Low light TV channel — not thermal, but 90% of the practical capability at 30% the price. Only thing a TI channel let’s you do that this thing can’t is see through smoke and clouds. Plattan is blind in bad weather.

No, the Russian numbers jive for the most part except for the total number in uniform. The numbers work if you assume they have under 820,000 in uniform. Twower has covered the numbers on his blog better than I can here from memory. The number that is nonsense is the claim they make that its still a million man army. They haven’t had a million men at arms for at least 6-7 years now, but its an open though unacknowledged fact that they are somewhere in the low 800,000 level.

Nobody is claiming Russia is paying professional soldiers as much as the US is. The pay is about 40% that. But that’s a ridiculous amount of money for a middle income country. It makes officers and the new NCO’s the elites of society again and what it really means is nobody will be piloting a PAK-FA to Beijing for some Yuans because they can’t feed their family in Russia. 12 years ago a Russian Major had to drive a taxi part time off base to keep his family in bread. Today he makes $34k a year which is higher than the median income in the Eurozone (forget Bulgaria — 34k is the median income in France!) and is not going to think about immigrating West where the best he will be able to do is drive a taxi again.

Keep in mind there is also supposed to be a housing program for career track people too with the lifetime housing benefit worth a good $80k too. There are plenty of EU armies today with far worse pay and benefits than Russia. Even if the housing program is currently less than ideal with them forcing apartments in less than desirable locales on you, its still free equity. The pension bump is also nothing to sneeze at. Some of these pensions for more senior officers are higher than the max American social security benefit.

Fixed guns are much more accurate than turret installations, and for a cannon with a slow rate of fire like the Gsh-30K you need accuracy to overcome the fact that it will never have the shotgun effect you see with the pee shooter on the Apache. The difference between the 30*113B the Apache fires and the 30*165 the Hind fires is night and day. Apaches use guns to kill dismounts and rip up light vehicles as they cant use them against heavy armor. The Hind is not so limited and can rip up basically every tank out there with its 30mm cannon.

The only reason they moved over to 23mm’s for the Mi-35M is because the kick of the 30mm was destroying the GOES turrets. The 23mm cannon is inferior.

Sokol actually cant. The entire production line was packed up and shipped to Irkut. Irkut is actually thinking of expanding the existing production line they inherited to double capacity.

http://rosprom.org/news/aviation/na_irkutskom_aviazavode_mozhet_byt_sozdana_eshche_odna_liniya_po_sborke_yak_130/

Those be the famous AWAC killing K-172’s right? I’m always horrible with missiles — they all look like giant dicks to me.

Single piece large russian/belarussian touchscreen MFDs were shown at the last MILEX show in Minsk. Russian or American doesn’t matter. All these screens are made in Taiwan 🙂

Antonov is a KB (a design bureau in Russian parlance). They will survive, and maybe even thrive under the good graces of their principal client the Russian MoD. The question isn’t whether the design house will survive, but what remains of actual manufacturing in Ukraine and the answer is that something like 85% of this manufacturing has already packed up its bags and moved to Russia. The only jewel in the crown left is Motor-Sich and the Kremlin is actively working to gut it too by establishing a helicopter engine building capacity in Russia and ending one of the last major dependencies on Ukraine the Russian’s have. Motor-Sich will not be able to survive on AI-225 sales to China and India alone. They have talked about entering into the fighter engine market with some sort of RD-93 derivative since they own a lot of the same IP as Klimov dating to the Soviet period, but Klimov is simply better funded and they are building a new $1 billion factory for Klimov with French assistance, and nobody will be funding a retooling of Motor-Sich with that kind of money. But Ukraine is screwed all over thanks to the wise leadership of all those Oranges, and aerospace is the least of their problems.