RiiAnd later deriatives.. i like this idea very much! Looks like the Roadmap for Flankers have more miles to go. 🙂 What would it be i Wonder?
I thought this was a bit strange to be honest. I had expected that T-50 would replace Su-35 production for VVS around 2020 with 100-120 units in service, whereas Su-34 would continue to be produced as Su-34M until at least 2025. But then I also thought there were more like 30 Su-35s already in service, not a dozen. =/
I agree that VVS can do without MiG-35; that project only really makes sense if Russia believes MiG has a long-term future, i.e. that Russia has both the requirements and resources to keep Sukhoi and MiG occupied. There definitely seems to be some sort of tussle going on with regard to future projects amidst still-limited resources. The key question for me is whether or not T-50 is intended or suitable for carrier conversion — if not, then I think LMFS goes to the top of the priority list, which in turn favours MiG-35 production in the interim. A lot of people seem to be assuming that a carrier variant of T-50 is just a matter of time, but I’ve yet to see a single authoritative statement in this regard, or even detailed lay analysis!
RiiNot really much different than it has been for the last few decades.
Despite a drastic reduction in resources and number of ships available and global reconfigurations. In other words, commitments that have and will continue to persist through sheer bureaucratic and institutional inertia until they meet the slightest resistance, whereupon they will collapse. Hollow commitments of this sort are a disaster (and an embarrassment) waiting to happen.
RiiNo need to evaluate when the reasons for procuring the aircraft are unrelated to its performance, suitability, or even basic airworthiness.
RiiThe program is there to be turned into an operational capability should the requirement waft down from on high.
And so we’re back to the questions of vision and commitment. You’ll forgive me for having very little faith in the UK taking anything other than the path of least resistance, i.e. do nothing, delay, and fuddle about until the point is reached when buying an American platform off the shelf is the most sensible option available.
RiiStrip away all the rubbish about NATO and this seems a fairly reasonable assessment to me; my only criticism (from what’s conveyed in the article) is that he doesn’t mention that the logistical situation is going to improve greatly over the next decade, bringing the greater proportion of Russian forces up to the level of today’s elite units, and extending the capacity to operate abroad. We can even see this in the narrow field of military aviation programs: Il-112, Il-214, Il-476 are all to come online by 2020, and there are plans to restart An-124 production also, covering the full spectrum of fixed-wing transports. In the rotary realm we have a likely follow-on order for additional Mi-26T2s, introduction of Mi-38 and Ka-62, and projects for both a new Heavy Lift Helicopter (with China) and a High Speed Helicopter which should fly by 2020.
RiiWhen Triton stops shedding tail surfaces it’ll have a better claim perhaps!. For us I’m not sure that a Seaspray7500E kitted out Telemos/Mantis platform might not be operationally perfectly adequate and commercially a far better option. When the appearance is that there’s Heron lo-end and Triton hi-end on the MPUAV market, with little else in between, the gap for Telemos to exploit would appear quite distinct.
That would certainly seem preferable but … isn’t this program dead?
As for the comment about ‘formerly great nation’ I suspect you’re not sad about that at all.
Well, I don’t blame you for having this impression, but you would be wrong. I can’t think of any way to do justice to my sentiments in a succint or even coherent fashion, so I’ll just leave it at that.
RiiThat’s a great An-71 shot! I found a somewhat larger version (attached) and TinEye is showing the existence of an even larger (1372×912/163k) version, but the links don’t work. I don’t suppose anyone has it on hand?
[ATTACH=CONFIG]227194[/ATTACH]
RiiUSN: New Rail Gun Ideal For Countering Imaginary Flying Battleships
“An electromagnetic rail gun is a gun that uses just electricity — no gun powder — and, oh, by the way, can shoot a projectile like this, well over 100 miles (160km) at Mach 7,” Chief of Naval Research, Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, from the Office of Naval Research, told CBS News.
“So think about that. A slug that big — a slug that big going Mach 7 puts a hole through six half-inch steel plates,” he added.
“There’s not a thing in the sky that’s going to survive against that.”
Yeah, because aircraft were just shrugging off hits from existing cannon and missile technology.
Pressed on the subject, Klunder replied that intelligence gathered from Japanese anime indicates that it is only a matter of time before America’s adversaries field giant flying robots. “We have to be prepared,” he insisted.
RiiI’m not quite sure how multiple people seem to have managed to interpret “bumble about with half-arsed ideas” as “Nimrod was a brilliant program”. =/
But whatever. Narrowly conceived, P-8 + Triton is undoubtedly the best solution at hand. It’s just sad to watch the ongoing demise of a formerly great nation is all.
RiiFrom what I can tell, Russia was kicking around MPA/ASW proposals around for a fair while before settling quite recently on this Novella upgrade for Il-38. This suggests to me that they’ve opted to reject both the Tu-214 and A-40 proposals that’ve been discussed in recent years in favour of a (hopefully superior) solution further down the track, whether based on MS-21 or a new dedicated airframe, possibly in concert with the Altius and Global Hawk-ski UAVs in development. Or maybe we’ll see a Tu-214-based MPA ordered in the next couple of years and it’ll serve alongside the upgraded Il-38s, who knows? How much life do the Tu-142s have left? Could Russia be looking at eventually replacing both aircraft with a single platform?
RiiBumble about with half-arsed ideas, reverse course a few times, eventually scrap domestic plans and opt for American platform, further eroding UK industry and cementing dependency on the United States.
Pretty much the last fifty years in a nutshell.
RiiYnetnews: Israel’s V-22 purchase to be funded with pre-emptive American loan.
Israel would only pay interest and fees until the current military aid package expires in September 2018, while the principal on the loan would be covered by a new aid package promised by President Barack Obama, which would extend the annual foreign military financing (FMF) aid until 2028 [….] the Defense News report quotes former Israeli ambassador to the US, Danny Ayalon, as saying it was reasonable for the Israeli government to expect the extension of the foreign military aid, based on a wide-ranging congressional support for the Jewish State. One Washington source told Defense News that the complicated financing arrangement required a “leap of faith” by all the actors involved in the deal, as the DPP approved means the US will pay defense contractors for the arms long before the new aid package for Israel is approved.
There’s ‘backseat driving’ and then there’s climbing into the front seat and pushing the driver out of the car. Spending money from another country that they haven’t even agreed to give you yet… wow.
RiiThe never-ending Canada saga:
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140406/DEFREG02/304060010/Canada-No-F-35-Buys-Before-2018
As cynical and manipulative as it undoubtedly is, it would be wonderful to have this kind of public scrutiny and debate applied to military-industrial matters in my own country. We have an eerie culture of silence here, born of a combination of lockstep bipartisanship between the two major parties on questions of national security, a culture of reverence for all things military (there was a recent furor when an MP dared to criticise the officer in charge of Australia’s recently militarised border patrol operations. Of course, that’s precisely why they were militarised in the first place: to make them effectively impossible to criticise), and a real cowardice amongst the Labor Party that is reluctant to engage where it should, something that can be attributed partly to the military reverence alluded to earlier, but cannot be explained wholly in those terms because it’s a cowardice that manifests elsewhere as well.
* The Liberal Party, conversely, has basically nothing to criticise; when the Labor government invited the Americans to station troops at Darwin, then-opposition leader Tony Abbott could only sputter that a Liberal government would invite them to set up two bases instead. This is indicative of the range of acceptable debate in Australian political culture.
RiiA-50EI is 10.5m rotodome.
I was wondering about this, thanks.
There is no reason that A-330 can provide superior life cycle costs as its aerodynamics/weights will be completely changed.
I think it’s safe to assume that a twin-engine modern commercial airliner will offer superior life cycle costs to an evolved four-engine 1960s military cargolifter, much as was the case in the tanker competition.
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