I dont think many of you have done your homework. With each subsequent block of MKI’s there are less and less Western systems installed. The Indians have been replacing everything mainly with indigenous systems and the Russian share has grown too. And only where there is no Russian or Indian system they like they buy Israeli. There is very little European stuff in the block III MKI’s already. The MFD’s they use now are made by SamTel of India. The jamming pods are Russian (and not Israeli or French anymore) etc….

The Sokol plant said today that the Russian air force will have all 12 of the Yak-130’s it ordered by November 25th. All is well with production and they want more orders.

http://arms-tass.su/?page=article&aid=84754&cid=25

There was a picture of the naked unpainted Algerian Yak with only the Irkut company logo on it posted on militaryphotos is September or October. There were also reports as late as December 2009 of the the Russian air force expecting delivery of 9 more Yak’s in 2010. 4 are currently in service and painted in VVS colors.

It was an interesting press conference but that 30 year line is taken a bit out of context. He was talking about the current in service systems which are mainly S-300PS’s or early 1980’s origin. These systems are all expected to be scrap after 2015 when their services lives will be up. When he commented on the S-400 he called it modern and perfectly up to date, but then went into bashing the procurement rate which is embarrassingly slow. He also mentioned the ‘”loss” of some 300 technologies due to industrial base degradation. In particular they talked about graphite for missile seekers — nothing you cant import or ratherly cheaply get back if there is such serious “demand” and its also nothing new. We’ve known from open sources for years the sorry state of sub-contractors in Russia and about the loss of all sorts of technologies when these firms go belly up.

The MKI story is fairly complex, and I dont have time to run through the history of each subsystem, but suffice it to say the Indians went MKI shopping in 1997 initially and things were a bit shall we say “chaotic” in Russia circa 1997. Mobsters were raiding factories and running off with tooling for entire lines. Basically all the avionics producers in Russia were bankrupt or didnt exist at that point. The Indians were offered a series of things for the MKI including MFD’s initially designed for the MiG-1.44. There were a range of problems back then including entire facilities failing ISO certification. Since then basically every enterprise in Russia having anything to do with aviation have attained ISO certs. You cant really export things abroad when your factory floor looks like a missile hit it and you cant provide even basic ISO 9000 certificates for clients seeking to place billion dollar orders. It’s a very different country today.

Moore’s law means you dont have to be very good to get all the processing power you need today. The mission is the same, but the chips available double in capability every 18 months.

Russian advances in electronics are not impressive they are simply inertial and “good enough.” And more often than not simply mean a Russian designed chip being fabbed in Israel. Russian electronics are simply as good as whatever their Israeli or Taiwanese fabs can make. Some of you fanboys dont seem to understand globalization all that well. As long as they arent under sanctions they can get whatever chips made they like with no problems. The technical limitation is the chip fabrication technology and not the designing of a chip.

Now their domestic fabs are not a pretty picture. There are BIG problems are Angstrem, their CEO is going bye-bye. That chip making equipment they signed a contract with AMD to get (90 micron stuff so not exactly the latest and greatest) is gathering dust in a warehouse in Western Europe because comrade CEO screwed up some aspects of the financing. This is all open source stuff. Read your newspapers.

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rosrep.ru%2Fnews%2Findex.php%3FELEMENT_ID%3D3474%26SECTION_ID%3D12&sl=ru&tl=en

Raptorski indeed. :diablo: