Now for another issue. I am wondering about the engine problems that may be afflicting both Indian and Chinese Flankers. Perhaps UMPO plant may be overextended trying to make engines fast enough for MKKs, J-11s, MKIs and so on. I must add that despite some problems on the engines, the Indian SU-30s are able to maintain very high and intense periods of operability during exercises and not one has been lost in contrast to the other planes.

And I have not encountered hearing any problem on the J-10s which use AL-31FN. Not even a wisp of a rumor. This is odd because the J-10 is more risky in terms of catastrophic engine failure compared to the Flanker which has another engine as a back up. It is likely the AL-31FN may have improvements in reliability. Another factor is that the engines are made in a seperate Salyut plant near Moscow, not the UMPO plant in the Urals. So maybe less pressure there, though it now appears the engine production is ramping up—with a new contract signed last April—as the J-7G line in Chengdu is closed and converted to J-10 production.

well IIRC, some of the AL31s used in the Su30s were left overs from soviet times and that was one of the main reasons they had more problems. there is the issue of storage time and build quality.

newly built Al31s should not have these problems.

…How can you suppose that little technical advances had been made from all the investment that went into designing and building of Russian aircraft? Didn’t you say that Russian were able to overrun West in case of war? That was the goal and seems that they have fulfilled it..

From your words it seems to me that West was constantly pushing the cutting edge with each gen while Russians were stepping at the place.. OK, we have for example MiG-15 and Su-27 and we have F-86 and F-15. Where is the difference?

:rolleyes: and people wonder why i ask them to read my posts carefully first.

sure the russians got there, or abouts, but look at how many more steps it took them. from the Mig15 to Su27/Mig29/Mig31, how many types came in between? Mig17, Mig19, Mig21, Mig23, Mig25, Mig27, Mig29, Mig31 and thats not counting the Sus and Yaks etc. also, remeber that the Su27 did enter service later then the F15.

…West having the same production costs as Russians? Wake up, mate.. On which planet did that happen? Show us some figures, please.

did i say they were the same or even similar? :rolleyes: i was merely pointing out that western ac dont cost nearly as much to make as they are sold for on the international markets.

…Russians were building greater numbers of weapons that West did? 😮 ??? Look at MiG-31/MiG-29/Su-27 and F-16/F-18/F-15/F-14 production figures and say it again..

that was from the later years of the cold war when the USSR was already starting to cut back, factor in all the planes the two sides built over the course of the cold war would be more appropriate.

…As to the spiralling effect, I wonder how did you come to the idea that military was responsible for Soviet collapse and not politics and economics in general. Soviet defense only could have been as high as its economics would allow it. Some proof and figures to the Soviet defense budget in the 80s.

again, not reading properly. when did i say the military costs was the only reason or even the main reason that the USSR collaped? all i said was that it was a significant contributing factor, and surely no-one is going to dispute that.

The best philosophy for peace, is, obviously, giving up designing any weapons..

so what you going to do when someone who spent all their spare change on weapons wants all the things you worked so hard to build? :rolleyes:

edited for clarity.

that photo is PSed, whoever made it is a jerk

hmm, looks like they are getting better at it. 😮

There’s a short piece in today’s Flight International – about first flight of Su-30MK3.

Ken

😮 yeah, thats the one i meant.

This alone could be right, but you have forgotten that the additional costs to achieve the same margin of durability tend to grow exponentially. If you got an aircraft engine with MTBO of 1000h and you want to increase the value to 2000h, you might need much less funds for development and precision assembly than to increase this value from 2000h to 3000h. Even in peace times it was much cheaper to produce twice as much relatively simple and rude engines than to develop and produce them as expensive and durable ones. This would mean to handle with completely new producing techniques (multiaxis CNC, CAD/CAM, FEM etc.), as well as improved computing technology (mostly FADEC). I did not say that Russians haven’t used CAD/CAM or FEM techniques in general, but certainly not within the whole chain of distributors and suppliers or in such extent as western engineers have….

no offence, but thats just being shortsighted. military weapons are almost never mass produced using cutting edge tech, its too expensive. usually weapons are mass produced using mature tech which have become much more reliable and cost effective. however, you still need to invest greatly in R&D to be able to push the cutting edge out far enough that what was cutting edge yesterday is now mature tech ready to be applied on a large scale. that is in effect what the west has been doing with much of its military funding, at the expense of current combat capabilities.

this means that in the short run, the overal combat alibility of the west’s armed forces where probabaly less then that of the soviets on the account that the soviets could replace losses cheaper and quicker.

however, the drawback with the soviet method is that its unsustanble in the long term. a much larger proportion of the USSR’s defence budget went on building vast numbers of weapons ready for a war that will never come. in the end they are all thrown away, and little technical advances had been made from all the investment that went into designing and building them.

this means that the west was constantly pushing the cutting edge that little bit further out with each gen of weapons compaired to the soviets. and that started to build up, and as a result, in the long run, they were able to produce superior weapons systems are about the same price (only talking about production costs, the americans are famous for having massive profit margines).

in order to keep up, the soviets were forced to use their very best tech to mass produce weapons of a similar quality as western weapons being built with mature tech. but even that was still a little inferior, so the soviets still had to buy larger numbers of these weapons then the west. so in the later years of the cold war, the soviets were forced to spend a much much high proportion of their GDP on defence that was what bankrupted them.

low productivety didnt help either. but the spiraling defence budget was still a major cause.

What is better for your limited budget? To develope and produce three LADA Niva or a single Lincoln Navigator? Because in terms of its original purpose (..to ride..) Niva can perform as well as the Lincoln in heavy terrain, this all at much lesser costs. And what is more, you got three cars instead of one.. If one should eventually break, don’t give a damn, you can replace it quickly and cheaply. That was the philosophy…

again, missing the point. weapons are to fight with, not merely to ride around in. if you were in the army, would you prefer to have one M16 automatice rifle in your hand or three springfeild built-action rifles?

with large weapons systems, there is also the operating costs (three fighters will burn more juice then one); crew training costs (costs $ms to train pilots, even crappy ones); decomishoning costs (all those SSNs/SSBNs in russian port will have to be properly scraped some time, and that’ll cost ya); attrition costs (having planes that crash more frequently means you need to buy more planes to fill attrition, and you may also have to train more pilots 🙁 )…all of which sucks money from your defence budget, and that carries with it an opportunity cost – in this case, the ability to push the cutting edge out futher.

designing weapons systems that are easy, cheap and quick to make is the best philosophy for war, but it is the wrong philosophy for peace.

The above paragraph is pure slothful generalization fallacy, and to me implies some sort of quaint, outdated “home carpentery” ethic to the massive, standardized production line of military mass production.

This philosophy was carried to its absurd extreme by the Germans in WW2, who over-engineered useless, non-critical parts with expensive materials and inordinate amounts of resources. None of the other allies had such extravagances as German aircraft- Specific parts have specific, exacting requirements that they must *meet*, and if the part doesn’t have to meet a certain requirement, it makes no sense to overengineer it for pure aesthetic value- in a war environment, which is what the context of the Su-27 etc. is. E.g. The maintenance system in the USSR was totally different to anything in the West.

you are missing the point with german example. at time, they were pushing the limits of their technology to the every edge of what is practicle and even beyound. that is the problem they had. in a way, i’m seeing many paralles between that and the B2/F22/typhoon/rafale, very capable, but very expensive and time consuming to make, so the type’s overal combat ability might not be as good as a less capable type that is much cheaper and quicker to make. but thats a different matter.

is it out of the ability of the world’s manufacturer’s to mass produce ac with high quality finishing? yes, we have seen that done with almost every western ac over the past 20 years.

however there is a difference from choosing not to give a plane the ‘perfect’ finishing because of cost implications and not being able to do it at all. purhaps i should have emphysised this a little bit more to avoid confusion.

if a plane doesnt get a good finishing because the manufacturer wants to cut down on cost that is one thing, however if a manufacturer simply cant make a plane to that quality level, then that is a very different matter, and that lack of quality will be reflected in every part of that ac.

“it makes no sense to overengineer it for pure aesthetic value- in a war environment, which is what the context of the Su-27 etc. is. E.g. The maintenance system in the USSR was totally different to anything in the West”

totally agree with that, however you are forgetting one crutial thing – the world is not at war.

IMHO, that was what helped the russians to loose the cold war. they designed and built all their weapons so that they are ready to fight a war the next day, and most likely would have won a conventional conflict. problem was there never was a war, the west had a simple but effective solution, just use nukes if they were about to be overrun/warn out.

as a result, in the long term, all those weapons that were cheap to mass produce wasnt as durable or relable as the more expansive western weapons, so needed more maintanence and needed to be replaced more frequently. and that eat into the defence budget.

So? The principle is still sound- the point is simply that looks do not equal combat capability or anything else. Looks= looks.

there is a difference between what is acceptable quaility variations and what isnt, and the standards are different for different types of machines, so what is acceptable for one type of weapons may not be acceptbale for another. that was the point i was trying to make.

and i have to agree with crobato on the belief that looks also reflect on the build quality of the whole machine and not just the surface.

if you cant match the finishing on the outside of the plane, chances are you wont be able to match the quality of the build inside the plane, and that has a baring on performace; if your workers dont pay enough attention to their work to make the outside of the plane look good, then that lack of dedication my also be reflected on the workmanship of the rest of the plane and also performance and reliability.

there may be exceptions, but expections are not the norm.

T-34s remained crappy looking right up until the end of the war. It didn’t affect their combat effectiveness or reliability one bit. T-34s were at their most unreliable in 1940/41 (before the war) because they were just introduced and the crews/mechanics were not used to them.

again, they were still in a state of war, and while the T34s were impressive peives of kit, they were no match against the german tigers in quality so the only way to win is to increase quantity.

at the most desperate stages of the war, T34s were only expected to get to the battlefield and fight for a fewer hours or a few weeks at best (that was the bair minium and build quality improved as the situation got better). but the tanks of today are expected to last for decades.

that is the difference between weapons designed and built for war and weapons designed and built built for peace.

Yeah, heard they were flying like 600 to 800 hours a year with them.. Since they were Su-30s, I expect them to have performed aerobatics in massive extent, not just smooth trips around the globe.

well its not like western AFs are know for nursing their planes, yet we dont hear of problems like this.

the PLAAF example, if true, is an even more unacceptable incident where a brand new flanker crashed on its first fight killing the crew. 😡