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Bash the Pak-Fa thread


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Interesting to see that they've edge-aligned more and more of the service panels on these newer PAK-FA prototypes.

 

If you'd asked me a year and a half ago which is stealthier, PAK-FA or J-20 I would have said J-20, thanks to much better attention to details on these sorts of things.  But it looks like PAK-FA is closing the gap.

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Interesting to see that they've edge-aligned more and more of the service panels on these newer PAK-FA prototypes.

 

If you'd asked me a year and a half ago which is stealthier, PAK-FA or J-20 I would have said J-20, thanks to much better attention to details on these sorts of things.  But it looks like PAK-FA is closing the gap.

 

Better missiles to, and backed up by a far more experienced design bureau and command and control center

 

still bothers me that they dont call it the Su-50

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Better missiles to, and backed up by a far more experienced design bureau and command and control center

 

still bothers me that they dont call it the Su-50

 

Debatable; a lot of the experienced people have retired or emigrated.

 

It would be interesting to compare the J-20 development cycle to the PAK-FA's, but that would require knowledge of when studies were started, how much money was spent and when, and what and how many supporting facilities were used.  I doubt that data will be out in the open any time soon.

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Debatable; a lot of the experienced people have retired or emigrated.

 

It would be interesting to compare the J-20 development cycle to the PAK-FA's, but that would require knowledge of when studies were started, how much money was spent and when, and what and how many supporting facilities were used.  I doubt that data will be out in the open any time soon.

People retire, standards dont

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rip the hopes and dreams of Shukoi
http://www.janes.com/article/58166/singapore-airshow-2016-analysis-pak-fa-s-asian-export-hopes-stymied-by-lack-of-fifth-generation-qualities

Previously, Russian defence think-tanks had been projecting that the T-50 would be purchased by Asian nations that were already operating some model of the Sukhoi Su-27/30 'Flanker'-series. This would include Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. China, another major operator of Sukhoi aircraft is developing its own next-generation aircraft in the Chengdu J-20 and Shenyang FC-31.

Russian specialists familiar with the T-50 programme state that the aircraft will have trouble gaining traction in the Asian market as the on-board systems offer very little fifth-generation technologies despite what is projected to be a considerably higher price tag than the latest Su-35 'Flanker-E', ordered by China and Indonesia.

 

http://mil.today/2016/Economy2/

Least of all, the cost reduction will affect development and procurement of weapons for Strategic Missile Force and nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. At the same time, development programs of a mobile railway-based missile system or fifth-generation strategic bombers can be suspended.

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That article makes me very sad I didn't follow up trying to get a job writing for Jane's.  It's clearly not that hard.

 

 

 

Russian industry has consistently referred to the Sukhoi T-50 PAK-FA as a fifth-generation aircraft, but a careful look at the programme reveals that this is an 'in-name-only' designation. What qualifies a fighter aircraft as being a next-generation design is more than just having a stealthy-looking shape, said Lockheed Martin representatives.

 

That's some pretty wicked spin there.  Sure, it's possible to have an angular pseudo-stealth mockup, like say the Q-313:

Q-313-1.jpg

 

And everyone would laugh at you.  But the shape of the aircraft is what causes it to be stealthy in the first place.  The magical paint and other radar absorbent materials (RAM) are a decidedly secondary factor.  The best RAM, from everything I've seen on publicly available sources, reduces radar cross section by about an order of magnitude.  That sounds really good, but it's not.  The relationship between radar cross section and detection range is a fourth power function.  If you want to halve the detection range of an aircraft vs. a given radar you need to reduce its radar cross section by a factor of sixteen.

 

So, if you took a conventionally designed aircraft and slathered RAM over every loving surface of the thing, ignoring the fact that RAM is heavy, not generally very strong, not generally very heat resistant, and opaque to both visible light and radio waves and would blind the pilot and the radar, the stealth performance would still be drastically worse than a properly designed low observable design.

 

The idea that the T-50 is some sort of Potemkin stealth fighter is ridiculous.  The aircraft clearly has planform alignment, horizontal stabilizers in line with the wings, sawtooth edges on the radome and some of the service panels, an internal weapons bay, and curved air intakes with some sort of blockers.  All of those features are substantial aerodynamic compromises, there would be no reason to have them unless the aircraft were actually stealthy.  There's no reason to think that Sukhoi doesn't understand how to make those things work either; Yakovlev clearly understood them in the 1980s, and Sukhoi merged with Yakovlev in 2006.

 

 

Both the T-50's NIIP Irbis radar and the NPO Saturn 117S engine that are two of the major subsystems of the T-50 are the same as those installed in the Su-35. Also, a number of the avionics on-board the T-50 and Su-35 are common. Those that will be part of the production-configuration of the T-50 will more likely than not be only incremental or evolutionary improvements over their analogues on-board the Su-35, say the same specialists.

 

 

That's a hatchet job and the author should know better.  Sukhoi has said from day 1 that the 117S engines are a temporary expedient until the izd. 30 is available.  This is hardly unprecedented course of action, the TF-30 in the F-14A was also intended as a stop-gap.  Unless the Russian economy tanks so hard and stays tanked so hard for the next several years that they just can't bear to afford the new engines (like what happened with the F-14A), then PAK-FA will be getting better engines.

 

As for the radar being the same as the SU-35, what's the matter with that?  It's an AESA radar, and at least on paper it's perfectly competitive.

 

Also, if old engines in prototypes are a huge turn off, then nobody would be interested in J-20 or J-31, as those are powered by the same engines as the SU-27 and MiG-29, respectively.

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