Don't put it past the Chinese to put out something for show without actually having the functional equipment under the hood. Stealth is hard -- sensors have the potential to leak radiation, communications can be picked up on, etc. Just because the Chinese have something flying that looks stealth doesn't mean they're any closer than we thought they were.
While you might be right, this sounds like classic cognitive dissonance. Instead of accepting that China is a fast rising military/economic power, let's rather just believe that they're bluffing.
These straw-man arguments are the reason why I don't post on Hacker News more often. Where did I say ignore China's rise as a power?
I'm basically just saying: don't panic. The US lead in aerospace isn't going away any time soon, we are farther ahead of the rest of the world than most people give us credit for. We first tested the F-22 in 1990. You know when the F-22 first saw combat? It hasn't yet. For 22 years no one has anything that we would even use it against.
If you want something to be concerned about, China's IP transfer requirements for companies doing business there and the cyber-attacks on our defense contractors should be more than enough to keep you busy.
I am not an expert on stealth, but AFAIK, being "stealth" is more a marketing term than objectively measurable.
Stealth is not a binary property "either stealth or not stealth", but a relative one "less easy to spot by adversaries who have binoculars, radar, IR, etc".
Because of that, one can call almost any design stealthy. If this radiates, say, half of what their previous generation did, I would call it stealth, even if it is not the best in the world.
Also, any fighter will produce lots of heat that it will have to radiate somewhere (eventually), so if you place your IR detector in the right spot, it will light up. That makes it a bit of an arms race. For example, radiating all heat upwards will do wonders, as long as your adversary doesn't have anything higher up looking in your direction. Once they do, you will have to find some other approach.
A more appropriate term than stealth (which really applies only to radar detection) is "low observability." This includes multi-spectrum detection; IR, radar, acoustic, and visual means.
There's a lot of domain knowledge in traditional engineering that is impossible replicate artificially - much more so than software.
You can take the best rail engineers in the world, put them in a room, and they still won't be able to make a half-decent mid-size sedan to save their lives.
It's not about if you're "good at science and engineering", it's about your country's history and track record in building bleeding-edge aircraft. China is playing catchup in a huge way, though they do get to take the fast lane thanks to ex-Soviet tech.
Ace aerospace engineers come out of building airplanes, not reading a book or going to conferences.
Or provide some empirical data that proves that your not just an ignorant racist.
EDIT (in light of response): My apologies if this is indeed sarcasm. No need to take that somewhere else, instead I can take my 'complete lack of understanding sarcasm' somewhere else. :)
science, yes. engineering, not as much as you'd think.
Asian cultures place a HUGE HUGE HUGE emphasis on rote memorization. The kind of learning that isn't exactly conducive to creative endeavors like engineering.
The probability that this is just a Potemkin airplane is not very high. Developing an airframe isn't just Legos... This is a highly sophisticated design, and appears to match all the prerequisites for matching the normal criteria for "stealth." Just because you're conflating emcon and other security features doesn't diminish the likelihood that this craft is good at avoiding detection by radar.
> The origins of the fighter are equally murky, although superficial similarities to the U.S. F-22 and F-35 have fueled speculation in the West that Beijing based the J-31′s design on blueprints reportedly stolen from the servers of at least six American aerospace subcontractors in 2009.
There was some drama about China possibly obtaining US stealth technology during Yugoslavia. There is an even more crazy conspiracy theory going on that this is why we bombed their embassy.
The Yugoslavian incident involved an F-117 -- completely different low observable technology than that used in the F-22/J-20/etc.
The mumblings I've heard is that the Chinese stole blueprints from the F-22 project. I don't have a URL handy at the moment, as I'm not near a web browser.
Besides, you can Google a sized-referenced picture of an F-22 from every angle. It's a relatively well-documented airframe.
F-22 is really awesome because it has X, Y and Z properties. And to have X, Y and Z in your plane there is one good and reasonable way to make it happen. It is the obvious way. If the US didn't come up with it someone else would have. By restricting design you are stopping innovation... or where did I go wrong in reasoning this way? Honest question.
I don't think many people are claiming that all patented designs are 'obvious', even to a field expert. Just that quite a lot of the ones currently making news headlines are.
The issue of there being 'only one good way to do it' is completely separate. It is analytic that legally barring competitors from implementing even a non-obvious design, once it has been discovered/invented, restricts others from further innovating on it.
It would be difficult to argue that the US should license all of its military technology to China on FRAND-like terms. But when companies refuse to do this trans-nationally, it seems like trade war, especially if there is only one way to do it. It's an interesting question at what point the profitable IP owned by a country's corporations should be considered a strategic national asset (and IMO it illuminates some of the decisions by trade organisations and even courts).
The appropriation of any technology with potential military applications will always be governed the rules of the game -- there is no global legal authority to appeal to in such matters and nor would the USA want there to be one, for obvious reasons.
Your reasoning is perfectly valid, with the caveat that public policy typically does not have the goal of global advancement of military technology (in war, what matters is what you have relative to what the enemy has), whereas it does, or at least should, have the goal of global advancement of civilian technology (economics is not a zero-sum game).
There is more than one way to skin a cat. Look at the YF-23, the competitor to the F-22 which won the ATF competition. Other than having two engines, a wing and a cockpit, it bears little resemblance to the F-22. The same also holds true with the XF-32 and the F-35. Both were competing with similar design goals in the JSF competition, yet look very dissimilar.
Good way to sneak up on an AWACS over the strait though. Who cares if you get whacked by escorts on the way back?