savage-rabbitI think one of the great myths of aviation is the ME-262 and its supposed significant role in the war if substantial numbers of them were ever made. This is made so by Adolf Galland in his “The First and the Last” book.
The plane’s engines was unreliable, easy to set aflame, prone to burnouts. It killed its fair share of experienced pilots and aces when the Luftwaffe needed them most. It’s slow acceleration makes it prone and vulnerable if jumped upon from a low height.
The allies at that time were going from air superiority to complete air supremacy so I think it’s not quite fair to fault the Me-262 for getting shot down on take off due to it’s slow acceleration. As soon as the Me-262 gained speed a P-51 would need a height advantage of some 3000 meters just to catch the German jet. In late 1944 and especially in 1945 the sky over Germany was so crowded with allied aircraft you could hardly move about in daytime in some regions without getting strafed. The fact that the Me-262 was able to survive at all in the sky over Germany in 1945 in daytime with literally several thousands of allied fighters gunning for the (at best) some 150-200 jets operational at any one time says alot about what a potent weapon it was. The real mistake of the Nazi’s was their lukewarm attitude toward jet technology in general. If they had poured the resources they wasted on truly useless projects like the V1 and V2 programs into jet engine research and settled for producing the He-280 when it was ready jets could have been ready in time to make a difference. The He-280 was a reliable aircraft that still had a fair performance advantage over contemporary piston engined designs even if it was a mediocre aerodynamic design. A mediocre jet in time would have been better than an exceptional one (Me-262) that came to late. Thankfully the incompetence of the Nazi leadership worked to the advantage of the Allies and from my point of view that’s a good thing.
savage-rabbitAgree with you on most points. Would disagree on the electronics though. With the technology at hand today, it would be pretty easy to analyse, study, and break down individual components in the circuitry and remake the circuit with ease. A working model pretty much with the same features as the original can be made.
Regards,
Not if you are talking about something as small and complcated as a processor. Keep in mind that you would at best only have a few copy’s of the chips in question. But even if you could strip them, examine and map them with an electron microscope you still have to reproduce the manufacturing technology. And you wold run into many of the same problems as the original designers did. Grant you, relatively modern military hardware often runs on processors that are truly ancient by commercial standards. Even so if this is a proprietary processor with unique features that we are talking about and which is not available off the shelf, you will still be forced to reproduce it. Then of course there is the little matter of reverse engineering the software, doable but I don’t think it’s a trivial undertaking and if you have to port the code to another processor architecture that brings it’s own problems. All in all I’d say reproducing electronic hardware and reverse engineering software is if anything as difficuld or even more difficult than dealing with the space age materials the airframe and engine will be made of.
savage-rabbitWith a really good set of photos and a good computer, you could probably reverse engineer an F-117A if you really wanted to. The problem with reverse engineering any sort of stealth aircraft, though, is the RAM. That stuff has a certain set of ingredients, so to speak, and you’d need a lot of smarts in chemistry to get it just right. The Russians had some trouble copying samples of the Concorde’s tire rubber in the 60’s for the Tu-144, and that was just a rubber compound. Of course, French counterespionage efforts included placing screwed up samples of rubber on the runway as well, so I’m sure that didn’t help at all 😀
Right, materials are a bitch. Even if you get your hands on an airframe you can analyze the materials that make it so special and determine their properties and composition but you still have to reverse engineer the entire manufactring process. Metal alloys are one thing but synthetics are considerably more complicated to reproduce.
From what I have been given to understand, when the Soviets copied the AIM-9B they didn’t so much copy it as approximate it. For example, they couldn’t copy the IR seeker exactly so they comissionned several research institutes to design a seeker/sensor along similar lines. They then chose the best result. So the R-3 was by no means distinguishable from an AIM-9B only by its cyrillic labels the engine of the AIM-9B was for example not copied IIRC.
savage-rabbitEverybody is aware of the Chinese and their success at reverse engineering old soviet equipment including the Mig-21 and other military hardware.
The initial J-7A was not reverse engineered from the MiG-21F-13 it was quite lawfully license manufactured and the license package came with sample aircraft and technical documentiation. The MiG-21MF on the other hand was reverse engineered to produce the J-7C/D but not 100% and it would hardly have been possible to do this as quickly as it was done if it had not been for experience gained during license production of the F-13.
Would it be possible to reverse engineer a current (fourth to fifth generation) fighter aircraft from scratch in a reasonable amount of time.
It really depends on what you mean by reverse engineering an aircraft. Do I get any technical documentation or just a working example of the aircraft? If I only got the aircraft:
1. RW’ing the aircframe? Doable but getting harder with the use of more synthetic materials.
2. RW’ing the engine? Also doable but very hard.
3. RW’ing the electronics? Not practical, you can get some good inspirations from working examples but not copy them.
Let’s put on our tin foil hat 😀 and assume, just for the sake of argument, that the Chinese pulled of the intelligence coup of the century this morning when they succeeded in stealing a F-22 prototype. I still don’t think they’d have regiments of F-22s swarming around in the sky over China in five years time. It would be a definite boost to their ambitions to produce an F-22 killer but I don’t think they can produce a copy that can hold a candle to the original in any reasonable amount of time. It wold be easyer to draw conclusions and work them into their own designs.
savage-rabbitThere are these three, pretty new photos of these Ugandan MiG-21s. They were surely overhauled, and they added some devices on it like flare launchers, but I can’t really see from here whether they put new gizmos in the cockpit or not.
http://www.airliners.net/open.file/635473/L/
http://www.airliners.net/open.file/724023/L/
http://www.airliners.net/open.file/724024/L/
😀 😀 😀 Thanks dude! That made me smile……. Pity they don’t show the wings. but I’ll settle for this.
savage-rabbitPLAAF recruiting poster? 😀
savage-rabbitUnfortunately, no. I do know IAI has allowed a number of tours through their facilities, but they didn’t allow photographing or even writing down numbers…
Well I have seen some photos form their factory including some Ugandan, Zambian and (Probably) Cambodian machnies being worked on but all markings were covered up. 🙁 The Israelis have really succeeded in taking the concept of Paranoia to a whole new level. The funny thing is they don’t seem to have the least hesitation when it comes to releasing cockpit photos of these birds?!?!
Here are another two, Eritrean MiG-29 and MB-339. Any bids on an Ethiopian Su-27? I wouldn’t mind seeing an Egyptian F-7 either 😀
savage-rabbitFlex, those Ugandan MiG-21s photographed inside a hangar are still in Poland (i believe they were prepared for delivery at Deblin). Those are the MiG-21bis and UM Uganda got from Poland in the mid-1990s. The wreck at Entebbe is an -M or -MF (probably the latter).
The Ugandans did upgrade their birds in Israel. I’m not quite clear whether this was just an overhaul or even a zerotiming of the airframe or a complete MiG-21-2000 upgrade. I mailed the photographer but to my disappointment he only had the one photo 🙁
Do you have any upgraded MiG-21s? I have been looking for pix of Israeli upgraded Fishbeds for ages with little luck apart from this Ugandan Sparka and a couple of Ethiopian MiG-21’s but those were only overhauled in Israel not upgraded.
savage-rabbitor compare it to the 60+ million the French paid for their Rafale B F2s 😎
I trust that’s £60 million? :diablo:
Hey bugs…f22 at 150 really bigs??? youre dreaming, that machine is more expensive.
Hmmmm…. $2.4 billion for one batch of 13xF-22 Raptors (Production aircraft of Lot 2. ) works out to 184 milion dollars per aircraft. For Lot 1 it was 10xF-22 for $1.9 billion which works out to $190 million per aircraft. These numbers are according to Boeing. The price per aircraft will decrease with each batch as economy of scale kicks in but then again that will also be true for the Eurofighter of course. 😀
I grabbed the figure of $150 million off CNN where it came from one of the Pentagon’s uniformed office drones.
savage-rabbitNow…….What are you boys thinking…… 😉 :diablo: :dev2:
Yummmmm…miniskirts! :diablo: I suppose we will see a sharp increase in incidents of PLAAF pilots and groundcrews walking into pitot tubes.
savage-rabbitThe ‘Telegraph’ are reporting that Tranche 2 has finally been signed for, a £4.3 billion order for 89 jets.
Call me a cynic but strange how this ‘good’ news is announced at a time when cuts to the army are announced as well! :rolleyes:
Great news for the RAF though.-Dazza
Thats £48,3 or $92.5 million per bird. Which compares to what $150 million for each F-22? 😀
savage-rabbitHey Felx,
Any chance of posting pictures of Zambian and Ugandan MiG-21’s? 😀
Here is an Egyptian MiG-21. This is the upgraded version capable of firing the AIM-9P.
savage-rabbitMy first attempt at PS using MS paint 😀
The J10 is the same pic that SOC posted.
How about this? I just love the clone tool in Photoshop. The PAF markings would look better if I had been willing to spend more than 3 minutes making this composit. :diablo:
savage-rabbitTwo squadrons of A-29s purchased from Brazil
Two squadrons of AT-29s built from kits purchased from BrazilAll extra money put into air defense.
COIN aircraft and lots of SAMs and FLAK. In view of the Serb experience that sounds like a plan, except, I’d throw in a few medium and light transports and and some helicopters. Preferably militarized civillian designs it makes sanctions busting easyer. 😀 Given that if there is ever a future conflict in the Balkans Nato will enforce another ‘deny flight’ policy helos and light attack aircraft are about the only things you could conceivably get away with operating anyway. Expensive jets would be useless but then the Bosnians probably have alot more sensible things to spend their money on than obscenely expensive high-tech jets like the F-16 or Gripen. Like say… rebuilding their infrastructure?
savage-rabbitOne of North Korea’s Evil Beagles :diablo: and and a cool 😎 photo of a North Korean F-6. Note that the F-6 is packing R-3S/PL-2 rails. You don’t see that every day….
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