Electronics are relatively easy especially when you have access to foreign fabrication equipment and are not sanctions PWND. Radar isnt even particularly hard. Radar design houses are generally 50 people deep and $100-200 million in. Phazatron at one point was running on like $15 million per year.

A jet engine is an entirely different animal though. That tests everything from your radio-electronics base in that you need supercomputers running some very custom stuff just to model the engine stages to getting FADEC to work and of course all the relevant material sciences. A jet engine program will employ 20,000 or 30,000 people for a decade and a half and run you $25-30 billion dollars and even then it might not end up competitive.

The fighter is the engine. Everything else even a midget state can cobble together.

Indian procurement strategy is a riddle wrapped in an enigma stuffed in a bong with a whole lot of cannabis. Best not to try and make any sense of it….

About 1/4 of French aircraft can not drop GPS guided bombs. Basically ZERO Mirages and none of the early tranche Rafales.

They dont have a reactor for 100,000 ton design. The RITM-200 reactor on their new icebreakers and meant for the Lider cruisers is only big enough for a 50-65,000 ton carrier in the Gorshkov/Kuznetzov size range. The RITM-200 is a 175MW class reactor. The Ford class utilizes 300 MW class reactors. The limiter for the Russians is reactor size. They will not develop yet another reactor for obvious cost and economy of scale reasons. Better to have 2 Kuz or even Vik size carriers than 1 Ford class anyway. 90 jet air wings are beyond a retarded extravagance. Once the reactor design is perfected on the Arktika and Redut/Polimet is finally sorted and they have a long range naval air defense missile they can build the Lider and once the Lider is mature and they have some kind of economies of scale worked out for the reactors they can pump out an extra 2 and make a carrier.

The Soviets had a system worked out for these things — icebreaker first, then cruiser, then a carrier. They never got to do the carrier before the USSR collapsed but the Russians are sticking to much the same development model. Arktika -> Lider -> a carrier.

Arent any freebies for Israel. That $38 billion is all loans for arms. Admittedly the loans are at a lower interest rate than Israel’s sovereign credit waiting warrants but who else is buying $38 billion in arms in one go aside from the Saudis? As subsidies to a client state go this is pretty minor as the Israelis, unlike say Ukraine, actually pay their bills.

More CMs vs ISIS… what a waste.

I suspect this time they are testing to see if the failure rate of missiles has been improved in last year. I suspect they werent too happy with results of year ago. Syria is just a big training range for the Russkies. Lessons being learned etc…

So why does that necessitate a change in the nose mounted radar?

Because the old radar was heavy and obsolete. 1980’s tech in the old one.

Whats the opinion about the two incidents we saw recently – Mi-24/35 and a Turkish Super Cobra…. both lost their tail but the Turkish helicopter dropped as dead weight where as the Russian one even tried to recover and it ended up in normal posture on the ground, very hard and caught fire.
Is it possible that some more altitude could have given chance to the pilots to have a proper ‘crash’ landing?

Russian helos still do not have fire retardant coated fuel tanks. Yes, they are better at taking a hard landing than the Cobra but when the tanks go they burn like fire crackers. Those poor guys likely survived the landing only to burn to death. It is typical problem with Russian engineering — do things half way.