Do not forget the psychological aspect of it! A new arms race has started, and there will be losers and winners. Unfortunately, the europeans seem to come out as losers out of this one, as there is no concrete 5th Gen fighter on the horizon. What a shame!

why does there need to be an arms race necessarily?
why can’t some just live in parity? or even inferiority?
China was at peace when in the past it clearly had inferior technilogocial platforms vs its neighbors.
its neighbors (or strategic competitors) do the same certainly?

This is new information for me. But still, then the F-35 simply wouldn’t be employed in the role it was devised for, namely air to ground. It will always be at a disadvantage against stealthy, fast fighters with a a high combat persistency.

To be more clear, of course the F-35 is able to shoot down enemy planes, but the notion of western air combat is to start a war with superior platforms. As already noted, numbers count. But the F-35 is so expensive. How many would Japan afford? 100? That wouldn’t be a good starting point to meddle with a china with perhaps 200 or 300 J-20…

then J-20 has acheived its intended purpose to stop wars.
who says the ‘west’ must always and can always afford to maintain military superiority vs. china?

china has lived under superior air platform of its neighbors relatively peacefully for a long time.
why can’t China’s neighbors live in peace when they are in the shadow of someelse’s superior air power platforms? 😀

I agree in regards to raw performance, but a2a is more than that. Keep in mind I am not saying F-35 definitely trumps it, but given US aero technology lead over everyone else, their stealth expertise, sensors, etc, I would not count the F-35 out as a credible, potentially better a2a opponent.

Like I said in the other thread…

J-20 started well after F-35 is well into its program. its rough tech capabilities are know. people are not going to sit there and twiddling their thumbs.

the chinese would be very stupid if they do not evulate what f-35 can do in aircombat as part of their J-20 program.

I for one have confidence that Chinese are not stupid.

What basis is there for the claim that the F-35 is lesser performing than the J-20? For all we know it has significant advantages in A2A.

if it had less raw a2a performance than F-35 it would have been called H-20.

Why don’t bomber designers build very sleek aircraft, and then hang 50k lbs of bombs under the wings, along with EFTs? Which do you suppose would suffer a higher drag penalty?

and why did the Tu-16s have that big bulge on the wing?

and why did F-111 a rather small internal bomb bay early on and deemed fine?
and why did tornados and fencers have no internal bay at all and deemed fine for strike missions with ordinance strapped underneath their wings.
surely with out LO considerations back then they still must have known about the “higher drag penalties” have they and stuff everything inside because as you suggested hanging bombs outside would definitely suffer those “higher drag penalties” than a bigger wetted area. and to paraphrase our friend up there. You need some real gall and alot of hope if your going to start saying that engineers who designed the jets know less about the tradeoff then those who sit infront of their pc’s posting on internet forums 16 hours a day.

at end of the day it is a trade. there is no way you can say it must go one way because it doesn’t.

you know before ww2 transport and bombers were very much alike.
until performance need drove the bomber designers to get rid of big wide fuselage and squeeze all the iners as tight as possible. some even squeezed so much that their max load has to be carried on the outside… their internal volume wasn’t big enough to carry all the bombs.

Perhaps if we limit the discussion to wingtip Sidewinders and conformally carried MRAAMs. It most certainly does matter when you’ve got EFTs, 2000lb bombs, sensor pods, and the pylons, etc… hanging under the wings.

why do you assume an external store is necessarily more draggy than an bigger wetted area? :dev2:

We’ll see. After the intense spotter activity surrounding the taxi tests and first flight I would have thought we’d get clear evidence about another flight (or an An-124 flying in), either in the shape of forum activity or photos.

an-124 flying in.

ha.

traditionally the fighters from CAC/SAC or transporters from Xian (duhhh) just fly themselves to XianYang. after assuring that the ferry flight is ok.