plawolfi was disapointed by the lack of any PL12/SD10s, so i have to improvise some out of AMRRAMs.
also, the instructions does not have an universal colour key, so all the painting instructions were useless to everyone who are not familiar with trumpiter’s colour coding (which i suspect would be the vast majority of users. this meant that i had to keep refering to my J10 pic library, and will greatly incovenience anyone who does not have good quality pics of the J10.
aside from that, it is an extremely detailed kit and a very good buy.
plawolfthere’s also the JH7 ‘Fei Bao’ AKA flying lepord.
it appears that the PLAAF is giving nicknames to all its recent indiginous fighters. the J10 no doubt also has one, its just that very few people has heard of it because its supposed to not exist. 😉
plawolfAs I said in the post I couldn’t locate the photo. I had it at work :rolleyes:
Here it is:
well the four fuselage AAMs are definately PSed. the base picture might also be a CG to boot.
as for evidence. please, have a look att he rear fines. there is still a bit of the original pictrue they were cut from stuck on.
however, the fuselage hardpoints do eixst. have another look at the third pic hyperwarp posted in post No18. they forward fuselage hardpoints are clearly visible.
if these hardpoints can carry a 250kg bomb, they can carry any AAM the J10 can use. the rearward pair is not so clear cut as there is a length issue, plus we have yet to see them on any pics.
but thats still 9 hardpoints at the very least, probably 11. and we are not even considering the possibility of multi-racks. so the hardpoint issue is not a problem.
besides that, there is not much more the say since there is no set of concrete specs for the J10 yet.
plawolfAbsolutely – I’ve seen sites like globalsecurity raise that point. China doesn’t have the planes to have carried out such testing yet.
Personally I think the whole PLAN carrier thing is just an exaggerated half-truth to create good PR for the CCP and increase patriotism. They’re doubtless doing all they can to work out how to build a carrier, but at this stage I think the CMC is still thinking about it. They hardly have an unlimited budget and what with turning the PLAAF into a modern force and building more destroyers & frigates to protect a potential Taiwanese invasion force, I think carriers would be an unnecessary distraction at this point.
In any case, as I’ve said a thousand times, there’s no evidence that the pro-carrier lobby group has gained ascendency in the CMC yet. There will always be a lot of military personnel who think carriers are more of a liability than an asset in this current age.
its generally a fair assessment, but its disappointing that you still cant resist putting your foot in by raising the completely irrelevent and blatently wrong idea that the CMC is showhow behind all this publicity. :rolleyes:
try and find one offical chinese source that even meantions the PLAN planning on getting a carrier in the far distint future, never mind anything that suggests that the PLAN is building one right now.
if you actually bother to check the facts and use your head instead of relying solely on neo-con websites/papers for your analysis, maybe you’ll have a little less misdirected hostility.
plawolfWell, rumour has it that Chinese pilots have been training on a landbased flightdeck replica for years.
there is little evidence to support these claims. its probably just a case of a few flights to test steam catapults and/or other carrier based systems. but that will almost certainly be low intensity work, done for future projects instead of current ones.
the most obvious hole in these rumors is the fact that china currently has zero carrier fighters. how are you going to simulate the ‘controled crash’ landings of carrier based ac without the right landing gear and structural reinforcing?
the new naval Mk2s might have such features added, we dont know since there are no high quality pics of them. but even if they do have the right mods to make them carrier capable (which is highly unlikely), these planes have only recently been delivered, so there is no way the PLAN could have been pratising with them ‘for years’.
plawolfYes, I knew I was stretching it a bit. Do you really need all those helicopters though? 30+ Flankers should be possible.
I haven’t said that I think the Chinese are refitting Varyag, but they are obviously doing something and I’m curious. Someone suggested that they are only going to make the flightdeck operational so that she can be moored somewhere and used for training. Does that make sense?
and why would they do that? you only need to pratice to make carrier landings if there is a carrier for you to land on in the first place. china is still so way off from being in a position where it is in need of a fixed wing carrier. and even though it can probably make one now, it will be a major undertaking and will have pretty high opportunity costs, not to meantion it needing ALL of the PLAN’s newest toys to form a battle group around it to make it deployable. so i just dont see them making so many sacrificies in terms of other projects (SSN, SSBN for example) for something they dont really need right now.
if they are fixing it up, it means that they are either going to make it into a casio/theme park as they say they will, or they are going to patch it put and put it into service. but the only useful role for it in PLAN service is as a helo carrier tasked with ASW and as an amphibious assault ship for a secondary role.
plawolfNeed a translation for this one!
its fibre-optic cable for wire guided weapons. nothing more then a brief summery of what it is and what it is used for.
plawolfthis is just china bashing to shift attention elsewhere. and it well blow over like all the previous ‘storms’.
the difficulties suffered by the US economy has very little to do with china’s currency beg, and i am actually amazed some many idiots (provided they genuinely believe it, i have even worse terms resevered for those jumping on this just for the sake of it) are jumping on this band wagon.
the very definition of a currency peg is that it is pegged, ie it is fixed. the value of the yuan has not changed against the dollar. so whats so different now, from say the asian financial crash, when china’s currency peg was actually praised by the US?
if the yuan is undervalued, it is largely because the dallor is also undervalued. had the US dollar maintained its historical value, the yuan’s value would be about right (economists, and i use the term very loosly here, that advocate the undervalued yuan almost all agree that it is 20, 30% undervalued. had the US$ not devalued by 20, 30% under bush, the value of the yuan would be about the same as what they say it ‘should’ be.)
if anyone doesnt have a case against the yuan’s peg, it is the americans. if this was raised by the europeans for example, then they would have a case.
as for this leading to military conflict. well that is extremely unlikely. there are just as many, if not more americans and american companies that benefit from trade with china as those that suffer. and a great many actually benefit from the yuan’s peg to the dollar (since they manufacture in china to sell back to the states and elsewhere). these people and companies also hold a great deal of political capital, and they will use that to maintain their own interests if they have to. so in the end, it all pretty much balances up, just like it has always did.
anyways, this has little to do with military, and really should belong in the GD forum.
plawolfIt was designed for an airgroup of 52 fighters and helicopters:
16 x Yak-141
12 x Su-33 (Su-27K)
18 x KA-27PLO
4 x KA-27LD32
2 x KA-27SThis is obviously never happened. What about close to 40 Flankers and a handfull of helicopters for AEW and SAR?
i think you will find that one flanker, even the 33, would be bigger then two Ka27 helos in terms of parking space. so there is little chance of you managing to cram anywhere near 40 flankers on that thing.
a more reasonable number would be 25~30 flankers with an additional 10~20 helos for SAR, AEW, ASW etc. even then its probably pushing past the carrying limit.
china has little interests far from home worth fighting for. the only reason for it to need a full fleged fixed wing carrier force is to try and protect its sea based shipping and/or to compete for superiority of the seas with the US.
clearly china is nowhere near the stage to compete so overtly with the US. but 30 flankers will be of little use against anyone with the power and will to disrupt chinese shipping to start with. so whats the point?
also, if you look at past PLA developments in any and every field, you would see that the PLA has little interest in ‘one-off’ things (except for testings, or if the product does not fully meet expectations of course). anything they commit to, they will commit to in large numbers – song, kilo, sov, S300, flanker, ‘2208’ FAC…
there is no reason why this tend would end with carriers. china is not in immediate need of fixed wing carriers, so there is no need for them to strain (budget, tech and time wise) to get one or two substandard examples into servive now when they can easily feild several cutting edge examples in 10, 20 years time.
and we are not even getting into all the political problems china would face if it decided to deploy a wing wing carrier. it will probably get a lot of stick even for a helo carrier.
the commitment to carriers is even less likely when you consider the politics and recent trends of the PLAN. a sub man is currently in charge of the PLAN, and that is being reflected in its percourments. look at the numbers of Songs, yuans and kilos SSK and new SSN and SSBNs being built or on order compared to the 052B/C DDGs.
both elements (surface and sub-surface) of the PLAN fleet are being drastically improved, both in quantative and qualiatative terms, but there is no dispute where the emphysis lies.
if the PLAN is going for a helo carrier now, its probably party a political move to try and ‘compansate’ the surface fleet for its smaller share of the budge and also to try and please the carrier advocates, and party an operational necassity to help boost the PLAN’s poor fleet ASW capacity. there would be many other advanatges such as giving the military extra deployment options should there be trouble in the straits, a helo carrier would be far more suited to combating piracy (the current No1 threat to chinese shipping) then wing wing carriers. as well as the fact that the helo carrier could probably also be used to train crews and even fixed wing pilots for when the PLAN does go for carriers in a big way in the distint future.
plawolfFull load displacement for that class is 67,000t.
and it can carry what, 20, 30 fighters?
not much use against anyone who might pose a threat to china.
plawolfGot this from CDF:
New 37mm naval gun…
its actually more for the anti-smuggling agency and coast guard. 😉
its derived from the swedish 35mm AA gun, but was changed to 37mm to take advanatage of the 37mm naval munitions stock.
the weapon has a low recile (14kn), and is designed mained to be fitted onto small ships.
the design was finalised in 95 and put into limited production in 97, ‘currently’ three coast guard and anti smuggling ships are equiped with them, and the feedback is vey positive.
thats about the main points.
plawolfif they are going to put the Varyag into service, it would most likely be as a ASW and/or amphibious assault helo carrier.
1) such a helo carrier would be far mroe useful to the PLAN then any fixed wing AC in terms of its immediate needs (ASW and taiwan).
2) the Varyag’s size would mean it would not be a very usefully fixed wing carrier, but would make a pretty decent helo carrier.
3) the PLAN doesnt have any carrier based fighters/ tankers/ AWACS/ EW plains etc to put on the Vargag to make it an effective fixed wing carrier. all of the above systems would take many years to develop and perfect. if you had that much time to propare, you might as well make a brand new hull as well. no point in putting all the kit on a ship only to have to rip it all out again in a few years when hull starts to go.
the only advantages to using the Varyag instead o building a new ship is cost and time saving, as well as china’s massively overbooked shipyards.
but that is assuming that the PLAN is proparing to use it. it could just be that they really are thinking about making it into a casino or another theme part. the minsk is doing very well after all.
plawolfwhose engines does the Y-8 use ? if its russian why didnt the Ru refuse to supply engines?
because the chinese cloned the engines as well.
but apparenty, the newest Y8 (six blade) is supposed to be using engines made by a US based company in canada or something like that. just skimmered across a line on it in one of the mags (AFM IIRC) the other day.
plawolfthe guy with the mic is dressed like a chef. maybe its his new menu. 😉
plawolfand whoever said that was a PLAN carrier model? :rolleyes:
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