What? Are you saying the J-10 weighs more than the early J-8I, even though the latter plane is much longer, has two engines, has little to no composites, uses an older form of aluminum alloy and has a greater wingspan? AFM and the Sinodefence website now reporting 8300kg which I think is reasonable.

I have never seen any proof or claim that the MTOW can reach nearly 25,000kg.

The original 9700kg something weight was something that was spec’ed for the J-9 project.

Look at Lavi Figures,
7,031 KG empty weight. 22% weight by composites. 2700KG fuel capacity, 1227KG engine weight. Gripen is 26% weight by composites.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/lavi.html

J-10 looks much larger with heavier engine and will need higher fuel capacity.

And the funnny thing is Lavi cant reach Mach 2 with 50% internal fuel and two python 3s. Engine is proportionally weaker to its size.
and here People are claiming J-10 can reach Mach 2 with 3 external fuel tanks.

That’s because of the intake configuration, compare top down views of the Gripen and J-10 and see which one looks slimmer then. However, noone in their right mind should be comparing these two in terms of weight anyway.

intake does not matter as it part of Gripen overall width. Gripen is much sleeker aircraft from nose, cockpit design, canards with thinner fuselage etc.

Dionis Says : This is all completely irrelevant. What you are doing is separating a large scenario.

Think of the Russian Navy / Air Force / Naval Aviation and Army coordinating here.

You have tons of various bombers, fighters, ships, subs all coming in to take out a US CVBG or several of them.

You think Sovremennys or Tarantuls will just go in one at a time or what? Come on man. That’s just weak.

Well if were going to go down this route then why not consider perhaps 6 or 7 carrier strike groups, (not all together in some kind of bullseye formation either!) we will throw in USAF assets too, subs yep we’ll throw some subs in too that are operating independantly from the CSG’s, ‘Cyberspace’ warriors – yep throw them in too, Space based intel gathering assets yep we’ll take them too. See two can play the add more assets game, trouble is one side has far more assets available then the other and its not the Russians.
I really do suggest you pick up a copy of harpoon ANW dionis, you can play these type of scenarios out to your hearts content but warning, you may find it frustrating though as gaming from the Russian side is not the calk walk you might imagine it to be.

when you bringing 6 or 7 carrier groups in one place than you are eliminating the elmenent of surprize. and it is not the number of assets but sustainability of war that will matter. and West cannot bring firepower in one place even during limited time as it will expose othere places that can inflict more financial damage.
Russia is concentrating on space based system. there are six defense related. it is just one organization.
Galileo is still sitting on ground waiting for ride in Russian rocket.

Applied Mechanics Association to launch 15 satellites in 2008

CANNES (France). Feb 14 (Interfax-AVN) – The Applied Mechanics Scientific Industrial Association, based in Zheleznogorsk, the Krasnoyarsk Territory, plans to orbit 15 spacecraft in 2008, Applied Mechanics Scientific Industrial Association Director General/Designer General Nikolai Testoedov said.

“We expect to manufacture and loft a total of 15 satellites including two Express AM-33 and Express AM-44 communications satellites, six Glonass-M navigation satellites, six defense-related satellites, and the Yubileyny student scientific satellite,” Testoedov said at the presentation, given by Thales Alenia Space in Paris.

Testoedov noted that the Association had already launched six Glonass-M satellites and the Raduga-1M dual-purpose spacecraft.

The budget of the Association will incorporate contracts, awarded by the Russian Federal Space Agency, the Russian Defense Ministry, corresponding ministries and departments, including the Communications Ministry, as well as foreign contracts, in particular, contracts with China.

J-10 definitely has better supersonic performance than flankers. Consider this, it’s stated to be able to fly at mach 2.0 under A2A configuration of 3 fuel tank + 2 PL-12 + 2 PL-8. Range limits amount of missions it can do and CAP time, but not if the combat itself.

Anyhow, the advantages of J-10 have been stated as better maneuverability (although flankers have edges in certain area). Depending whether you are in the J-10 or J-11 camp, you argue different things. The other advantage of J-10 is that it’s generally considered to be more stealthy than J-11 (aside from the smaller size). The advantages of J-11 is pretty obvious too – more space, larger radar and such.

Currently, J-11B supposedly has some newer toys like the new radar + new IRST and the holographic HUD. But we really don’t know how well SAC’s work in MMI and situation awareness compares to CAC. Who probably has far more experience in this. Of course, the upgraded J-10 is supposed to vastly improve the MMI and situation awareness + everything else.

do some basic calculation for TWR in operational load.
i dont think J-10 will be lighter than F-16 as it looks bigger than F-16 with larger wing area and much dragier in front.
Single seat Flanker with 16.5 tons empty equpped and 6 ton fuel+ 2 ton air to air missiles gives better than 1:1 TWR.
Put same 2 ton missles+ 4 ton internal fuel+ 10 ton empty weight will give 16 tons of weight which gives much less than 1:1 TWR. and u want to add exteral tanks to add it. Performance will be degraded alot.
now suposse u want to upgrade engines to 13.5 ton class. than you are adding 1 ton extra to a single engine fighter with same weight but u are adding 2 tons of extra thrust to twin engine fighter for the same weight. The more powerful the engines become the greater the advantage for twin engine fighter. Twin engine figher simply has more capability and upgrade potential.

Hmm all the talk of being 9 trillion or whatever is inconsequential, see no-one is gonna suddenly say ‘hey you ,yes you UK,we want all are money back tommorow’ and then we cough it up. It just dosnt work like that. The UK is without doubt one of the worlds leading economy’s (i don’t know the world ranking) and far more survivable then most think. IMF sourced map of world GDP from 2005 figures included for you. Edit: the source for your report, is Russian is it not? If so i’d be very sceptical of it, free press and accurate reporting are not something to common there.

I am not talking about past debt but future creation of debt to grow economy
UK net GDP is basically zero. No debt creation No GDP. IMF report is false. it does not take into account debt creation for GDP. and UK is not survivable it cannot afford a mobilization even against third rate war by itself. I think Falkland war was the last one. but it was very minimilistic. Russia has fought big wars by itself in past 100 years and continously spreading out. look at first Coldwar from 1949 when Soviet Union was alteast 20 years behind West and industry was completely either destroyed or shifted to uneconomical places. UK is simply not in that level even withe external support.

It is not baseless flaming at all. Maybe crude but it is still representation of the economic aspects of defense procurement. A highly important fact and why the Typhoon thread is currently littered with various different cost figures.

And u seem to be out of touch with economic aspect as well. the onlly way West can compete with Russia in economics is too create huge amount of debt (whole tax revenue is based on spending of public/private which is based on debt expansion). Very simple Economics 101.
A country like UK with false GDP (completely built with foreign money) and $9Trillion debt has no chance at all.

http://www.kommersant.com/p851047/r_1/Putins_9th,_extra,_address_to_the_nation/
Anyway, no one noticed the GDP reservation. We were witnessing so stunning achievements and so large-scale prospects, that any reservations were forgiven without reserve.
“Our children will not have to pay our old debts,” went on Putin, and I thought that some people in the audience sighed with great relief.

The president, though, meant that Russia’s “state foreign debt reduced down to 3 percent of GDP, which is one of the lowest debts in the world”.

I don’t know where to start.

Flogger.. did you even bother to read what this topic is about. its about air forces that operate Russian and western aircraft and their experiences. I could care less about Algeria, Syria and its MiG-23 because they are air forces that don’t fit in this category.. they are predominantly Russian customers and you are again trying to prove a point no one asked. Yak-130 sure, whats the point of posting its picture, the only user of it is the Russian AF and no one asked anything about the Yak or the RUSAF.

Yak-130 has one export customer plus two technology customers. Just think over it.

Then there’s comments about time and age.
Lets see, the MiG-27 was introduced in the late 70s, the Mirage 2000 was in the early 80s… not exactly a big time gap.

EF/F-22 are also introduced in similar time frame. so i guess they are at same level. and i have already mentioned MIG was working on MIG-29/MIG-31 at that period of time so it didnot have to make Flogger superduper multirole fighter. They have Su-24/Su-25 for that era.

also note that while their modernization program for the MiG-27 and Jaguar are extensive, that much focus have been put on the Jaguars and only recently they have completed just 1 MiG-27.

offcourse the amount of crashes of jaguar is an embrassment for a twin engine bomber not fighter which has to pull high Gs training.

as for downplaying the sources.. there’s no logic in that.. so what if its old? if it happened in the 90s, then thats when it happened and it was an incident that was recorded.. of course what does that mean? it means they experienced problems with their MiG-29 and not just them but a variety of customers. Of course, it doesn’t mean they will completely throw it away, they will eventually fix it so they can use it, thats a no brainer and its idiotic to think they will throw it away just over that one incident.. but it also means they are stuck with it too. It also doesn’t change the fact that during the Kagril war (yes it wasnt Siachen my mistake) the Mirage 2000s proved its worth with Indian pilots.

Mirage-2000 does not prove anything. thats why there was no follow up order.only for attrition replacement.
Even Rafale was not ordered for IN. Remember those times euro was 80% of dollar.

as far as Su-30MKi and all that.. in the end, India is issuing an MMCA and there’s quite a few western types in the competition and its likely they will go for one..so there goes most of your arguements to those who keep pointing it out.. (not to mention that the MKI has quite a number of Israeli and French parts as well).

show me a single significant part? thats why it is so easy to create MKA/MKM from MKI.

as for Cold war era… well no duh, most of these aircrafts came from the Cold war.. why bother bringing it out? the Mirage 2000, the MiG-27, MiG-29.. they were bought in the cold war. So what.. the fact remains is that these air forces are still using it.

Mirage-2000 was bought with hard cash. while MIGs/F-series fighters were distributed at prices and incentives that u can consider it mostly for free to allies. There is huge difference but i dont think u can think that deeper.

Flex, are you trying to just argue on each individual post or did you read my other posts?

1. I already said that the Mirage 2000 and Mig-27 were designed for different things. But in the end, the Mirage 2000 provided India its much needed ground attack abilities during Siachen.. something that should be the role of its MiG-27.

And u never got the point MIG-27 and Mirage-2000 belongs to different era and different price points. Indian MIG-27 even had a radar and defensive suties. MIG-27 is more suitable for attacking plain desert enviornments.

And yes I even mentioned the Jaguar, India has been more serious in upgrading the Jaguar’s capabilites than the MiG-27. Many countries that operated the MiG 23 already retired them, even before retiring their older technology MiG-21s. You may ask why they would do such a thing. The truth is.. swing wings are costly machines with even more maintenance needs.

Just look at Jaguar crashes vs MIG-27 and Jaguar hasnt shown its mettle..

2. Its convenient that you ignored countries that retired their MiG-29s. Czech Republic, Romania, Germany to name a few.

Do u think countries of Europe should do the same as China keep airplanes for unlimited amount of time like J-6/J-7/Q-5. Baseline MIG-29 came with 25 year life and they are pretty much done with it. and rich Country like Germany doesnot need to share a fighter which was built for low end tasks.

3. You mention people buy western because of politics. Well of course politics has a factor.. people buy Russian because of politics as well. Thats how the arms trade works.

People buy western because of creative financing and people buy Russian because give them better value for money

4. The issue was never about the purchasing habits of what a country. Its well understood that countries have political and financial reasons as well as capability interests when making arms purchases. They have their reasons and that was not what I’m talking about.. but certain people here are trying to retort to statements I’ve never asked or made. India buys Russian and Western aircraft to diversify its sources and also, to make up bulk which is the case with cheaper Migs. That was never in question. The statement I made was that between these two, India (and a few other countries) prefer their western fighters. no more or no less. We could argue that they don’t or that they really do.. but instead the Flogger-Star49-Flex gang want to argue about things outside of this scope. you must realize that even if say India prefers its mirage 2000, they will still buy Russian for political and other reasons. so will many other countries. but of course you are intent on turning this into a fight between biased pro Russian groups here and biased pro US groups.

if India prefers Mirage-2000 and not buying it means there is some thing wrong with price-capaiblity ratio.

5. you also made a statement that most countries buy from two sources.. thats not true at all, there’s plenty of countries whose main aircraft are from one source. Korea, Japan, Turkey.. mostly American. Kazakhstan, Armenia, Syria, mostly Russian. there are few countries that operate two comparable aircraft from Russia and a western block nation.

these are mostly left over from coldwar.

Your sources are worth less. ur showing coldwar era Migs with hardly $5m price tag. Show me a MIG/Su fighter with $30m price tag that had a problem?