^ That’s a real good question, man. I got curious as well, but couldn’t find anything at all. I checked Radio VDV on VK, the Ryazan airborne and everything, and while they had some more photos of this event, there were none that showed the drone any closer than in those video snaps unfortunately. In fact, they’re further away:

(and there’s one of them priests you seem to love so much, TR1, sorry!!!)

However, about an hour of googling on the Russian web made me realize just how freakin many Russian companies there are that develop and build drones in all imaginable sizes and configurations, from hummingbird to MQ-9ish size, and just how few of these actually have ended up in use by the armed forces in some capacity to date.

Well, I hope somebody figures out what that drone is eventually because that’s quite intriguing.

Beauty and the Beast at the same time.
Im trying to eyeball the Canon section.. seriously, where does the PakFa discard all the cartridges? they have to go over the wings.

The starboard-mounted gun on Su-27/35 (and by all accounts, PAK-FA) has no ejection ports where the gun is, and the box-like ammunition magazine is offset from the gun, right behind the cockpit area. There is a cartridge hatch on the port side of the fuselage though (under the LERX), for loading and unloading/retrieving the chains. There’s a small hatch on top there, that gives you access to a shaft where you attach a crank and use that to load/unload the magazine through the hatch underneath.

They aren’t just dropped like on a WW2 fighter to my knowledge, but recycled back into the magazine for retrieval back on the ground. In fact I can’t think of a single post-1970’s plane that just drops them like that, but I might be ignorant.

Guys, there is already a PAK-FA thread for these kinds of discussions.

Even though I’d rather not see it anywhere because it’s been done to death twenty times over. Still, there’s already a thread…

Ah! Just some teething problems on new tech – a bit like an Armata tank breaking down on Red Square.

While I’m sure that the Armata has experienced teething issues, it’s never broken down on the Red Square. One of them got stalled there because the parking brake (or rather “mountain brake” as they call it) was inadvertently engaged and the inexperienced parade crew had no idea what happened so they called in a towing vehicle. Even with that they couldn’t move it an inch, it was glued firmly to the ground with the engine revving to no avail. When the technicians from UralVagonZavod showed up, they disengaged said brake in two seconds flat and the tank could move on just like that. An absolutely hilarious blunder to be honest, but not an actual breaking down.

now look at J-20

wow j-20 wing is very Anhedral. like big transports c17 and an-124. that mean that its not very agile in my opinon. more like the slow lumbering airlifter

Did not know that Flat Pack story Ken, intersting.

I prefer KeyPub names- Su-34 Hellduck.

Hellduck is brilliant, yes, and it’s actually caught on far beyond this forum which is amazing.

The closest “real” duck is that old MiG canard prop MiG-8, nicknamed Utka (duck).

How is “Fagot” offensive? It’s a classical woodwind instrument.

Anyway, the USSR nicknames are not officially endorsed in any way, and on top of that they’re oftentimes used for several different planes (Chaika/seagull for example is used for any plane with a gull/dihedral-anhedral wing, most notably the Be-12 and the I-153… And Cheburashka is anything with large engine nacelles, usually the An-72/74, but also the L-410 etc).

It’s not always about shape either, take Grach (rook) for the Su-25/28/39, no particular reasoning behind that, or Ruslan for the An-124 which I think is named after the protagonist in an epic poem by Pushkin…