Just how do you know that? Just how sure can you be there wont be any shooting between the two? I would post the pic of the crystal ball again but once is enough for today i guess. Assumptions are very dangerous, or as an old work collegue of mine used to say, ‘Never assume Son, never assume…’

I don’t need a crystal ball, I have at the very least a high school education and the literacy rate to go with it. Perhaps you could explain to us why we are destined for war with China or Russia then? The only reason China is trumped up as a threat is because the Congress and the DoD need somebody to be the bad guy. Congress will decry Chinese military advances one minute and then go into another session about how to expand trade with China. The first keeps Congress happy by providing jobs and the military happy by providing a reason to be so large and expensive. The second provides economic advantages. Were it not for some idiots on an island nobody would think of China in a hostile light at this point in time. And Russia? Get real. The NMD system will nullify any Chinese nuclear threat for the most part. Any armed conflict with Russia will turn nuclear because of the nature of our military parity. How will the JSF aid in a nuclear warfighting environment, or better yet in the aftermath? No JSF is going to be bombing Moscow and living until weapons release, for one.

Logically we should be preparing to fight a war with Pakistan (reference their asinine claims in the news today that the DoD blew apart by releasing UAV video), because it looks like they want us to, and Germany, because we’ve been to war with them twice over the last hundred years, making them statistically the most likely opponent. You can never assume, right?

Or perhaps we should learn to see without the blinders of bias obscuring our vision and learn to realize that in the real world that they teach you about in college China and Russia, even though they are not following step-by-step the American model for democratic government, are not the bad guys anymore. And there is no real reason why they ever should have been in the first place if you ask me.

Because we want to KEEP it that way. That and those two nations aren’t the only ones that will be flying advanced fighters. They do have customers.

Which is why I do support the F-22 program, which can perform also PGM attacks just fine. Need more/bigger bombs, call the B-2 or B-3.

Besides, I’m not convinced it would go nuclear. If the US decided to help Taiwan is China going to invite getting wiped out because we smacked some coastal air defense sites with conventional weapons? I don’t think too many leaders think “we lost a few air defense sites so let’s throw it ALL on the trash heap.”

Were we to be forced into involvement by idiotic politicians, can you honestly tell me that it’d just be a few coastal AD sites that we’d hit? If so, then Formosa is boned anyway and we may as well be sensible and let China deal with its own internal problems as it sees fit, and as is its right.

It has since been revealed that Aircraft 101 was in fact a Tu-144D; I think it was SSSR-77112 if I remember right.

Anyway, the aircraft mentionedreached their design goals through expansive testing and envelope expansion. Sukhoi was basically told to drop the T-4 and get back to figuring out the T-10, so that’s what they did. That’s really all there was to it, that and the BACKFIRE. Tupolev had major clout in the bomber market back then anyway and likely aided in getting the BACKFIRE picked. Amusingly, had the T-4 been in fact built instead of the BACKFIRE, that might have been it for Tupolev as a bomber manufacturer. The T-4MS may well have been picked for the heavy bomber a few years later instead of the Myasischev M-18, the design handed to Tupolev for refinement into the Tu-160. Tupolev lost a lot of clout by basing their design on the Tu-144D in part, and the military types were not too keen on what they viewed a rehashed airliner. Had Tupolev’s military production lines at Kazan not been expanded and kept around to build the BACKFIRE they may not have been handed the M-18 design, and been booted from the bomber business! Interesting how a lot of this stuff relates when you think about it.

why wasn’t it demonstrated at least to get some measurements and validate the design?

It’s called envelope expansion. Concorde didn’t hit Mach 2 on its first flight. The MiG-25 wasn’t taken to Mach 2.83 on its first flight. The F-15 didn’t hit Mach 2.5 on its first flight. And it even took the B-70 program a while to get to Mach 3.

Sukhoi was basically ordered to quit the T-4 for two reasons: 1) the far cheaper and less complicated (comparatively) Tu-22M was being pursued for the naval strike role instead, and 2) the MoD wanted Sukhoi to focus on the T-10, which was regarded as a very high priority. So, they canned the program, performed a McNamarian destruction of extant prototype components, and sent the jet to Monino. The military got the BACKFIRE instead, and Sukhoi was able to focus on solving the plethora of problems with the T-10 to produce the T-10S. In terms of capability, everybody won. The naval supersonic cruise missile strike program bore fruit, and the USSR got its first world-beating jet fighter in decades. Lack of continued testing of the T-4 probably had to do with the pulling of funding for the program and the fact that none of the weapons or systems seemed destined to be cross-platformed onto other aircraft. Was the jet capable of Mach 3 as it existed? Probably; high-mach cruise was a design goal and there is no evidence to suggest the jet had any aerodynamic issues preventing it from reaching design goals, and the RD-36-41 engines were obnoxiously powerful. So the jet should have been aerodynamically capable and not suffering from being underpowered.

Sat down last night with the wife and kid for National Treasure 2 on Blu-ray. Pretty good flick, I enjoyed the first one and this one was a worthy sequel. One lingering question does remain, however – WHAT WAS ON PAGE 47? 😀 I know, I know; conspiracy theories, historical liberties, Nicholas Cage…a fun movie though if you just want a good time.

ER, the point I was making in my deleted post was that EVERYBODY posts off-topic (or close enough to start the derailment) now and then.

Your post was just part of the clean-up. You were responding to something I was deleting, so your post would have been out of place had I left it!

it also looks horribly on the forum

I respectfully disagree! This is evidence of the fact that users are free to voice their concerns over how the forum operates. I could point you to a place where that is frowned upon if you want 😀

I wonder how this policy of going off topic would be policed: what is going genuinely off topic and what is just letting the conversation drift?

That’s my concern as well, I don’t see how a policy could be generated that’d be black and white.

similar reactions would happen in any thread where a poster would be deliberately looking to **** off others.

Precisely why people should just ignore those who would try to incite problems and simply ignore them! Part of the problem, as you described, is simply blind patriotism/nationalism. Citizen of Nation A is sure that his nation is militarily superior to Nation B, and no amount of logic will ever change his mind. Then you have what flex described, individuals only relying on technical specifications to make arguments. The second group of individuals is problematic because it is harder to change someone’s mind who is at least basing their argument on something tangible, but the individuals in the first group all need to get a little more mature and realize that yes, this is the free world and people are in fact allowed to have differeing opinions, and yours might not always be right!

Hi to every one

there is one iranin cobra was down by shot from 100 mm main gun of iraqi t-55 tank during 1980-88 war

Ok, you win. Of all the incidents described so far, THAT is the one I wish I could find footage of 😀

[color=red]Putting the Mod hat on for a minute or two, there is nothing in the Code of Conduct giving us the power to toss users who consistently take threads off-topic. Perhaps that is something we could look into, but it’d have to be a judgement call I’m guessing. Getting into a side discussion about quality control of American aircraft manufacturers in a thread discussing the F-22’s mishaps, for example, would seem relevant to the topic at hand if not completely related. So I’m not sure if a concrete policy could ever be enforced apart from simply throwing out any and all off topic posting, and that would delete a lot of valuable and worthwhle discussion. It’d be akin to nuking a city to kill a single person, massive overkill.

Apart from that, keep these things in mind:

1. The best way to get an offending user dealt with is to send a PM to a moderator. Sometimes threads get large or mixed up and we miss things that deserve our attention.

2. If someone is being a fool, simply ignore them. If you reply to them and get into some sort of absurd argument, you’re both equally guilty. Be the bigger person and simply don’t reply. The ignore feature works well also, I’ve heard (I can’t use it, or I’d miss half of what I have to edit 😀 ).

One other option might be to amend or expand the CoC to include action against users who persistently make the same off-topic arguments in various threads, treating that as an evolutionary form of spam.

That’s it from my end for now.[/color]

On a different note related to this thread, re-reading one of the Russian books I talked about earlier has led to a bunch of new and interesting information on the development of Russian ABM systems. Apparently the 5Ya26 weapon from the S-225 system may actually have been developed into the GAZELLE interceptor. The book describes it as a conical weapon using command guidance and thrust-vectoring control achieved by means of altering the exhaust path by injecting the exhaust through different portions of the nozzle, and details how and why the weapon was incorporated initially into the S-225 as a complement to the 5Ya27. The 5Ya26 got absorbed by the Amur project, the name for the A-135 development program.