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Chinese F-22 equivalents. Air Force says "I TOLD U SO"
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Not to say that the US would be in much better shape but it's hard to imagine the US responding with any less than total war after the use of multiple nukes against it's positions.
If, hypothetically, the US had a single aircraft carrier and used it to defend Taiwan, it would be functionally the same as using 13, since attacking would lead to exactly the same outcome: everyone loses and dies horribly
http://www.slate.com/id/2280831/
Gist of it is: worries are wastly overblown. China is so far behind the US that its going to take them decades to catch up.
Case in point: China now has exactly 1 stealth fighter... The US has 139....
See: SU-37
> SU-50 (in another 10 years or so)
Edit: as for fighters, a significant percentage of Saddams in the first gulf war were either destroyed by F-4 phantoms or cruise missiles while on the ground. Outdated weapons > the most sophisticated fighter in the world if your air bases are visible to satellites and the people shooting at you have precision missiles.
And watch, it will work because the MIC, Generals, DoD, and the populace will use this as an excuse to shell out billions more for some fighter plane that is built for both a war that most likely won't happen and is so far out in the future that by the time that plane will be used, we'll already be building it's replacement.
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Yea, which is what I kind of pointed out. A P-51 mustang from world war 2 in the hands of the USAF is more dangerous than an F-22 in Chinese hands at present (assuming modern missiles could be loaded onto the P-51 and it had modern computers rigged into it), because of the ability of USAF aircraft to all network with each other.
A drone that is 50 miles away could see an enemy aircraft, and a fighter can fire a missile locked onto the drone's target from 50 miles outside the bogie's radar range - that is huge. Networked smart weapons combined with things like AWACS mean if the USAF was still running its fleet entirely with F-14s they'd still be top dog
Trying to out next-gen other countries' fighter jets is just so much dick waving and a way to renew public support in a bloated military industrial system
Instead of expensive ways to shoot things, we need to get into automations (As someone said earlier) and drones, UAV's armed/unarmed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_Avenger
Stealth drone with a jet engine. Can fly at 60k feet, carry 3000lbs of ordinance, and fly at 740km/h+
We are well on out way it seems.
Radioactive super-drones? Yes.
Hell, they can act as motherships for regular lame-ass non-radioactive UAVs.
This is what I don't get.
The hypothetical enemy produces a prototype...so you guys buy a fleet.
Why not just build like, 4 prototypes or something?
The cost of developing a fuckawesome prototype must pale to the cost of building an enormous fleet of new high tech aircraft you'll never use, but prototypes have the benefit of generally involving new technological development that can be spun off to peacetime uses.
Whereas hundreds of planes do not.
Well, having read this entire shindig, I gotta go with this /\
China's rise to international prominence has been entirely economically based. About the only thing that might draw China into a conflict would be a threat to their buffer state of North Korea, and even that is in question.
Similarly, Taiwan is unimportant to either the US or China as anything more than a buffer state itself; rather, the main significance of Taiwan's "safety" is to ease the mind of Japan, where half of our Asian military presence resides.
As for the original topic, I am willing to believe that China's been spying on our F-22 research but don't think that the article in question demonstrates that. Even the author knew the concepts behind why the F-22 and other stealth units were designed the way that they were; why wouldn't China know these design concepts just as well and thus try to implement them themselves?
The plane has fuck-all to do with the F-22, it's just hard to tell in the side-view photos that are in the news (a top-down photo would demonstrate it better). The wing design is completely different (Chengdu has a thing for forward canards, which American firms have never liked), the engine exhaust is unshielded to radar, and the onboard radar isn't particularly sophisticated. If the plane is derivative of anything it's derivative of the J-10, their current from-scratch Chinese fighter, with a second engine and some stealth-like cladding on only the surfaces where it's easy to do.
Don't get me wrong; I think China will catch up eventually, but this plane is in no way an indication that they're there yet. They've got some deep-seated problems in their engineering culture that they need to fix first. Which I'm sure they eventually will. (Of course, the U. S. defense industry has completely different but equally horrifying problems, but I've gone on at length about that in the past and don't really feel like getting a good rant worked up about my industry just before I go to work).
Whelp. That sounds informed enough for me; I'll go with it.
North Korea is not really a buffer state, it's more like an open air refugee holding cell. China isn't really scared of South Korea at the other side of the Korea border, that's one of the things the recent Wikileaks debacle revealed. It's scared that millions of unskilled malnourished fanatic refugees will flow over the border to their version of the Rust Belt and fuck things up there. As long as North Korea keeps North Koreans in North Korea, China is willing to buff them up.
But it will never ever ever go to any sort of conflict for North Korea and the Kim regime. If Vanuatu declared war on North Korea tomorrow, the Party would have a serious thought on which side to support.
If United States and South Korea went to war with NK, China would post a million troops to the border, take a seat and watch Pyongyang burn.
Not really, R&D costs are the major thing for high tech aircraft. For the B-2:
And that's with 21 of them.
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