I think he’s more concerned with the term ‘cruise’. The operational procedures may have called for a supersonic flight, but the Su-15 did not ‘cruise’ by the strict sense of the term. It was meant to fly at high altitudes and high speeds to intercept nuclear bombers, so fuel economy was not a big concern. Realistically the turbojets of the Su-15 probably didn’t conserve too much fuel if they were running subsonic and in the middle altitudes, but they would definitely cruise under those conditions for best range.

There is little to IP rights for unaligned nations. The only thread of essence to the claim about some sort of IP rights is that they purchase engines directly from Russia therefore could suffer sanctions. But it looks like Russia is happy selling engines to the Chinese regardless of the current situation. Russia doesn’t seem to feel threatened by Chinese engineers offering their services abroad to support Russian-built Su-27’s, nor by China trying to indigenous develop their own Al-31 class engine. Nope, I think the Russians realize the craptastic quality of their competition and are feeling pretty good about their products & services in comparison.

IMHO the Chinese J-8II is but a modernized Su-15. There are quite a few similarities once you get past the more readily discernible, dissimilar features. I find it difficult to believe the Chinese made a leap from the J-8I to the J-8II without stealing from the Su-15’s basic layout.

The X-47B is a bomb truck. It couldn’t shoot down the Goodyear blimp.

It doesn’t have to acquire targets actively, it can act as a force multiplier by being the platform to drop a missile in the vicinity necessary. Maybe it acts as the block at the end of the hedgerow so to speak, cutting off an escape route. I’m not speaking of you, but I think people around here get caught up in this idea you need to super maneuver and emit large quantities of radiation to get air to air kills.

DSI is a non-moving intake design. The F-35 uses shielding and curved ducts to mask the face of the compressor, making it a non-reflective intake. We know nothing about the J-10B having stealthy materials or shaping. But we do know the DSI, being fixed, simplifies construction over the original design.

The original design might actually be better. DSI is a way to cheapen production, not necessarily make it work better.

The bars on those graphs can be misleading. I can make a 9.8 seem like a 500% improvement over a 9.7 by rigging the magnitude and how the bar is demonstrated. Who is to say that these charts here are not so rigged?

Look at the old F-105. Big jet. Heavy frame. Small wings. Big engine. Slow to spool up, but lots of power. Could cut through the dense air down low at high speeds while fully loaded that other jets could not. (The later Tornado with its variable wings swept fully back was about the only plane that could match it.) I heard second hand that if you took the bombs out from under its wings then it couldn’t cut through the air as fast. Unfortunately it also landed at very high speeds, so you couldn’t operate it from every airfield.