5th gen light mulltirole fighter/Mikoyan LMFS

Garry, I will try to research some actual values, so it is not a matter of opinions, but I still answer some points in advance.

you and your interest in facts instead of opinion...

If the front wheel is operating on a dirt trip it will create lots of dust, which low air intakes will ingest. That is BTW the reason why the Flanker has mud guards on the wheels, despite de mesh screens.

The funny thing is the old smoky engines didn't really care about dust and sand, but using mudguards and grills on the engines in itself suggests they expect to operate from rough airstrips does it not. The added weight and drag and complication is not that big a deal... I mean the demands for the Su-25 are much steeper...



Even MiG-31s have mudguards on their nose wheel... it is just common sense... even if the plane never lands on mud if the wheel disintegrates it stops the rubber fragments from being thrown up as missiles at the under fuselage and engine area...

Flankers could do >90º AoA already before the TVC was implemented, and that meant extremely low airspeeds, because a plane cannot fly flat against the wind for a long time... So in the end the problem with single engine TVC is just (IMHO) a small loss of roll authority at very small airspeeds, where yaw and pitch authority + plane's inertia can still be used and ensure noise pointing and recovery.

You sound like the makers of Typhoon and Rafale and Gripen explaining why TVC is not that great in actual combat... and it doesn't sound convincing.

The MiG-29 and Su-27 and their families had spaced engines well before they considered TVC engines... and the Su-57 has too.... it is all to do with improving performance by making the centre fuselage act like a lifting surface... which really does not work with a flat lower surface like a MiG-25 or MiG-31... which is OK because they are all about low drag and high speed.

Enemies have no TVC (F-35, Eurofighter, F-16, Rafale etc), while J-10C will have TVC on its only engine and only apparently J-20 will have TVC on two engines, which are very close to each other and hence may not have much roll authority. For this plane and for F-22 it is not even clear, whether differential deflection is programmed in the FCS.

The idea is to have planes better than your enemy... not the same...

It is a relative issue. It needs to be x % cheaper than a medium or heavy fighter, so that more of them can be bought and operated.

But Russia can't afford to match HATO in numbers... having some heavy stealth fighters... some heavy non stealth fighters, some medium stealth fighters and some medium non stealth fighters and some stealthy drones based on the stealthy fighters to operate with all of them is the best choice over all. Mainly because you could make thousands of drones and just store them. Use one or two for training and exercises, and have them deployed to bases ready to use, but most of their operations can be electronic. Hell... as the new gen engine for the Su-57 becomes available all the old engines used in the current in service Su-57s can be taken out and replaced with the new engines and all those old engines can go into drones... so their engines are already paid for...

Exactly. The market attractive of the Flanker is a direct consequence of its size.

But that is my point... bigger is better... you can do more with a bigger plane.

I have a friend who bought a small tower type PC computer in the 1990s... he thought it looked cute... till his son flicked the little red switch on the back of the power supply to change it from 240 volts to 110 volts and when my friend turned his computer on he said there was a bang and a puff of smoke and the computer would not turn on again. No problem... just blew the power supply... a new one was going to cost 800 dollars because it was a special design specifically for that particular tower computer... he was not happy. But the rest of the computer was a standard ATX design... they just used a non standard power supply to fit it into the small tower case. I told him to get a new case and power supply which together cost about $110. The point is that if he had bought a normal standard sized tower computer that was fully ATX compatible the new power supply would probably have been $50-$70 dollars.

He later asked my advice about buying an external hard drive... I told him the most important thing is capacity... there was a 1 TB drive with LEDs down the side that indicated how full the drive was and for $20 less a 2TB drive without the lights. He bought the 1TB drive. A few weeks later I bumped in to him and his new drive was almost full and where he has it plugged in he can't see the lights anyway. Regret is a terrible thing.

MiG on the other hand has no special sales arguments apart from price, and I am not sure whether this price difference is based on costs or rather on benefit margins... almost half the price in the market than a Flanker at the same margin would mean a MiG-29M costs like $10-12 million to produce, which I don't find likely

Having an all Flanker fleet would lead to a situation where you are forced to use a rolls royce to plough a field because that is all you have...

Sukhoi will try to hide the costs by saying the Flanker might be more expensive but you only need half the number to do the same job... which sounds interesting, but doesn't hold up to reality... both aircraft operate at a similar speed and with inflight refuelling can have the same flight range if needed, but two MiG-29s can operate together or split up and cover more territory.

In places like the far east with huge expansions of nothing bigger longer ranged aircraft makes sense, but in densely populated European Russia smaller shorter ranged aircraft offering better coverage make more sense.

You don't get a safer town by giving the local cop a bigger car with a bigger fuel tank... sometimes the job means they need to ride a bicycle and actually talk to people...

What kind of supporting drone are you imagining, in terms of layout and capabilities?

Well that is the thing... to fend off a cruise missile or swarm attack a dumb missile carrier that is loaded up and takes off with you perhaps flying a few kms above that launches its missiles at targets and then returns home to rearm while you launch yours and keep monitoring incoming threats and passing that information to ground based defences.

But then sometimes a better equipped drone can be more of a force multiplier, so weapons and sensors for missions that are too high a threat for a manned aircraft... or sort of an untethered towed decoy jammer weapon truck.

They can be very basic, no stealth, no supersonic flight, no systems but just a dummy airframe with some missiles on it, but then their life is going to be short against any enemy with some capability to monitor airspace.

You could have all different types... all of which can be in storage like an IRBM until it is needed, and you can use what would suit best... a hypersonic drone to roar into enemy airspace releasing weapons to shoot down AWACS aircraft and bombs to hit airfields on its way through at 60km altitude and mach 10... down to a simple bomb truck that flys at 10km altitude and basically does what Su-24s are doing in Syria...

I imagine actually a small plane that can do dogfight and fly supersonic, so it can actually oppose enemy fighters.

Why not... and just keep them in boxes ready for use when you need them... hell carry a few in a PAK DA as an expendable escort fighter... you would train with them but one between the whole group so most would stay in storage ready for use... you might lose some occasionally... fit the ones you practise with for self destruction, while the combat models don't need that...

It may be more expensive than the others, but still a huge advantage because it can be exposed to attrition, no pilots need to be trained and little if any flight hours are needed to keep them fit. Actually this is the reason why I think in the near future there is going to be a massive shift towards unmanned platforms under command of manned ones, which try to stay far from the fray.

Essentially though isn't it just fitting real wings to long range AAMs?

The Okhotnik is quite ok for A2G and reconnaissance roles: very stealthy, huge persistence, economic to operate (single engine, no A/B in the final version) and with capability to carry big weapons, which are necessary for that role.

It could also climb to high altitudes and launch AAM and ARM attacks into enemy territory to thin out the defences...

Leaving the aircraft penetrating enemy airspace fully armed and with more fuel than if they had to do that themselves... but why do you think no AB?

Being able to accelerate and climb rapidly would give a real boost to the range and performance of the weapons it will be using... and it would enable it to get airborne more easily at higher weights...

The MiG-35 is normally considered a medium fighter, but everything needs to be compared within the proper context. Su-27 is like 16 t, F-15 13 t, F-16 8 t. MiG-29 with 11 t, 17 m long and two engines is definitely not a light fighter. F-16 would be at the upper limit of what can be considered a light fighter, but as said 5G demands a certain size growth. The way I see it, if it can be powered by one engine of the type used in heavy fighters, then it is light and contributes further to the economies of scale of the air force.

Isn't that you trying to impose your view of the situation... the light and medium and heavy are labels we are making up.... surely the Su-57 is the medium fighter and the Su-35 is too... the heavy fighters are MiG-31s and Tupolev Fiddlers... they are operating with a high low group of fighters that are both stealthy and not stealthy... Su-57 and Su-35/30 respectively is the high, and the low is the MiG-29/35 and a new 5th gen fighter... which they have already said and shown to be twin engined.

They have shown single engined drones but not fighters.

You don't take away backup flight controls... their fly by wire is quad redundant... they don't say... well that is heavy and expensive and it is now a mature system so lets make it cheaper with a single non redundant control system... it just isn't safe and the consequences is the loss of the aircraft... why would they do that with the number of engines?

That is the lower limit I think... For the MiG on the other hand the problem is not those weights you mention, but the little fuel and load it carries and how heavy it is intrinsically. A F-16A has a MTOW 2.32 times its empty weight, the Rafale 2.48 times. The MiG probably does not even reach MTOW 2 times its empty weight. In the Flanker the big empty weight is more or less justified because it does not need EFTs, but that is not the case of the MiG.

So they are shit at making medium weight fighters... why do you think it would be easier to fit the same features and capabilities in an even smaller and lighter aircraft design?

Isn't that a reason to make it bigger?

Let us see whether newer weapons can be carried conformally in new designs without compromising drag and RCS too much. The KFX was moving in that direction apparently, at least for the first variant.

Conformal carriage is a copout by countries that can't be bothered or can't afford real stealth. All the cost and effort to make a plane stealthy and you put weapons on the outside ruining all that hard work...

Because it cannot manoeuvrer or accelerate.

It has a very low drag and with AB it should accelerate just fine... the MiG-31BM has SEAD roles... is it manouverable?

A zoom climb and acceleration to transonic speed will boost the range of any missile... no hard manouvers required...

It can have self defence weapons o maybe even be used as a mobile SAM, but it is not your typical A2A asset, it cannot be.

Why have you decided that?

Not the Okhotnik I think, TWR is going to be terrible an max speed subsonic... the fight will be over by the time it can climb

What are you talking about?

Do you think it is just going to fly next to an Su-57 and it is going to stay there until an enemy fighter gets to WVR and a dog fight and then try to help shoot down the enemy plane then?

AFAIK the idea is for it to operate at higher altitudes detecting enemy aircraft at great distances... other groups attacking from different directions so a high flying drone might detect the radar reflections from stealthy enemy targets because essentially they become bistatic radar aerials.

Depending on the types of missiles they get they could probably launch missiles on a bearing from an L band wing mounted radar system... the missile essentially acting like a drone accelerating and flying towards the target looking in IIR for any targets on that bearing... as you claim the L band wont detect targets at thousands of kms range so it will come upon a target soon enough. Equally any inflight refuelling aircraft or AWACS platforms can be attacked with these drones using long range AAMs too...

They should

9M100 will do the had turning... or the Su-57 can.

Yeah well, that is a shame. But you need to introduce newer technology which has not been still paid for, or we would still use horses and swords. Once the production has been established the price differences need to be reduced. But it is an interesting topic to research.

Horses are still in use, but horses and swords were replaced because the things that replaced them were better. Sometimes newer technology is just more expensive. PS-90A upgrades are nice but a bit of a dead end. New PD-16 engines on the other hand have the advantage of being a standardised family of engines and while expensive the pooling of spares and design unification mean instead of buying hundreds of engines for Il-76s you can buy thousands of engines for new and existing types and also the other aircraft using similar and related engines too.

Actually a F-16C has higher TWR empty than the MiG-29

But will it matter because the MiG-29 is faster and could simply choose not to engage... something an F-16 pilot would have difficulty deciding to do in his slower aircraft...

If you do that you loose badly in kinematics. Su-57 has a smaller cross sectional area than a Flanker.

Kinematics don't mean much when you are out of missiles... you can also carry extra fuel...

Just a quick modification of the proposal I made turned into UCAV, so that it is clearer what I mean. 15.5 m long, ca. 10 t empty:

Very nice, but the models MiG is using have two engines.

New designs seem to suggest weapon bays could be located in the upper surface of their new aircraft, or perhaps even rear firing...

It kills the joy of a nice, endless discussion I know

Not always... if you took the results of some countries using Soviet armour you would think it was all useless crap... sometimes reality shows other factors are more important and that when used correctly it is not... but also that good solid reliable and proven gear can fail too... a good planner will take such things in to account during planning and also in training and use, vulnerabilities, once identified can be minimised with smart use, and emphasised with inept use...

The west blows away most third world countries by exploiting known weaknesses... for instance in Desert Storm... try to fight at night and at long distance and use your air power advantage to have a turkey shoot... but of course some times conditions don't make that possible like in Kosovo where smart use of frankly obsolete equipment meant the overpowering air power of HATO was rendered pretty impotent, and they had to get Russia to fool the Serbs in to surrender with the promise that Russia would be part of the solution...

Yes. I just need to understand where the different planes are intended to operate, between "not 100% perfect tarmac" and "mud pit". I tend to think current fighters are intended for paved runways or roads but rather independent on its conditions not being that good, while Su-25 can normally operate from dirt strips, or worse as your picture demonstrates.

Well I suspect in design terms they would prefer hard tarmacs and big long wide runways, but they also know that in wartime even the nicest flattest runway can have all sorts of plastic bottles and paper blowing across it, and of course if your aircraft need to rapidly deploy somewhere else who knows what sort of surfaces they might be operating from, so expect the worst....

I just don't see that particular niche application of roll authority crucial

I don't think it is crucial, but widely spaced engine and engine trunks effect body lift performance and all round aerodynamics and you mentioned yourself when the twin engines are together they probably wont have any effect in terms of differential use for roll control so by default having separated engines is the only game in town if you want to be able to control roll in a superstall or at very high AOA where conventional control surfaces stop being effective.

But a single engine fighter can have an integral aerodynamic design too, and get lots of space for fuel in addition to lift, as Flankers, MiG-29 and Su-57 do.

Only by bulging them out like a MiG-21SMT and making them more draggy and increasing the frontal surface area/drag... without adding the extra thrust of another engine.

Sure, the good part is they don't need to. NATO cannot teleport all those fighters and the thousands of plane loads needed to support them to Russian borders.

HATO already covers a large portion of Russias enormous borders and their increased activity in the Arctic is only going to make that worse. HATO can fly fighters from all over the EU and base them in friendly countries all around Russian borders...

If US mobilization gets beyond than a certain threshold, it means war and Russia is already in theater, so they can choose the time to strike first.

Russia can't declare war on HATO just because they have moved all their planes to Norway, Finland, the Baltic states and Poland, the Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey and Eastern European countries and a few of the 'stans that are US friendly, and of course Alaska and Japan and South Korea... and Greenland...

Yep. Such an engine would fit a fighter sized like the one I submit. Totally agree on the drone storage, take them out every x months to see they work and that's it. No need to do 200 or 300 hours per pilot per year. Operation costs will be a fraction of those of manned aircraft.

Well the S-70 is 20 tons and the Su-57 is not 40 tons, so while it is a very low drag design being a flying wing it is carrying a lot of extra weight for its size... suggesting large payload capacity and or extra fuel for zoom climbs and flying around a lot more than the aircraft they are supporting... which makes sense because both would be useful features of a drone that supports fighters.

A light fighter with such an engine would need to be a 12-14 ton MTOW aircraft if you want good thrust to weight ratio... which makes it rather small...

Then why a medium fighter? I know, it is the oldest discussion on earth, but it is still unresolved. If you go for top tier capabilities you need the heavy plane.

Because in any network numbers matter too and having all heavy fighters makes it unaffordable. A medium fighter can be much cheaper to buy and to operate while adding numbers, and light drones can make the medium and heavy fighters more effective and safer too.

But then you will need to plug the gaps those high end assets cannot take care of, so do a plane which is cheap and in numbers. F-16 was designed like that and was a massive success. MiG-29 on the other hand is being substituted even in the VKS.

Most F-16 users didn't get a choice and are now expected to buy F-35s... that is how that protection racket works... 2% of your GDP goes to the US MIC.

If the F-16 was Russian it would have been retired with the other single engined aircraft like the MiG-15, MiG-21, and MiG-23, as well as the Su-9, and Su-11.

The MiG-23 was replaced by the Su-27 and the MiG-21 was replaced by the MiG-29... surely if the only difference is operational costs and maintenance and performance is the same or even better then why was the PAK FA a twin engined aircraft... and why is the new light 5th gen fighter specified as being a twin too?

Or do they not know what they are doing.

They are going there currently. Still uncertain what number of MiG-35 will be bought, and even then, to what extent this will be done as a measure of industrial / export sales support. In the future the scenario is one of high-low mix I think.

It is pretty clear they are waiting until the full AESA radar is ready for mass production... I remember reading reports in the 1980s about plenty of Flanker and Fulcrum airframes being built and sitting waiting while the radar and IRST and other systems production was catching up...

...and still be shot down by the one Flanker.

For most of the cold war and immediate post cold war no... The MiG-29C could carry R-77s and it EW suite was not amazing but was much better than for the bog standard Su-27P interceptor.

High-end capabilities are needed. MiG-35 should level that fight a bit but still there is a difference in payload, range and systems.

Of course, because it is always the aircraft with the heaviest payload and longest range that wins.

A Flanker with full internal fuel tanks is limited to about 5g until that fuel is used up. No restrictions on the MiG-35 though... and if a dogfight starts a MiG-29 can drop its external tanks and fight...

Besides most of the time Russian planes wont be fighting Russian planes and the helmet mounted sights and R-73 and R-27T/ET missiles make their opposing fighters scared... and justifiably so too.

Ok, imagine you fly a Su-57, are those drones going to super-cruise all the way to the interception with you?

Wouldn't MiG-31s be used for interception? For a deep strike into enemy airspace speed is not so important... the Su-57 might be cruising at 900km/h at 20m altitude while the S-70 might be flying ahead at 1,100km/h at 20,000m altitude looking for radars and SAMs and enemy fighters...

Ok, imagine you fly a Su-57, are those drones going to super-cruise all the way to the interception with you? Will they fly from a remote air base like the Su-57 will be capable of, or will they be located closer to the front? Will they engage enemy fighters actively or just as targets of opportunity? That is what needs to be defined in order to shape the platform.

Yes and no and all of the above and none... why do you think they are going to spend money on unmanned aircraft and not make them flexible and capable?

They might use them as suicide drones to get the enemy to reveal its defences and strengths, or it might escort the fighter like a wingman, or might be sent as a drone to climb high or fly low to penetrate defences...

If it is manoeuvrable, supersonic, long ranged etc, it will be an expensive heavy fighter too, regardless it being manned or not. I see them as shorter ranged, manoeuvrable and supersonic, with ca. half the payload of a Su-57.

I doubt it is going to be very manouverable being a flying wing, but being 20 tons there is a lot of weight there... it probably carries a lot of fuel... which it might used as ballast to control cg... and an engine with AB and TVC should allow pretty good performance too.

Like biplanes in zeppelins

Nyet comrade... like Vakhmistrov circus...

This is the role of the Su-57

But that would require more Su-57s... the point of the drones helping to clear a path means the Su-57s that follow the newly cleared path will have full fuel and weapons because they have not needed to climb and open fire yet...

Drones would reduce the number of expensive aircraft needed for an attack...

No space for it in the final configuration with flat nozzle.

What makes you think the final engine wont have a 3D TVC engine with a round nozzle like the new engine for Su-57?

Discussion can get very silly if what I call "light" is "medium" for you

The problem seems to me not what we call it... it seems to me that you think because a MiG-29 has two engines it is not a light fighter, but the single engined F-16 is a light fighter even though at max weights the F-16 is heavier at about 19 tons compared with the MiG-29 at 18 tons MTOW...

You seem to think only single engined aircraft can be called light.... what is an F-5 or an A-4 then?

There are no FCS without redundancy, but many planes and fighters with only one engine...

In Russia only the An-2 operates with one engine in the Russian military these days... the other aircraft have two... even helicopters... it is a safety thing.

I think the MiG-29 had some very special requirements and also they were probably limited by their systems' size to make it a single engine plane. Today that should not be the case anymore.

So why is the requirement for a 5th gen light fighter replacement specify two engines?

Why are the only modern aircraft made in Russia that have a single engine drones?

Once the VLO myth is busted, more and more countries will simply opt for signature management + EW instead. It just needs to be seen to what extent that is effective enough, I guess. It could be enough, if supposedly VLO designs are being seen by VHF and OTH radars hundreds of km away.

Right now not many countries have the capacity to see such targets at large distances and most countries have no capacity to do anything about it... if that NEBO system you just bought detects an Su-57 approaching what are you going to send to intercept that can see it too?

If it had external weapons... even if they were conformal most fighters could see that...

L/D will be very good, but it as a subsonic wing, it is very thick. The TWR is going to be like half of a fighter (10 t thrust for 25 t NTOW?) and as such, it cannot accelerate very fast.

More like 16 ton thrust with a 20 ton MTOW aircraft... but then the 50 ton MiG-31 seems to do OK with just 31 tons of thrust... so that is a bit dishonest... power to weight ratio is not related to top speed...

Well I was referring to A2A roles

MiG-31BM is also used to shoot down aircraft too...

Traditionally the most important features of an interceptor is speed and range and the sensors and missiles it carries.

But those planes already fly in transonic region. Do you mean it will accelerate from 0.8 to 0.9 M or something like that? That is not going to add significant energy to the missiles.

Climbing from 8,000m to 18,000m should extend range a bit... especially with lofted trajectory missiles like R-27EP and R-37M.

Against fighters flying high and dashing to 1.5 M or more, it will always be on the loosing side. And it will not be able to engage, disengage, outrun or dodge missiles. In a exchange, it is a sitting duck

What fighters can outreach R-37M?

We don't even know what its frontal RCS is so we don't even know if they will detect it... or at what range they might spot it...

Su-57 will (MHO) fly 2 M /20 km and has like 3500 km range, no chance for any other plane to fly with it

Why do you think it will fly that fast... and haven't you thought that perhaps something that essentially is the size of the Su-57s wing shouldn't be 20 tons... perhaps it has an enormous fuel fraction and is designed and intended to operate at high altitude and at supercruising speeds for long distances...

That is why I say other lesser planes will be deployed closer to the front in their respective areas of responsibility while the Su-57 takes care of air superiority and coordinates them.

But why... they already have a ground based IADS coordinating them... why would the Su-57s hanging back make sense... that would be the equivalent of an attack in Kursk where you have an arrow shape formation of tanks with Panzer 1s and 2s and the Panthers and Tigers hanging back shooting at anything that rises up to attack the Panzer 1 and 2s... the problem is that hidden anti tank guns will slaughter your panzer 1s and 2s before the Tigers and Panthers can do anything about it and then once those light tanks are gone you either use your heavy tanks or you go home.

The role you describe is like Su-57 + AWACS

But you can't send AWACS ahead into enemy held airspace to poke around and see what rears up...

Why would Russia need such a plane? MiG-31, Su-57 already can do that, using either their own sensors or data from early warning radars like Konteiner, and adding huge energy advantage to the missiles because of their speed and flight altitude.

Actually you are right... it wont be a plane.... they have already mentioned it... it will be a missile with the equivalent of a cluster warhead of smaller missiles...

Launch it from enormous range at an enemy air base... very high speed at high altitude to pop open at say 30km above an enemy military air base... simple IIR sensors will allow dozens of munitions with flight controls and seekers and a bomb to fall towards the ground at an enormous speed accelerating all the way down scanning for targets in flight or on the ground... they could communicate and decide on targets themselves based on the visible sillouettes... and the core of the main carrier missile could target the control tower or main radar perhaps...

Once the cockpit is gone, a lifting fan can take its place very nicely and that avoids many of the drawbacks of the F-35B.

Lifting fans are huge and take a lot of space for the fan and above and below for airflow requirements too... bad idea... the very few situations where it is useful is not enough to justify the compromises in design to achieve....

I think there are many environmental issues like Klimov's future,

Klimov makes helicopter engines... they don't rely on MiG-29s to stay in business...

I see that rather for bigger planes. Ideally for an ekranoplane in AShM mode.

For pure vertical launch (as opposed to angled launchers) a Russian plane would need to have a 10m fuselage depth... an airship maybe but not much else....

Naturally, it is not the definitive solution capable of cover the whole spectrum of planes actually present in Russian and the others superpowers arsenal (although China has actually joined the canard caravan quite enthusiastically...) but I would dare to say that it have proved to work just perfectly in the whole ballpark of different alternatives you have considered until now in your discussion.

MiG has plenty of experience with swept wing canard aircraft... the MiG-8 was built during WWII and was thoroughly tested, while the Ye-8 variation of the MiG-21 with a chin mounted air intake and full sized radar and canards was also thoroughly tested too...

The Soviets and Russians tested those ideas in the past and they never made it to service. They built them, they flew them and they have rejected them.

Stealth fighters with weapon bays have to be as big as su-57 or f-22. If they are small you will have to carry weapons externally like f-35.

And having to carry external weapons undermines all the cost and effort to make the aircraft stealthy in the first place...

You have a point there, there is always a way to twist supposedly objective facts, but numbers are a bit harder to twist. My idea is to find data (statements about runway needs for Russian fighters, real operational data of planes and so on)

You read occasional reports about MiGs being tested from strips of motor way...

Essentially agree. I would add that fighters with good range should be capable of finding road patches or airbases and not necessarily need to operate from fields.

The idea that fighter planes can just operate from anywhere was promoted by the makers of Harrier in the 1980s... when WWIII started the claim was that all the airfields would be attacked and destroyed and the only aircraft flying on the second day of WWIII will be the Harrier jump jets operating from supermarket car parks... which sounds fantastic, and is actually bullshit... they need hard concrete runways... a high power jet engine directed 90 degrees down melts tar seal and results it bulky molten material being blown up into the air destroying any engine air intake it enters leading to a crash. When operating from "dirt" runways they need PSP or pierced steel planking... in other words a metal mesh laid down to stop the dirt from being blasted up like the tar seal and destroying engines too... and that is ignoring the plastic bags and paper and cardboard rubbish blowing around most urban areas just waiting for a chance to destroy an engine.

When they talk about using dirt runways they mean the dirt strip alongside most runways... Russian runways are generally very wide and often allow three fighters to take off at one time side by side so if an enemy attacks with cratering munitions there might be areas a fighter could still use to take off... being 30-40m wide and 3-5km long you would have to absolutely pummel it repeatedly with cratering munitions to stop a Flanker or Fulcrum getting airborne... they just need 300m of clear runway and often the hard dirt area beside the runway is good enough.

The real issue with going to a suitable piece of motorway is first of all blocking it off and clearing it so no dickhead tries to drive down it while you are taking off or landing. You also need to move fuel and armament to that location and all your tools and ground support people and have mobile support vehicles to allow maintenance and repairs if needed... if you are still at your air base then that is much easier.

A good example, of which I was not aware until recently:

Yep, so what... as it mentions... the main bay is untested and that engine looks tiny I rather suspect its performance would be pathetic... in the 1990s Yugoslavia showed similar fighters in the form of the Novi Avion or some such thing... it didn't happen either.

They can and they should... better to be called names than to be killed.

Moving HATO planes to Russian borders just means they die quicker with nuke cruise and ballistic missile strikes...

Putin already hinted that is the way things work, when he said that if a fight is unavoidable, then better strike first. A conventional conflict cannot go beyond a certain level before going nuclear, so these calculations about all the thousands of fighters that NATO has are IMHO irrelevant to Russia. They will increase their numbers and reopen air bases slowly and without spending above their possibilities.

There is no way Russia can compete with all the countries of HATO, but it does not have to. Putting 500 F-35s in Poland just means those airfields will be targeted with likely hypersonic missiles armed with nukes.

Actually been thinking about it and those nuclear powered cruise missiles with unlimited flight range could be equipped with 24 small 152mm artillery shell sized nuclear weapons and the cruise missiles themselves can be designated UCAVs so they can make as many as they like and they wont be covered by START old or new... they could programme them to fly around the EU for years dropping nuclear bombs on all the airfields they spot... make them as hardened as possible and they could even use air detonation of some of their warheads as a self defence mechanism to defend from approaching SAMs and other missiles... design it to fly at very high altitudes...

We need to be careful, because the empty, normal and max weights of the Okhotnik are not known, and similar examples are not so abundant to make a good estimation. Butowski reports take-off weight of 25 tons, which makes sense, because the wingspan is huge (almost 20 m) and the reported range is 5000 km, so the internal fuel is huge too. Payload is tricky to estimate, because if carried internally, it would at best be that of a Su-57, that is, 4 big pieces of ground ordnance. That is 3-4 t max.

We do, but the Russians are smart as well... for all we know it might come with belly mounted conformal fuel tanks holding 3,000 litres each (x2) that are used for a full AB take off and climb to altitude and then full dry thrust cruise with the Su-57 to approach the target area and then dump the fuel tanks when empty and carry on full fuel and weapons... maybe even climb to high altitude and look for force multipliers like AWACS and JSTARS and launch long range attacks on both and then drop down and extend an inflight refuelling drogue and top up the Su-57 with some fuel and then turn and head home to be refuelled and rearmed... or it might lead the way in to enemy territory and distract enemy air defences...

Piotr also said it can fly at 1,400km/h...

Makes sense to me. You can see it as a way to support fighters, I see it as a tool for reconnaissance and deep strike. We need to wait and see.

It could probably do either, but I suspect its main purpose is to add numbers of missiles in the air because many air forces may outnumber Russia so having drones can help boost numbers as well as eyes and ears...

A fighter with one engine of the same size and thrust class (may not be a supercruising engine, though) can weight ca. 10 t and keep roughly the same TWR, that is the idea behind the F-16 and also the one I find more logical. It would make sense to make it more nimble and specialised in manoeuvring combat, while the heavy fighter, having advantage in range as a side effect of bigger size, should specialise in air superiority based on super-cruising, persistence, powerful radar and systems, magazine depth and so on. Makes a good combo to me

What level of nimble will stop cannon shells or missiles from hitting it?

Having two engines means more power and more flexibility and redundancy...

Ok, as said I see it a bit different but it may be like you say, if they go for a somehow bigger fighter. In my view, the Su-57 would cover the high level of the mix and the LMFS and LMFS-based UCAV would cover the lower part.

But if you genuinely want a high low mix of expensive and cheap fighters I would say they already have that... the Su-57 and S-70 is high and not cheap, though it is much cheaper than any western alternatives even from the 4th gen, while the cheaper low part they have the Su-35 and MiG-35 as well as the MiG-29M2 as well for the super cheap light...

Fifth gen light is not going to be cheap whether it has a single engine or three... (if it is a VSTOL fighter it might have lift jets).

This thing of single engine fighters as being discarded for safety reasons, I have not seen it proven yet. Some guys here say it was a political decision. The safety records of planes like MiG-21, which are still being operated all around the world, or other single engine planes, don't support the claim that they are significantly less safe.

AFAIK it is a political decision... the S-70 is a single engined aircraft, but being unmanned lack of a second engine is not considered important.

Even the Yak-130 has twin engines, though that is useful for training with multi engined aircraft...

The Yak-152 has one of course.

But the Zhuk-AME should be ready for a time now. What is still missing? They have a certain market window of opportunity, and it is closing with each year that passes.

Whether it works or not is not the issue... whether it is x times better than existing types already is use is the real question because it is going to be rather more expensive to buy and maintain initially.

We have seen this in the west where the Super Hornet entered service with lower flight speeds and poorer over all performance and being much more expensive with the stealthy modifications etc etc.... it led to a rather bad rap because it was much more expensive but in many areas was worse.

The Soviets had the same issue with the Yak-38 vs the Yak-38M... the latter had more powerful engines which improved acceleration but being a subsonic aircraft did not increase top speed and actually reduced range and endurance because it burned fuel faster and there was no extra fuel. It improved safety margins for landing and takeoff because the extra power was good, but overall it had shorter flight range and endurance and wasn't any faster...

I am surprised that such information is available, where did you see that?

IN the sense that extra fuel carried in external tanks can be dumped if they impose g limitations of flight performance... something no model Flanker can perform with internal fuel...

Russians say the supercruise will be the main operational mode of the Su-57. Of course, this makes no sense while patrolling or in peace time, but during combat missions this is quite likely. DCA, OCA, SEAD, in all those missions the survivability and effectiveness of the plane benefits from high speed.

Su-57 would supercruise at mach 1.6-1.8... much slower than a MiG-31 would fly to intercept a target...

The Su-57 can operate as an interceptor too, such qualities are included in the design. MiG-31 is of course another resource available for interception, but no the only one.

PVO used Su-27s and even MiG-29s as interceptors.... not every target is detected at max range and some airfields are located close enough for even shorter ranged aircraft to be useful.

A Su-57 so low&slow takes no advantage from its superior kinematics, and will give himself away by the emissions needed to control the UCAV. The S-70 at such altitude (that is beyond is service ceiling from what we know) it can be seen and attacked from very far away, while it has no kinematics to answer back, it will be eliminated quickly.

By what? HATO long range anti stealth radars that is part of their unified IADS system? Wont that be attacked with hypersonic ARMs and effectively nullified or at least silenced. The S-70 isn't exactly the side of a barn... it would be easier to make it rather more stealthy than the Su-57.

The S-70 flying low has little chances of being detected and can penetrate deeply and even egress safely, while the Su-57 controls the air space and takes care of any opposing fighters from the safety of being in tactical higher ground.

But surely best chance of not being detected and able to penetrate deeply is what you want for the component of the system with a human being in it... having something sticking up in the open where it can be targeted is the drone... the expendable portion isn't it?

Of course if stealth had any shred of reality they could both fly high and supercruise and being invisible like Zeus sending thunderbolts of death down on the enemy with impunity...

More than what? It is too early to know, and while the Su-57 fleet grows towards its maturity, all the Flankers and MiG-31 are there to help. As said, the characteristics of a Su-57 allow it to cover a significant amount of airspace. Such plane could possibly move to any point in a 500 km radius in less than 15 minutes and still keep enough fuel to fight. It is a huge force multiplier for the VKS.

The MiG-31s can move significantly faster too...

Sure, but the S-70 is not cheap. Will probably be comparable to a fighter, so it will not be normally employed in suicide missions, that is for sure.

But it can be cheap... make 1,000 of them and store 995 of them... with the other 5 use them for training and developing tactics and concepts... in fact build versions that are just engines and fuel and armament and communications and nothing else on the cheap and use those too... with a lot more in boxes... give them AI and enable them to inflight refuel other aircraft and to receive fuel in flight themselves....

Pictures + the fact that even with AB it would still have nearly half of the thrust of a fighter of that size. So no significant agility would achieved, while weight, complexity and all-aspect IR + radar stealth would be severely compromised.

That might be a deep strike penetrator drone version that is extra stealthy... the standard model might have a standard AB section with the same saw tooth nozzle as the F-35 on a TVC nozzle that would allow fine trim angles to be used in flight to optimise trim and reduce drag and RCS in flight...

And who cares about IR signature... a decent DIRCMS should sort that out...

But yes, for me "light" and "lower side of the hi-lo mix" is somehow equivalent, since I consider the paradigm of the F-15 and F-16 to be still the optimum one, even when the USAF did not implement it fully. I see it a bit like "light fighter" = half "heavy fighter", to put it bluntly

Perhaps they didn't implement it because it is not possible to take a fully functional and capable heavy fighter and split it in half and expect to end up with something useful. Your demands for the light fighter seem to be unrealistic... as capable as the heavy fighter but also light and manouverable too...

Tarasenko in the last interview points out to this hi-lo approach still being current and apparently the base on which they and the VKS are working.

Well wouldn't you agree if we were talking about insects and you took a big insect and tried to develop a complimentary support light insect you wouldn't start by taking the big insect and pulling off half its legs because you are going to make the smaller lighter insect half the weight so it doesn't need that many legs...

Sukhoi S-37 / Yak-141 were designed with one engine too (there is a number of other LFS projects too). If that safety motivation you propose refers to the crew, ejection seats have come along way and in most of the accidents today the life of the pilots is preserved, even if it could be demonstrated that single engine fighters crash significantly more. If it relates to the costs of the airframe lost, then the S-70 is not going to be cheap by any means.

The Yak-141 has three engines which actually makes it less safe than even a single engined aircraft... it is not just about the safety of the pilot or crew, but people on the ground and indeed the multimillion dollar aircraft itself.

Saving a few million dollars in fuel every year wont compensate you for losing an extra aircraft every 2-3 years because when that engine stops there is no back up.

Rezonans and Nebo radars can be sold and have already been deployed on a number of countries.

Sounds like the first things they would target with Iskander missiles and cruise missiles to me...

They would provide approximate coordinates of the threat and allow to launch missiles with ARH into their proximity. In practical terms it will force the targets to take defensive measures, unless they want to risk destruction or accurate detection, the moment they activate their ECM. So in the end there is a number of situations where maybe a fighter with little RCS and good EW is almost as effective as the VLO one, that is what I meant.

Except that fighters with a small RCS can be detected easily at very long range by conventional radars... it is VLO ones that can only be detected much closer.

Also we don't know how well an AMRAAM would go against a stealthy target... a release of chaff would provide a stunningly attractive target compared to the aircraft itself whose shaping makes it look tiny in comparison... and that is not allowing for direct radar jamming... the AESA radar in an Su-57 should be able to belt out an enormous amount of energy when required.... how would the tiny antenna on an AMRAAM take four or five AESA emitters belting out however many watts they put out...

Conformal ventral missiles for instance will not be seen by higher-flying fighters. There is a number of approaches that are not optimal but are workable I think.

Well that is not true.... most aircraft fly pitched up... nose up and the curvature of the planets atmosphere means that a plane 300km away wont be level with you even if it is flying at the same height or even slightly higher...

It could be many things. We could be talking about a plane with MTOW of 27 t and an AL-31F engine too...

I honestly question those figures you have given... 13.5 tons empty weight sounds rather excessive for something that is essentially just a wing with an engine...

There is no aircraft with such layout that flies supersonic, at least that I know. It would gulp fuel like crazy, if one engine was even capable of creating the needed thrust, and not even considering how would they trim the plane in supersonic flight.

The traditional method is ballast using fuel in multiple fuel tanks and instead of tail fins TVC...

It depends a lot, and R-37M is big, heavy with big drag. I would not put my money on a S-70 with R-37M against an Eurofighter with Meteor.

Carried internally the drag is irrelevant and who says the Eurofighter will see the S-70 in the first place.

I take the Russians' word for it. VLO can be countered. There are European OTH radars, UHF AWACS and so on. And NATO does not operate their fighters isolated but always networked.

A network the Russians would make their priority to degrade and destroy as soon as they are able...

An S-70 with huge radars on is no different, only it is unmanned, but equally as easy a target

the main threat would be radar guided missiles... large radars could be used as large powerful radar jammers too...

I completely agree, when placed in the middle of the body. In the cockpit, it is much less detrimental. And using and already existing plane, the development costs would be low enough. There is a market for such planes too.

That is what they said repeatedly about the F-35... using one design for everything makes it cheaper and easier to develop and if we make thousands we can really make them cheap and if it just has one engine... no don't design two... competition will make it more expensive...

I would find it very good if they would specialise themselves that way. By now they stay active in the business of fighter jet engines, they sell them to China to manufacture JF-17s for instance, and create new generations for both RD-93 and the RD-33. It is logical that they don't want to let go the knowledge and the money.

Giving Saturn competition makes them worth having.

Small enough for Slon

Any excuse to make more... sure...

I agree it would make sense for LMFS, as explained in the thread. In fact MiG worked on such configuration and brought it to an arguably more advanced level on the MFI with widely separated keels (less aero shadow of the wing on them) and horizontal tails surfaces for more control possibilities and lift improvement. Piotr Butowski reports this layout and good informed Russian sources say it is broadly correct, we will see. The big difference is the podded engines, to leave space between them for a big weapons bay, as in Su-57.

Another factor is that the aircraft is being made by MiG so 3D thrust vectoring works better with separated engines...

We are not talking about using them in that way and neither the talk in Russia is such, they want to create a hi-lo mix in order to get the VKS to be more economic to operate. If the goal was just capabilities you would only buy heavy fighters.

If it was just economic then just use 4th gen fighters to support the stealthy 5th gen heavy fighter...

An F-16 is vastly cheaper than an F-35 of any model and with better range, higher speed, better manouverability, better payload... much cheaper to buy and to operate... the only factors is avionics and stealthiness.

The situation in Syria shows the improve stealthiness of the F-35 is not enough to let it fly over S-300 sites with impunity so where is the value of all this extra cost for stealth and loss of performance parameters...

1.5 trillion would have paid for the 1,500 F-22s they wanted and just build F-16s for the low fighter...

MFI was cancelled due to budget issues, but the final technical solution was delta canard...

The MFI lost to the canard FSW S-37, but in the end Sukhoi build the Su-57 which does not use canards.

Certainly, there is no doubt about fighters being used from roads. But what I can't find is those low intake fighters taking-off from dirt runways. Planes with strong undercarriage and high intakes or where the front wheel is not clearly in front of the intakes can use dirt strips:

As Russia increases building roads I think the chance of actually using dirt airstrips will diminish... if there is a motorway available why wouldn't you use it?

The capacity to use rough strips is valuable and useful and things like rugged undercarriage means robust systems that can handle heavy sink rates on better surfaces too so it is not wasted money... the point is that you use the best surface you have available... if the enemy bombs your main runway and your second runway... is the apron big enough to use instead... or the hard ground on either side of the runway... hell it would not surprise me if they didn't make the ground on either side of their major runways out of concrete and then put a thin layer of maybe 5 cm of dirt to make it look like soil but could still be used for jet aircraft...

These two videos are of RC models but interesting nevertheless. You can clearly see the amount of dust, sand and stones being thrown at the intakes by the front wheel, even when the scale is completely different to what happens in a fighter.

Well it all depends on how the engine works... the radial and axial flow engines are different... the reason the Su-25 can operate in harsh conditions is because it is a radial flow engine... the fans are a solid disk with fan blades built in to the disk to draw air through the engine but around the disks which makes them strong and able to resist impact damage. An axial flow turbojet generally has fan blades like a propeller but lots of them like a propfan... dust and sand will pit the blades but are unlikely to break them unless you get a good sized stone...

Exactly, they solve it with STOL planes, which Su-57 is, too. Gripen also:

Most Russian fighters can get airborne in less than 400m.

Russian motorways are already thought with this use in mind. This video is quite cool, it shows how they turned the highway into an air base for Su-34 in a matter of hours:

Another factor is that they clearly have mobile support services and equipment for their aircraft so they can operate away from their airfields... which also means they could deploy overseas or if there is an incident anywhere in Russia that instead of worrying about having an airfield nearby they can also look for motorways nearby too... it expands their flexibility and would mean they could dramatically increase their sortie rate by simply moving the airbase aircraft closer to the area of interest.

He is a good source, it does not mean he is 100% flawless. There were talks of Russia developing a supersonic deep strike drone, so probably he understood this is it. But that is not all, he wrote "1400 km/h at low altitude", the same max low level speed of MiG-29 or a Flanker with twice the thrust, supersonic profile wings and 30% less wingspan... The probabilities of this being true with the design we have seen are between 0 and -1

So he is a good source but can be wrong in areas you don't agree with him.... suspicious... I mean sensible critical thinking is good but picking and choosing things to believe based on current beliefs is something else.

Of course it might be a low altitude strike drone too... you said yourself it would be good as a low level strike drone.... as such being able to fly at 1,400km/h would be rather useful wouldn't it?

And still Russia keeps building attack planes like there is no tomorrow.

They also make SAMs and AAMs... why don't they pick one or the other?

Between existing, ordered and planned Su-34 and Su-24 they have like 300 tactical bombers, with to plan in sight to reduce those numbers. Su-24 both in attack and reconnaissance version needs replacement, it is those units where I see the Okhotnik going.

Yet all the flights we have seen it has been with the Su-57...

A twin engine fighter being hit by a missile is done.

Missiles don't always make direct hits and a near miss creating damage to a target means an extra engine is a good thing.... there is no separation between the engines of the Su-25, though there is a metal plate, but several aircraft have limped home with one engine destroyed on the remaining engine...

It is no AAA they are facing, from which one could run away even limping, but enemy fighters. With 50% of power at best and probably extensive damage to the fuselage the plane is done, if it does not go crash on its own. Missiles on the other hand are quite lethal and normally down the plane they hit. It happened recently in Syria with the Su-24, and also with the Su-25 vs MANPADS... BTW this is also an interesting statistics to research.

What about the hidden advantage of having extra thrust with two engines and higher speed...

It does not mean it will fly high and slow in the middle of the enemy air space, at least when enemy AD and air force is relatively intact.

Why not? The information it could collect while being engaged would be valuable in terms of learning the structure of the defence and its makeup... if it helps call it RB-70 but without the inevitable loss of crews when penetrating enemy airspace to provoke the air defences in to action.

Considering just the airframe, the fact that Su-57 does it in mil power while retaining great manoeuvrability and acceleration, plus low RCS, is what makes it a much better asset against enemy fighters.

The aircraft are just platforms to deliver the missiles, so an Su-57 delivered R-37M wont be much different from a MiG-31 delivered R-37M except the latter will arrive having been launched from higher and faster so will have slightly more energy over a greater range.

Haha I like that. In fact it makes sense.

Treat them like cruise missiles...

I had not thought about it, but it is true that with 9-10 t of fuel onboard, they could be a useful resource to keep in the fringes of the disputed air space to assist tactical fighters extend their mission times and therefore effective footprint without the need to build a huge, specialised and vulnerable tanker fleet. That is a good idea.

All the more so if they are armed with long range AAMs and ARMs... the sort of weapons used early in an attack... if you have four S-70s for each Su-57 then two can launch long range attacks on major enemy SAMs or AWACS detected and then calculate the amount of fuel needed to make it back to the airfield and then offload the rest of the fuel to the other two S-70s and then return to base... with the remaining two S-70s topped up and fully armed they might detect long range targets and fire on them and then one could top up the Su-57 with some of its fuel and retire and the other S-70 could maintain position offering extra eyes and by that stage the two S-70s that went back to base should be back with a loadout they can decide on while they are away... if they detect another AWACS or JSTARS or inflight refuelling aircraft or troop transports then more R-37Ms, otherwise if fighters or helicopters are detected then large numbers of R-77M or R-77PDMs... ie the unmanned aircraft can rotate and occasionally you rotate out the manned aircraft too to give him a break... hell for long ops an Su-34 could be used.. the toilet and hot cup of tea and a biscuit and just being able to stand up and have a stretch might be appreciated...

And the F-16 is a very successful fighter by any measure, having gone from daytime fighter to all weather multirole plane with ease. For such an small airframe that is not easy and speaks volumes of the quality of the basic design and approach.

The guy who designed it thought it should have stayed a simple light cheap fighter... I don't think he is wrong.

[5G fighters are bigger than 4G.

So why does their light 5th gen fighter have to have one engine if it is going to be heavier than a MiG-29 anyway... isn't that reason enough to make it a twin engined aircraft?

Hahha, now you are stretching it a bit

Is that wrong though, am I misunderstanding your logic?

Plus the cost of the engine itself, plus maintenance. It makes some millions and multiplied by the size of the fleet it can actually pay full planes. Additional risks derived from extra complexity in twin engine planes is considered to be a source of flight incidents, too, but probably it is very hard to quantify.

Like the extra complexity of painting a fire door red?

Extra engines make it more likely to have a crash... reminds me of the joke about the irishman on a flight in a 747 to America and half way across the Atlantic the pilot comes over the radio and says that they have lost one engine... it is OK the plane can fly safely with one engine but the loss of power means we will be half an hour late. An hour later he comes over the radio and says they have lost power in a second engine but that things are OK but they will be an hour late landing. Half an hour after that the pilot comes on the radio with a bit of panic in his voice saying they have lost a third engine and they are looking for alternative landing sites and the irishman turns to the woman sitting next to him and says I hope we don't lose the last engine or we will be up here all night...

Next you will be telling me it doubles the fuel consumption having two engines.

This is what NATO plans to do against Russia, too. That would make their VLO fleet actually much more dangerous. But they are protected and partially mobile targets and failing to destroy them needs to be taken into account.

Russia has vastly more SAMs than HATO has cruise missiles... and Syrian Pantsirs and BUKs performed rather well against the cruise missiles that got close to them...

The idea currently revolves more around breaking the kill chain as they call it (difficult tracking by fire control radars) than anything else. Small size, LO design, ECM and tactics can do that too.

Except that the long wave radars they use, they use in conjunction with other radars to get pretty accurate location information about their targets so tracking radars might not be needed... just launch ARHs and IIR homing missiles close enough to find the targets themselves... and the kill chain is open again...

You would have 1º difference each 200 km due to Earth's radius, 5km altitude difference at that range would be 1.4º, almost 3º at 100 km. Still conformal weapons have no reason the be specially visible from the front but rather beam and lower aspect.

The obvious issue is that whether they are fitted or expended they effect the RCS of the aircraft... little corners and bumps and depressions so an AMRAAM will fit nice and snug against the fuselage is not stealthy at all whether the missile is there or not.

Paralay makes those numbers from volume and density, normally it is not exact but relatively close. The wing is huge, way bigger than those of the Su-57. It has big weapon bays, big undercarriage, huge fuel tanks... it is BIG

Its empty weight is 90% of the empty weight of a MiG-29...

TVC still has not replaced aero surfaces, I guess they don't trust it so much.

They trust engines enough for it to have one... why not trust it enough to have TVC?

Using fuel would limit the amount of usable fuel onboard.

Only to cope with the shift of cg as the aircraft passes through the speed of sound... after that the control surfaces and TVC should be able to keep it flying normally.

Still you don't mention the wing design, which I think is the key aspect here. Any thoughts?

It has been a circle hasn't it... the first supersonic aircraft had a straight wing but most of the service fighters had heavily swept straight wings which needed longer and longer runways and then they went for either swing wing or lift jet, or small delta wing and then they found the MiG-29/Su-27 wing suited subsonic and supersonic flight without needing a long runway. These days the wings are generally PAK FA types...

To be honest I for once agree with Elon Musk for shitting on Northrup by saying the fighter jet era has passed. For me air to ground role missions should be given to drones and some air to air roles given to multi-role aircrafts. The Su-57 has had unmanned flight tests.

A human pilot imposes serious penalties on an aircrafts design... extra weight and complication, but their ability is tough to replace... and their autonomy is also tough to replicate... we will have human fighter pilots for a while though unmanned fighter interceptors do make sense...

That is how I see it too, it is virtually identical in its layout to all other subsonic attack drones out there and the obvious assumption is that will be its role.

You mean like the MiG-25 and F-15 are identical in layout so their missions and roles must be identical too?

Or the F-22 and the Su-57 basically have the same planform layout... are they going to be used identically?

Is Russia planning to invade third world countries for oil?

Does Russia intend to send Su-57s into US airspace to try to wrest control and overthrow the government?

The conventional engine/nozzle were speculated to be a test hack and after seeing the scale model with the flat nozzle that possibility only got reinforced.

There are photos of tests of flat nozzles for the Flanker family too... development time seems a bit excessive though...

There were stealthy models of unmanned versions of the Yak-130... didn't end up making those either...

A model at an air show is not a contract.... it is a suggestion looking for funding... if it had funding it would be secret and would never be displayed publicly.

Agree, Turkey's drones are toys for propaganda and low intensity conflicts, Okhotnik on the other hand is a serious asset even against advanced ADs.

Give them some credit... you don't need to spend billions on super expensive drones... the concept is ultimately expendable... which newer more expensive drones are becoming less and less expendable...

So Okhotnik is apparently going to be cheaper than a heavy fighter, but still cost a lot of money.

If they keep making them in tiny batches they will stay expensive.... and almost hand made.

They say the problem with automation is not the machines, but what to do with the people that is turned useless. Autonomous systems still need a bit of development, training and debugging, but they will be implemented relatively soon I think.

And then the fatal link in the chain... the reason AI is less effective than a real pilot flying the same aircraft with the same limits is that a pilot wants to survive the encounter most of the time. Sometimes they will die if they think it is their only chance and that the job is worth the sacrifice.... hense Soviet fighter pilots ramming German bombers... but when they programme self preservation into their AI we have Skynet...

Well, to be honest that was a fluke, more caused by negligence on the US side than anything else. They are known to have been flying drones over non encrypted channels...

That sounds like the excuse that the Serbs shot down an F-117 was just a lucky shot. US negligence and arrogance does not make it a fluke... it is hard work and professionals doing their job.

Certainly, only JSF was a better cow to milk

And that is at the core of the problem... the US MIC is only interested in making money and could not give a shit about American military people trying to use this stuff in the real world. Politicians deciding on what stuff gets paid for and what does not only care about how much bribe money they will get and what sort of cushy job they will get after they retire based on the decisions they make... by the time it turns out to be useless they will be untouchable in the private sector earning millions...

Wait, MiG 1.44 won the tender. S-37 is this isn't it:

Your image didn't work... the S-37 is the black Berkut with the canards and forward swept wings and horizontal tail surfaces that won the competition against the MiG 1.42 and 1.44, but they revised the design and built Su-57 instead for the PAK FA programme they won the rights to lead by winning the tender.

Do you have pictures? I thought you were talking about something like a cyclonic separator, but then when I see images of the R-95/R-195 engines for the Su-25 I just see a normal axial flow compressor...

Whoops, I am mistaken. It is an axial flow engine.

Including the machine to fuel 15 planes at a time they are already using in Syria

Which is very interesting because they have also tested a mobile helicopter base whose components fit inside one Mi-26 helicopter which could therefore land near by and provide mutual support and perhaps share resources in places that were previously merely stretches of motor way...

The issue is not what he says or whether I like it, but whether it is possible. How can the plane match the speed of a Flanker if the drag increases and the thrust halves at best??

But who says the drag of an S-70 is bigger than a Flanker... even an unarmed Flanker still has weapon pylons and vertical tail surfaces and all sorts of bumps and dimples that add drag...

Look at those pictures: the S-70 is very big (almost 120 sqm wing area), 19.5 m wing span

It also is not a brick.

Being a flying wing it has the lowest drag possible for something that flys like a plane (as opposed to a bullet).

And it would be better if it could fly 3 M at low level, but we know that is not possible don't we?

The difference there is that there are no aircraft that can fly at mach 3 at low altitude, but there are manned aircraft that can.

and even more modern ones can barely go supersonic at low level, what makes you think removing half the thrust would make them faster?

How about if the 95% the weight of an empty MiG-29 guess is bullshit and it is actually a 7 ton dry weight platform without weapons and fuel and it has a 15 ton thrust engine as standard... besides as I mentioned a MiG-31 doesn't have a better thrust to weight ratio than a MiG-29.

Can you show me where it says 1,400km/h at low altitude? The figures I have seen say top speed but I assumed that meant at altitude where top speed is generally achieved.

Okhotnik compensates the slower speed vs. previous interdiction/attack planes with incomparably better stealth, range and of course by being unmanned.

But the S-70 didn't just fall from the sky..... it was designed and built the way it is for good reasons... can you explain why you would want an escort for your new super fighter to be so slow?

I mean that even being massively "outnumbered" by NATO fighters (only in theory but no in theater), they still seem to focus their air force more in attack roles.

I would think having a big powerful nose mounted radar and anti stealth radars in their wings and of course IRSTs is focusing on shooting down enemy stealthy aircraft and is a bit redundant for shooting at targets on the ground. The MiG-35 has downward looking IRST sensor pods optimised for ground attack... if they were interested in attack roles it would be the plane they were buying in greater numbers...

Because to actually keep enemy ground infrastructure shut down you need a massive amount of sorties, and also they seem to think it is easier and more effective to kill enemy fighters in the ground than in the air.

Of course it is, but you still don't win a conflict by defending... you need to go out and smash the enemy and his nest.

I don't deny twin engine has advantages, but the way you put it, it seems unthinkable that SGM and most wars afterwards have been fought with single engine fighters...

The promise of cheap single engined fighters has not panned out... you could make one... but no one making them wants them... even Iran is making twin engined light fighters... if they wanted to and had the confidence they could easily replace the two engines in the F-5 and make it into an F-20 but they have not...

I demonstrated to you that F-16 has higher TWR than MiG-29, if you have good examples of planes that are comparable in twin vs. single engine version and that prove your point, please go ahead...

Your claim is that single engined fighters are cheaper but have no examples.... F-16 and Gripen are both rather more expensive than the MiG-29 to operate and that is ignoring the low hanging fruit of the F-35.

The Magical F-16 can carry 7.5 tons of weapons and fly further than anything else, but it does that with conformal fuel tanks that add weight and drag, but the selective choice of weights and models means it can always win... except in speed and after losing one engine to a bird strike...

The purpose of the F-16 having one engine was to make it cheaper and simpler and they failed on both counts.

To be fair, it depends on the circumstances. I am referring to an enemy with high capability and powerful air force, in whose airspace you are not going to be alive for long if you are a slow plane like the Okhotnik flying high, but of course, you seem to think it has the speed of a fighter and more stealth, so it can make sense for you.

So you think flying at mach 3.5 would keep an SR-71 safe over Russian air space today?

Flying at supersonic speeds at high altitude is an American wet dream... even without AB the IR signature of friction heating the leading edges make it a long range IR target... the SR-71 is of course the worst case in this regard but there was a reason the Russians kept the R-40TD in service long after the MiG-25 left service... they could detect an SR-71 at 120 miles (clearly US information), which meant the SR-71 appeared on the MiG-25s and MiG-31s IRSTs before they appeared on the formers radar and could be attacked from head on at extreme ranges with the mach 4.5 missile. Looking up the only other hot spot would be the sun...

Maybe in some type of mission you decide to sacrifice unmanned planes, but that cannot be the norm or you will find yourself quickly without aircraft.

They had drones 50 years ago that used the engine from a MiG-25 that travelled at very high supersonic speeds... it wasn't particularly modern or sophisticated, but they likely have a few unused MiG-25 engines lying around the place... it would be a cheap use for them... fly them over enemy airspace and monitor what lights up and what finally shoots it down and then launch a hyersonic missile to destroy that system. Launch another cheap high speed drone and monitor its progress... after you have launched a dozen... the equivalent of 6 MiGs worth of engines... they will of course have gotten wise and might just monitor it... so load them all with warheads and the ones that don't get shot down can suicide into HQs and Comms centres... or major western land marks...

Why are you so worried about saving money... we are talking about a war between Russia and HATO... what would you be holding back for?

Maybe they will be nice and offer good surrender terms to Russia...

But the general principle that the safety of an aircraft is mainly dependant on its capacity to stay away of enemy air defences applies.

No it doesn't because the purpose of an unmanned drone is to test and penetrate the defences of the enemy.... the idea is to save the lives of pilots by giving factory workers work...

If you don't attack an enemy he will keep trying to punch you in the face and eventually he will slip a couple of shots through... if you don't hit him back you are dead.

If his attacks either succeed or are stopped then he faces no consequences for continuing to attack... in fact his reward will be that he knows if you can't or don't retaliate the worst that can happen for him is to give up the attack.

The deeper in enemy territory and the slower the plane, the lower the flight must proceed. A MiG-31 at 3 M may penetrate some hundreds of km in enemy air space at 20 km altitude, attack a tanker or ISR plane and egress, a Su-57 may join the fight when the fighter escort takes on the MiG and still survive, but an Okhotnik flying subsonic at medium to high altitude deep in enemy air space is dead. It could fly higher to cover more space when in reconnaissance missions, but it would be advisable in such cases to stay closer to friendly air space. Of course the stealthy design will allow it to creep closer to enemy AD than other planes, mapping them in passive mode.

Well there is another possibility... perhaps the 13.5 tons of structure means it was made to pull 20gs or more... the unstealthy exposed engine might be to allow for a TVC engine nozzle.... maybe this aircraft is able to dodge missiles... if it has 5th gen radar and sensors to detect stealth targets then it should be able to dodge incoming missiles better than any manned aircraft... perhaps those huge weapon bays are full of 20 odd 9M100 self defence missiles too...

For all we know it could just be an EMP bomb that flys stealthily 500km into enemy airspace and then pop every electronic system within 400km of it melts...

I suspect a big part of the S-70 case is to be able to stay on station for many hours and not allow anybody to raise their heads.

So if it is just a big fuel tank with bombs in it that moves at subsonic speed then why do you think it is so heavy? There are a lot of other designs for long loiter times at high altitude... most HALE drones are not flying wings after all.

Bigger than a F-16 does not mean bigger than a MiG-29. F-16A was 7300 kg empty vs. 11000 for the MiG-29 in early variants,

Another problem with using the F-16 as an example... the F-16A was a day only fighter... in fact the designer argued that it should only be armed with two Sidewinder missiles on the wing tips... that plane never really existed...

Well, yes. I am not wanting to make a plane without wings or something, just to make it smaller and simpler. A colony of ants has big soldiers that are massive and fearsome compared to the smaller working ones that are more numerous... but all have six legs

But a smaller and simpler ant is called a drone. Geez you walked in to that one...

I don't know if that is a relevant factor, bot believe or not I have actually read analysis about it. IIRC, they said the high risk incidents associated to engine installation and ancillaries in F-15s were much more numerous than in F-16.

You sound like Elon Musk... the safety procedures are expensive and time consuming and we have no record of related safety concerns so why don't we stop implementing all these time consuming safety procedures that don't make things safer anyway....

Hahaha, no, but you say two engines is more thrust, which is essentially the same kind of misconception

Which model F-16 has a 16 ton thrust engine? And that is the early model MiG-29...

Rather S-70 is 23% heavier than MiG-29 right?

Either way I don't believe it.

Wing sweep indeed play a role, but I mean wing profile:

I know what you mean.

Supersonic wing has a sharp leading edge, little camber and very small relative thickness. It is good for speed but creates little lift

The leading edge root extensions on the older MiG-29s has a rounded leading edge... is it subsonic only?

The wing in the Okhotnik is the actual opposite: very high aspect ratio, high relative thickness, blunt leading edge. It is a wing for high lift at low speeds and high fuel capacity. If fighters could have such wings with their many advantages and still be fast they would do it for sure.

If that were true then my question would be why is it not thicker. If it is never going to be supersonic then why is so thin... surely increased internal volume means more fuel and more payload... why not pump it up like a transport plane so if can carry a lot more fuel and more weapons because that would enable them to fit forward and side and indeed rear radar antenna arrays and make it into an AWACS type drone with long range...

In the S-70 thread there is this:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQ-H3hfU8AINurI?format=jpg

And based on the information there the comparison with the X-47B seems to give pretty clear information...

The same speed, so high subsonic.

32 percent better payload, 20% better flight range, 12% better flight endurance in hours, 10% better altitude...

Which gives us pretty specific information....

What makes it interesting is that the west is estimating that despite the Su-57 using composite materials to make it lighter... they think the S-70 weighs 13.5 tons empty weight while the X-47B has a 6.3 ton empty weight.

I presume the MTOW is the same at 20 tons.

The payload would equate to about 2.6 tons...

And would include the Kh-38 based Thunder glide bombs...

Four of which would be about 2.4 tons at 600kgs each.

In an article just posted in the S-70 thread...

With regard to the ongoing work on the Russian heavy impact drone, special attention is paid to its capabilities in the range and duration of combat missions. If you believe the data that began to be published recently, the radius of combat use is up to 3 thousand km.

I suspect the US will start to demand UCAVs are included in any future START agreement... with a couple of dozen small nuclear bombs it could be quite potent... you could build hundreds of these things and deploy them after both sides are broken... they could destroy targets that weren't worth hitting as military targets but are worth eliminating as population centres of hostile enemies... 65 x 152mm artillery shell nuclear bombs would do it... at about 40kgs each they could be stacked in a rack that fits in the bomb bays where they are held vertically with a parachute to slow their fall so the drone avoids the effects of the blast by the time the bombs go off at maybe 100-200m above the ground... about a 20KT payload... each.

This is not the best counter example, F-15 was the USAF interceptor after all...

Identical role and mission?

Really?

They have a similar role as air superiority fighters...

Like the MiG-25?

Soon enough Americans may ask them to do so

The UK and French government do as they are told.... not the Russian...    

Then the images of the Okhotnik with round nozzle that were released are also not representing the final model?

Final model?

Was the F-16A the final model?

S-70 is probably going to be around for some time and will likely be constantly upgraded throughout its operational life... that is just normal.

You seem to be assuming there will only be one version...

Only they are not cheap, they carry expensive foreign engines, EO systems etc. But they are very good for political gain because no pilots die, while the companies of Erdogan's clan earn money replacing all the downed drones. What is there not to be liked?

Cheap compared with F-35.

Hell, that is one of the main advantages with IA, it has no fear and its self protection threshold can be tuned... unlike humans.

I disagree... self preservation instincts keep a species alive... running head long at the enemy will just get you shot down.

Skynet was bad programming work, maybe by Boeing 737 SW team... and probably ill intentioned to kill people in fact

But Skynet only becomes an actual threat then they can run factories and mine the raw materials they need to build and maintain themselves...

True, and if they are crafty enough, they manage to create the sort of "too big to fail" programs that the whole political and military establishments will end up having to embrace and hence covering-up to the very bitter end...

The C-17 was the prototype... and the F-35 is their poster child...

The MFI program was won by MiG, but it was cancelled and the PAK-FA program started.

You seem to be confused... If MiG won the MFI programme then why did Sukhoi make the PAK FA?

The fact that they clearly didn't make a full sized aircraft prototype suggests that single engine model didn't win anything.

Manned aircraft that can fly 3 M at low level?

What I was trying to say is that there are not manned aircraft that can fly at low altitude at mach 3 so expecting an unmanned aircraft to fly at mach 3 at low altitude is unreasonable. There are manned aircraft that can fly at 1,400km/h at low altitude so it is no great leap to suggest an unmanned aircraft might be able to do the same.

I never said I know with certainty the empty weight of the S-70, just provided some estimation done by a third party. But as you say yourself, that is not the key and that is BTW what I am saying, too, because I am referring to drag vs. thrust.

But doesn't that rip your whole argument apart... you want a light fighter and by your definition the reason a twin engined model can't be used is because MiG-29s have a dry weight of 14 tons which is too heavy... well this is a single engined aircraft that doesn't have the extra weight of vertical tails or a cockpit and it is even heavier in terms of dry weight by ratio with the F-16 with the X-47B which is the US equivalent you seem so keen to use as yard sticks.

If the F-16 is so fucking fantastic because its empty weight is low, yet is not cheap to operate by any measure of course, and the MiG-29 as a twin engined fighter with a higher empty weight is so bad... and your solution to the problem of excess weight is to remove an engine doesn't the S-70 with an engine removed prove beyond doubt that you are wrong.... it is a single engined aircraft with more than double the dry weight of the US equivalent despite exceeding that US equivalent in several parameters just like the MiG-29 does the F-16...

Sure, if that was the case I would not be so certain. But low level... no way. BTW, if it can only fly 1.1 M in full AB it is also not a great companion for a Su-57 after all.

Why? How many support and supply ships in the US Navy can out run an aircraft carrier?  Why do you think the Su-57 is going to be flying around the place at supersonic speed? The Su-27 and Su-35 didn't/don't.

In fact very few modern fighters will burn the fuel and take the time necessary to get supersonic during normal operations.

The only aircraft that regularly go supersonic are MiG-31s and MiG-25s...

They can work together, it does not mean the fly together doing the same things. As said, the ideal share of work as far as I see it is that the S-70 takes on the more risky parts of the attack missions, while the Su-57 covers it

You say they will work together but think the Su-57 will "cover" the S-70... if they are working together wouldn't they be covering each other?

Those are Su-35 and 57 right? Yes, but that does not contradict what I am saying. Their most numerous planes are Su-34 and Su-30

Sounds like you are assuming the Su-30 is used for ground attack, which might be the case for a country like India with no Su-34s, but for Russia the Su-30 is more like an upgraded Su-27.

The Russian Air Force was not interested in the MiG-29SMT and the main features the MiG-29SMT upgrade provided was significant air to ground capability.

All their new aircraft have sophisticated systems that allow air and ground targets to be engaged but apart from the odd iron bomb run I would suspect most focus on air to air... with the exception of the Su-24s and Su-34s and Su-25s which actually are dedicated ground attack aircraft.

See above. They are buying Su-34 by hundreds.

To replace Su-24s which are going and Tu-22M3 which are now with DA... they actually had more Su-24s than they are getting Su-34s.

As a matter of fact, that speed reduces the engagement window of any SAM on it, no point in discussing it.

No it doesn't. The S-400 can engage aircraft moving at mach 3.5 out to 400km... and it they could track the SR-71 from take off to landing... listening to some you would think the SR-71 was their first stealth aircraft... it is... but only in teh sense that they thought the U-2 was their first stealth aircraft too... they assumed the Soviets wouldn't notice that plane either....

It does not make it invulnerable, but makes the job of the air defence quite harder, as the gaps between AD nodes get larger vs. such fast targets.

No it doesn't. The S-400 can deal with targets moving at 4.8km/s... and targets moving that fast does reduce the engagement range to about 60km, though partially because objects moving at that speed are ballistic and therefore have fairly steep trajectories which also effects engagement range.

An SR-71 moving at less than 1km/s can be engaged out to max range by S-400 and S-350 and even BUK.

They have good AD target drones, too. And pretty fast, with good electronic stuffing inside, they could serve that purpose too.

The point is that with the INF treaty gone they can make all sorts of "UCAVs" with any flight range they like and it would be much cheaper than using a Backfire... they could use them for domestic air defence tests and keep hundreds in boxes ready for use for real over enemy territory...

Not money, but airframes.

During an open conflict with HATO do you think either will matter afterwards?

The idea is to perform the mission with less risk to irreplaceable pilots in intrinsically dangerous missions, not to write planes off for the fun of it.

The point is that the serious lack of air defence missiles that HATO is equipped with means sending up fake targets and drones actually makes a lot of sense for Russia... very cheap simple subsonic cruise missiles... perhaps equipped with MALD type decoy rockets like the ones they have for their 122mm rocket pods, would distract the air defences from the hypersonic high altitude and stealthy low altitude attackers they also launch.

I was one thing I found amusing with HATO expectations during the Cold war... the Soviets were considered idiots and would send in forces and it was only after those forces were soundly beaten by HATO air power or whatever that they would then meet the threat and use their air defence capacity... it always seemed they would hold back their real force structure until they were forced to by successful HATO attacks... they were never going to use modern combined forces to start off with...

Attack missions are the priority, as I am saying from the beginning. Hence keeping the attack fleet in good shape and in numbers as large as possible must be the goal of a good professional work, or it s effectiveness will fall.

Whether manned or unmanned the first attack missions will face a largely unknown defence, so why not send in unmanned attackers to begin with... the US sends in cruise missiles first to degrade the command structure and the air defence capacity by taking out the big long range SAMs... why would Russia not try to do the same?

I am not proposing to stay defensive in the sightless way, just to avoid suicide missions unless they are high priority.

The term suicide mission does not really apply to an unmanned drone attack... the purpose of making them unmanned is to make them expendable...

And most high priority attacks of that type would be suicidal for a manned platform most of the time... it should be done by a hypersonic missile...

Dodging missiles in subsonic flight is not very promising.

Changing speed altitude and direction is much easier at subsonic speeds than at supersonic speeds and that is the best way to reduce the performance of a BVR missile... you are never going to out run them and the faster you go the less you can manouver...

Reduced energy means decoys and jammers will be more effective too.

Or carry those EMP weapons they are working on, no doubt it would be fantastic against critical infrastructure in the strategic depth. And you don't need a massive amount of ordnance for that, which would help a small force to sneak deep for that kind of strike...

Could be launched from a torpedo tube and fly in international air space till it gets close to an economic or financial hub like London and then boom... or should I say whimper.

Cheaper than using Goldeneye...

I just reported some calculation and said it cannot be very light, because it is very big. It could be another value, I don't know.

Isn't it a similar size to the X-47B... which is about 6 tons empty weight... and about 20 tons MTOW.

To be honest, I think the thrust issue has already been clarified. Absolute thrust without relating it to the size of the plane is not relevant, and for issues like acceleration it is TWR that matters.  In terms of energy conservation, max speed and also turning, excess power is more relevant.

The problem is that engines with the best thrust are expensive to buy and to maintain... the difference between the F-5 and the F-20 is the number of engines and by your mantra the F-20 should be cheaper to buy and operate with only one engine, yet the truth seems to be the opposite... the thing that made the F-5 a cheap little fighter was its small efficient engines that were cheap to maintain and operate.

The wing is actually very thick, perfectly comparable to that of transport planes, B-2 bomber or X-47B subsonic attack drone:

It has already been established it is a subsonic drone.

Not exactly razor thin...

Exactly, I was referring to interceptor as a role and not as a definition of the plane, which is an air superiority fighter.

Of course there is no difference in role or operational use from a MiG-25 and an F-15... but does that make sense...  Which model F-15 is similar to the MiG-25R, or indeed which model MiG-25 equates to the F-15C?

The MiG-25 is an interceptor and a recon aircraft and a bomber in the RB version but they are specific models and honestly they are vastly better than the F-15 in any of those roles. The F-15 is a multipurpose FIGHTER that can intercept but is not that great for the job.