J-20 5th Gen Fighter Thread VIII

[latenlazy]

View attachment 165481
J-20A in primer flying into CAC

On a sidenote can we confirm J-20 uses high amount of composite skin? Because the fact it's still yellow basically everywhere still indicate its metal skinned or maybe it uses GLARE, so external panels are still aluminium.

Lots of different kinds of primer colors out there. It’s agnostic to what the panel materials are, especially when you also need to apply RAM.

 

[latenlazy]

Retooling the production line is going to cause nearly if not more issues than simply making the plane and wait a bit for logistics to catch up. Considering WS-15 will have different intake characteristic and will likely require a redesign of the intakes. If the issue with WS-15 is something like the maintaince logistics isn't quite there yet they would've just went with WS-15 with J-20A instead of choosing to stopping production and redesign and tool everything once it becomes ready. Not to mention they made a whole new variant of WS-10 just as a stand in. It seems like a lot of effort if WS-15 is expected to be available very soon. IMO, I'm pretty pessimistic about WS-15.

A new WS-10 variant is not a lot of effort at this point in the design’s maturity. They were probably already working on it as a MLU option for older J-20s and flankers. Intakes may not need redesign either. The pairing between intake and engine isn’t *that* sensitive, so long as you are getting sufficient mass flow. A higher mass flow engine paired with a lower mass flow intake is a bigger problem than a lower mass flow engine paired with a higher mass flow intake. The new WS-10 variant may also just have higher mass flow.

 

[tphuang]

Retooling the production line is going to cause nearly if not more issues than simply making the plane and wait a bit for logistics to catch up. Considering WS-15 will have different intake characteristic and will likely require a redesign of the intakes. If the issue with WS-15 is something like the maintaince logistics isn't quite there yet they would've just went with WS-15 with J-20A instead of choosing to stopping production and redesign and tool everything once it becomes ready. Not to mention they made a whole new variant of WS-10 just as a stand in. It seems like a lot of effort if WS-15 is expected to be available very soon. IMO, I'm pretty pessimistic about WS-15.

What is up with you and derailing thread with this WS-15 obsession. If it's isn't ready yet, then it's not going on J-20A yet. They have a perfectly fine engine in WS-10C2. If that's what they are using on J-20A, then that's the most appropriate engine at the moment.