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Comment by jasonwatkinspdx | Hacker News Reader

"It could be that China doesn’t know how to build a working lift fan and that’s why they left it off, Aboulafia said. But for a country that has unveiled two different radar-evading stealth warplane prototypes in just the last two years, that seems unlikely. It’s more plausible that China could build a lift fan-equipped plane and has chosen not to."

The major difference is in posture. The US military wants to be able to project power globally. That means fighting from carriers or allied bases of varying quality half way around the world. The Chinese only care about their borders and regional power projection. VSTOL doesn't gain them anything since they'll never be that distant from their own bases.

This is the same reason why the Chinese haven't put much into carriers, but have a ton of ballistic missile ships.

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Actually, the Chinese have had a serious problem designing and building quality jet engines for fighter aircraft. The two prototype "stealth" aircraft they've demonstrated (J-31 and J-20) use Russian AL-31 engines pulled from Su-27s, because the native WS-10 engines fail to pass muster consistently.

Indeed, the same is true of the J-15 (an Su-33 clone), which is currently the only carrier-capable aircraft they've flown. Fewer than 16 of these aircraft have been built. Its use of the AL-31F makes the J-15 hard to produce, but also severely limits its payload/range.

For reference, over 500 of the mainstay F/A-18E/F Super Hornets have been built, and ~1500 of the previous models (A-D) were produced.

The Russians are none too pleased about Chinese repurposing and reverse engineering of their aircraft (particularly for engines), and have stopped selling Su-27s and many aircraft parts to the Chinese over IP disputes.

The lack of Chinese airpower and carrier operations isn't a product of posturing or strategic differences. They've invested a huge amount of money retrofitting the Admiral Kuznetsov (now Liaoning), are building a second one, and are training pilots for carrier ops with foreign trainers.

The Chinese air capabilities are instead hampered primarily by a lack of engine technology and production capability. Never mind the lift-fans.

That's an interesting point. I didn't know the domestic Chinese turbine industry was so limited. Do you know why? Chinese industry certainly is capable of high tolerance machining, and they're literally the best at the world in complex assembly, so I'd have to guess they're behind on the design or materials side.

The Liaoning is a bit of a weird duck. It provides air cover and anti-submarine capabilities to naval formations, but it's not capable of projecting power into a region via strike missions the way US carrier groups do. It fits within the posture I described. But also it seems like it may just be a boondogle to satisfy some admirals that want to be one of the nations that has a "carrier".

The public claim is that the quality control and reliability on the WS-10 production lines is poor, but there's evidence that there's more to it than just that. The WS-10 is produced mostly natively, but its design is largely reverse engineered from the AL-31F. In fact, its turbine blades are imported from Russia. This corroborates reports that the Chinese lack the design expertise at present to design a fighter engine from scratch.

Also, keep in mind that the WS-10A is derived from the AL-31F, which was first flown on the Su-27, but has since been replaced in Russia by modernized AL-31FM1 and 2 or the new 117 family engines. The FM and 117 series engines have generally better performance than the older F/FN parts, and likely are more efficient. Thus, we can see that the Chinese are working off an old design.

I feel upvoting this and your other comments is insufficient for saying thank you to adding to the discussion. I know little about military tech, but you've hit the very few bits that I do know (grandfather was a career B-52 pilot) and I appreciate learning more from someone who seems like a reliable source (unusual on the internet, right?).

Thank you!

Glad you mentioned the F/A-18. One thing the author fails to understand, is that the term "Joint Strike Fighter" is given to planes with a very specific purpose. The F-35 is supposed to be a replacement for the F/A-18, which is a plane designed to be good at fighting in air-to-air combat and amazing at striking targets on the ground. The F-35 has a similar mission, and as a result, it isn't meant to be the ultimate air-to-air weapon. All else being equal, a specialized product should be better at it's given task than a hybrid, and the F-35 is a hybrid.

That being said, there are still some significant problems with the F-35.

This is the same reason why the Chinese ... have a ton of ballistic missile ships.

And many of those ships are carrying large numbers of SS-N-22 Sunburns, only one of which can sink a carrier, and which stand reasonable odds of penetrating even the latest generation point-defense platform. Fire ten at a carrier, maybe one or two get through, no more carrier, battle over.

The Moskit is indeed a very difficult missile to shoot down. However, one is nowhere near enough to sink a carrier. With a 320kg warhead, one hit probably would not even render the ship combat ineffective.

Also, only the four Sovremeny-class destroyers carry that missile.

yes, Moskit is primarily intended against smaller targets. It has too small range and too small warhead. For anti-carrier missiles look at P-500/P-1000 and P-700.

While all these missiles are very fast, they also very visible in IR because of their speed, so it makes shooting them down easier, so they expected to be fired like "wolf pack":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-700_Granit :

"The missile, when fired in a swarm (group of 4-8) has a unique guidance mode. One of the weapons climbs to a higher altitude and designates targets while the others attack. The missile responsible for target designation climbs in short pop-ups, so as to be harder to intercept. The missiles are linked by data connections, forming a network. If the designating missile is destroyed the next missile will rise to assume its purpose. Missiles are able to differentiate targets, detect groups and prioritize targets automatically using information gathered during flight and types of ships and battle formations pre-programmed in an onboard computer. They will attack targets in order of priority, highest to lowest: after destroying the first target, any remaining missiles will attack the next prioritized target"

The War Nerd has a great essay on why aircraft carriers are obsolete in modern warfare:

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6779

...from 2002. Since then, the Chinese have kept developing their own carrier capability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_progra...

Possibly they are only doing this to fake us out, and I don't disagree with the war nerd's argument that carriers make worryingly good targets...but I wouldn't write off the whole concept just yet.

> Possibly they are only doing this to fake us out

No, they are doing it to maintain their regional position with regard to potential conflict areas with regional rivals in the Indian Ocean/South China Sea area, particularly, India.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/12/world/asia/india-aircraft-carr...

I think that too, but you need to read that remark in the context of the post it was replying to (which suggested that such carriers were obsolete and referenced an article suggesting that China would rely on submarines).

Hmm... this assumes that a carrier would directly engage the enemy. To my understanding, in modern times they are more like a mobile airstrip and supply base, and you would leave the carrier far over the horizon away from hostiles.

Your only other options are to fly your planes straight from the USA to your target, or to build bases with airstrips all over the world, which are easily bombed.

A more current war nerd article

http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-china-joins-the-yacht-club/

The DF 21 is basically unstoppable, best long term solution inho is putting drone carriers underwater

"This is the same reason why the Chinese haven't put much into carriers, but have a ton of ballistic missile ships."

This is changing...

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