The article is using photos of the earlier prototypes, hence “exposed engines” and what not. They actually started covering the nacelles long ago, in the latest 4-5 prototypes they built. 

The plane that crashed (supposedly due to some freak control issue, as it entered a flatspin and for Sukhoi jets with TVC, even the craziest post-stall situations and flatspins are complete childs play, super easy to get out of, barely an inconvenience) was the very first actual serial aircraft, so if it had any similarities to the prototype series it would naturally be the latest ones, and thus wouldn’t have any exposed metal surfaces in the rear. I mean, naturally.

What happened to the dedicated T-50/PAK-FA/Su-57 thread? This forum is unrecognizable, and seems rather dead now after the crazy re-design. 

Number #057?

Well, judging by the old-style IFR cover and stuff, it has to be one of the older prototypes (or perhaps the KNS, though it didn’t sport the sensor windows before) that we’ve seen before, but given a demo bort number.

I think this is a bit closer, but I messed up with the colors so there is some serious banding going on. Oh well, can’t wait to see some official shots of it from above/below…

Blast from the past… I did actually get pretty close, then. Except those pitot tubes were funkier than I thought, and that APU exhaust is positively huge.

As for the alleged airspace incursion, according to both Russian and Japanese plots it was only the RuAF A-50 that came close to the Liancourt rocks (it didn’t fly over them by any stretch of the imagination, but it might have grazed the Koreans’ unilaterally declared “airspace” there, i.e. within 12nm of the rocks, as the Japanese plot shows)…

The Russian plot (or flight plan, I guess) puts it well outside of that “airspace” though.

Japan claims the islets too (just some barren rocks, population ~40 people, all of which reside in a single Korean complex, and are basically only present to cement Korea’s claims over the rocks and to guide tourists), and because of this, claims their airspace was violated as well…

But, due to this, this blob of some kind of weird doubly “sovereign airspace” in the middle of the sea is far from generally accepted. It is all well within their ADIZ though, and there are no disputes as far as that goes (and you may freely fly there, but you will probably be escorted).

Anyway, the joint Sino-Russian flight of Tu-95 and H-6 bombers joined the A-50, flying through the Korean strait and back. They did not violate any airspace however, real or imagined.

Are we going to ignore the photo of the plane with the utterly non LO optical pod attached?

Not like T-50-9 (prototype, barebone, no RAM or anything) is LO anyway. Photo’s from 2018, too, but was published only now.

The talk seems to suggest that it’s more of an “ad-hoc” pod related to the development of the platform (just like a glorified GoPro or something), and not something meant to actually enter service as some kind of targeting or surveillance ditto.

Well, the SR-71 did the same thing as the U-2 but (much) faster. After the Powers and Anderson incidents, the U-2 clearly wasn’t quite up to scratch to conduct surveillance over (militarily qualified) enemy territory, but the SR-71 still could pull it off. The U-2 was relegated to performing surveillance from safe airspace.

At the time, surveillance satellites were gaining ground but they were still cumbersome things with all the inherent limitations of satellites (easily tracked and predictable orbital trajectories, no way of quickly directing them to a new hotspot on short notice) and with the added issue of not being able to in any way beam down high-resolution photography – the film cans had to be physically dropped and retrieved somehow.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s satellites became markedly better, as the CCD was introduced among other things, and as the technologically adept enemies’ surface-to-air weaponry kept getting better the SR-71 was increasingly being relegated to surveillance over places where it wasn’t particularly threatened, just like the U-2 had beforehand.

Later on you got to the stage where the SR-71 and the U-2 basically performed the same job, but the latter was far cheaper to operate. So, that’s why the U-2 remained in service for longer, despite not being quite as hot performance-wise.

Nowadays, we’re really in the drone age, but the legacy platforms have gotten much more powerful as well. Surveillance satellites are leaps and bounds better and more numerous than before, sensors on regular piloted aircraft are incredibly advanced and can accomplish loads by just skirting national airspaces, legally flying in international ditto unbothered. Unmanned surveillance drones are on standby at forward deployments all over the world, with dozens in the air at any given moment. If they happen to get shot down, which has happened (eg the RQ-170 in Iran, which pretty much led to its very unveiling too) it isn’t quite as troublesome as when a piloted spy plane goes down.

That said, there could still be a time and place for a kind of high supersonic or even hypersonic surveillance drone, for obvious reasons, and perhaps there is some black project in operation. That approach does create a host of issues though, it’s not easy to be discrete when taking that route.

Yes, they’ve hooked their various MFDs up to DCS for display, hence the gaming peripherals.

Video (first half):
https://topspb.tv/news/2019/06/11/al…medium=desktop

You’re probably right, thank you :

The full-scale mockup in the photograph is just slightly larger than the Ka-226 in front of it. Nowhere near as large as that model implies (8 windows etc).

So… A smaller version?