Siege wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Snow Leopard: License-produced VTOL aircraft broadly analogous to a 1970s-era Harrier. Dunno where it comes from. Umeria has Issues with mass purchase of a San Doradan fighter or I'd work with Siege to gin up one of theirs.
I'm sure we could work out a licensing deal for production in Umeria if that's the issue. Umeria might not like San Dorado, but San Dorado really doesn't care, especially not if this plane is a hypothetical predecessor to the Vixen. Move the old tooling to Umeria, have you guys produce it, and make money off it anyway: it's a win-win deal!
Two separate responses:
1) Snow Leopard is a subsonic aircraft, like the Harrier, and in combat with basically any fighter jet designed after 1960 it'd probably lose. It's designed to provide attack, support in brushfire conflicts, and to fly off of dedicated helicopter-carrying ships.
Umeria's Chariot and Helix's Vixen, by contrast, are (so far as I can tell) fully competent as frontline aviation fighters, and could tangle with most of the fighter jets in the world today with reasonable hope of success, though details depend on details obviously. Sort of like the F-35, as designed with F-16 or Eurofighter technology.
I'm not sure it's entirely accurate to call a VTOL Harrier-like aircraft a precursor to Vixen, but there'd certainly be some similarity, and lessons learned from the Harrier-clone would apply to building Vixen (or Chariot).
Anyway...
2) Actually, thinking about it more, the Umerians at that time in particular (1970-75) would just eat that up and think it was the best thing ever, and whichever techno-bureaucrat negotiated the deal would probably have at least a few people half-jokingly nominating him for king of Umeria.
To be more precise, the Umerians' issue is simply that the warrior-mathematician-bureaucrat class
hates the idea of only being able to defend their country at someone else's pleasure. This was an issue as far back as the Cocaine Wars, and explains why the San Doradan merchants did not get much traction trying to sell the Umerians guns to deal with all the crackheads created by their earlier cocaine sales.
The Umerian response was dominated by the early precursors to the warrior-mathematicians, and they were so focused on building up a domestic arms industry that was
theirs that they were willfully irrational about the idea of buying superior foreign weapons.
By contrast, a situation where someone sells them the production tooling for a combat aircraft, to be operated by low-wage but basically literate and competent Umerian technicians, in exchange for a (very hefty) cut of the sales profits... that would appeal strongly to the Umerians in the '70s, which was the time when they finally had their domestic economy straightened out to the point where they were beginning to be able to think about designing and building modern aircraft.
That would be SO win-win from their point of view, because having the ability to physically build and improve on the weapons, and learn from the design and so on, is what they really value. Even if someone else rakes in the arbitrary value tokens in a big way as a result.
Beowulf wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Er, no, sorry, I meant Mark IV but lost count. Purchases or license production in the mid-1990s, to both complement the prospective fifth generation fighter and provide backup capability if the design turned out to be a flop.
Mark IV version sounds fine to me. License production is probably doable, especially if you use native avionics. Then there isn't a bottleneck for radars and other sensors. I assume you also licensed a prior mark of the J-10.
The Umerians weren't up to building triplesonic fighters that wouldn't fall apart in midair in 1970. By 1975-80 they could have done though this probably resulted in a number of inept workers and more than a few managers and engineers being sent to labor camps for screwing up.
They would gleefully have set up a license-production line for the J-10A or J-10B in the late '70s, even unto the extent of letting the Tianguonese manufacturer make money hand over fist off the deal... as I discussed with Siege and for the same reasons.
Snow Leopard: License-produced VTOL aircraft broadly analogous to a 1970s-era Harrier. Dunno where it comes from. Umeria has Issues with mass purchase of a San Doradan fighter or I'd work with Siege to gin up one of theirs.
The (what is currently numbered J-11) wasn't the first STOVL fighter that Tianguo designed. It's just the first one to get a production contract. An earlier iteration would have been, well, the Harrier, as an armed derivative of the Kestrel.[/quote]Actually I like the idea of it being a San Doradan aircraft design that Helix basically leased production of out to the Umerians because they wanted to clear their production line to turn out the (much faster and nastier) Vixen instead.
Stas Bush wrote:You are making another SDWN and I can't participate... Nooo...
Everyone would welcome you, me included.
!
For myself, I would appreciate any insights you might have on the psychology of the governing bodies in modern China, because while they aren't the same as the Umerians there's at least a funhouse-mirror relationship. It is a matter of which I am relatively ignorant, even though such knowledge would be interesting and useful to me, alas.
Then again, that's exactly the sort of thing that would take up more of your time than you might have to spare, which is fine and I totally understand. I hope your novel kicks butt.