Shenyang J-31 Stealth Fighter

What is the point of a VTOL fighter these days?

Enormous penalty in lots of performance areas and cost in development and operation for an ability to use very short takeoff strips or operate from small ships.

It is better to make bigger ships.

If your airstrip gets attacked then you operate your aircraft from short strips of road... they can't destroy all your roads.

As I said... the penalty imposed by taking off vertically would be much greater than operating your aircraft from the road outside your airbase.

Besides the suggestion that a VTOL aircraft can just take off from any clearing is bunk.

Pick a clearing in a forest and try to take off there and all the mud and grass your jet engines blast into the air will guarantee your engines will stop working and never work again.

In practise Harriers never operated from forest clearings and generally used rolling takeoffs of 200-300m which a Mig-29 could probably have used too.

Most 5th gen fighters have very high thrust to weight ratios anyway so with an air to air load will likely be able to operate from strips not much longer than 3-400m so for a runway that is 2-5km long to disable it you would need to hit it in 10 to 25 places to ensure there was not enough contiguous flat surface to take off from.

Given time runways will be repaired too... if you anticipate the enemy will be able to hit all your airfields before your fighters even get airborne then perhaps you really don't want your pilots in the air anyway...

Of course regarding the triplane layout... they seem to want to make their own Su-33s... and no it is not stealthy... at all.

Nice idea in theory, but taking a container ship into a combat zone and making it a target is not the best idea.

It simply doesn't have the armour or compartmentalism or the resistance to battle damage a real warship has.

Nice and sneaky but when exposed a sitting duck.

And lets face it the Harrier is a slow aircraft which at the time had the best weapon it could possibly have had at the time in the all aspect AIM-9L.

Against decent aircraft in widespread service at the time with a decent radar and BVR missiles they would have been in serious trouble.

A Mig-23 with look down shoot down radar and R-24R and R-24T AAMs and R-60s and those Harriers would have been in serious trouble... with their speed the Migs would have been able to pick and choose where and when to engage and they could engage from head on at long range... unlike the Harrier.

Obviously now with AMRAAMs the Sea Harrier is much better off than it was, but it is still a subsonic fighter and when the enemy has R-77s it is still in trouble.

The fan also occupies an enormous internal volume and while hot air ingestion is a serious issue FOD ingestion is just as important and this lifting fan improves the situation with hot air ingestion it does nothing for FOD ingestion which is the primary concern if you just want to take off anywhere.

I rather suspect the VTOL F-35 is not going to go into service anyway.

1) Much greater lifting power compared to ducting jet exhaust

Actually small vertical jet engines are more compact at were the choice of the only other two supersonic VTOL aircraft... the Yak-141 and a French modification of one of their Mirage aircraft.

Such a vessel would be too easy to sink to be effective.

It makes much more sense to use cargo vessels to keep delivering cheap goods to the west and defeat them economically...

I don't think there is enough superiority in numbers any more.

Even the Soviets went for numbers but still had performance in mind as well, but with modern multi targeting systems and smart weapons that generally hit their targets more often than not outnumbering your opponent is simply not enough.

The other issue is how effective will that first surprise attack be... because the response will be to sink all Chinese flagged cargo vessels on sight... which will totally cripple Chinese exports and imports capability by sea.

Wasting money on a VSTOL aircraft like that is silly. What they should be doing is spending money on alternative fuels. It is not that hard to get an internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen gas. The byproduct of burning hydrogen gas in an engine is water in the form of steam. Collect and condense that water into a small storage container in the car and when you get home from your journey you connect a pipe to your car so the water runs into a fuel cell and a solar panel is used to separate the hydrogen and oxygen from the water to be pumped back into your car for your trip tomorrow. In fact there is no reason why the fuel cell and solar panels couldn't be included in the car design. No more petrol stations. Wont that be a kick in the balls of the big powerful western oil companies? Sorry... there are no more western oil companies... they have rebranded themselves as "energy" companies... just like the Department of War and the Ministry of War both changed their names at the end of WWII to Department of Defence and the Ministry of Defence. Their function and purpose was not changed in any way... just their stationary.

If the US ever did anything to really p!ss the Chinese off the easiest thing the Chinese could do is start selling US bonds.

The Chinese have bought US debt in the form of US bonds for some time now and it doesn't take a genius to work out that they want leverage on the US for something.

The idea that the US has any chance of isolating China like it has North Korea is silly. It is not the US government that has a say, it is western big business that are flooding into China looking for places to set up their filthy non safe standard factories to use the plentiful labour that does not require health benefits or any rights at all. Cheap production allows larger profit margins.
The US might put sanctions on China but Europe wont, and that will give their products a huge competitive edge... it will be much cheaper than the American goods made in some other sh!thole where they don't even have a word for unions or workers rights.

Boom. How you going to fly to target Chinese cargo ships when all your
fuel is gone? US submarines could be fooled by reflagging cargo ships as
Taiwanese.

You are missing one important factor.
WTF are either of them going to start a real war with each other for?

Libya makes sense for the US because there is lots of untapped oil resources in the country, and whether the new regime loves the US or hates it... if it wants to rebuild it will need to access those untapped oil resources... which will lower the price of oil on the international market... which is exactly what the US wants. It wouldn't even matter if it was Chinese or even Russian companies that get the contracts... as long as that oil flows the US is happy.

A war with the US would lead to immediate damage and blockade of China... hard to enjoy economic growth in such a condition. For the US it might not be so bad as cutting off the cheap workforce of China might make some US industries start looking at using american workers instead.

The huge irony for the American people is that it was their tax money that bailed out the rich people in America. What did these rich bankers do? Spend money in the US economy to stimulate growth for all Americans?
Nah!!!! P!ss off. They put their bail out money into China because the returns to them are better in the short term and they can make more money that way.

What the American people should have demanded was that the bailout money should have paid back all the bad loans. It wasn't that long ago that there were laws that said if a bank lent money to someone they weren't sure could pay the money back then that person was not liable if they couldn't pay it back.
It was a law that made loan sharking illegal as an example.
It was also the main reason why getting a loan with most banks used to be harder than getting into Harvard. You basically got it if you were rich. In other words you got a loan if you could prove you had so much assets and income that you didn't really need a loan.
They changed those rules and banks would give anyone a loan to buy a house as long as the house was collateral because if you found you couldn't pay the loan they just took the house and with house prices going up all the time they didn't lose anything. When the house market collapsed however and house prices plummeted all of a sudden you had millions of loans worth billions of dollars where the borrower can't afford to pay off the loan and the loan is now worth more than the house the loan was used to buy. The borrower could sell their house but were unlikely to get enough money from the sale assuming they could even sell the house, to pay back the loan so they would still owe money to the bank and have no house to live it.

Another option would be to nuke a couple of US cities... that would destroy a lot of houses and push the price of the remaining houses up so they could be sold and the money paid to the banks in full.

Starting in 2005 illegal aliens were given the privilege of getting mortgages in America. I believe it was 2008 when there were news reports that HUD said there were 5 million illegal immigrants who were in foreclosure.

5 million times average mortgage of $450,000each since most of them were in California=Trillions.

And do you think it was the big powerful illegal alien lobby group that got them this right for mortgages?
Do you think it might have been the greedy banks that pushed it through thinking that with house prices the way they are it doesn't matter if pets could get mortgages the banks still make money on the deals... as long as the house prices keep going up.

The true numbers now may even be higher. illegal immigrants in America were buying and selling homes between themselves then running across the border with Trillions.

Really? The world economic collapse wasn't greedy bankers... it was poor illegal mexicans who are now rich mexicans?
Don't really read much about US border patrol catching people hauling large bundles of money into Mexico across the US Mexico border.

Starting in 2000 in California the spanish speaking radio stations were saying illegal immigrants could buy a new automobile with little down and only a utility bill. The illegals in California jumped and danced.....then got their new SUV's and drove them across the border never to pay for them.

In all actuality America is insolvent. All it's money went south of the border and to China.

So what you are saying is that Americans offered to sell cars and houses to people who were in America illegally.
I don't believe Americans are that dumb.

The War will be over currency policy or arms sales to Taiwan. China will only go to war in self defense.

It would be very easy to engineer a war with China... just have a colour revolution in Taiwan. The US has practised it all over Eastern Europe and now the Middle East and Africa.

The point is however that China has nukes and a military big enough and a government that really wont care about casualties when it is trying to get what it wants.

China will start listening to the US about the value of its currency when the US listens to China about "Human Rights".

Hehehehe... I think back to some of the chats I had with mostly American teenagers in the mid 1990s about how the Russian MIC is dead and that by now Russia would have old model F-16s in service and other cast off western fighters.

It never occurred to them that the Russian MIC might recover, or that other countries like China or India might develop competitive aircraft.

Obviously we know very little about this Chinese aircraft, but the fact that it no longer looks like a warmed over Mig-21 is progress and such a development might result in Japan re examining its post WWII policies.

At the start of WWII the Japanese naval air arm was second to none and that didn't happen by accident.

They have plenty of potential, but a lot to relearn too.

It looks to me like China have some spies inside the JSF program...