You don’t need to look at WWII, Iran-Iraq War or Operation Desert Storm are enough to illustrate potential problems of mines. While Iraqi mines did not deter USN’s operations strategically, it has shown that even old mines could cause headaches. Even low tech mines could take out USN’s cruiser Princeton and the amphibious carrier Tripoli from operations.

“Proof” of ROCN mining strategy or inventory is very difficult to get. Unlike new aircrafts or new large warships, naval mines are just not sexy enough to be reported regularly. But given the works and fundings of CSIST’s WS Office, I don’t think PLA could afford to dismiss ROCN’s mines easily.

Of course not.

However, ROC tends to treat the threat of PRC invasion as unlikely, and has a jaded attitude in general. They may not treat it seriously enough to have a significant inventory, and of course that may just be part of a long list of things they probably don’t have enough stock of.

So you’re saying that China would one day wake up in an ‘let’s go invade Taiwan!’ mood and fake an exercise and all of a sudden invade Taiwan?! ROTFLOL. One, tensions will already be high should China consider invasion. Taiwan will already be at alert status. Two, trying to fake an ‘exercise’ with the true intention to invade still means having to recall and mobilise the troops required for an invasion. A recall of that scale means nothing less than an invasion. If that’s not enough, third, HUMINT sources would confirm an impending invasion. So sorry to bust your wonder bubble.

Which you can mobilize, and still call back.

And do you know how many times tensions were high in the last ten years or so? How many large scale exercises China pulled in the vicinity? Exercises that included mock invasion attempts? What did Taiwan do exactly, given that Taiwan has a pretty jaded attitude even the PLA’s large scale exercises?

With mines able to be seeded from even commercial vessels, very very fast. And the location of mines can be determined accurately with GPS since the Taiwanese are the ones laying them. Yes, they can be retrieved, its not a light effort, but compared to the cost of getting invaded? Better to seed a minefield.

And do all that without being tracked by vessels from the other side?

Now tell me how many mines and minelaying vessels the ROCN has? Don’t tell me about commercial vessels laying mines. Anyone who has the will to invest in a large inventory of mines and a mine laying strategy is going to have minelayers as a sign of it.

Yes, the Taiwanese strategists would likely have planned for such a possibility. But that doesn’t mean it is practical. Landing on Taiwan’s east coast means increasing the vulnerability of the amphib fleet many fold, which has so many implications to the success of the mission that one wonders if it is a viable consideration at all.

That vulnerability only assumes if you choose to arm the other side, which you may not if you have decided to deploy more defensive assets on the west side.

Seems to proove that these tests are quite further advanced than we thought … and definitly no PS !!! :diablo:

Besides … it also looks not like a PL-8s or R-73 missile but more like some kind of an instrumentation pod as I suggested …. any other suggestion H or F-version ???

Additional a FT-1 under a JH-7 …

Thanks for posting, Deino

Interesting. With that wingfence, its definitely the older JH-7 without the -A. Yet the plane is now grey instead of the PLAN white. We have seen the prototypes in other colors, but not grey before. Repainted perhaps.

You also didn’t address how the amphibs would handle the problem of mines when the PLAN’s minesweeping capability is so low. That, and the fact that PLAN’s minesweeping would have to be done PRIOR to any amphib invasion, which would in turn give away at which point would the invasion come from, and allow for redeployment of ROC forces to repel the invasion.

The problem of mines, is that you have to lay them ahead in anticipation of war. The problem is, how do you anticipate war? You want to lay mines and it turns out you don’t have a war at all? Mines is a weapon that cuts both ways; laying mines in the seas around Taiwan also means putting them in one of the most traffic sea lanes around the world, which means it will not only hurt their own merchant shipping—their own lifeline—but the collateral effects of the minelaying would spill to the shipping of other countries like S. Korea, Japan, and South East Asia.

The regiments that had Q-5s are indeed being replaced or supplemented with JH-7As, and at least one with an Su-30MKK. Namely the 18th and 28th Division among them. That tells you that the PLAAF does not take the CAS role highly enough to produce a dedicated aircraft for it.

The new Q-5s actually function more like fast mini-strike aircraft rather than CAS. Now that you have the latest models with a laser target designator in the nose, ala the MiG-27K. In my view the Q-5 comes out like a cheaper, shorter ranged analog to the MiG-27s—both are renosed fighters to give a better view of the lower front hemisphere. It’s not a plane analogous to the Su-25 or the A-10. Early in the career, the Q-5 was envisioned for things like carrying nukes or even antiship missiles. The plane was a cheap fighter bomber for the lack of a proper one in the PLAAF.

The FC-1 is simply a light weight multirole jet. It can do point defense interception to precision ground attack roles, even ship attack roles. To say its being groomed as a Q-5 successor does not fit the pattern we have seen. Even if its small and light, when it gets incorporated into the PLAAF, it would be regarded as a plane for the elite regiments. While people like to talk about high-medium-lo mix for the PLAAF, the operational reality is more like new-old mix.

The PLAAF still has a lot of old J-7s, even J-8IIs, that it can deploy as flying MLRS or dropping dumb bombs.

That would be easy to compensate. Given that the helmets inside, the cockpits and the wheels are almost the same size, the scale would be accurate. I take it from here the J-10 maybe about 15m long from the tip of the radome to the end of the nozzle. This does not count the overhang of the tail and boom for the parachute.

Another J-11B pic. This one looks like someone took a snapshot of a poster and was too near to focus properly.