Recently, 2 Chinese military aircraft were seen flying for the first time. Some people wanted to read about my thoughts on them. In this post, I'll be referring to them as "Diamond" and "Dart" based on their shapes. Speculative designations being used elsewhere are:

Diamond = Chengdu J-36
Dart = Shenyang J-XS

some articles

Instead of embedding photos here, I'll just link to some articles with pictures:

business-standard
aerosociety
yahoo

what the photos show

aircraft size

Diamond seems to be ~22m long, with a central weapon bay long enough for the PL-17 or YJ-83 (6.4m), and 2 smaller bays long enough for the PL-15 (4m). It could probably carry glide bombs too. Its wing area is quite large for a fighter aircraft. The planform is similar to a F-16XL, and scaling that up to 22m [...]

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Outline:

(00:28) some articles

(00:41) what the photos show

(00:45) aircraft size

(01:32) aerodynamics

(02:02) control surfaces

(02:54) stealth

(04:04) landing gear

(04:25) flight location

(04:48) engines

(06:06) sensors

(06:44) cost

(07:27) strategic purposes

(07:48) Diamond

(09:40) Dart

(10:08) other possible new aircraft

(10:55) Taiwan timelines

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First published:
January 1st, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ceknBY4GpoNWwJNn9/new-chinese-stealth-aircraft

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.