I’ve seen that before, that’s a hilarious image, Ken 😀

WRT internal bays on a MiG 1.44, there appeared to be revetments for semi-recessed weapons the size of an R-77.

Today, I watched Predator and AVP:R on Blu-Ray. Predator is just a classic, and the HD version is awesome. There is a little graininess in the grey background sky at the very beginning when the helo comes in to drop off Arnie’s team, but overall it looks fantastic. AVP:R, on the other hand, is pretty much flawless. Ignoring the movie itself, the picture quality is the best I have seen by far by anything HD-related. Pause the movie, count the raindrops. It’s awesome. Whoever was responsible for the transfer of the film to Blu-ray did leave the brightness turned way down, so it appears a little too dark, but if you jack up the brightness then it’s fine. Normally jacking up the brigthness too much can wash out your picture and result in a loss of clarity, but not in this case (as like I said, the brightness was obviously too low on the disc). Apart from that minor nitpick, it’s a really excellent example of what HD videos can do. Plus, the movie is just a great slag-fest of fun, and there’s at least one new scene in the unrated version that makes it obvious why it was deleted to make sure they got no higher than an R rating.

Electro-optical.

RCS 1/1000th of the F-15. But whether it is just frontal or all aspect not known.

Probably frontal, where you’ll get the lowest figure. It won’t be all-around, that’s for sure. Point a radar directly at the top of a Raptor and I bet you get a big fat return.

The value of the F-15 RCS taken whether it is either the minimum frontal RCS of RAM employed F-15 or a normal one F-15 carrying 4 AIM-9, 4 AMRAAM and 2 drops tanks is also I guess is also not given?

Probably frontal, and clean. In my experience these figures are usually for clean aircraft, as different weapon fits will have different effects.

As for the rest, I don’t think there have been any definitely officially confirmed figures released? And that includes any RCS figure, those are classified and likely to stay that way! Your best bet for getting a good handle on the specs is to find the Aerofax volume on the F-22. It apparently caused quite a stir when it was released due to an impression that too much sensitive information was given to the author for publication, including some of the photos. If you want a good starting point, that’s the place to look. And it’s a pretty good book at any rate.

The Keldysh Plasma Stealth was a technological dead end,

That depends on what you believe I think. Was it going to be some huge cloud hiding the aircraft from radar all the time? I think not. It is more likely that the system was intended to serve as an active ECM system to defeat tracking radars and active radar weapons. There was a JDW article around the time that the 1.44 was unveiled that talked about the Keldysh device and IIRC there were some British (BA I believe) scientists who validated the concept but couldn’t quite figure out how the Russians made the thing work. The Keldysh system was likely an offshoot of or the same system that was to mask the Meteorit missile system from radar. In theory it is a sound concept, as long as you aren’t expecting the total stealth I described above. RWR detects missile seeker emissions, Keldysh activates to fool the seeker, and pilot executes a high-g maneuver to escape the missile’s FOV to avoid reacquisition. As a reactive system it does make a lot of sense, if they got it to work. At one point they were even offering a related system for export.

and i´m trying to figure out what exactly the Mig 1.42 brings to the table that the original Typhoon tranche 2/3 Eurojet 230 (that engine was tested in 1998) equiped didn´t have…

Superagility. While the Eurocanards are very agile aircraft, it would appear that the Russians went almost overboard in some of their aircraft with respect to aerodynamic performance. They seemed designed to dominate the WVR arena. The Keldysh system would have forced opponents into the WVR arena after it negated the radar-guided BVR threat. Alternatively an intermittent Keldysh signal could irritate an attacker’s radar long enough for the MFI to get within range for a BVR shot. Then close on the target while it’s busy evading an R-77 salvo and go WVR for the kill.

I haven’t the slightest idea, so I’ll forward your question to the Webmaster.

That one labeled Red 57 is pretty damn close to what it would’ve looked like. You can see why it wasn’t a true LO aircraft, but from a frontal aspect it should’ve had a pretty reduced RCS compared to modern 4th generation fighter designs.

As for my artwork, I’ve got a lot of projects of that nature that have been sidetracked for various reasons 😀