China Flanker Thread II

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siegecrossbow

General
Staff member
Super Moderator
Is this that version of the engine? (What’s the designation for the 140 kn now? Seems like we’ve moved away from straightforward A-B-C system).

I would guess WS-10C but I don’t know for certain. No doubt there is commonality between the J-20 and J-16 engines.
 

Inst

Captain
That’s a pretty tame claim for Indian media. I really expected to read something like “MKI’s capabilities are so powerful, it can blast away the J-16 before the pilot can climb into the cockpit”
I mean the MKI does have advantages over the J-16, mainly in its TVC. The J-16's advantages lie in avionics. It's typical Russia vs China airframes; the Russians tend to have better airframe design (the Su-35 has better designed fuel tanks that give it a range advantage over Sinoflankers), better engines, and the Chinese have better avionics.

If the J-10C radar is as big as claimed, it makes very clear how the Chinese want to go about things in contrast to how the Russians want to go about things; the Russians want to reach WVR and win through superior agility, while the Chinese want to keep things BVR and win long-range. The Chinese are closer to the Americans in this case (emphasis on stealth, BVR, and the Chinese managed to panic the USAF with the PL-15 being better than comparable American missiles), while the Indians are closer to the Russians (and the Rafale, a poorer BVR fighter than the Eurofighter, purchase, shows it).

On the MKI vs J-16 line, the Indians can make a credible argument based on their WVR advantages against a BVR-oriented aircraft.

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On reading the article, the article is correct in that Su-30MKI outperform J-11As and probably Bs as well, since the Su-30MKI features TVC, and the J-11As and J-11Bs feature pulse doppler radars, the PLAAF having been too cheap to go for PESA options. It's wrong because it completely neglects the J-16's AESA advantage over the Su-30MKI, however.

The Chinese claim that the J-16 is decisively superior to the Su-30 is true when considering Chinese Su-30MKKs, which are basically strike J-11s and lack both PESA and TVC. The "generation ahead" statement is strictly false; the best the J-16s could claim to be compared to Su-30s of any designation would be half a generation ahead, since 4.5th generation is defined by AESA.
 

plawolf

Lieutenant General
TVC is overblown, especially on aircraft that were not designed with them to start with.

The biggest limiting factor in fighter agility is the airframe design itself. Push the airframe beyond it’s designed tolerances and at best you waste all your energy and make yourself a sitting duck, and worse case you can manoeuvre kill yourself from stalls, Gee-lock or catastrophic airframe failure etc.

The MKI with its canards and TVC are great at airshow displays, but in real combat simulations, their TVC proved more Hinderance than asset as American pilots gleefully recall from red flag.

The Russians didn’t delete the canards off their Su35s because they were super useful. And the Su35 only attained its agility due to significant internal re-designs to tailor the plane to work with TVC.

In a real world WVR fight, I really don’t see the MKI having any meaningful advantages over the J16, especially with the use of HMD and off bore sight AAMs. Hell, J16s with PL10s should totally obliterate MKIs using R73s in WVR all day long.
 
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