Funk:

You see the funk is a living creature. It’s about the size of a medicine ball, but covered in teets. Came from another planet. Landed on Aleksandr Zelin’s house. Back then Zelin was just a simple farmer, but he took one look at all those moldy teets and lost his mind. He began to milk the funk. Made himself a funk shake. He began to feel fizzy inside. He found he could see around corners. Suddenly, he passed out. But when he came to, baby, he was slappin’ a bass guitar fast and loose like some sort of delirious funky priest.

http://www.russiandefenseblog.org/?p=766

the wait will be over soon. 😀

I bet the 26th.

HI I was wondering, whats the point of having the AL-41 if the Su-35BM/PAK-FA will be only powerd by the 117’s???????????:confused:

They will add the Al-41 later.

There was an article in a Swedish paper for Engineers where a specialist on stealth design from Saab talked about the Gripen. He mentioned the canards:

He is the one holding the patent for a stealthier Gripen. He’s discussing it some, how to make a ‘Z-shape’ (whatever that is…) to achieve stealth. Here’s a sketch from the patent:

Pardon the poor google-translation. I hope not too much is lost in the translation.

http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/fordon_motor/flygplan/article397028.ece
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nyteknik.se%2Fnyheter%2Ffordon_motor%2Fflygplan%2Farticle397028.ece&sl=auto&tl=en

What’s your point? Crashing prototypes happens. The YF-22 also crashed due to FBW issues, so I guess LM have no clue about what they’re doing.

After the crash, the pilot stepped out with minor injuries and they got new planes in the air, only slipping six months in the time schedule. And as of now, not one pilot has died in a Gripen accident.

As to the Ikea comment, that’s just a flame bait.

Note the Z formed by extending the canard chord line and wing chord line, and creating a fold or crease between these lines.

You sound way too certain…

Does that “no one else” include the Russians too? :rolleyes: Cause I believe that’s what they cited when they deleted canards from the Su-35BM. RCS reduction.

Well, Americans too had and still have stealth with canards, but only in sketch. You will, hopefully, *not* disagree that sketch is one thing and reality another. And right now, reality says that the only low RCS (a.k.a. stealth) airplanes flying around are american bulit. Guess what, none has canards. So if they think canards are bad for low RCS, and untill someone else comes ahead with a different but existing, mass produced, operational and combat tested and proved stealth approach, I’ll go with the american concept.

No offence whatsoever, I don’t particularly like the American attitude, but what is right is right.

…and Northrop Grumman has a patent for variable geometry forward swept wings, but they don’t make a fuss over it.

No offence again. Just making a point.

X-36 has canards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_X-36

The design is quiet interesting and i strongly believe SAAB already have the right level of expertise to pull it off their hat.

But for everyboy benefit; i just bring you a not-so-fresh news (June 2007).

The nEUROn team is already at technology feasability studies stages for the successor of Tornados and Mirage 2000 (of course not those in French service) at DGA request as well as an operational version of nEUROn at an even more advanced stage.

One of the conceiptual drawings to be find on Dassault website ressembles F-23 strongly…

EFCS: Not a bad thing.

I’ve heard of this picture, but I have never seen it. Do you have a link?

That said, look at Japan’s ATD-X aircraft. It is supposed to fly in 2011. They’ve already built the engines from scratch. It’s a gripen class 5th gen. Japan does not have as much fighter aircraft engineering experience as Saab, nor does it have as much LO experience as Saab AFAIK. How long has it taken them? 5 years?

There are European engines capable of providing the necessary thrust- Volvo’s F414 variant and the EJ200/EJ230 as long as they are used in tandem. PAK-FA, F-22, and MCA all use 2 engines. It can’t be that bad for a 5th gen aircraft to have 2 engines- as long as it’s not optimized for A2G this should be a non-issue.

Saab has a very good record with its aircraft and I trust any 5th gen will be the same. Really, they don’t have to make the aircraft as stealthy as the F-22 or F-35. If it is half as stealthy as the F-35, but makes up for it in either kinematics, jamming, optics, datalinking, and/or price, then they will still have a winner.

If you consider that the main target of the F-35 is to destroy, perhaps definetely the European capacity of producing jet fighters and consequently to keep for a very long time the NATO countries under American sovereignty, the cost of this program, from the US point of view, is perhaps not so high.

You’re assuming that there will be manned fighter aircraft after the 5th generation. For better or worse, I’m not sure that’s a good assumption. Europe is involved in advanced stealthy UCAV designs. Will there be any American manned fighters post 5th generation?