The claims of Mig-29 purchases are coming from the US State department. Obviously not a source with any credibility, but they have been screaming numbers of up to 50 Mig-29s for a while now. How true they are I don’t know. They seem to have a bee in their bonnet about something. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it became a self fullfilling prophesy. The claims might actually lead to Chavez thinking he has a need for such a capability…

yeah very true, he might actually place orders for the same based on the need for such a capablity, and the Russians cud actually give them the same …..

BTW, here some news article for the Military Helos …

Venezuela buys russian military helicopters

March 11, 2005 Posted: 12:35 Moscow time (08:35 GMT)

MOSCOW – Venezuela and Russia signed an agreement on Thursday on the purchase of 10 Russian helicopters worth $120 million.

The deal was signed by Venezuelan Defense Minister Jorge Garcia and Russian ambassador Mikhail Orlovets.

9 of those 10 helicopters are planned to be used to police the border with Colombia, and one is the transportation helicopter with a capacity to carry 86 fully-geared soldiers, or 100 without equipment.

Under the contract, a maintenance center for the aircraft will be set up in Venezuela. Russians also promised to transfer technology and train Venezuelan officers.

So Mi-24 (?) and Mi-26 are on its way … I wish he cud have orderd some HAL’s Dhruv ALH, on his visit to India …

That is absolute nonsense. If Russian/Soviet build quality is inherently bad as some people like to believe, they would never have been able not only to design, but also mass-produce equipment like the NK-12 (engines on the Tu-95) gearboxes, or those on the Mi-6 and Mi-26 helicopters. Or turbopumps for rocket engines (remember that current US military sattelites are launched with Russian rocket motors).

The fact that the Soviets chose to ignore strict construction margins wherever possible does not mean they were incapable of adhering to such standards. Like Garry said: if such strict margins complicated operations on a system, they deliberately used more lenient margins. Because of that, doing structural battle damage repair on a MiG-29 isn’t much different than on a MiG-21. Now if you think that’s the same for an F-16 versus an F-104, you are oh so wrong…

that was a good summing up on the manufacturing doubts , hope the guys wud be matured enough to understand these ….

Russia Proves ‘Peak Oil’ is a Misleading

In 1970 the Russians started drilling Kola SG-3, an exploration well which finally reached a staggering world record depth of 40,230 feet. Since then, Russian oil majors including Yukos have quietly drilled more than 310 successful super-deep oil wells, and put them into production. Last Year Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest single oil producer, and is now set to completely dominate global oil production and sales for the next century.

If the opening paragraph of this report started by claiming that completely unlimited crude oil reserves exist inside planet earth, readers might be tempted to regard the entire text as preposterous ghostwriting for a novelist like Frederick Forsyth. If the report then went on to claim that the Russians have exploited this stunning reality for nearly thirty years, right under the largely unwitting noses of western intelligence, readers could be excused for mistaking the author for a lunatic, or perhaps as a front for spy novelist John le Carré. The problem here is that unlimited oil reserves do exist inside planet earth, and the Russians long ago developed the advanced technology necessary to recover these unlimited oil reserves in an efficient and timely manner.

Profoundly disturbing hard intelligence like this does not sit well with the frantic cries of western academic shills and lobbyists, determined to convince you all that the end of the oil world is nigh, or, more accurately, that America faces an imminent catastrophe when global production capacity “Peaks”, i.e. when world demand for crude oil finally exceeds the rate at which we can physically pump the required product out of the ground. The gist of these false claims are outlined in a speech given at the at the University of Clausthal, by lobbyist Doctor Colin Campbell during December 2000:

“In summary, these are the main points that we have to grasp: Conventional [Free flowing] oil provides most of the oil produced today, and is responsible for about 95% of all oil that has been produced so far. It will continue to dominate supply for a long time to come. It is what matters most. Its discovery peaked in the 1960s. We now find one barrel for every four we consume. Middle East share of production is set to rise. The rest of the world peaked in 1997, and is therefore in terminal decline. World peak comes within about five years” [circa 12/2005]

Campbell is just the tip of a giant iceberg of academic Peak Oil ‘experts’ who suddenly appeared en-masse to give you this frightening news, right after President Saddam Hussein suddenly started trading his oil in Euros rather than in US Dollars, a devastating switch with the easy capacity to destroy the US Dollar in less than five years if it was left unchallenged and unchecked.

So these shills [decoys] were carefully positioned to deflect your attention away from the obvious greed and incompetence of the United States Government and its Wall Street masters, and focus it elsewhere instead. Then, hopefully, a few years later down the track when prices start to bounce through the roof, and America has no Euros to buy crude oil, you will blame gasoline prices of $5.00+ per gallon at the pumps on an ‘inevitable decline’ in world oil production, rather than march furiously on Washington DC with locked and loaded firearms.

Though attacking Campbell and his ilk is not the purpose of this report, his idiot claims can be debunked readily enough. While it is true that nowadays we only officially find one barrel of oil for every four barrels we consume, this is primarily because we temporarily stopped the incredibly expensive process of looking for crude oil when we had already physically established more than two trillion barrels of reserves in known reservoir locations around the world. When those known reserves drop to [say] one trillion barrels we may be tempted to go and find more, but not until then. And while it is true that the production rate from each individual oil well ever drilled has slowly declined over the years, there is a perfectly valid technical reason for this predictable reduced flow rate, which will be explained later.

In order to understand how Russia has left the rest of the world standing in its wake, it is essential to know a little bit about where oil is located, and how it is extracted from the ground for refining and commercial use. It is an enormously complex subject, especially when considering the ultra-deep wells, which should really have a separate category all of their own. Many years ago I was personally involved at the sharp end of two ultra-deep drilling operations [one of them in direct liaison with Russian experts from the Moscow Drilling Institute], and will try to keep this drilling lesson as simple as I can. Thankfully perhaps, the underlying principle of how and where oil is recovered from is not difficult to comprehend, as illustrated by the diagram below.

The theory underlying how oil is formed at such enormous depths in the mantle of the earth is not central to this report, because the Russians have already proved its point of origin in absolute drilling terms more than 300 times. Those interested in the exact process should research the archives, where there are more than two hundred Russian papers on the subject. Probably a good place to start would be “The Role of Methane in the Formation of Mineral Fuels”, written by A.D. Bondar in 1967. What is central to this report is the massive advantage that Russia’s ultra-deep drilling discoveries and technical achievements give it over the western nations.

As we have already discovered, oil can be produced virtually anywhere on earth, provided the host country can afford the expensive [and sometimes classified] technology, and the massive cost of drilling a well to extreme depth through extremely hard rock formations. But just think what even 20 or 30 deep producing oil wells can mean for the people of a country that has no natural resources of its own, or worse still, for people who have been told by glib western lobbyists that they have no natural resources of their own. Anyone who can prove that the western nations were lying or simply wrong, will become a trusted friend forever. Vietnam is a classic example.

After more than 60 years of being enslaved, pillaged, and raped by the French and then by the Americans, the poor Vietnamese were told officially by American oil multinationals that their country was barren; that western ‘cutting edge’ technology had failed to find anything to help them recover financially from the mess left behind by American bombs, Agent Orange, and a host of other delightful gifts from Uncle Sam. This of course was exactly where America wanted the Vietnamese to be: desperately poor and unable to take action against their former invaders.

The Russians had other ideas and a very different approach. After telling the Vietnamese that the Americans had lied to them, oil experts were flown in from Moscow to prove this startling claim in a no-risk joint venture, meaning the Russians would provide all of the equipment and expertise free of charge, and only then take a percentage of the profits if oil was actually found and put into production. Vietnam had absolutely nothing to lose, and swiftly gave Russia the green light.

The Vietnamese White Tiger oil field was and is a raging success, currently producing high quality crude oil from basalt rock more than 17,000 feet below the surface of the earth, at 6,000 barrels per day per well. Through White Tiger, the Russians have assisted the Vietnamese to regain part of their self respect, while at the same time making them far less dependent on brutal western nations for food-aid handouts.

All of a sudden in a very small way, Vietnam has joined the exclusive club of oil producing nations, and a stream of cynical U.S. Senators and Congressmen have started making the long pilgrimage to Ho Chi Minh City in order to ‘mend fences’. Predictably perhaps, the Vietnamese are very cool, and try hard to ignore their new American admirers.

Welcome to the White Tiger oil field in Vietnam.
Observe the truly amazing oil flares, in an area the Americans officially declared ‘barren’ of oil reserves!

The White Tiger project was the first outside Russia to openly exploit and showcase this ultra-deep technology and oil production from basalt rock to the world, though the original intent was to do so much earlier in India during 1983. During that year a large drilling rig in the Ganges Delta was scheduled to drill down to below 22,000 feet into basalt, and then dramatically flare “impossible” ultra deep oil. Oil well Bodra #3 was directly supervised by teams of experienced Russian drillers and scientists from the Moscow Institute of Drilling, with the author the only westerner on site, contracted to control one of the critical advanced systems needed to reach target depth smoothly and efficiently.

If Bodra #3 had been allowed to drill ahead unhindered, there is no doubt the resulting impact would have sent shock waves around the oil world, and gained enormous international prestige for the Russians. Even more importantly perhaps, the desperately poor people of West Bengal would have gained access to their own energy reserves. Unfortunately, Bodra #3 was not allowed to drill ahead unhindered. The Americans were determined to stop the project one way or the other, and played on New Delhi’s obvious fear of the Communist State Government in West Bengal. After bribing a handful of corrupt central government officials, US intelligence sent in professional American saboteurs, who managed to wreck the drilling project while the author was away on a visit to Sydney in Australia.

Before we continue to the second massive advantage derived from ultra deep oil, and thus the primary reason why Wall Street decided to illegally invade Iraq, it is essential to look briefly at the way in which America devours a massive portion of global oil supply. You see, the ‘Peak Oil’ scam is not really about the world running out of oil reserves or being incapable of producing sufficient quantities to provide for its various national users. Instead, Peak Oil was fabricated to disguise America’s individual increasing greed for crude oil, and its imminent inability to pay hard cash for the product. Put simply, America is going broke fast, and Wall Street wishes to blame someone else before the angry Militias appear with their locked and loaded weapons.

This sorry situation is best summarized by Professor Victor Poleo of Venezuela’s Central University, who told IPS in April that, “The mechanism by which global oil prices are set is intact, but the normal behaviour of supply and demand is not.” According to Poleo, the root of the problem is that the United States ”is a terminal victim of its energetic metastasis. It has neither the oil nor the natural gas needed to feed its style of development. With just six percent of the world population, it consumes nearly 25 percent of the oil and gas produced worldwide.”

Professor Poleo went on to explain that there were expectations that demand for gasoline in the United States would stabilize at around 7.2 million barrels a day by the mid-1990s, ”but that didn’t happen,” he said. ”The United States’ voracity for gasoline rose to nine million barrels by 2003, one of every two liters burnt in the world.” And domestic demand for crude oil will continue to grow. The United States imports today six of every 10 barrels of oil and two of every 10 cubic meters of gas that it consumes, and by 2020 it will import eight of every 10 barrels of oil and four of every 10 cubic meters of gas, according to U.S. government reports.

Despite the fact that American intelligence already knew of Russia’s achievements with ultra deep oil production from the mantle of the earth back in the early eighties, it was obvious that this slow and expensive method of adding to national oil reserves could never keep up with America’s voracious appetite for gasoline. So ultimately when domestic demand grew too fast, or cash reserves were finally depleted, America would either be obliged to halve its own use of gasoline, or steal it from someone else by force. Halving gasoline usage was out of the question, so instead of building hundreds of ultra-deep drilling rigs, Wall Street squandered the cash building more aircraft carriers, with the desperate objective of attacking and permanently occupying the Middle East.

This is the point at which the second massive advantage derived from ultra-deep oil comes into play. Do you remember how puzzled the reservoir engineers were when they discovered that their existing reserves were being “topped up” from below? They later discovered that what they were really observing were naturally occurring ultra-deep oil wells, leaking vast quantities of oil from the mantle of the earth upwards through fractures into what we nowadays refer to as “sedimentary oilfields”, located relatively close to the surface. As the production companies draw oil out of these known reservoirs through oil wells, field pressure is slightly reduced, thereby allowing more ultra-deep oil to migrate up from the mantle and restock the reservoir from below.

Russian studies of their own ultra-deep wells and those in the White Tiger field in Vietnam, indicate in very rough terms that migration from the mantle is probably 20-30% less than production at Middle East wellheads, meaning in turn that if the flow rates of existing Iraqi and Saudi wells are reduced by about 30%, oil supply and production can and will continue forever, constantly replenished by ultra-deep oil from the mantle itself. It goes almost without saying that even with production reduced by 30%, there is more than enough oil in the Middle East to provide for America’s increasing usage for at least the next century. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why your sons and daughters have died and will continue to die in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

u can read the full in here

well we can have a little read abt the Deep hot Biosphere, if u guys don mind

The Deep, Hot Biosphere

Thomas Gold
July 1992

Abstract: (Subject: microbiology)

There are strong indications that microbial life is widespread at depth in the crust of the Earth, just as such life has been identified in numerous ocean vents. This life is not dependent on solar energy and photosynthesis for its primary energy supply, and it is essentially independent of the surface circumstances. Its energy supply comes from chemical sources, due to fluids that migrate upwards from deeper levels in the Earth. In mass and volume it may be comparable with all surface life.

Such microbial life may account for the presence of biological molecules in all carbonaceous materials in the outer crust, and the inference that these materials must have derived from biological deposits accumulated at the surface is therefore not necessarily valid.

Subsurface life may be widespread among the planetary bodies of our solar system, since many of them have equally suitable conditions below, while having totally inhospitable surfaces. One may even speculate that such life may be widely disseminated in the universe, since planetary type bodies with similar sub-surface conditions may be common as solitary objects in space, as well as in other solar-type systems.

We are familiar with two domains of life on the Earth: the surface of the land and the body of the oceans. Both domains share the same energy source: namely sunlight, used in the process of photosynthesis in green plants and micro–organisms. In this process the molecules of water and of CO2 are dissociated, and the products of this then provide chemical energy that supports all the other forms of life. Most of this energy is made available through the recombination of carbon and hydrogen compounds concentrated in the plants, with the oxygen that became distributed into the atmosphere and oceans by the same photosynthetic process. The end product is again largely water and CO2, thereby closing the cycle.

This was the general concept about life and the sources of its energy until approximately twelve years ago, when another domain of life was discovered (1). This new domain, the “ocean vents”, found first in some small regions of the ocean floor, but now found to be widespread (2), proved to have an energy supply for its life that was totally independent of sunlight and all surface energy sources. There the energy for life was derived from chemical processes, combining fluids – liquids and gasses – that came up continuously from cracks in the ocean floor, with substances available in the local rocks and in the ocean water. Such sources of chemical energy still exist on the Earth, because the materials here have never been able to reach the condition of the lowest chemical energy. The Earth formed by the accumulation of solid materials, condensed in a variety of circumstances from a gaseous nebula surrounding the sun. Much of this material had never been hot after its condensation, and it contained substances that would be liquid or gaseous when heated. In the interior of the Earth, heat is liberated by radioactivity, by compression, and by gravitational sorting; and this caused partial liquefaction and gasification. As liquids, gases and solids make new contacts, chemical processes can take place that represent, in general, an approach to a lower chemical energy condition. Some of the energy so liberated will increase the heating of the locality, and this in turn will liberate more fluids there, and so accelerate the processes that release more heat. Hot regions will become hotter, and chemical activity will be further stimulated there. This may contribute to, or account for the active and hot regions in the Earth’s crust that are so sharply defined.

Where such liquids or gases stream up to higher levels into different chemical surroundings, they will continue to represent a chemical disequilibrium and therefore a potential energy source. There will often be circumstances where chemical reactions with surrounding materials might be possible and would release energy; but where the temperature is too low for the activation of the reactions. This is just the circumstance where biology can successfully draw on chemical energy. The life in the ocean vents is one example of this. There it is bacterial life that provides the first stage in the process of drawing on this form of chemical energy: for example, methane and hydrogen is oxidized to CO2 and water, with oxygen available from local sulfates and metal oxides. Hydrogen sulfide is also frequently present, and leads to the production of water and metal sulfides; there may be many other reactions of which we are not yet aware. Of all the forms of life that we now know, bacteria appear to represent the one that can most readily utilize energy from a great variety of chemical sources.

How widespread is life based on such internal energy sources of the Earth? Are the ocean vents the sole representatives of this? Or do they merely represent the examples that were discovered first? After all, the discovery of these is recent, and we may well expect that other locations that are harder to investigate would have escaped detection so far.

Bacteria can live at higher temperatures than any other known organisms; 110 °C has been verified, and some biologists consider that the upper temperature limit may be as high as 150 °C (providing always that the pressure is sufficient to raise the boiling point of water above this temperature).

There can be little doubt that venting of liquids and gases from areas of the Earth’s mantle beneath the crust is not limited to a few cracks in the ocean floor. Indeed fossilized “dead” ocean vents have already been discovered (3), showing that the phenomenon is widespread and occurred in different geologic epochs. A similar supply of fluids seems to be widespread also in land areas, where it is much harder to investigate; but it has been noted that many areas of basement rocks contain methane and other hydrocarbons. This has been seen in numerous mining and tunnelling operations for a long time. Major fault-lines have been noted to be high-spots of hydrocarbon seepage (4). Hydrocarbons have also been encountered in deep drilling in basement rocks, as in the Soviet superdeep well in the Kola peninsula and in the pilot hole of the German Continental Deep Drilling Project (KTB). The large quantities of methane hydrates (methane-water ices) found in many areas of the ocean floor, and thought to contain more methane than all other known methane deposits (5,6), suggest a widely distributed methane supply from below.

In land areas, deep in the rocks, it would be much harder to discover and investigate biological activity than in the ocean vents,. The pore-spaces in the rocks are quite sufficient to accommodate bacterial life, and the rocks themselves may contain many of the chemicals that can be nutrients together with the ascending fluids. But, of course, there would be no space for larger life forms. Just as bacterial life in the ocean vents would not have been discovered had the secondary larger life forms not drawn attention to it, so any active bacterial life deep in the solid crust could have gone largely unnoticed.

The remains of bacteria in the form of molecules – “hopanoids” (derived from hopanes) – a material coming from bacterial cell-walls, have however been found in all of the several hundred samples of oil, coal and kerogen (distributed carbonaceous material in the crust) examined by by Ourisson et. al. (7). These authors note the widespread or apparently ubiquitous presence of these molecules in the sedimentary rocks, and they give an estimate of the total quantity as of the order of 1013 or 1014 tons, more than the estimated 1012 tons of organic carbon in all living organisms on or near the surface. They also note the virtually identical pattern of the chromatogram of these molecules in oil and in coal. Further they note that some of the molecules most commonly used to identify the presence of biological material in petroleum, such as pristane and phytane, are not necessarily derived from plant chlorophyll as is commonly believed, but could well be products of the same bacterial cultures as those that gave rise to the hopanoids. The presence of these bio-molecules can therefore not be taken to prove a derivation of the bulk substance from surface biological debris.

What are the depths to which active bacterial life may have penetrated? Could bacteria get down into the deep rocks? Would this represent just a minor branch of all the surface biological activity, or could it be comparable with it in the total amount of chemical processing caused by it? How important would such life have been for the chemical evolution of the crust of the Earth?

u guys can read it full in here

Probably. It is my understanding that the IR guided weapons were carried to allow the engagement of stealthy targets detected via IRST or by longer wave ground stations. The R-60MK was chosen because two pylons could carry four missiles which would be useful against low flying very small targets like jet powered cruise missiles. It is my understanding that on the way out from base the bombers detected would be fired upon with the big missiles while returning to base to rearm and refuel any missiles launched would be engaged with missles and the gun initially. Later missions would use long range missiles and IR missiles and guns when the remaining bombers were closer.

k, i need some specs for the MiG-31M’s engine ….. as u said earlier, the thrust was agumented to 16.5 tonnes.

and another dumb one, is it possibe (atleast theoritically) to fit the 25 tonne thrust NK-_ engine of the Tu-160 on to the MiG-31s?

whats it so strange abt it?? ….. after all she needs steam/gas for its turbines, so who is gonna fulfill that need of the turbines?? …. and the prob is that Turbines go on strike if they don get enough steam/gas to run …. very very gasaholic chaps they are.