why would airfields be only allowed attacked with airplanes?

I don’t disagree. But if we’re talking about such a far-fetched scenario as a US-Taiwan-China war, then any Chinese ballistic missile attack would be met with a similar attack on it.

This is why the whole scenario is bogus, and why a project like the B-1R is simply a tool to scare up political support for some additional military spending.

I thought the future prototypes of this plane were going to be so totally different?? I think I can see the S-ducts on this one :p

Ok I’ll go away now.

The whole problem is that the US is limited to operating aircraft from a mere handful of carriers and airbases, the latter much further away from the action than the dozens of PLAAF bases

With the exception of a couple, the closest other PLAAF bases are further away from Taiwan than Okinawa is for the USAF. Most Chinese fighters can’t even reach Taiwan, let alone operate over it.

I watched one good 2 hour long program about USAF future engagements against best of todays 4+ and 5th gen. foreign fighters. It spoke about B1R carrying only longest range AIM-120s and i think over 30 of them if i remember correctly. It would also potentially carry laser for destroying Mig-31s and so on. I wish i recorded it.

This?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OCywRMr-y4

The scenario presented here is a bit far fetched. A group of enemy aircraft is going to be high-tailing out of the area when planes start falling around them, without knowing who is firing, from where, how many of the enemy are there or if there’s a missile headed for you.

In think you are hugely underestimating Chinas current rate of growth.

I think some people are overestimating them. China still has a pretty modest air force, in terms of technologically advanced airframes. It still has thousands of rust buckets it need to replace with J-10s and the like…which today are already nothing special and in 10 years time will be well past their time.

They’re doing good, but are nothing to worry about.

Even now it would be very hard for USAF to fight Chinese airpower.

Only because they would be so spread out. And its that spread that makes the PLAAF unlikely to be able to carry out this “swarm” attack on Taiwan that is presented here.

By what I can tell China only has about 2 major air bases close enough to Taiwan to allow for things like J-7s to operate and have hope of reaching Taiwan. How many planes could these air bases stage? China just physically couldn’t mass that many short-range aircraft close enough to Taiwan.

Even most J-10s would have a hard time reaching Taiwan from further away bases, which are about 500 miles away. You can’t establish air superiority over Taiwan if your fighters can’t even reach the place. Su-27/J-11/Su-30 would bear the brunt of air-air fighting. But they are limited in number to a much smaller force.

This doesn’t leave much room for any “swarms”

By the year USAF has 100 F-35s in available on two aircraft carriers, China will have double the amount of 4th gen and 4+ gen. multirole fighters.

Sure. Make it 1,000 4th gen fighters. Still most of them can’t reach Taiwan. Taiwan itself has about 350 4th gen fighters today. These are not very good looking odds for any attacker.

It’s funny that no one wants a B1R but if the chinese had it everyone would say it was a game changer!

Sure. Everyone overreacts to everything these days. Leave it to journalists…

I could buy that. But what happens when the first 100 PLAAF planes are blown out of the sky in the first day? What will China’s appetite be for wasting its entire air force in a turkey shoot? My opinion is that wasting time on a specialized solution for a threat that isn’t really there, is a bit panicky.

Does a J-7 even have the range to fly to Taiwan, fight, and make it back to base? How many aircraft could China mass in the airbases nearby Taiwan? And how vulnerable would those airbases be to strikes from Taiwan or the USN? What could 5 Aegis cruisers or destroyers off the coast of Taiwan mean for any Chinese aerial assault? Thats about 500 ready to fire Standard missiles. No one would be crazy enough to face that.

I don’t quite see what advantages this offers over a stealthy super-cruising platform like F-22. A fight of 4 F-22s could carry 24 long-range AAM, super-cruise, be much harder to detect by enemy radars and have the element of surprise. What advantage does the B-1R platform offer over this, other than the ability to transit from a Hawaii base to Taiwan directly? (F-22 could probably do that too, but it could be based off Japan or Korea instead)

The likelihood of stealth fighters defeating a swarm of 4th generation aircraft is probably much greater than the chances of a long-range “flying SAM site”.

Second, I don’t see where this “Chinese swarm” is coming from. According to Wikipedia China has about 550 fighter aircraft worth anything (Su-27s, Su-30s, J-10s, J-11s). Can China even afford to “swarm” Taiwan…which has about 330 fighters of comparable performance. Even if by 2020 they manage to get this number up to 1,000 modern fighters, this doesn’t really leave a lot of room for massive number superiority.

J-20 isn’t a game-changer imho. We know nothing about it other than it looks “cool”. But we’ve seen this before from China (J-10, Type-99) and it doesn’t necessarily translate to actual performance. Plus add another 10 years before we can see it in serial production.

Third, the likelihood of a China-Taiwan clash in the next 10 years is zilch. There’s millions of Taiwanese investing in China. The Chinese aren’t exactly stupid. This seems more like an over-reaction, which some American military think tanks tend to enjoy a lot. But this B-1R idea is certainly past its time.

China’s geostrategic advantages in this enterprise are overwhelming and have been balanced in the past only by their overwhelming technological inferiority.

What does this mean? China is still technologically far behind, and there’s no chance it will be catching up in the next 10 years either. The Chinese navy has a fraction of the capabilities of the USN, and how much the Chinese can support even a short-term commitment to full scale war against Taiwan and the USN…is very questionable.

1. Our carriers are invincible!

They are. China doesn’t have the capability of restricting their operations. Those “anti-carrier ballistic missiles” are a funny story, but hardly anything more. 2 carriers with 100 F-35s off Taiwan, plus numerous escorts with several hundred long-range SAMs would pose more than a serious challenge to the PLAAF.

4. Our F-22s and F-35s will score 20:1 kill ratios!

I’d expect much higher.

What about a hull design similar to the Sea Shadow:

Platforms can be attached laterally or longitudinally.

Anyway, is there a more appropriate forum for naval matters where I can ask my (perhaps silly) questions?

Thanks

It appears it’s not only the Russians who think S-ducts are yesterday’s tech

For months members of this forum (or years by now) have insisted with absolute certainty and numerous circles drawn on pictures…that the T-50 HAD in fact s-ducts.

Then when it came out that it didn’t…every single one of them came out and revealed, to the embarrassment of the American aviation industry, that S-ducts were a primitive thing of the past.

Yep.

I agree about the S-curve, I mean it patently does not seem the most space effficient means to achieve LOS blockage.

If visual line of sight blocking of an compressor face was all it took, the P-80 shooting star and the Mig-15 were the world’s first and foremost stealth aircraft!

Unfortunately, that is clearly not enough, for the reasons that radar energy does not behave the same way as light waves. The reason why the s-duct is there in the F-22 and others, and why it is much superior in RCS reduction, is because it only builds upon the fact that there is no line of sight to the engine face. The way it reduces the RCS, is by bouncing that radar energy multiple times over RAM and RAS…leaving nothing coming out.

No amount of radar blockers or RAM on engine faces is going to produce similar results…

Simply because the Japanese call it “stealth”, or the Russians pretend it is stealth…tells us nothing about how effective it is or how it compares to the F-22 method. There’s lots of things that are called “stealth” out there…Ask the Iranians.

and Sukhoi pursued it with it’s demonstrator

“s-duct” technology was perfected in the P-80 shooting star of 1944. Simply because Sukhoi build an aircraft where the engine face was partially hidden from view…does not equate at all with experimenting with a stealthy intake design…which they obviously didn’t.

though all approaches may very well be successful at their aim (radar blocking)

Most certainly not true. And secondly, there’s “rcs reduction”, and then there’s “rcs reduction”. The French call their plane “stealthy” too.

Simply put…magnitudes are worlds apart. These approaches seem more closely related to the B-1 inlet design, where they also accomplished los elimination through similar way. It technically is “rcs reduction”, but obviously it is not of the same magnitude as for the F-22.

There’s just no physical way they can achieve similar results…

the compressor face is hidden by geIt is very difficult to believe that compressor face will not add to the RCS (with or without radar blocker)ntle horizontal and vertical cant of the air-intake/trunking.

And yet, I can still see it 🙂 I must be the only one.

So what is the consensus on the forum?

The consensus is that I photoshoped the compressor face in 🙂

It is very difficult to believe that compressor face will not add to the RCS (with or without radar blocker)

Youtube said the radar blocker is the latest best newest technology in the world and there is simply no REASON to doubt that the Russian solution is way better than everyone else’s. That means there is no point in discussing this any further.

Because otherwise why even bother with curve (?) in the intakes etc

There is no curve. There is no bend. That is about as conventional of an intake as they come.