Well- Yevgeny Felsner (designer) said that the fixed wing version worked perfectly well, and would have fulfilled the missions fine if you deleted the STOL lift jets to make room for more fuel. VG is not a universal panacea- it is complex, heavy, and requires more maintainance. The series Su-24 can’t be called a STOL aircraft by any stretch of the imagination.

Swing wings were however fashionable. The F-111 occupied both Mikoyan and Sukhoi in the mid-to-late 60s; vast amounts of documentation, test models were produced. The F-111 was photographed in vast detail at the Paris Airshow. Both the MiG-23 and Su-24 moved from tailed delta to VG, because VG was the “in thing”, and what the customer demanded, not just on technical merit. Indeed, in the MiG-23’s case the wing was the cause of prolonged problems.

According to http://www.airwar.ru/enc/fighter/mig27k.html

the Kaira-1 system of the MiG-27K comprised a TV camera with enhanced contrast (low light) capability to allow longer range target ID in poor visibility conditions. A second TV camera was co-located with the laser rangefinder/designator. I don’t believe this second camera had the same low light capability, or the first camera would be pointless.

The Kaira-24 of the Su-24 has only the single aperture. I believe either the low light TV channel was put into the aperture with the laser rangefinder, or it was simply discarded. The Su-24 had terrain following and mapping radars, which would have partly compensated for the loss of the low light capability.

I agree, it does look like the Kaira, and the Tu-160 and Tu-22M installations are different, but ALL my references say they both use OBP-15T optical sight and that picture is definitely of a Tu-22M3.

ooops 🙂

Well, it was late…