Chinese Defence Industry

So where are the planes if that is the case? The Su-57 has been delayed and scaled back so many times that I have lost track.

That is not true. Delayed, yes, but I have never ever seen a max production number estimate from them.

The intention was never to make an all stealth fleet like the Americans did, so production of Su-35 and Su-30 and MiG-35 were expected to continue after production of Su-57 started.

The plan was always to get Su-57 into production and make a batch of them and then decide whether to make some more or a lot more.

To focus on the Su-57 the other stealth fighter programme was put on hold for a lighter cheaper model that MiG were going to develop.

They have now started work and funding on that LMFS programme now too, which will be developed in parallel with the MiG-35 development and production the same way they tested and evaluated new stuff for the Su-57 on the Su-35 fighter.

All aircraft need some RCS reduction, but not all fighters benefit from being stealthy and the cost in terms of payload is a handicap and price means having your entire airfleet stealthy is actually expensive and short sighted.

When I have ever said that the J-31 Will be better then the F-35 or the J-20 better then the F-22. The point was that you dont know. You are making statments without any facts.

Based on track record and history.

Same question for their navy ships ? How many breakdown engine during deployement ? How many successfull test about their weaponery ?

As a solution to their problems with Ukrainian made ship engines the Russians chose to buy Chinese copies of German engines that suddenly became unavailable due to western sanctions over Crimea. Those engines gave huge problems with reliability. Copying an engine is not the same as just replicating parts from any old material. Often a key part of the design of a reliable engine is getting the strength or brittleness or heat resistance or other feature of a material for a component right... sometimes it is several properties you need to get right or the parts fail rapidly, and you get engine problems.

The Chinese clearly could copy the parts but equally clearly did not correctly copy the parts or got something wrong that has led to reliability issues.

Now this is not being anti Chinese... if anyone could make good diesel engines then they of course would and wouldn't bother buying from other countries. Russia bought from Germany because they were the right fit for the purpose... Chinese copies would have been available at the time but rather than going cheap copy, they spent extra and bought the originals.

When that was no longer an option they were in a bind because of course they can learn to make their own copy but it would take time and money and testing to get it right and it seemed the Chinese already had a copy ready, so they bought those... only to have lots of serious problems with them.

To be fair if they had just taken the engines they bought from Germany and copied them it probably would have taken much longer to produce something they could use because of all the testing and then once it works getting it into serial production.

Spending lots of money on replacement engines and waiting for China to get the copy right is time and money they could spend on producing their own replacement engine families.

China will work it out and get it going fine... ultimately they should be able to make decent engines, but so can Russia so they stopped buying those Chinese diesel engines and started working on their own versions.

The funny thing I think is that not only has Germany lost the sales for engines for Russian naval vessels... and it will be for both military and civilian ships, but China now makes a copy... which while clearly not perfect now, eventually they will get right, and the Russians are going to do the same, so not just loss of customers but creating competition for themselves on the international market with at least two competing companies...

Never delayed. Scaled back yes, but not delayed.

I would say the opposite of that... delayed a couple of times to get it right, but I have only ever seen western estimates as to numbers they plan to make in total.

Unlike the US who initially planned quite a few F-22s to replace all F-15Cs with original plans for 1,500 F-22s, which was halved to 750 when they realised they were going to be 250 million each and eventually production was cut to about 190. Talk of 3,500 F-35s to replace everything and now F-15s being put back into production and it starts to look shaky.

Of course hugely inflated production numbers allow them to pretend they are going to be much cheaper than they were ever going to be and so they can blame production number cuts for increased prices for individual aircraft.

They basically had the stated goal of replacing all their fighters with F-35s so adding up all the current fighter types they operate and adding some export sales and you can fake numbers like 3,500, so the per unit cost does not seem so bad. The problem is that you only save money if you design and build sensibly, and if you never fix major problems then the costs of fixing old problems on brand new off the serial production lines compounds the problems and costs.

If they said they would make 76 and put them in service and iron out all the bugs and problems it would take longer, but they already had plenty of delays of their own... delays to get something properly tested and working right is a good thing.

China buys Su-35's because they want to learn how to copy and make better jets since theirs are shit.

To be fair, now they have them the quality of then new planes and upgrades to existing planes should improve.

Add to this that China is throwing money away without carrying.

China is spending lots of money, and are upgrading and producing all sorts of things. It is hard to tell from the outside, but I would feel certain there is a plan... the fact that we don't understand it doesn't really matter.

They have not long term long range naval experience but their plans regarding trade from Asia to the EU and back on land and sea and in the air suggests they are not planning evil aggression on the scale we have seen from the west in the last few centuries. Their new stuff does look modern, but as mentioned looks are not substance... they need to use these new products and get experience under their belts and decide what they need and what they want... which is not the same.

They can certainly afford to spend a lot of money on weapons and like Russia only spend a fraction of what they could, so they are certainly not approaching the wastefulness of the US or the west. I would suspect they will try to convert their military ship building capacity into something that can build civilian vessels in large numbers too, but to operate around the world they know they need the capacity to send military vessels there. Not to invade or destroy, but to support and defend Chinese interests.

We have seen how nasty and unfair the west is regarding both Russian and Chinese trade ties around the world.... Africa is full of (Russian) mercenaries stealing European trade customers, and China is using money and loans to drag the third world in to death trap spirals of debt to enslave them and control them... something the Europeans and westerners have been doing for centuries but now the suggestion that China might be doing that and it becomes evil and bad... but still only when they do it. EDIT: And the facts are that there is no evidence that the Chinese are using loans to ensnare and enslave like the west has been documented as doing for the last 3 centuries. Most deals with the west involve changes to local laws to improve the rights of foreign multinational countries and reduce the human rights and personal rights of the people in those countries. As the African countries say... the Chinese and Russians make no such demands and just want trade...

In such an environment China and Russia need to be able to ensure their interests are respected and ships that can sail around the world armed with guns and missiles is the easiest way to achieve that.

Russia is slowly building up forces to a plan based on what they have and what they have prepared and what they can produce, China is doing it much much faster, but with less obvious testing and less apparent care... you sort of get the feeling they are doing it blind with a simple recipes with all the components put into a ship shaped container... make ten and then use and see if they are OK and then bring out a new model or make more.

Which is fine... I am sure even a destroyer with problems is better than no destroyer at all.

Problems can be solved over time, and very few new and capable designs have no problems.

More ambitious projects are all new and when nothing works you get Ford class ships and Zumwalts and LCSs... too ambitious with no interest in finding cost effective solutions that work...

When every country will have hundred of billions of Yen in their banks the money will loose all its value.

I would say the opposite... with everyone having Yen it becomes a more transferable currency.

Even if it goes to zero value they make all their own stuff and also make stuff for other countries so they will be fine and the foreign currencies used to pay for their products will be worth so much more.[/quote]


Most people I know see two things in a shop... "American" Nike boot for $300, and chinese Nuke boot ripoff for $30... probably made in the same factory by the same workers just working different shifts from the same materials... I know which boot they are going to buy... and no bullshit about western made products being more durable.... shoes are not made durable any more otherwise people stop buying shoes. Like phones and everything else you buy shoes have a limited life time to make sure in 2-5 years you buy them again, whether it is soft sole rubber that wears through, or batteries that stop charging to full potential after 3-4 years... it is done on purpose and China are copying that too sadly... but at the prices they charge it becomes acceptable... but buy 5 pairs because in 3 years time when you go to buy another $30 pair of boots they will be $90 or more or you can't find that brand any more and have to risk something else like Nake, or Nirke.

Although several russian fanboys here seems to know for a absolute fact that everything Russia makes is perfect and nothing ever goes wrong. And that every single thing China produce is crap and would never ever work in battle.

For a while China didn't even come in to it and it was the Soviet Union that makes rubbish and they don't know what they are doing... they don't work from experience, and they don't care about their soldiers, they just blindly copy captured or stolen western technology.

There were even American teenagers in the 1990s that thought the MiG-23 was a straight copy of the F-4 and that there are 30 calibre holes in the MiG-23 air intakes because the captured F-4 had suffered small arms damage and so they copied the small arms damage as if it was part of the design.

These same experts thought the Polikarpov I-16 was actually a copy of an American GeeBee racer... because they look similar.

The fact is that sometimes the Soviets copied, sometimes they bought designs from the west... the Maxim machine gun for instance, the DC-3 Dakota transport type, various Ford truck designs were bought... Christies tank and suspension design was bought and used... many early Russian tanks were French and British in origin that were bought and modified and improved.

The Nene jet engine and the Derwent jet engine they bought just after WWII and put in production were rapidly modified and upgraded far beyond what they started out as to be fairly quickly quite unrecognisable. The engine in the original An-2 was developed from a Wright Cyclone engine produced under licence in the Soviet Union.

It would be fair to say the new high tech thermal imagers they are using on their Armata tanks and other vehicles and helicopters were originally based on French and Swedish and South African thermal imager technology, but the current models are their designs.

Where they can buy, they buy... but where they try to buy and are barred, or backstabbed... like Mistral helicopter carriers, or turbines from Siemens, then they will do what they can for themselves...

Ironically the the sanctions are supposed to hurt but in the longer term it means they start producing their own versions which they can improve and develop to make better, which can then be sold on the international market as competition for the original.

Extra salty for the Ukraine because no one else was mass buying their ship and helicopter and aircraft engines, and now they are producing improved models they can't make for themselves any more.

Honestly, I think the Chinese should consider sending a small cadre of forces to Syria to operate with Russia and to learn from them. They could let pride blind them and do it themselves on their own, but it makes sense to learn from someone already doing a good job... what they learn could save lives, and it would be an ideal opportunity to test a few of their systems like drones and weapons etc in a realistic environment, and use feedback to improve and update.

The reason I say that is because it will really hurt them if they leave it until they get into a conflict for themselves and they will have very little time to sort out problems and while they sort out problems with things they will suffer casualties. It makes more sense to learn helping Syria get back on its feet and that might lead to a few rebuilding contracts too which is a good little earner...

To be fair when we talk about copies we are actually talking from a position of ignorance... often they will reveal some new missile or aircraft or vehicle that obviously looks familiar... in fact identical to an existing type and we shout copy... but they might have paid for the design and cooperated with the company that made the original to create a licensed version the way India paid to make the Su-30MKI version of the Su-30MK.

The Soviets had all sorts of licence produced products in service like the Li-2, which is essentially their licence produced version of the DC-3, whose military version, the C-47 was widely used... the Soviets actually bought DC-2s in 1935 and then ordered DC-3s a year or two later when they became available and negotiated and paid for production rights to make the aircraft, and if you didn't know any better you would say... copy... which is an understatement... it took 2-3 years to convert the original design and drawings to metric, and of course it had several changes that they needed that were not required on the original... like shutters on the engines for extreme cold air operations and of course they used their own tires and other components to adapt... their standard sheet metal was of a different thickness for instance... just pirate copying it would have been not the easiest option... like they had to with the Tu-4.

We can say they copied this or that new Russian design but how do we know they didn't just pay for design assistance and a bit of cooperation like the Americans did to get vectored thrust high energy nozzles for the F-35.

I would expect a few of these AWACS types based on small islands in the South China Sea would provide excellent early warning as well as a very good air picture of what is happening in the air and on the water in that region...

Would think a few Sonobuoy seabed arrays would complete the picture with an under water view of what is going on too.

So each island might end up like an aircraft carrier with AWACS and fighters as well as anti sub helicopters...

Being a relatively small AWACS aircraft I would think as long as it is an AWACS platform and not just AEW that it should be a popular export item to control smaller groups of aircraft in different regions of a country or even conflict... it is sort of an IADS for aircraft... and dramatically improves the performance of aircraft in a situation because it should be able to provide a 360 degree radar view of the area so fighters can operate with their radars off or just in listen mode, and the AWACS aircraft can manage the available fighters by finding and identifying the threats and targets and allocating aircraft and directing them to launch positions where they can fire their missile wiht a good chance of a kill but where the target aircraft might not even realise they are even there... the ideal situation in air combat.