2% sounds better than $7.4bn, doesn’t it?

How a Govt can earn respect if they don´t play by the rules?

Playing by the rules of others is no way to earn respect, and India should know this better than most nations, e.g. her nuclear weapons program.

Every government in the world makes up rules and brakes them at will that is just life as we know it

Indeed; there are no rules and never have been.

I was going to say I don’t think there’s enough hard info about PAK DA around to justify a dedicated thread at this point, but at least it serves as a nice repository of various Russian concepts over the years…

Would be awsome if russians could fit two very high bybass turbofans in such flying wing in such arragement.

I would love to see that think flying.

PD-30 is a 30-ton (~65,000lb) class engine under development for modernised An-124 and future airliners such as the proposed EkoJet. I don’t imagine it could be ready before 2025 — too late for PAK DA?

3 x PD-14M perhaps more plausible?

If the Chinese thought that the DF-21D was the magic weapon that spelled the end of the super carrier I wonder how they will view rail gun equipped carrier battlegroups sailing off their coasts.

The only person evincing a blind faith in a magical superweapon here is you.

Such a good assessment of F-35C vs the competition in the pacific when absolutely nothing is known about the capability and/or maturity of the J20 and J31..

You have to have an extraordinarily pessimistic assessment of China’s recent and future progress if you think F-35C by late 2020s is going to offer anything like the advantages over its (Chinese) contemporaries that USN has enjoyed since the end of WW2. If we’re shifting the goalposts to “well, it might do better than 1:1…” that’s one thing, but then that rather calls into question this whole idea of wandering about within range of land-based airpower in the first place.

Now that may be changing, driven primarily by China, and the F/A-XX may prove to be something of a spiritual successor to the F-14, but that won’t in any way call into question the wisdom of the Navy’s decisions to pursue the Super Hornet in the 1990s.

Super Hornet was the right program at the right time. JSF, on the other hand, is an unmitigated disaster, conceived in hubris at the very apex of American power (eventually) born into an environment already markedly different, and that will continue to evolve out of all recognition within the prime of the aircraft’s service life. The only real question remaining is whether the damage from JSF will be measured only in dollars, missed opportunities, and the self-inflicted further erosion of American and western supremacy, or whether it will also be measured in blood and noted by future historians as a contributing factor in that great turning point, the Chinese defeat of the US Pacific Fleet in 203x.

True, but still as expensive as a Gripen NG…

It’s a larger plane.