Well if you are reffering to my post , that was not my intention . Clearly i havent seen the bays so i do not know wether the aircraft has working weapons bays or not.

That comment wasn’t directly at anyone specifically, just an open question to all those who insist it doesn’t have weapons bays.

What possible reason is there for it not to have them?

All anyone can say at this point is that there are no pictures that show the J20 with weapons bays open.

To go insisting that there are no weapons bays when there are multiple photographs showing panels where you would expect weapons bays to be is not logical and suggest an ulterior motive.

Where ?, the only doors shown open are the Undercarriage & braking chute, i dont recall seeing a distinct photo of the weapons bays just people scribbling over grain long rang photos and making a guess.

Just look back this thread and its predecessor. Some people have even been kind enough to put arrows on actual pictures to show where there appears to be weapons bay doors.

What I really want to see are clear, HQ pictures of the brake chute and undercarriage doors closed, because then we will see what kind of alignment and finish they can achieve.

If its hard to tell where the chute and undercarriage doors are when they are closed, we can safely say that there are weapons bays.

Just apply some common sense and it would be obvious how ridiculous it would be to make a flying prototype without weapons bays when the airframe is clearly designed to have them, and internal weapons carriage has been one of the key design requirements of the J20 from the offset.

They clearly have the technology to design and fabricate serrated doors that are evident with the undercarriage doors.

What possible difficulty could they encounter that would prevent them from applying that exact same technology to make weapons bay doors?

There is no logical explanation for it to not have weapons bays, and there are clear photographic evidence to show that there are panels exactly where you would expect weapons bays to be.

The only reason I could see for people to think that it does not have weapons bays is to attempt to downplay the J20 as some kind of one-off tech demonstrator not fit for production. That’s wishful thinking in my book.

alfakilo :

kgblue nailed it with his answer :

I would like to come back to the first phrase :
“”A weapon system like this is only needed if one has an aggressive intent.””

Which is true wrt the USA+F-22 . :diablo:
No one in the World would even dare to try to gain the air superiority over the US soil even if the USA were using F-16s only .
The F-22 has never been needed to defend the US airspace . It has been built exclusively to archive air superiority in enemy airspace , which shows that the USA are always building stuff to go to war and not to defend the motherland .
As far as we know , this is the only Nation is the World to act this way … Maybe with North Korea :rolleyes:

If I was chinese , I would ask my Gov to spend even more on R&D and national defense .
No alfakilo , the Chinese don ‘t have any aggressive intent , by that I mean that they are not going to go to war with anybody unless they are seriously threatened .

Good points, fully agreed.

By 2025 or so , China will be unbreakable .
They ‘ll better be or the trio India/Japan/USA (with S. Korea et Oz) could decide to attack for whatever reason backed up by the UN (Russia would not move , too much to lose . Better side-up with the Europeans) .

Um, no. China also has a veto. Any attack on China will never have UN sanction, but its not like that has ever stopped the US before.

or to run strikes against a well defended Naval Force .

I think it has already been covered that J20s would be ill suited to carrying large AShMs and would certainly not be able to carry enough to have a decent chance of penetrating a carrier’s defenses. But they might be useful if they could get a decent number of HARM-equivalent ARMs close to an enemy fleet undetected to support a saturation attack by conventional aircraft.

Its top speed should be around Mach 2 (or Mach 2.2 , depending on the engines and on the RAM coating quality) , its range and payload should exceed US 5th gen fighters .

That’s the first I have heard of a mach number, where did this come from?

Its first operational radar should be a Chinese/Russian Pesa radar similar in capability than the early French RBE2 but with a greater range . I guess a 180km detection range against a F-16 size target .

It will almost certainly use a Chinese ASEA. The Chinese have a lot of experience with ASEA and has fielded a vast number of assets that use ASEA, but has yet to made anything that uses PSEA, so it would not make sense for them to go with PSEA now.

By this point, it seems that the moderation is unwilling to stifle political posts, so…

How was the original point ‘political’? :confused:

Just exactly what does anyone think the Chinese need with a ‘stealth fighter’? Where and what is the threat?

What is the point in this question? You could ask the same question of pretty much every weapon programme in the world and get the same answer – someone else has a better weapon and we need to keep up to date with our own kit.

The second part of your question is clearly political, and trying to use cruise missiles as a cover for such a political point just seems weird.

Well that was quite a lot of severe OT-ranting, sorry. 🙂 Back to J-20!

What IRST-solution have the Chinese designers chosed? Consealed in the frame like F-35, or carried externaly in some form of “stealthified” pod? (Yes I assume it has -or at least will have- an IRST of some sort).

I’m not sure the prototype has an IRST installed yet. There are no obvious fairings. CAC already has a new domestic IRST that they are testing on the J10B (the J10B is said to use much of the avionics designed for the J20, and this was done so to help speed up J20 development work), my guess is that they are still working on a ‘stealthy’ way to mount it on the airframe, so they decided not to just slap a regular IRST on for the sake of having one.

At this stage, they are probably much more interested in testing just how stealthy the J20 is in real world conditions.

The would likely have reserved space for things like IRST and IFR probes, but these are low priority items and probably won’t be fitted until the pre-production batch.

The easiest and surest way to turn China into your enemy is to treat it as such.

If the west wants to achieve military dominance over China where they would attack China with little risk or consequence, then the west has already lost and just doesn’t realise it yet.

Lets see how those already debt laden economies fund such a ridiculously ambitious arms race without committing economic suicide like the USSR.

China is only spending half as much of its GDP on defense as the US, and thats without taking into account the costs of Iraq and ‘stan, and China is already rapidly closing the technology gap.

That’s a hell of a lot more scope for growth for the PLA without putting too much strain on the economy. Can the US afford to double its defense budget?

China doesn’t want an arms race, but if one does develop, it is not such a certainty that China would loose.

Read what the other poster wrote. They were talking about drag, and how an F-16 had less. My response was that a similarly equipped F-16 would be far draggier.

And that argument was in turn given to ‘prove’ why it was improbable that a combat loaded F35 would be able to outrun a clean F16.

Now as far as the outrunning, it was USAF Lt. Col. Hank Griffiths that said he enjoyed outrunning clean F-16s in combat loaded F-35s, using dry thrust.

And of course it is completely unprecedented for marketing departments to put a ‘spin’ on what was actually said to make a product sound better than it really is?

On the one hand, you have hard numbers backed up by sound theory, on the other, you have an officially sanctioned press statement.

I know which I would rather trust.

You can choose to believe every word of LM marketing releases as absolute truth if you wish, but its going to take a bit more than ‘cos LockMart said so’ to convince many others, especially when there are hard numbers that appear in contradiction to the claims.

Than an F-16 with a comparable load? You all are smoking some good dope.

Didn’t you start off claiming that the F35 managed to outrun clean Bl50s? Now its comparable load? Is that a slight shift in the goal post I detect? 😀