You can’t just say ATI Radeon, you have to give the number that goes with it, for example Radeon 9800. If you just say Radeon you could be refering to anything from a Radeon 7000 (about 3 years old) to a Radeon 9800XT (most recent one).

I find it hard to believe that Romania can produce better avionics than Russia.

Correct me if I’m wrong but nanites are tiny little robots, not a type of metal. How exactly would they make a plane stronger? Would they be injected into the plane and then repair it after it gets damaged or what?

Also, I think this technology is still 50+ years away from being applied in the real world.

Yeah thousands of Russians who were even remotely Jewish were allowed into Israel. Many of them were no doubt engineers, physicists, mathematicians, programmers, etc. This occured when the USSR fell apart.

However, Israel already had a fairly advanced aerospace industry prior to then.

So the question is, was there a significant improvement in the Israeli military industry in the last 15 years? If so, then more likely than not these Russian immigrants had something to do with it.

There was a big discussion about this on TV last Saturday (or possibly Sunday) on CBS. During the 90’s, the Patriot was praised for its performance in the Gulf War, supposedly it hit something like 40 out of 44 targets, and there were videos of it hitting its target. Several countries rushed to buy the system.

But then, new information was released that the Patriot missed 40 out of 44, and only hit 4. The videos (shown in the dark) showed explosions, but that was just the missile exploding after it missed its target.

Now they are asking for billions of dollars to improve the Patriot.

Although to my understanding, the Patriot was originally designed to hit only planes, not to be an all-around air defense system against both planes and missiles, so you can’t really blame it for missing so many scuds in the gulf war.

Another big problem with the Patriot was that it would sometimes identify friendly planes as enemy ones, and lock on to them, which would cause the pilots in those planes to freak out. On one occassion it actually fired at a friendly plane and destroyed the plane and killed the pilot, I forget where or when.

Yes it crashed. There are currently no Su-37’s in existence, but a new one is being constructed.

once the Aircraft are bought they are the property of Israel to do with as they please.

That’s not quite true. When you buy military hardware from the US, you always have to agree to certain terms. For example, you are not allow to sell it to a third country without the US’s approval. But I don’t know if modifying planes with a different radar would violate the agreement or not.

On cost vs capability I give it to the L-159. Sorry but when it comes to AJT’s no one can compete with the Czechs, not even the big shots like USA/Russia.