j_hungary
Professional
Gave me a chuckle - you saw the crappiness of the engine?
Talked about it with a previous post, read post 112. Normal engine today don't smoke like that when they are supposed to have more than enough low FAM (Fuel-Air Mixture) ratio. It takes a very serious condition (Acute bank angle/high g or anything that diverted the airflow) to limit the FAM and smoke come out.

In 5th gen, your engine needs to be able to withstand very low FAM by pass, if you smoke like that everytime you put down your throttle, you are not stealth because you are going to get a lot of accel/decel time on an engine. So I wouldn't call this a 5th gen engine if they smoke like that during a horizontal run, in this video, they call it "Smoking like a F4" and these are ex-fighter pilot and my explaination of engine is coming form another fighter pilot, that's my brother, who incidentally is a Trent Engine tech working for Rolls Royce after decade of working for Boeing.
And most 6th gen you would need to have high efficiency engine to operate in any flight profile, also able to use DEW, so I would say for sure you won't see that engine in the actual 6th gen.
Agreed.
None of these things would be visible on a random cellphone video - same would most likely go for a NGAD video of similar quality. Otherwise agreed. Considering most of these features would not be visible on video asking for visual proof is a silly catch-22. Hence we speculate.
Hence I don't like to speculate.
But you acknowledge tailless does give an edge in stealth no mater how small. I don't see any canards on J-36. It uses these tail fins for maneuverability:
View attachment 94153
Expanding surface area doesn't necessarily reduce stealth especially if that new surface area is in the same (mathematical) plane as the rest of the plane, unlike canards.
It has to be either canard or expanded flight surface, that's why this is delta shape, what you lose in reflection from the tail fin you gain from the increased delta shape wing. It didn't matter if the extra surface is in the same area, because you don't just cut the beam from 90 degree angle. It bounces off everywhere, otherwise the bigger platform would have been stealth if you only cut the beam from 90 degree
More or less agreed. That's why I think discussing about what does and does not qualify as 6th gen is mere semantics and should be ignored. A more productive discussion is why you think it is or it is not 6th gen.
Again, as I said, I don't think that's 6th gen just by the stuff that I see, again, unless China define their 6th gen is simply just tailless delta and thrust vectoring, because that's the only thing I see in those videos.
And again, as I said, can they use this as a 6th gen platform? Sure, why not, everything can be used as 6th gen platform, but again, I would need more context, like this.
We know this is a video of a plane dogfighting another plane, but the context of that is this is a X-62, and they are using AI to dogfight, if such context does not exist, I wouldn't buy AI can be used to dogfight either, now whether you believe this actually happen is another issue, but this is the context of this video.
We don't give the same luxury when saying China copied F-35 or "copying" any of the other planes. Now the shoe is on the other foot.
Again, as I said, if this is the case, then wouldn't China be copying X-36 and RQ-180? I mean they wouldn't be one day waking up without any input with both platform and say we should put tailless design in our next gen fighter, it has to come from somewhere. I mean sure, you can say it's a "coincident" that they also come up with Tailless design after X-36, B2, B21 and RQ-180 already hit the market, but that probably is too much luxury........




