if 117s was cleared for export to china there would be a contract signed by now. all engine contracts in the past were made public. Does 117s has technology that interests china?
if yes, then china would get some engines by now, if they were free to export on their own. if not, then best chinese engines are as good as 117s. Which is more likely?

why would anyone want just 4 planes, as the text suggests?

I am guessing s117 engines arent for sale on their own. chinese would surely just buy them, if they are after engines. engine maker doesn’t have as much at stake as sukhoi. it needs an export for its new product. it pretty evident ruaf isnt going to be ordering su35 in huge numbers.

as far as i can tell, j11b production has ended. or is at least on hold. but given the pressing need to produce j15 and j16, i would guesstimate it is the former. also, i am not sure it is so easy to install s117 in existing, already produced flanker variants.

but MALD pretending to be a target is exactly why the SAM network could mistake it for a fighter in the first place. Without emitters, those would still be just tiny contacts which would be easely distinguished from real, larger planes. At least if we’re talking about current generation planes. If we’re talking about notational 2030. war where over half of the fighter bombers would be f35s, with radar signature as faint if not fainter than just the small decoy, then that might be enough to work.

Whole idea of non cooperative identification is using precise enough radars to find out what is the nature of returning radar signal. If we had radars that could get synthhetic images of other fighters tens of km away, maybe today we could achieve that from 100 km away. Or more, since we’re talking about ground based radars which are not limited the way fighter’s smaller radars are.

So, in a sense, even MALD type decoy may not be as effective at medium range. (100 km? 150?) it can not reproduce what the radar would really see if it emmits everything from a much smaller area. radar would notice the emissions are coming from one place, not hundreds of points on an airplane, some sometimes 10 or more meters apart, all creating a synthetic image or at least a very specific signature.

at the same time, degrading perfomance doesn’t equal negating the detection ability completely. Depending on operating wavelengths of the IR sensors, and the level of moisture making up the cloud, the detection quality and range will drop, but it is hard to assess by how much.

I always had one idea in my head for a detection network. Rings of jeeps with optical and IR sensors looking up in the sky. By placing a jeep/sensor every 10 or so km, one should be able to make up a passive detection ring that would detect pretty much anything flying under 20 km altitude. Even the supressed non AB exhausts of 5th gen planes should give off a nice hot plume once they are looked at from the side/underneath. The first circle then alerts the rest of the network and inner circles could watch out for the intruders. Once the camera knows where to look at, visualy identifyling a flying threat 20 km away should be quite easy.

Cost is one potential prohibitive problem. Perhaps not so much in material costs, as such sensors are, if i am not mistaken, still well under a million apiece, but manning costs of hundreds/thousands of jeeps could prove to be too much. Alternative is to use non moving platforms but make them portable enough so they can easely be relocated. That in itself shouldn’t be an issue, but it would still mean a lot of the sensors would basically be left unguarded.

another big issue is powering and maintaing such a network. I’ve no idea here but it may very well prove to be quite expensive and complex to pull off.

Of course, the biggest issue of them all is moisture. Meaning cloud cover. If that would pretty much shorten the detection ability to first 5-10 km altitude, then the whole idea is worthless. I guess in very dry climates it may still be useful, though.

Considering jf17 carries 2300 kg and f16 carries 3175 kg, then scaling up those figures, both in size/weight and engine thrust to fit what we know of j10 (including the recent disclosure of 1650 km range which has to be with 3 external tanks, and comparing that with similar mission and load for f16) i would say j10 carries between 3000 and 3400 kg of fuel internally.

were any range figures mentioned with each of those two mission profiles? the AA mode, if it is all cruise and just 5 minutes of combat at the max. point, should go comfortably over 1000 km. AG mode less so, depending on how close to the target the low penetration flight profile starts.

edit: found it. this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7tuiaeS_kc&feature=player_embedded presentation had similar slides. and the presentor mentioned explcitly that AA mission was 1400 km and AG mission 1000 km. I guess that means that LO portion of the flight was just 50-100 km in and out but still…

i don’t see why supersonic speeds would make satellite guidance unlikely. there are several air to ground, air to air missiles, ground fired rockets, guided artillery rounds etc in service in the west which can do mach 3-4 and receive GPS signal. Even Trident missile improvement programme includes GPS guidance, and those warheads may be doing even more than mach 4.

that being said, i would agree radar guidance seems likely for cm400akg, judging by the nose cone. There is also a possibility of combined gps and radar guidance.

While not easy to know precise measurements, judging from that one image where cm400akg was laying next to jf17 and other bombs, it should be within 4-5 meters long. So basically it may be similar in dimensions to air launched version of c802. Since it is using a rocket motor and not air breathing propulsion i would wager it isnt designed for huge range. It strikes me more as something in the class of russian kh38me. With a more aerodynamic shape and possible lock on after launch method, cm400akg could perhaps be a missile that is nearing 100 km range. I would, however, assume its warhead is pretty hefty, like kh38me. Probably in the 125-250 kg class, depending on the actual range.

is it mostly a matter nonbypassed air volume / airframe drag ratio between f135/f35 and f119/f22 or are there other major factors in play there? If so, which? Does engine pressure come into play? Does, for example, f119 compress air more than f135, allowing higher exit velocities? So perhaps f135’s core can’t work properly with air that naturally gets compressed a lot at mach 1.2, so it can’t get much thrust out of that and gets the higher pressure from AB, fired behind the core? Likewise, f119 can withstand greater pressure, even at 1.7 mach, and ejects that compressed air at speeds that are unattainable to f135 without AB?

Or do both engines work with basically same air pressure before the air enters the engine? Meaning their inlets take care of the air pressure? But what about air volume then? maybe the air pressure is the same, but if one inlet offers more air volume, then the engine behind that inlet has an opportunity to use all that air and cram it more inside its core. Is that how f119 works?