Posted on 07/23/2017 10:23:14 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
It’s a 4.5 generation fighter. It’s very good, but we are now into 5th generation fighters. For instance, the F-22 and F-35 fighter.
Must have a large RCS with those vertical twin tails. They make great corner reflectors.
I mostly agree with the author of the article. We are finally in an AWACS, airborne net, BVR world. Missile technology is far better than it was a half century ago when it was discovered in Vietnam that fighters still desperately needed close-in cannons.
Stealth, sensors and good BVR weapons are more important now than raw maneuverability. I also suspect the F-35 may be the last manned fighter we ever build. AI and remote pilots are the future.
FR love fest for the ineffective former soviet defense industry begins in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
They will simply field far more Flankers.
Quantity has a quality all its own ~ Stalin.
Agree with you about manned aircraft, but still have to appreciate the aerial magic of the Su-35 even though the F-35 would likely kill it many times over in a real life combat scenario. The 5th generation of tactical aircraft represent a quantum leap in technology and tactics and very few of us have a basis to render an opinion because the capabilities are new and a radical shift from what we know to be true.
Despite all of that, it is undeniable that the Russians build beautiful aircraft.
They cannot afford to field more Flankers. Russia is pretty much broke and their defense budget is such that we can afford an F-35 easier than they can afford a 4th generation fighter.
precisely. the “OMG, the russians and their awesome military are going to kill us all!” threads are hysterical crap.
Nice aircraft but this is a good reason why your wingman doesn’t fly on your a$$. As soon as the Russian pilot pops his nose up the wingman guns him.
All that money they sent to the Clintons..
Readers might recall that Imperial Japanese Army and Navy fighters had outstanding maneuverability throughout WWII. What they failed to understand until very late in the war was that the Allies, once they got over their shock, adapted their tactics and aircraft designs for speed, ruggedness, armor protection and firepower. By the time the IJA and IJN began fielding designs that in orporated these features while retaining the maneuverability that Japanese fighters were rightly famous for, they had lost most of their experienced pilots and their manufacturing infrastructure was being bombed into rubble.
Similarly, German tanks were technical marvels. But Russia and the United States came up with separate solutions to counter their technical prowess.
As the article’s author points out, all that superior maneuverability doesn’t mean much if the enemy doesn’t intend to fight you on those terms. That said, seeing an aircraft that big perform a hammerhead stall or Pugashev Cobra maneuver is pretty impressive.
Don’t know much about planes but she’s pretty.
Right. Russia doesn’t put out the large numbers as they did as the Soviet Union. According to Wiki, Russia now only has 15 SU-35Ms and 58 (4 for export) SU-35S. Damn small numbers.
They are broke is right.
“...Quantity has a quality all its own ~ Stalin.”
Often asserted (though this is the first attribution to Josef Stalin, that I have come across), it’s false.
If it were true, we could equip all our troops with BB guns and never worry again.
Which is more reliable in combat? 100,000 $50 AK-47s with unlimited cheap ammo, or a $5,000,000 dollar whiz-bang net-centric, hyper-accurate electronic sighted, GPS enabled, tight toleranced, 3-D printed, precision machined, ultra light weight rifle with very expensive self tracking and guided ammo?
Who wins a air battle between 25 F-35s with 4 missiles each or an opponent who has 500 aircraft that can outrun the F-35s but only have machine guns with 1000 rounds each?
Put your money on the F-35s if you dare.
My [Paul Rako, not me!] father's WWII tale about Allied versus German telephones contained a valuable design lesson.
By Paul Rako, Technical Editor -- EDN, 1/17/2008
Veterans Day 2007 brought to mind a story my father once told me. He was in the US Army’s 8th Engineering Corps Division. His unit saw fierce fighting in Hürtgen Forest during World War II. He told me that Germany’s battlefield telephone lines used sheathed-wire pairs in clamshell enclosures. A small lever energized a machined, cam-operated mechanism that smoothly slid the connector halves into engagement. Allied soldiers had standing orders to shoot through the engineered connectors and to cut the cable with their bayonets.
In contrast, the engineers who had strung the wire for the US field telephones left a few feet of loop every hundred yards, so that slack would be available to fix even large breaks. The current loop closed through the earth; only one olive-drab, insulated-iron wire connected to the phones. The Army used iron because it was more resistive and stronger than copper; that strength was necessary to withstand the hardship of soldiers’ pulling it off the spools to the front lines of battle. Allied soldiers who encountered cut US-telephone wires had orders to use their bayonets to remove the insulation and tie the broken wires into knots, tugging hard to make good connections. They then threw the wire back into the ditch or bomb crater.
The results of these two engineering approaches became evident in the toughest fighting in Europe. If everything went according to the Germans’ plan, their telephones worked far better than US phones. As soon as the Germans had to retreat or give up ground, however, the US soldiers made sure that the German phones would not work for weeks or months. The Germans didn’t have enough clamshell connectors in warehouses to replace all those that US soldiers had destroyed with their weapons. The exact opposite scenario happened with US field telephones. When the US military gave up ground, the Germans cut the wires, but, as soon as any Allied troops retook the ground, they tied those knots and once again had working phones.
Certainly, the specs for the German phones were far superior. The signal-to-noise ratio and fidelity were fabulous. But those great specs were of little use when the phones didn’t work. The US phones worked well enough in real-world battlefield conditions. The German phones were overengineered, which brings me to my point on overengineering: Good design is about making compromises on a continuum of choices. That fact describes analog design, and analog design is what life is all about. I don’t really need 700 menu selections on a BMW iDrive joystick.
We had a high kill-ratio in Vietnam, both in air and ground combat.
We lost there because we had an enemy who was willing to absorb far more deaths than we were. If an enemy simply throws aircraft at us, willing to lose at a rate of 5-to-1 or more, as long as they could inflict casualties on us, at what point will our political and military leadership withdraw?
And if they sell the technology to the Chinese, who have just as much money as us, and a bigger manufacturing base?
As the old saying about aircraft goes,if it looks good, it is good.
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