lacks organization in the manner of an POTO equivalent, unified, defense theory to preemptively discourage Western and certainly U.S. 'interests' from entering what should be a Chinese SOI.
DeleteThe vehicle for that political and trade exclusion zone is A2AD but the method, while principally oriented around long range surveillance and missile technology could easily, 'for morale purposes' include an F-16 type DOTC approach to unified presence (assisted maintenance, common training and exercises, like the TTTE and Red Flag as part of a single maintenance/performance guarantee training effort) which would help both raise the moral of surrounding Asian states _very_ unsure of their place in a rising hegemony of Chinese interests. And bring real competence to the region's armed forces as an all Asian military cooperative with varying levels of commitment and performance allowed.
In this, you need to understand that I believe we are sticking our long noses into an impossible narrow jam and daring less a threat than an demographic destiny to swing the door on us. I do not believe, for reasons of hypocrisy of policy (you guarantee your interests by respecting others in a fashion which is reliable) as well as ultimate technologic capacity we can or -should try- to win an ASB secured position in the oceanic void facing East Asia. The Russians attempted it off Cuba and got their **cks broke. The Germans tried it, twice, with U-Boats and ended up sinking less than 1% of global shipping for the loss of 38,000 lives as 70% of their sub forces.
We will lose because we are the weaker, dumber, less driven, techno state and any policy of containment similar to Russia will only result in interior trading, in non-USD (see: Peace Pipeline, the real reason we are 'mad at Iran'...), which we cannot shut down with maritime interdict as Doenitizian or Halseyian ASB warfare tactics.
Even as China can very easily shut down our dependence on her and the Three Tigers exports with ICD, subs and mine technology (see: WWII and what really ended the IJN ability to compete with U.S. forces therein).
For all these reasons and more, the Pacific Rebalance/Pivot is a _STUPID IDEA_ when we will not even defend our own borders against million man invasions and less than a quarter century after NATO really meant anything the Europeans are back to sponsoring regional wars with Bear Baiting in the Ukraine. We just don't have the street cred to be engaging in Keynesian stunts like this.
We should pull back and invest in our economy, regaining major portions of our industrial base as if it had been bombed flat by WWII standards and begin to technologically redefine the speed and scale of our interventionist needs because the current force model is **Economically Unaffordable**.
I will always advocate for this, even if it means giving the Chinese advice on how to turn a luke warm design into a world beater.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, standing against me is the entire MICC which has successfully spent hundreds of billions on a piece of junk 'strike fighter' that doesn't have the legs of an F-111 or even F-15E to be useful in the Deep Blue Void regions of the PacRim and is subsonic (slow sortie generation = fewer DMPIs per day than one-way missiles) besides. Two characteristics which should have rendered it utterly 'Operationally Unsuitable' to meeting U.S. adventurist needs, more than a decade ago.
The military, as the designated SMEs, doesn't speak out because they have adopted the 'useful tools get sharpened political ones get (their throats) cut' ideology of dependent survival as an apolitical entity. That too must change but it will not do so as long they can perceive a 'mission' capability which is essentially about sustainment and growth of the military as it's own enterprise rather than as a support agency for the health of a very sick nation.
I will not stand by and see my nation become a war-addicted adventurist state in the manner of Old Europe, solving it's problems by adding to the burdens of other nation _groups_. The latter should be it's own indicator of Building The Beast which defeats us. Spartans could not be taken as individuals but their combined arms capabilities were minimal compared to the other Greek city states which came to loath their 'leadership'.
Organization and cooperation will defeat and deny our entry to ever larger parts of the world, even if it means export of nuclear options (and it may come to that) by independent agencies. And since we are dependent upon a good-standing trade and national reputation, we have an awful lot of tarnished escutcheon to repolish.
The first step to trust is truth.