This isn’t entirely accurate 😉

B-2 levels of LO are going to be pretty obsolete very soon. Maybe not against Western SAMs, but let’s not get carried away. Anything more than B-2 levels of LO might cost far too much – as B2s are horrendously overpriced, even if that level of stealth is cheaper now than it was before to achieve.

Agility and low level penetration abilities with moderate LO should be viable too.

B-2s were obnoxiously expensive because you had all of the R&D costs spread out over 21 airframes rather than the 75 or 150 they wanted at various points. Cutting edge aircraft produced in very small numbers are going to be absurdly expensive, it’s a fact of life.

The problem with a low level penetrator with moderate LO is that in certain environments you may still need EW support or a robust onboard EW suite. That can be expensive in the latter, and a giveaway of your position in the former. Plus, low level greatly reduces the range of any standoff weapons, meaning you have to get closer to a threat system which will increase your probability of detection/engagement.

Power of the engines has nothing to do with capability.

Except speed and acceleration.

Do you know the route they flew? As the crow flies it’s only about 9000km from Russia to Cuba.

Well, staging from Kola will give you a range of over 10,000 kilometers one way to Venezuela. I think I read somewhere that they tanked on the way back for IFR practice and made a big deal out of it because it was the first time they did that in a training sortie. So if you fly from Kola to the US ADIZ northeast of Maine you’re over 6,000 kilometers, meaning a range both ways of over 12,000 kilometers since they obviously flew back and recovered somewhere.

How many An-225s did they build: 1.

As a PURPOSE BUILT AIRCRAFT. They don’t need a hundred of them.

Typhoons: 6 (and they’re so useful they’re being scrapped while the Deltas soldier on.)

They built 6 for the under ice capability, they had the Deltas for open water operations. What’s the problem there? Some reports suggest they’re being scrapped because they’re expensive to operate and with the Russian military not being funded as well as they might like in recent years there is nothing wrong with that. The SR-71 was very useful when it was scrapped to save money.

But the issue is why do they need a new strategic bomber when the Blackjack line is still turning out aircraft

Because they can’t make BLACKJACKs in the numbers they’d need I’d guess. The current theory is that the new aircraft being made are being fabricated from existing components or are incomplete airframes left at Kazan that are being finished. At this point the BLACKJACK is a 30 year old design so adding a few of them to bulk up the strategic bomber force on the cheap and then pursuing a new design makes sense given the total situation they have before them.

Payload capacity : ???? kg

B-1B can carry up to 80,000 pounds of dumb bombs. Total weight is really irrelevant however, as they’ll rarely load that many bombs on board. If you want PGMs, they usually go on the rotary launcher anyway, limiting you to 8 weapons per bay for a total of 24. Which is still a serious loadout, but you get the point.

As for speed the B-1A reached Mach 2.2 but the USAF traded that away for a lower RCS which they deemed made it more survivable. As for the range issue I’ve always thought the 14,000km was brochure material as the Blackjack has no records over 5000kms despite all the effort they went through to set as many records as possible with it.

They made it more survivable to be able to perform as a low-altitude penetrator. The Tu-160 is not a penetrator. Different airframes for different roles. As for the range issue, Tu-160s harassing the East Coast and the airspace around the UK have done so without IFR support.

6 MIRVs is a preference not a limitation.

If you want to activate 14 MIRVs per D5, you’ll be inactivating warheads somewhere else to comply with treaty restrictions.

As for survivability how is a sub that’s hard to find because it hides under ice any more survivable than a sub that’s hard to find because it’s quite?

Because of the absurdly robust double-hull construction. Again, it was designed to be an uber-survivable SLBM platform operating under the ice. Both subs are hard to find in their respective environments. But Typhoon is better protected once you do find it. Hence why it is arguably the more survivable platform.

Engine power doesn’t have squat to do with anything.

Are you kidding me? The Tu-160 is a far larger aircraft and needs more power to both get off the ground and to get up to Mach 2 when required.

Basically all it says is you need a huge plane to do less than what the smaller B-1 can do.

Like the B-1B, a lot of the BLACKJACK’s capability (Kh-15 capability, bombs, etc) wasn’t added when they realized that they were not in fact going to be building 100 of them.

How about survivability? The B-1 was good for Mach 2.2 (faster than the Blackjack) but the USAF gave that up to reduce the cross section to the point that it was better to have the low RCS than to have the speed.

Again, BLACKJACK: not a penetrator. While it does have reduced RCS measures as well, albeit not to the point of the B-1B, it is a standoff missile platform.

The Blackjack holds NO records in the 10,000km category.

Which also proves nothing.

[COLOR=RED]Thread sanitized. Try and play nice, leaving the politics and personal opinions about China out of it.[/COLOR]

Last thing I knew, it was a casualty of the cutbacks after the fall of the Soviet Union. Prototype was rumored to have been under construction at Novosibirsk (NAPO), don’t know if it was actually completed. I’d assume that if any substantial work was done, it still remains, as it should’ve represented the first serious LO platform in Russia.

The PAK-DA is a semi-strategic bomber which will replace the Tu-22M3 types

Are you sure? I assumed the PAK-DA was the eventual Tu-95MS and Tu-160 replacement. A lot of the Tu-22M3’s roles are supposed to be taken by the Su-34 since the T-60S was offed a while back.

Their line of thinking is there is no need to create a Ubber Stealth aircraft a-la B-2 type

If they want a strategic missile platform that doesn’t need to come in close proximity with targets, they can drop stealth altogether. If they want to be able to operate in a modern battlefield environment, then they should focus on B-2 levels of LO, else they’re at risk to a lot of interceptors and modern SAM systems.

So will it have any relation to the T-60?

If it’s not supposed to be a Tu-160 replacement, then it will if they’re smart. That was going to be a serious aircraft.

It’s not the size of the tool but how well it’s designed. See the B-1B / Blackjack for example. Ohio / Typhoon for another. In both cases the smaller of the two WELL out perform the larger.

The Tu-160 is not in the same class as the B-1B. The B-1B is no longer a viable strategic delivery system, and it never even got ALCM capability in the first place. The Tu-160 is a pure strategic delivery system, although it is being upgraded for conventional roles much like the B-1B was. Were you to compare them on their merits, the Tu-160 is the superior aircraft, possessing greater range, greater speed, and longer-ranged weapons. Any advantages the B-1B currently enjoys are a result of different mission taskings and cannot really be compared between the two.

The dumbed down version of the Ohio / Typhoon debate would be the Ohio has more missiles that are more reliable and more accurate than the Typhoons counterparts. Ohios are quieter and more reliable.

SS-N-20s are accurate enough for nuclear delivery systems. They aren’t hard target killers so they don’t need to be absurdly accurate. SS-N-20 is being phased out not because of any reliability problems (you might be thinking of Bulava) but because the weapon was mated with the Typhoon and isn’t suitable for use on the remaining Deltas.

The Ohio carries 24 missiles vs 20 in the Typhoon for more missiles at less than half the displacement.

Trident IIs normally carry 6 MIRVs, compared to 10 for an SS-N-20. That’s 144 warheads for an Ohio compared to 200 for a Typhoon. So one Typhoon can hit more targets than one Ohio. This is a retarded point to argue however, as the US has a larger SSBN force. Russia relies more on land-based weapons. So on the grand scale of things, the differences between Typhoon and Ohio do not affect the strategic balance. What Typhoon does do is give you a highly survivable, hard to locate SLBM platform that can hang out under the polar ice cap and raise hell when needed. Ohio is designed to survive in the open ocean.

Given that Typhoon was a very specialized platform in a lot of ways, a more accurate comparison would be Ohio vs. Delta III/IV. In that case I’d agree that Ohio is probably superior in most aspects. But Typhoon is arguably superior to Ohio as it represents a more survivable strategic weapons platform capable of striking more targets.

Whenever Ahmadinejad opens his mouth, it means very little. He doesn’t control the Iranian military. He can talk all day about bombing Israel but until the guys in charge give him the power to act on his words he’s just posturing for votes next year.

Biggest cargo aircraft, An-225: meant to transport Buran. No sniggering there.

Biggest submarine, Akula (Typhoon): meant to be ultra survivable and punch through the arctic ice cap to fire SLBMs, an environment where it’d be hard to find anyway. No sniggering there.

So now that they have the money why didn’t they just start the Mig 1.42 program back up if they thought it was competitive? As I recall they did claim it was suppose to be faster and stealthier than the F-22 after all. And if it were truely testbed status they’d have flown it more than twice (they only even raised the gear once). Sukhoi managed more with their company funded S-37. That at least I think could be convincingly considered a testbed. If the Mig was a testbed what did it test?

When Russia cancelled the program, MiG flew it as a testbed. Given that they were financially worse off than Sukhoi, only flying the 1.44 twice and watching Sukhoi fly the S-37/Su-47 a ton wasn’t out of the ordinary. The thing to remember about the testbed thing was that it was used as a company testbed, not a RusAF testbed. They wanted to test things related to new 5G fighter designs, the engines, etc, and it fell apart due to both funding and Saturn taking the AL-41 engines back.

Why didn’t they go back to it? When they started looking at the PAK-FA, the MFI design was already over a decade old. Made sense to start fresh and have your best and most prosperous at the time fighter designer take the lead, that being Sukhoi.

Russians cancelled the MFI in 1997 and the official reasons given was cost of the aircraft estimated at $70mil (FY1997 dollars). Now, was it really cost or did the aircraft simply suck? Can one tell after just two test flights?

It was offed due to high cost. Remember that a LOT of programs were offed during that time period: Su-27M, MiG-31B, to name two other big ones. Plus, it wasn’t flown until 2000. They had no idea if the jet was a dog or not when it was cancelled.

AFAIK, the 1.44 tested Al-41 engines although that sounds rather odd to me. Unproven engines tested on unproven aircraft? Something stinks on that claim…

A few points on that issue:

-The AL-41 was meant for the MiG MFI. This is why, due to a shortage of engines available, MiG got the priority (and the engines) for their jet, while the S-37/Su-47 had to deal with modified D30F6 engines.

-The AL-41 was flight tested in a MiG-25 at Zhukovskiy before being fitted to the 1.44, so saying it was unproven is not exactly correct. The Red Star volume covering the MiG-25 has some details on this and photos of the testbed fitted with an AL-41.

-Consider the intake design with its LO aspects. Another engine may not have worked with that configuration.

Basically, the engine was not in fact untested or unproven to a degree, and the airframe was designed for that engine, so there you go. New aircraft flying with new engines isn’t out of the ordinary when the engines have already been bench tested and flight tested. The YF-22 and YF-23 each flew with brand new engine designs, and weren’t tested initially with, say, F100s or something similar. Lockheed did fly the A-12 initially with J75s instead of J58s, but that’s because the J58 wasn’t ready when the airframe was.