Russia will be offering Syria the Tu-144 “Concordskii” for its national airline before you know it…:rolleyes:

If you asked the average man in the Damascus street how long their military would last in a conflict against Israel they would measure such a time period in multiples of 24 hours – perhaps 24/48/72 hrs at the very most – in which case I don’t know why the Syrian government even bothers to spend such a large proportion of its state revenues ( somewhere around 60% of government spending I believe) on its military!

The IRST 😉

The IRST will have only a limited range of the detection even at such a high altitude and against such a ‘hot’ target. The MiG-31 crew need to know in which part of the sky to search for the ‘SR-72’ – they need to be guided to the general predicted location for the target by a ground based centralised radar network system as is the traditional manner of the Soviet/Russian ‘PVO’ air defence system. But if the ground based radars can’t detect such a stealthy target, who’s going to guide the MiG-31 to the target?

Stealth does not imply radar signature alone. How is a Mach 6+ jet going to hide what will be a massive IR signature?

And what IR sensors do you have in mind?

What sort of ground based or aircraft based IR sensor would be able to detect such a beast? To what maximum range can the most sensitive IR sensor work out to? Do you think the IRST system on a MiG-31BM would be effective against a target flying at Mach 6 and 100,000 ft, and after detection what would it use to shoot it down? It’s debatable whether the SR-71 was ever threatened by the MiG-31 so I don’t see anything flying at twice the speed of the SR-71 feeling any more threatened.

What are the capabilities of existing ground based sensors, what ranges do they work out to?:confused:

How many spark plugs were there on the Dornier Do X?

Bear in mind it flew 2 different types of engine during its career.

Yes, they used both… its well documented.

http://home.att.net/~jbaugher1/f5_40.html

Thanks for the link.

Interesting comments on how the Vietnamese viewed the F-5 favourably in comparision with the MiG-21. I believe that the Soviets also found that the F-5 had no problems in dealing with the MiG-21 in WVR combat during comparitive tests carried out on F-5s, which had been passed on by the communist Vietnamese government.

I can’t help but notice that the only capital city in Europe (yeah, it is in Europe) that is covered by an ABM system is Moscow – surely other European capitals such as London, Paris or Berlin are just as much entitled to be protected against nuclear attack and are just as likely to suffer an attack as Moscow is? Does the Kremlin object to all kinds of ABM system being constructed in Europe including those built to protect European capitals or is it just an objection to ABM systems located in Europe designed to protect American cities?
If even a quarter of the countries of Europe decided that their capitals should have the same level of ABM protection that Moscow now possesses, how many ABM interceptor missiles would then be located in Western Europe? :confused:

In fact, one should remember that Europe, a landmass with 3 times the population of Russia and with an economy at least 10 times greater than of the Russian Federation, only possesses a fraction of the nuclear warheads that Russia possesses, and has, at the moment, no ABM shield to speak of.

Perhaps this is were the only real imbalance of forces lies…

I was browsing the Russian forum below when I came across this ‘goryachii super-hot’ thread concerning Russia’s future 5th Generation combat aircraft

http://forums.airbase.ru/viewtopic.php?id=55697

“Vesti” is one of the leading government aligned national TV stations in the Russian Federation. Here’s what they had to say on the ‘News’ recently;

http://www.vesti.ru/rvideo.html?vid=102130

There wasn’t anything much in the news clip that probably wasn’t already known but it was reported that the take off weight was 20.1 tonnes, the powerplants had a thrust/weight ratio of 10:1, the aircraft is practically invisible to air defence radars and… oh yeah, its flight charateristics, are significantly superior to those of its nearest American analogue…:rolleyes: