Shenyang / Chengdu "6th Gen" Aircraft - General Discussion and Speculation

I can see how the twin aperture factors in that equation. Not many existing AAMs are armoured enough anyway, and I'm not sure if the boundary air surrounding an AMRAAM is hot enough to render even a measly 50kw laser useless, especially when the missile is in its last-mile cruise phase and slowing down.

It seems extremely doubtful those apertures support any kind of DEW. A laser would not use a large sensor window; it would use a trainable mirror. And if the goal was shooting down missiles, then only arming along the frontal arc shows a lot of faith in the system and the pilots - since they would not be able expose their tail in a fight.
 
It seems extremely doubtful those apertures support any kind of DEW. A laser would not use a large sensor window; it would use a trainable mirror. And if the goal was shooting down missiles, then only arming along the frontal arc shows a lot of faith in the system and the pilots - since they would not be able expose their tail in a fight.
I won't go out of line and claim that those dual apertures are 100% super lasers either, only time will tell. But putting giga sized facets purely for IRST also doesn't seem like it unless the PLAAF is betting all in for some breakthrough in passive ranging.
 
I won't go out of line and claim that those dual apertures are 100% super lasers either, only time will tell. But putting giga sized facets purely for IRST also doesn't seem like it unless the PLAAF is betting all in for some breakthrough in passive ranging.
That does make sense, and it isn't even first such solution(see xf-108 rapier and yf-12), and here we need stealth(no, facetted solution isn't ideal).

Laser with any energy to speak of almost certainly will not work well through such window; it's already a type of weapon system built around rather delicate balance of heat at both ends.
 
All the heat from lasers and whatever AESA they put there has to go somewhere tho. Anyone speculated yet on how much say, fuel carried by the J-36 ? That will determine the cooling capacity available to the airframe. Which in turn capped how much power you can put in your lasers or radars/avionics.

The fuel will act as heatsink, absorbing the heat and those heat will seep out to the environment through the fuel tank wall. Thus making the wing tank ideal as it provide volume and potentially large surface area to dissipate the heat. So more fuel = more cooling capacity.

I have made some crude estimate on fuel capacity based on the reference wing area of 184 sqm for J-36. I have to devise correction factor tho as the equation is based on airliner wing fuel capacity. It yield me some 10 metric tonne of fuel in the wing. the next step would be the ratio of how much is likely stored in wing vs fuselage. 50% ratio (F-15 does have about 48% of internal fuel in wing) Thus the total fuel capacity for the airframe is 20 metric tonne.

Using that value and use the linear regression equation i developed based on known aircraft cooling. This can give some cooling capacity of 111 KW/sqm of aperture area. Not everything tho goes into avionics.. only about 39% of those. Thus for radar 43.3 KW/sqm

laser is i'm curious how much.. Like radar tho it depends on power and dimension available to the aperture.
 
All the heat from lasers and whatever AESA they put there has to go somewhere tho. Anyone speculated yet on how much say, fuel carried by the J-36 ? That will determine the cooling capacity available to the airframe. Which in turn capped how much power you can put in your lasers or radars/avionics.
I was assuming something in the neighborhood of 40+klbs of fuel for the big USAF NGAD concepts, and the J36 seems to be designed to many of the same concepts.


laser is i'm curious how much.. Like radar tho it depends on power and dimension available to the aperture.
Lasers are notoriously inefficient.

For sake of discussion let's assume a 50kw laser.

Old designs you'd be talking 450kw of heat to dump out, high end new designs somewhere around 50-150kw. Personally, I'd assume around needing to dump 100kw of heat from the laser.
 

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