It didnt take Sukhoi 10 prototypes in order to make one with weaponbays being able to open. Check high res T-50-2 pictures…

Funny you should mention that. I was actually looking at 52 for this. See below; It’s a blow up of 52. They seem to be sealed if anything.. no?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]246485[/ATTACH]

Because they were otherwise never seen ever since the first prototype?

Hey if there is another photo where they are shown clearly, I’d love to be pointed to it, I must have missed it somehow.

It’s not the question whether it’s overly expensive or not to integrate such bombs, but whether it makes any sense in the first place. Even if it’s comparably cheap, where cheap is really just a relative term, it looks like burning rubles with no benefit and every rubel spent on this is one too much. What weighs even more however is that test flights are wasted for this and I think there are many more important point on the flight test schedule which are worth it to be pushed.

And before the typical fanboy defensive response comes, yes there is quite a lot of money burned elsewhere is well, but that’s not the subject of this thread!

You guys read too much into this. They just hang some ordnance from the pylons; to test the pylons. If the pylons are meant for other types of ordnance, they’ll hang that from them too. And when the proper external tanks are ready, they’ll hang them there too.

It’s called testing…

A 100k tonne carrier would come in at around $10bn, an ssbn is usually between 2-4bn

It seems so: EMALS catapult with a not so steep Sky Jump like on Kutnetsov can definitely work (I wouldnt try it with a F/A-18 or a F-35 however).
Only thing that made me quite dubious is that they start from deep inside the flight deck, something I donn’t see the real convenience when compared with a conventional arrangment.
For the rest there are six tracks but with only 4 starting point, so I guess maybe yust some of them are hibrid while the other are just Stobar.

Or it has nothing to do with reality and it’s just a (bad) quality model. First of all it seems to be huge, which would place it beyond the price range of the entire European Union+ Russia’s budgets.

Scratch that, it was #6 that was being tested!

http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?137587-RuAF-News-and-development-Thread-part-15&p=2308006#post2308006

I still don’t get it..