Y-20,
are against entitlement culture, value merit,
Well there are two more areas right there we agree on……..how odd??
just those two? you don’t like hamburgers?
perhaps you’re more into Pad Thai?
like this?
Also, the Mirage F1 might look deceptively straight-forward (like the archetypal “supersonic combat aircraft”), but it’s actually hideously complex mechanically – it could hardly have more moving parts if it had variable sweep or variable incidence! In fairness, among most of its contemporaries (F-4E, MiG-23, F-8 etc.) it fits right in, but it’s not exactly a simple airframe by modern standards.
The French price premium does raise an interesting issue though, with the ASTRAC upgrade mentioned so often over the past few weeks it has occurred to me that the Russian aerospace industry has pretty much all the building blocks in place to offer a very interesting alternative.
– They have designed upgrades for second-hand aircraft before (MiG-29SMT), including some of similar vintage (MiG-21 Bison, MiG-23-98)
– They have successfully implemented at least a few of them (MiG-29SMT, MiG-21 Bison)
– They have a unique selling point in having an excellent engine upgrade option (SMR-95, with tech insertions from the RD-93 and RD-33MK durability should now at least match the ole ATAR)
– They have a competitive, off-the-shelf radar (Kopyo-M as in the Bison) that is easily light and compact enough to fit the Mirage’s rather cramped nose (85kg vs <120kg for RDY-3)
– They have superior anti-ship (Kh-35) and anti-radar missiles (Kh-31P) which fit in the AM.39 Exocet envelope
– Iraq pretty much demonstrated that the Kh-29 AGM can be carried
– They have counterparts available for pretty much every other aspect of the ASTRAC package (ARH AAMs, agile SRAAMs, new ejection seat, new INS/GPS, new HUD/MFDs, new RWR/ECM, perhaps now even an LDP as on the MiG-35)
– Maybe they could even fit a single piece windscreen, as on the MiG-21 Bison (South Africa and Israel certainly did so on late-model Cheetahs and Kfirs)
– Replace 2 DEFA guns with one GSh-301? Stronger recoil than an individual DEFA, but *much* lighter and still plenty adequate in terms of fire power. The internal volume gained, combined with that used for the LRMTS in the F1CT, might just suffice to fit OLS-UEM.Come to think of it, practically all of this could also be done to the F-4E. Iran, are you listening (setting aside for a moment the question of why they would prefer to stick with Western airframes that will always be hard up for spares, rather than just buying MiG-29s and JF-17s)?
there is a russian ugprade to Mirage F-1 .
in South Africa!
i dont know what it has other than RD93 engines
I always much prefer aircraft with dedicated roles rather than multi-roles as we saw much more interesting designs back then.
I personally like the look of the two-seater, such as this EA-7L
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