First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter 613
Frosty Piss writes "The first clear pictures of what appears to be a Chinese stealth fighter prototype have been published online. The photographs, published on several unofficial Chinese and foreign defense-related websites, appear to show a J-20 prototype making a high-speed taxi test — usually one of the last steps before an aircraft makes its first flight — according to experts on aviation and China's military. Several experts said the prototype's body appeared to borrow from the F-22 and other US stealth aircraft. The US cut funding for the F-22 in 2009 in favor of the F-35, a smaller, cheaper stealth fighter that made its first test flight in 2006 and is expected to be fully deployed by around 2014."
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
The article says it would be a contender for the F-22, and calls it the world's only fully operational stealth fighter. Why don't the f-117 or even the f-35's count?
The F-117 has been retired, and the F-35 isn't operational yet. Indeed, there's a growing scandal about the lack of progress in flight testing (as well as the emergence of weight and exhaust heat problems) for the F-35, and it's likely at that at least one version... probably the STOVL "B" version... will be canceled. And it's possible that the whole project will be canceled.
Re:Invented in US? Made in China. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Someone help me out here. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, pictures were leaked of the blackhawk and the stealth bomber from the US too, though it occurred later in its life.
.
Since the blackhawk is not remotely stealthy (it's a helicopter), I'm assuming you meant something different. Like maybe the SR-71 "Blackbird"...which certainly looked stealthy, although in reality wasn't.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
Despite the F designation, the F-117 is an attack aircraft, not a fighter. The F-35 is a multi-role aircraft, ala the F-16. The F-22 is a true air superiority fighter, ala the original F-15. That' why we've scaled back F-22 production and ramped up F-35 production. Hasn't been much need for a U.S. air superiority fighter in the last 20 years. On other hand, we've needed lots of attack aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Re:Invented in US? Made in China. (Score:5, Informative)
Cobra maneuver:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgHoBDW56CI [youtube.com]
Draken (01.55 02.05 02.13):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgHoBDW56CI [youtube.com]
No such thing in the JAS 39 promotional video :/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNWpK9Qe4vk [youtube.com]
37 Viggen going backwards:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fye_2AipFTA [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11-osaKapEI [youtube.com]
I don't know why it was odd that a Swedish one happen to be able to do it. Just because it's not Russian or what? =P
Regarding Viggen development (en.wikipedia):
"In 1960, the U.S. National Security Council, led by President Eisenhower, formulated a military security guarantee for Sweden. The U.S. promised to help the Swedish militarily in the event of a Soviet attack against Sweden; both countries signed a military-technology agreement. In what was known as the "37-annex", Sweden was allowed access to advanced U.S. aeronautical technology which made it possible to design and produce the Saab 37 Viggen much faster and cheaper than would otherwise have been possible.[5]
According to the doctoral research of Nils Bruzelius at the Swedish National Defence College, the reason for this officially unexplained U.S. support was the need to protect U.S. Polaris submarines deployed just outside the Swedish west coast against the threat of Soviet anti-submarine aircraft.[5]"
Re:Hacking Pays Off (Score:4, Informative)
Except the Chinese and American economies are too interlocked to repeat something like the that. Its hard to say what Sino-American relations will look like in the future, but I don't think the Cold War is a particularly good model.
How about a hot war? In the early 20th c., it was widely and loudly proclaimed that the economies of the great European powers were far too dependent on each other for any serious conflict to take place. They might play ego games with each other by building lots of battleships, sure, but anything worse than the occasional naval skirmish, or brief land war in some far-away colony, was unthinkable And, um, we know how that worked out [historylea...site.co.uk].
Re:China the new global superpower, and US decline (Score:5, Informative)
The U.S. is in decline because a lot of people think the problem is overspending on the military. It's not. Don't get me wrong; yes there's lots of pork in the U.S. military budget which could be cut. But it doesn't comprise most of U.S. government spending, nor is it the cause of the U.S.'s budgetary woes. And a good part of the reason we're in the buget mess we're in now is because people like you who think that it is implement solutions which don't address the real problem.
U.S. military spending is actually one of the few parts of government spending which has been more or less steadily declining since WWII, both as a % of the budget [urban.org] and as a % of GDP [cbo.gov]. It started climbing after 9/11, but it's still close to the lowest it's been since WWII [truthandpolitics.org].
What's killing the budget (indeed, where most of the money is spent) are the social programs; specifically, medicare and medicaid. They're projected to grow so quickly [cbo.gov] that even if you stopped all military spending, dropped it to zero , all the money that saved would be eaten up by growth in medicare and medicaid within 20-25 years. In other words, in 20-25 years we would have no military, no military spending, and our budgetary problems would be the same as they are now.
The first step in fixing a problem is to correctly identify what is causing it. The Congressional Budget Office hires a lot of really smart people to do nothing but identify the causes of the budget problems, and publishes a nifty report on it [cbo.gov] about every 2 years. Please go read it. Put aside any moralistic preconceptions you may have about which parts of the budget are good or bad. Look at it purely from an accounting standpoint - which parts are decreasing and which parts are ballooning out of control? The parts that are ballooning out of control are what we need to address to fix the problem, the parts that are decreasing are a much lower priority.
Re:Someone help me out here. (Score:2, Informative)
I'm starting to wonder about miss-direction. It does look similar to the F-22
Far more likely its based on stolen US plans. This has previously happened several times in the past. The Russians are very well known for stealing US aircraft plans and making it their own. IIRC, The Bear was a literal, exact replication of a US aircraft, except for Russian tags and imperfections from inferior manufacturing capabilities.
But in this case, far, far more is required to replicate US stealth aircraft than simply the plans. Much of what makes it stealthy includes engines, paint, and highly advanced materials. Not to mention the computers and software. Our aircraft have a low end super computer on board; which is especially noteworthy given that most are lucky to have more than a couple dozen Pentium class computers. Beyond that, in some cases, new manufacturing processes are created to allow for manufacturing. So even if it looks like our aircraft, doesn't mean its actually anything other than a distant second.
Having said that, its very, very clear. China intends to create a stealth arms race. And regardless of its current operational state, chances are their program is very active and will likely trigger sizable additional funding for the US within the next couple of years to counter Chinese efforts. Why? Because if you think about it, with a stealth bomber and stealth fighters for escort, your need for ICBMs, outside of deterrence, almost completely evaporates.
Re:Someone help me out here. (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, The Bear was a literal, exact replication of a US aircraft, except for Russian tags and imperfections from inferior manufacturing capabilities.
Do you mean Tu-95 Bear? If so, you must be confusing it with the earlier Tu-4, which was a direct and literal copy of B-29, and Tu-85, which was an evolutionary development of Tu-4. But Tu-95 was a brand new design, and pretty unique at that (fastest turboprop aircraft ever by a large margin even today - 'nuff said).
Re:Someone help me out here. (Score:5, Informative)
Far more likely its based on stolen US plans. This has previously happened several times in the past. The Russians are very well known for stealing US aircraft plans and making it their own. IIRC, The Bear was a literal, exact replication of a US aircraft, except for Russian tags and imperfections from inferior manufacturing capabilities.
Given half a chance and if they think they will benefit from it everybody steals everybody else's tech... get over it. But the idea that the Soviet aircraft industry was based on stealing the plans of US aircraft and producing rivet for rivet copies is complete and utter crap only a faithful Fox News watching Glenn Beck fan would believe. This myth originates from the fact that the Soviets did produce a rivet-for-rivet copy of the B-29 and called it the Tu-4. The Tupolev Tu-95 is a very distant descendant of the Tu-4 and has nothing in common with the B-29/Tu-4 what so ever. The Russians did steal some technical documents relating to western aircraft and equipment (Concorde for example), they more commonly engaged in reverse engineering with famous examples being the R-13 missile which was a clone of the AIM-9B Sidewinder (but with a Soviet designed IR seeker) and allegedly portions of the avionics suite of the MiG-23 which reportedly benefitted from tech salvaged in Vietnam from US F-4 fighters. Mind you the Soviets are not in any way alone in this. It is often conveniently forgotten that much of the first generation of transsonic US jet fighters benefitted hugely from research data obtained by the US from nazi-german aircraft manufacturers as well as the expertise of ex-nazi engineers some of whom were war criminals. The same goes for the US space and missile program and submarine design. It's easy to point out the resemblance of aircraft like the Su-27 and MiG-29 to us designs like the F-15 but there is practically nothing common between those Russian designs and the F-15 other than a passing resemblance. The most you can argue is that the F-15 may have influenced the Sukhoi and MiG design teams in some way but that's about it, other than this they are totally different and unrelated designs.
Re:Someone help me out here. (Score:4, Informative)
A Cessna, flying at 70,000 feet, at several times the speed of sound, with an exhaust plume three times the size of the plane. That is what gave it away more than anything: the massive, super-hot exhaust plume traveling at a few thousand miles per hour. That is what the Soviet SAMs locked in on, and could not catch.
Re:China the new global superpower, and US decline (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Someone help me out here. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, if you have the reserve currency (USD, currently) actually you can magic things out of thin air. You simply print more notes, buy from overseas and until the rest of the world realises that your "reserve" currency is backed by basically fuck all, you're home free.
Unfortunately seeing as the US has been doing this since vietnam, people are finally catching on and going to start dumping their USD like crazy (i.e., buying back all those assets/resources your citizens purchased with monopoly money)
Re:Someone help me out here. (Score:2, Informative)
Uh, no. First, lets touch upon the literal version of the claim: "did the USSR run out of money". Yes. The USSR traded with other countries in the world not under the soviet system. They had an imbalance of payments and little to no holdings of foreign currency.
Military was not a part of this in any manner, and USSR debts were not affected by its dissolution, as Russia picked them. Economies of other ex-USSR countries didn't get any better as a result of it, either.
Second, lets consider the statement as euphemism for economic devastation in the USSR. This how this idea is usually meant, and its not usually not expressed simply as "they ran out of money".
I lived there, you idiot!
There was no "devastation", not even under the most economically inept Brezhnev's government, and not even under Khrushchev and his experiments.
The USSR initially built a lot of "guns" and a lot of "food". There population was growing, and they needed to produce more "food". Meanwhile, the cold-war induced them to need to produce more "guns" too. What they didn't produce very much of was tools; they under-invested in capital goods. What this meant over time was that they could not make as many things per-capita as the US could. The total pie was smaller in Russia, it was growing more slowly, and much more of it was focused on "guns".
The whole point of their system was that there is no "investment", government already owns all resources and only pays salaries. The only important thing is to keep a balance between consumer products and infrastructure development, as salary government pay to people will be spent on consumer goods that have to be available at the moment. There are no "capital expenses", just a need for simultaneous expansion. USSR economy was best when that balance was maintained, and worst when it was shifted (usually toward infrastructure).
Weapons are a tiny speck in this picture, and food was maintained through subsidies just like in US.