The military-industrial scientific research system of the academic master.

Although Strelets and Pogosyan also felt a little uncomfortable, fortunately they still had a decent project to work on.

Regardless of which finished product is stronger or weaker, at least everyone is still at the same stage and their mentality is not unbalanced.

But there is another group of people who are not so lucky——

It should be said that Europeans are not backward in the concept of fourth-generation fighter jets.

As early as the 22s, before the F90 made its first flight, Britain and France jointly proposed their own next-generation fighter program "FOAS" (Future Air Combat System) and won over a group of countries to prepare for joint research and development.

It's just that at this point in time, Europe had already shown a tendency to become somewhat limp, and military pressure had dropped sharply after the end of the Cold War. Rather than continuing to invest funds in the military field where "there is no direct benefit", politicians still prefer to use the funds to directly distribute welfare in exchange for more votes.

In this context, the high research and development costs of the fourth-generation fighter jets are bound to make people retreat.

Therefore, since the project was launched, the entire project has been a lot of noise but little action. The actual investment cannot even catch up with the wealthy Americans, let alone the Russians who raised funds through various channels to develop the MiG-1.44 and S37.

However, Europeans soon discovered that lack of funding was only the least of their problems.

In terms of technology, due to management chaos and the lack of key technologies, Britain and France were unable to understand the then mainstream EF2000 and Rafale, and even lagged behind China's J-10 in progress.

However, instead of catching up, the relevant participating countries had a legitimate reason to delay.

It was not until around the turn of the century that the United Kingdom once again demonstrated its talent for stirring up trouble and chose to withdraw from the cooperation and participate in the United States' Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) project. The latter's restrictions on technology transfer resulted in FOAS being unable to obtain the most critical stealth technology, and the entire project eventually came to nothing.

After that, France proposed a fourth-generation fighter with a tailless delta wing layout based on the Mirage 4000, trying to improve stealth performance by simplifying the aerodynamic structure. However, Dassault and Snecma were struggling with the problems of Rafale and M88 at the time, and had no spare energy to complete such a technically difficult project that lacked sufficient financial support, so it only remained in the PPT stage.

The United Kingdom, which participated in the JSF project, may be able to obtain a fairly decent multi-purpose stealth fighter. However, at the research and development level, Lockheed Martin, the general contractor of JSF, split the development task into a large number of fragmented and scattered tasks, and deliberately assigned several unrelated parts to each "partner country" involved in the research and development.

Anyone with engineering experience can see that this approach is bound to lead to catastrophic management chaos.

Sure enough, even Lockheed Martin itself began to gradually lose control of the situation. As for BAE Systems, which was commissioned by the UK to participate in the research and development, it was unable to obtain any valuable technology or experience at all. It was equivalent to working for the Americans but having to pay their own wages.

The Elysee Palace or 10 Downing Street may not care about this situation, but aviation practitioners in the two countries are inevitably dissatisfied.

Therefore, if we were to ask who felt the most uncomfortable after the first flight of aircraft No. 2001, Charles Edelsteiner from Dassault would definitely be one of the strong contenders.

When it came to the FOAS program, Dassault was one of the most dedicated participants, and even relied on the Rafale project to verify the feasibility of some key subsystems.

It was only because of the lack of the most critical stealth technology and the traditional betrayal of the British that they had to give up.

Now that I have seen the news about the maiden flight of China's stealth fighter, and I have frequent dealings with Chinese counterparts on a daily basis, it would be a lie to say that I am not itching to try it out.

This reaction was quickly noticed by Liu Yongquan.

About half a month after the maiden flight of aircraft No. 2001, he took the opportunity of attending a meeting in Beijing to find Chang Haonan with a record of the meeting.

My original intention was not to report anything, I just brought it up for fun.

"Mr. Chang, I noticed that Dassault seems to be very concerned about the development of our Project 20..."

The latter is now checking the material characterization results reported by Li Yabo. They have reproduced the experimental results that the HDK305 coating material exhibits a negative refractive index under specific circumstances, but have not yet figured out the mechanism behind this phenomenon, let alone designing a transparent material that can stably exhibit a negative refractive index.

So when he first heard the other party's report, he didn't take it seriously and just thought it was natural.

He replied half-jokingly:

"Lao Liu, I feel that from the day of the test flight last month until now, the whole world has been very concerned about the development of our Project 20..."

But Liu Yongquan did not laugh, but shook his head solemnly:

"But Mr. Chang, what Ed Steiner is interested in is a little different."

He turned the transcript to a page in the middle:

"You see, he only briefly mentioned our current progress and some specific parameters of the No. 2001 aircraft. Instead, he spent a long time asking indirect questions. His implicit meaning was to ask whether there was a direct technical connection between our fourth-generation fighter and the J-10..."

Hearing this, Chang Haonan finally shifted his attention from the computer screen to the document in front of him.

According to records, in the past half month, Edsteiner went to Shengjing twice and met with Liu Yongquan for a total of five hours.

Nominally, it is to coordinate with the other two smaller models in the Falcon Z series, but less than 10% of the content is related to this.

The rest of the story is just as Liu Yongquan said, and every other sentence he talks about is about stealth aircraft.

And the focus is quite tricky.

"To be honest, his question is not a sensitive one, but I really don't know how to answer it..."

Liu Yongquan continued to complain:

“I said at the beginning that since they are all made from the same design, there must be a technical continuity, just like the Mirage 2000 and Rafale of Dassault, but he still insisted on asking whether it could be compared to the Mirage 2000 and Mirage 4000…”

"I guess it's probably because these French people are jealous and want to find evidence to prove that our fourth-generation fighter jets are improved on the basis of the J-10..."

These words almost made Chang Haonan laugh out loud.

Because he suddenly thought of a famous saying by an expert from the Strategic Research Institute in his previous life: "We don't have any fourth-generation aircraft, the most we have is a modified J-10."

I was ridiculed for a long time because of this.

It was not until later that someone discovered that he had even participated in the acceptance of the domestically produced fourth-generation fighter jets...

However, while he was laughing, he also remembered something else.

In the original timeline, after the J-20 completed its first flight, the greatly stimulated French decided to restart their fourth-generation fighter program.

However, starting from scratch would be too difficult and time-consuming, so we seriously discussed the plan of developing a "quasi-fourth-generation fighter" based on the Rafale.

Now that Dassault has suddenly tried to sound out the possibility of modifying the J-10, it is hard to guarantee that this idea may be related to it.

So he suddenly changed his joking expression and said seriously:

"Old Liu, find an opportunity to calm down Edelsteiner and tell him this: Although the J-20 is a brand new model, its design was based on the J-10 twin-engine version that was used as a backup plan in the early years... Of course, don't be too straightforward. It's best to pretend that he was tricked into telling you something by accident, so that he can believe it more easily..."

"..."

After all the requests, Liu Yongquan was confused.

He spoke hesitantly:

"Boss Chang, why haven't I heard that... the J-10 has a twin-engine version?"

His tone was full of grievance, as if he had suddenly become an outsider.

Chang Haonan shook his head helplessly:

"Of course not, but Edsteiner is a professional after all. He is just impulsive now. Once he calms down after a while, it will be easy to see that there is no direct relationship between the J-20 and the J-10, so he has to add a layer of non-existent so-called 'twin-engine J-10' in the middle to make the lie more convincing..."