With regard to America’s economic power vs China, please remember that the Chinese will soon have a middle class with purchasing power that will be larger than the U.S. Give it ten years or so. Don’t believe me? Ask any major global brand where its focus will be in the next 15 years. Agreed America is restrained increasingly but powerful or not, no nation can fight 2 simultaneous wars and fight more and most importantly afford it on a sustained basis. The true cost of Iraq and Afghanistan on U.S power has to be measured in terms of economic costs and political ones like we are seeing in the U.S’s very restrained response to Russia. Whats truly alarming is the failure of the U.S to resolve this conflict before it escalated. I think of the Georgian president’s continious appeals to U.S and the international community for help which implies they were expecting it and the ongoing miscalculation of intent by both the Bush administration and the Kremlin regarding each other.

In a legal sense if China acquired the technology for the Su 27, adapted it and improved it there’s little Russia can do; its called reverse engineering and is near impossible to sue sucessfully over.

To be frank, Russia expected this. The Chinese reverse engineered their equipment in the 60s so China desiring to reverse engineer again is no surprise. If you go to China and see how much is outrightly copied by a nation that has almost no concept or respect of copyright then you quickly realise if you sell to China, expect your products to be copied. DVDs anyone? How many years were the U.S complaining over that one. My point Is Russia knew this would happen, that’s why it restricted engine technology, the flight control system et cetera.

Does it matter? Not really, but if Sukhoi honestly expects China not to reverse engineer, it is being naive which I do not believe is the case. Remember its Chinese imports of Russian technology that kept Russian factories open and lets face it, a partially composite Flanker will die just as easily to a Raptor…but I’m sure there are propaganda phamplets outhere that suggest otherwise…

You convinced me Sferrin. Forgot just how large a 16inch shell would be. Plenty of volume for a scamjet /etc. Additionally shells have got to have a lower cost of ownership than carrier plus airwing plus weapon themselves

A scramjet assisted projectile is a very good idea but surely it will be constrained in size (it has to fit a railgun launcher / barrell) vs a potentially much larger uav / jsf deployed hypersonic missile which obviously wont be hypersonic when launched but can be much larger than railgun weapon plus be fired from medium altitudes. Thus range advantage should in theory always lie with air launched weapon which by being less dimensionally constrained can carry more propellent for greater ranges. Looking at soviet antishipping missiles clearly size and range are linked, the soviet meteorite hypersonic missile being positively huge in dimensions given high speed and range requirements.

Its an interesting concept but what you propose is just a longer ranged engagement between opponent vessels. If say by 2020 we have such battleships, what stops them from being cobbled down by uavs deployed by carrier firing hypersonic (developed for new U.S long range strike bomber) antishipping weapons likely to be available in the same timescale? What we have is a repeat of Yamato vs Aircraft carrier. As long as carrier maintains distance (past defence zones were some 600kms just to defeat Backfire threats of 80s), this new battleship will be impotent but uavs and or jsf will easily have an engagerment range advantage to say nothing of fact that the U.S would retain carriers simply because of their huge investment in them. If carriers had 600km plus buffer zones to defeat backfire threats obviously they can do the same against battleship. Unfortunately for battleship, at this range AND greater the carrier via uavs and or JSF can strike out and engage battleship. Perhaps if battleship was stealthy like DDX it may stand some chance of survival but long range artillery is not a decisive capability against carrier aviation (shame, such a ship would look awesome).

An interesting question is whether the KS 172 if it enters service can be fired on datalinked information. If it could, its use cued to VLF radars could be very useful in a saturation fire situation. Even if you don’t hit those Raptors they will use up alot of energy and be defensive well out from their mission objectives and combined with some silent Sam launches (S400 can illuminate just for last 2 secs) you could have some VERY interesting results. Conversely you could just fire that monster KS 172 on information provided by a S300 or S 400 told to scan an area highlighted by VLF radars. As for American jammers, they wont exist very long on a battlefield with 400km sams and 300km+ aams. Now move those sams around alot as Yugoslvia did VERY effectively and all you have is alot of wasted Harm shots and a high probability your Stealth force can’t route around / target threat radars it can’t detect because they keep moving and use LPI waveforms to say nothing of just being silent until datalinked to scan sectors on information provided from contioniously emmitting VLF radars which will be QUITE safe with S300s protecting them against harms etc. Now before we say F22s and B2s can target the sams lets remind ourselves of the outstanding job Nato and U.S did in attacking Yugoslav sams and Iraqi Scuds. Until the U.S can perfect radar that can penetrate foliage (fat chance, they have been trying for 30 years) our sams will be quite safe as long as they move around (easy) and keep emissions to a minimum and when they do emit, use discrete waveforms and short scan patterns (easy for a phased array radar). As for killing the VLF radars, these are very numerous in countries like Russia and China so say killing one in China might not do you much good, Russia for instance has HUNDREDS of them all overlapping. As for using Rivet joint/ jamming assets, those won’t last long if they are close enough to your Raptor force to be useful to it. The truth is America has not faced an enemy with equivalent numbers of aircraft and the same generation of Hardware in a very long time and no a handful of Mig 29s in the Yugoslav and Iraqi Airforces does not a formidable foe make. The F22 by its shear expense and developmental timescale has become vulnerable to the very systems (sams and fighters) it set out to dominate. In the 8 years since first EMD flight in 97 we see proliferation of advanced longwave IR detectors, secure datalinked enabled netcentric warfare, long ranged sams and aams , radars with 20Kw power to say nothing of Sam Radar developments which must be at least equivalent and lets not forget VLF radars now can be datalinked by almost anyone and no Stealth can’t negate VLF on account of the Ram having to be extremely thick / heavy and long wave radar tends to ignore small part angle alignments unlike centermetric radar bands. Couple VLFs long range but poor tracking resolution with high power but discrete LPI waveforms and you can attack a Raptor covertly or you could just charge up a powerful AESA radar on information cued by VLF, send volley after volley into a Raptor force and win by attrition (easy to do when a Su 35 costs a quarter of a F22 and VLF radars are free on account of being legacy systems in many countries to say nothing of China which is ringed by them. As such Raptor is good only against last generation systems and total overkill for the bush wars America is currently fighting but who knows in the future?

Why do we assume a Su 35 force would have to ALL be radiating at 20kw? Would not just one make itself visible to the Raptors whilst others remain emmission silent and datalinked, lobbing off missiles (which they have more of) at extreme range possibly beyond Rators radar range or certainly its missile engagement range into a 2-4 sq km area provided by coordinating several VLF radars to say nothing of “silent” LPI S 400 missile launches. One on one Raptor vs Su 35 maybe a no brainer but at Raptors cost we have to assume there will be more Su 35s than Raptors in a combat situation and that this will be exploited to mob Raptors using traditional combined arms tactics (S400s, passive Kolchuga receivers, Su 35s, VLF radars linked together).

Good point! Completely forgot that D5 tested in early nineties.