SchorschThat doesn’t necessarily discredit the Soviet Union, nor especially its designers. There were numerous Soviet aircraft the US never had a proper equivalent for. An-2, MiG-21, Mi-6, Mi-24, etc. In most cases, the US had no need for such an aircraft, or at least perceived that they had no need for it.
Exactly. You have chosen famous Soviet designs. There is a difference between a technical marvel (like the SR-71) and an aircraft that is very useful in its tactical role, but not necessarily a technical marvel (like the MiG-21 for example). Technology-wise, the Soviet lagged behind most of the time. Given their inferior economical base nobody has to be ashamed for that. Still they were able to create powerful weapons of war and put them into a working system.
From the pure technology point of view, the F-111 was ahead of the Su-24. From the usefulness factor, both could possibly fullfil a number of missions with comparable effectiveness. The early Su-24 apparently had quite simple avionic package.
SchorschFor any of you Aero boffs out there. I need help with designing a wproject. This is probably in the wrong forum here but since i have browsed this forum for years and years; and respect the fact that there is a lot of knowledge within this forum in aerospace related topics, ive decided il post it here anyway. Id really appreciate it if any of you could help me with the dimensions of the wing for a subsonic glider. designed to fly at 10 m/s with a co-efficient of lift = 0.8. density of the atmosphere being 1.225. mass of the wing = 0.2 kg. it would be great if i could come up with a wing that develops a lift force greater than (0.2*9.81) N. The higher the lift the better. Its a constant cord wing, so its not tapered. Any values on chord vs wingspan would be greatly appreciated. Diagrams would help aswell if your prepared to help. Also I need help with the chamber height of the wing. Thanks in advance!
You wing area would be:
(m*g)/(CL*0.5*1.225*v²) = 5/(0.4*100)= 5/49 = 0.102m²
Take an aspect ratio of ~10 and you have a span of 1.01m and a chord length (MAC) of 10cm.
Now you just need to chose a profile. A usual thickness ratio would be 15% for such speeds, so your wing would have a “height” of ~1.5cm. As that is possibly not really efifcient, it will make more sense to go for lower aspect ratio of 5. That gives you a span 51cm, an MAC of 20cm and a maximum height of 3cm. For more lift increase area.
SchorschThe Russians never lacked any technology as you affirm, the Russians simply had a counterpart to any american fighter or jet bomber.
The former GDR had walkman and computers, too, when it collapsed in 1989. Just it was very expensive, not competitive against the originals, and 10 years late. But nice pictures anyways.
SchorschThe VAK-191 and the Harrier were not designed as strikers like the Tornado.
Something like Fiat G-91 or Alpha Jet to deal with the iron-feast.
The NKF (later Tornado) did start in the mid 60s, long before the VAK-191 have had its first flight. In 1970 it was decided to built the Tornado without the fighter role. Maybe all learned the lesson from the F-111 mistakes. Hence the interim buy of F-4F to develop a new fighter which did become the Typhoon in the end.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFW-Fokker_VAK_191_Bhttp://www.vstol.org/GermanVSTOLFighters.pdf
In the 60s, the military doctrine was that of a war with atomic weapons from the start.
Prime targets were the ABs. That would not have survived the first hours of a war in Central Europe. The NATO-ABs in Germany had/have seperated living-areas in some km-distance from the AB, what did allow the survival of the personal, when the runway is nuked. To avoid too much own losses in the first wave. All former soldiers in Europe may remember the alarms. The main purpose was to distance your unit in the shortest possible time form a static target. Every AB had to house no more than a single sqdn. It was a guess, that the own AB maybe nuked already, when the first wave of own fighters did return from their first mission. To ashure the survival of that, that have to have the capability to land everywhere. In the 70s that doctrine had changed to flexible response for both sides and the ABs had to survive something like the air-attacks in Korea or June 1967 to render that unserviceable for a critical period. “Road-system ABs” and the related aircraft came into use to survive that pressure.
Here is one copy-paste from the second link, which by the way is an exceelent source (I already had it before).
• VAK 191B optimized as single-mission design to deliver a
nuclear weapon
• High speed low altitude profile taking off and landing
vertically from dispersed sites
• Design sized to be as small as possible to meet mission
requirements
• Propulsion concept included vectored thrust lift/cruise
engine plus 2 vertical lift engines
• VAK = Vertikalstartendes Aufklärungs und Kampfflugzeug
(V/STOL Reconnaissance and Strike Aircraft)
As far as I learned the VAK-191 was designed to take off vertically or very short take-off roll, fly low level with high subsonic speed, deliver The Bomb and return and land vertically. Here are the requirements:
Formal NATO VAK 191 specifications:
– Delivery of a single nuclear weapon at Mach 0.92 and low altitude
– Low-low mission profile with a combat radius of 320 km (180 nm)
– VTOL operations from dispersed hardened sites
– Supersonic dash capability (Mach 1.2-1.4) at medium to high altitudes
– 15,000-16,000 lb gross takeoff weight
The low-low profile and STOVL configuration allowed to use a pathetic wing area. In general the aircraft had too much compromise built in, typically for such a design.
From the technical point of view the concept with lift engines is interesting. Many might say that a lift engine is old news and the Harrier concept was the way to go, but the engineers did this on purpose.
Really interesting is that East and West of the iron curtain the solutions for tactical problems were similar. The Russians often lacked technology, while the Americans lacked the skill to ease requirements a bit to allow engineers to design a useful aircraft, instead designing things like the F-111 (which wasn’t a bad aircraft, but could have been so much more affordable and more successful if some requirements had been eased).
SchorschComparing fighters without the intended main mission in mind is an useless exercise.
The German Vertical approach was different and a failure, when compared with the Swedish solution for example.
Of course, and the VAK-191 and Tornado were both built for the same role: Interdiction and Strike, in case of the VAK-191 without doubt nuclear. But all S/VTOL aircraft had in common that the mission envelope was limited. The tactical flexibility of a Harrier is of course unbeatable, especially in a Middle European environment.
But it couldn’t do the missions a Tornado could, and I guess nearly no S/VTOL aircraft could (F-35B maybe).
SchorschIt was wrong then, it is wrong today.
Just a poor article that jumps on the bandwagon of the A380 delays and the A350 confusion (Fall ’06 was quite stormy for Airbus). People who express their agreement are equally poorly informed. You’ll find similar kind on this forum. It is not really an Airbus/Boeing thing.
SchorschSee? And you thought Russians just copied every idea from the West. 😎
My world is falling apart …
SchorschThere is one reason why the Su-34 is a great aircraft, and that is because it has a toilet in its cabin, while this might sound unimportant having a toilet in a long flight over 7 hours is a real convinience for a pilot and his WSO.
I am really thinking hard but I don’t find the Western original, the first operational military airborne low-level attack toilet. Maybe in the B-29? Nah, wasn’t low level.
SchorschSu-34 is the only modern F-111 equivalent.
But i don’t see how it is actually superior to the good old F-111.
It must be somehow superior to the F-111D.
May be Schorsch can tell us?
Most bizarre to me is the max war load of Su-34 only 8t! It schould be at least 16-18t if F-111 could ferry 14t. May be russians never push their designs to its limits, but even smaller F-15E can carry 12t.
The F-111D was the worst of its kind due to nightmare avionics. The versions of the F-111 differ primarily in avionics, but also in engine power and for the -C and the -G (former FB-111A) the wing extension.
The F-111 suffered from contradicting requirements. First of all the need for very fast low-level speed and high Mach numbers. The Su-24 had more sober requirements, while it was designed for Mach 2.2 in the beginning, too (like the Tornado). All three swing-wing low-level strikers had their Mach2-capability canceled later, the Suchoi even got fixed inlets from the production line on.
Capability-wise the F-111 and Su-24 are heavier aircraft with more weapons load. The Tornado has less punch, but one must understand its heritage. It evolved from a series of failed VTOL designs (VAK-191). Everybody in the 60s experimented with VTOL aircraft, just to figure out that it hardly can fly a real mission. The only surviver is the Harrier, which showcased the shortcomings quite impressively (at least in payload-range as GR.1). The Su-24 and MiG-23 both were started as VTOL aircraft, too, but the swing-wing was the better compromise.
BTW: The actual war load of an F-111 is 6 to 8 tons at best, half of that for the F-15E. The rest is show only.
SchorschThe Su-24 has a similar range capability to the Su-17. The main difference is only, that it can carry more than double the warload of that and heavier weapons.
The Tornado IDS is a class ahead in range capabilities and the F-111C-F did go even further.
Non is surprised by that, because Russian were limited to Tj engines.That Cold War time behavior does become boring, when people do stick to wishfull thinking and do not even realise the shortcomings every design has.
During Glasnost it was an open secret that the Su-24, Su-15, MiG-31 and many other types did not fullfill the range specifications for several reasons. Nothing other at hand and series production did started early, the producer did promise to deliver a solution for that later on. To the anger of the armed forces, that promises were never fullfilled. That is not limited to the East of cause, but the wishfull believers of eastern design are still unable to accept that.
The Russians actually considered turbofans themself, but obviously there was no engine avalaible and so they sticked to turbojets. Actually one of the worst design decision one can make. The TSR.2, however, had a similar design solution. Maybe a reason for its cancellation. Although the TF30 is never popular with fanboys of military aviation, it was a rather revolutionary design at the beginning of the 60s.
The SFC of TJs is up to 50% higher than for turbofans of the class of the TF30 (which itself is no optimum fighter engine). The TF-30 had a bypass ratio of 1, the engines of the B-1B even 2. The RB.199 of the Tornado stood at 1, too.
Actually, the range capability of the Tornado remains a mistery to me. I have never seen it without wing tanks. Has anyone numbers for a typical profile for the “bomb-the-Oder-bridge” mission: (low, low, low; tanks drop when empty; subsonic ingress & egress)?
Schorsch[…]
Thank you, ELP, for adding true value to these discussions.
There is so little out there about stealth.
SchorschThe RCS of Su-35 is reduced to around 1 – 3 m2 (frontal of course).
I guess that such an RCS can hardly be translated into a tactical advantage if the opponent has modern radar. Despite that, if the aircraft does not have AWACS support, it needs to switch on its radar to target aircraft beyond visual range. And an emitting radar should be visible to other modernly equipped opponents.
Anyways, as other people stated, RCS in excess of 1m² will not really yield any advantages.
Schorsch[B]Yak-141 in 1990 had no known western equivalent its cruise engine was completly ahead of any western design and was retaken in the JSF.
Just go back one page and see the truth. It was a well known concept in the West but for reasons not exploited. The VTOL aircraft just turned out to be too costly and not flexible enough for other missions than nuclear attack.
SchorschYou mean the legitimate purchase of a few hundred Derwent and Nene engines and their incorporation into the Soviet AF. With only a few hundred bought and fresh supplies drying up pretty quickly the engines bought were enough for testing and dismantled to make accurate drawings so spare parts could be created, they produced their own improved or just different versions of those two engines to suite their own needs and the availability of materials. The Nene and the Derwent never actually powered any in service Soviet aircraft… they just went into prototypes and were used as the basis for new engines which did power Mig-15s etc.
The Soviets often got a bad rap for being backward in technology but their first copies of the German engines were more powerful than the german originals and had longer lives because they were made of better materials. They were certainly not behind the west in general if the west includes the US, which also benefitted from access to Rolls Royce engine technology too.
It is still a copy, no matter how you put it. “License” and “ownership” are maybe elements unknown to Soviet people & economy.
And why wouldn’t they want to bypass having to develop their own stuff and borrow technology elsewhere. The Cold War was not a game, the consequences were real and not very pleasant. Why limit yourself to artificial rules regarding what is right or good… the west certainly never did.
Still you will have problems showing me how Soviet design solutions made their way westward. I never heard/saw any report on the West copying/”get inspiration” by Soviet designs.
One reason is that the East was so clandestine.
The Soviets just saw that whereever they invested the money to close a technology gap (or even created a little lead), two new gaps opened. And that was just military, the canyon-wide technology gaps on the civilian side were never addressed. Consequence: known.
SchorschAlthough I must say, I am very surprised with the Soviets way of maximizing its designs, that it never came up with a modified long-range interceptor variant to replace the old Tu-128 ‘Fiddler’!
Regards
Pioneer
Possible that the requirements for interceptors were tougher. When the Suchoi 24 was developed the MiG-25 was procured. The Su-24 surely was a quite poor high altitude performer, just like Tornado IDS was. Still, I think it would have been a useful weapons platform. They rather went for the costlier solution, the MiG-31.
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