New Chinese defense blog: Interesting Photographs of J-18, H-8

Whilst meandering around the internet looking for some good j-20 planforms I came across an interesting blog. It appears to contain some pretty good and unique images of some current Chinese defense projects.

The first image that caught my eye was one stumbled upon showing a sketch of the J-18 VSTOL fighter. It shows the aircraft being lifted by a hydraulic platform elevated to ~40* with dual engine nozzles rotated down similar to the technology used on the F-35B, albeit without the forward lift fan. Also included are images purportedly showing the aircraft taking off and planforms showing no less than 7 internally carried short and medium ranged weapons. Page containing J-18 images

After some more poking around I found this which contains what appear to be some poorly PS'ed images of the supposed H-8 stealth bomber. What is interesting to me about these images is that they seem to intentionally include objects that can be used to give a sense of scale to the bomber. Also included are some technical specifications of the bomber; to include a 10,000km range unrefueled and a cruising speed of M1.2.

I did some searching and there seem to be a lot of unique images on this blog, not specifically just these two pages. Also interesting is the prose of the writing. It almost seems like a propaganda piece; which could have more to do with the many inherent language barriers between Mandarin and English than any actual political objective. There seems to be no clear information about who runs or writes the blog but there is a decent amount of information that can be gleaned from the various posts.

Thoughts?

a reply to: Caughtlurking
Thoughts?

Yes, they should be looking to develop their own innovative systems to advance the human race rather than compete with a government whos capabilities are impossible to ascertain.


Oh look a bootleg F-22...ooh china is advance.


how about you do something no one knows how to do.

a reply to: tadaman

That would require a new Operation paperclip.

a reply to: tadaman

China is playing catch up even to nations like Russia and Japan. They are building designs that give them the most return for the lowest risk. The most important part is learning to work with RAM and composites, and developing your own systems. By building designs that are similar to designs that you know work, you're taking part of the difficulty out of the picture, while at the same time you leapfrog your experience to where you can build something new and unexpected.

a reply to: Caughtlurking

While interesting, both need to be taken with a grain of salt. Both are propaganda pieces that seam to be written through the style of the typical state run mouth pieces. Both show concept pics and CG created photographs that have been around for years now.
China has a tendency to do the same thing as Iran and N. Korea. Make outlandish claims and try to back those claims up with fabricated visual special effects. I understand why they do it but what I don't think they understand is that this type of propaganda, that is directed at the the US and the West, only serves to get the fear mongers in the West into a frenzied froth. That in tern gets the US and the West to spend more money on defense R&D and policies to counter what China is trying to do in the region. It's rather counter productive for them in general.

a reply to: Sammamishman


I don't feel like the images have been around for years. Mostly I find them on Chinese forums that seem to be relatively recent. That H-8 concept looks a whole lot better than Russia's latest flying wing drawing. There are quite a few useful pieces about their technology on that blog that is hard to find in English anywhere else.


In my opinion it's just a decent site to reference for obscure Chinese defense projects. Propaganda is what it is but it's better than no information. It's just a little aspirational and fantastical. This J-15 concept page is a great example. Funny but with some good images. In their minds they are right there with us and not 15-20 years back.

The first image at the first link you list, captioned "J-18 VTOL Stealth Fighter 1," also appears on this site dated from 2011. That's at least 4 years old, so it's been around for years. I found the second pic here, from 2013. Still qualifies as years (if barely).