Su-25 attack aircraft

how much ordinance can the SU-25 carry relative to the a10?

The SU-25 seems to be rather small for an attack aircraft.

A-10 and Su-25 are not for the same jobs.

Most of the time the Su-25 is for attacking enemy strong positions and so its normal armament is rockets and bombs and gun pods.

For the Americans their biggest fear was all those tens of thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of other armoured vehicles the Soviet Union had, so its priority was anti armour.

If either flew with anything like max payload they would fly like dogs, have very short range and probably get shot down fairly easily.

There is a PAK aircraft programme for a replacement CAS aircraft... whether it ever gets into service or not is another question.

It has an inbuild targeting systems and no recco pod which is a diadvantage.

The Russian have not previously used targeting pods because most of their planes supposed to be for ground attack had the systems built in to allow them to do their job.

With the Su-34 the plan seems to be have a built in all purpose system and have add on pods that have extra capacities that can be added... it would make sense to do the same for the Su-25, which in its current model has quite a good avionics suite including target detection as well as self defence features too.

The Su-25 is a much smaller and faster plane than the A-10 and would be a rather more difficult target to shoot down with guns.

The new guided versions of their S-8 80mm and S-13 122mm rockets should enhance its capability without making it too expensive to operate... and the new Hermes missiles should be rather good too.

I believe the replacement is designated PAK SHA...

The new Radar and EO systems they are fitting to their Ka-52s and Mi-28NMs could be added to the new PAK SHA too

The field of view is greater and you can just switch the pod for a new one if you have better stuff. The inbuid system need to be upgraded at the factory and when using it you need to go toward the target which won't be alone and enter the effective range of manpads or SHORADS.

The pod however increase drag.

They could improve it by puting an Optical ball on the nose to increase efficiency.

Pods are good for multirole aircraft that might be being a fighter or interceptor during one portion of the war, but then when the enemy air power has been damaged you might want to switch them to ground attack, so a targeting pod makes more sense than built in equipment as it is cheaper to upgrade podded equipment, and over time you will have a range of pod types for different situations... against some enemies a targeting pod might be good enough.

For instance the late model Fitters... particularly Su-17M4s had adequate optronics and ground attack equipment, but they had a few other Fitters not equipped to that level. In the Mig-27 range the M and K models were very well equipped but earlier ones not so well equipped for finding targets.

A modern decent targeting pod will include all weather optics and navigation systems and often datalinks to make older aircraft like Su-24s or Su-17s much more effective at roles like ground attack.

The upgraded pod for the F-14Ds just before they scrapped the plane was a nav attack system with a datalink to ground forces so the forward air controller (FAC) actually got radar and thermal imaging video footage from the aircraft flying above him and could indicate on the display where friendly forces were and where the bad guys were and issue direct requests for fire support. The F-14D without that upgrade package would be like trying to use an F-15C for the job... ie not so much hit and miss... more miss and miss because the F-15C has the nickname... not a pound for air to ground... it is a fighter. With a pod it could be anything they want it to be... of course the F-15E would be much better for ground attack and that was the idea...

With the Su-34 they put standard generic optics and of course high res radar, while for anything that needs more then they have pods... including radar pods for recon missions, jamming pods for SEAD missions, and targeting pods for strike missions with specific requirements...

Most of the time what it does is comes in and hits a target that is slowing a ground operation by hitting it with heavy rockets and bombs... it is actually very rare for it to ever use guided missiles normally...

Being small and light means it is quite fast for what it is but not so fast it doesn't see targets on the ground.

The competition for the Su-25 was the Il-102 and if you look at the specs for that aircraft they are actually much closer to the A-10... 7 ton external payload, and a big forward firing gun, but it had a tail gunner and tail gun and was much bigger.

The A-10 is about the same size as a B-25 and is not that much faster... sure it has a big gun but not that amazing... it is only a 30mm cannon... it is a 30 x 173mm round which is slightly bigger than the standard 30 x 165mm Russian 30mm, but the Russian Navy actually had a twin 30mm gun turret weapon that used an even more powerful 30 x 210mm round.

The rate of fire of the 7 barrel avenger isn't even anything special... the 30mm gatling on the MiG-27 fires faster and it only has 6 barrels.

The A-10 is as big as it is because the gun it carries and its ammo bin and the enormous electric motor needed to power the gun are the size and weight of a volkswagon beetle car.

Taking the huge gun out and replacing it with a simpler gun could vastly improve its performance in terms of flight and manouver.

I remember reading about an American pilot who had flown both... they were on a visit inn the 1990s and all the American pilots wanted to fly the MiG-29 and the Su-27 but they had an Su-25 there too, but one American pilot flew the Su-25 and really liked it... he said the engine response was much better and it has a much better power to weight ratio and was a zippy little plane that would be safer to fly in mountains because of the better response times from the engine and the flight controls.

If they want something bigger for strike roles they had the MiG-27, Su-17, Su-24, and Tu-22M3... now you can add all their multirole fighters with guided air to ground weapons, and of course the Su-34.

Ironically a problem the Su-25 pilots mentioned from their experience in the short Georgian conflict was that the rate of fire of the gun was too high... essentially they were wasting far too many rounds on each target because the gun fires more than 50 shells a second.

One of the improvements made to the aircraft was to allow restricted round rate bursts... so you don't fire 30-40 rounds at a truck when 4-6 rounds would do...

Another issue is that despite upgrades and improvements the Su-25 still is really not an anti armour aircraft... HATO doesn't have so much armour that all their ground forces and artillery and attack helicopters can't cope so rather than being a modern Il-2, the Su-25 is effectively more of a modern Stuka, that comes in and blows the crap out of the enemy when the enemy has formed up to fight a Russian force moving forwards.

Essentially it tends to blow up hardened enemy positions with bombs in the 250kg and 500kg weight range (normally two dropped at a time so 500kg or 1,000kgs of bombs a few metres apart... which is devastating...) or for enemy troops scattered around the place volleys of rockets... the sort of targets an ATGM can't really handle well... remember Russian ground forces have tons of ATGMs of their own, including 152mm artillery which means 40kgs of HE on target when needed... so they don't really need a plane to come in and fire more small anti armour missiles... they want a small fast jet that can operate from frontline airfields so it isn't far away so when you call it it will be there within 20 minutes or less... but it does not have enormous range and bomb capacity so it wont be miles away busy doing another job for another unit...

Obviously it needs to be able to do a variety of jobs against a range of targets, so new Kh-38 missiles with 40km range and a 250kg payload will be useful, but also those Grom missile/glide bombs based on the Kh-38 would also be used as well as a range of new missile and bomb types.

In fact the new variety of light bombs designed for UCAVs would be interesting on multiple ejector racks for attacking lots of different targets at once... each guided to their own target coordinates...

Some sort of datalink communication with a forward air controller with sensors showing the guy on the ground a view of the ground around him in real time like a video game map showing the positions of friendly and enemy forces so the guy on the ground can highlight targets to be hit and create a detailed view of friendly and enemy forces which could then be shared with HQ and commanders in the field in real time would be a much better improvement than carrying more missiles for instance.

Improvements in accuracy of delivering dumb rockets and bombs make it an effective and cheap aircraft that is relatively simple, but can have armour to protect it from the ground fire such a role is always going to attract on any battlefield.

I wonder would it be possible to mount the Sprut SD's low recoil 125mm on an aircraft, say the size of a Mig-31? Such an aircraft could be interesting in terms of both anti armor and fire support, it could shell the enemy form 5 km away or even more with cheap guided rounds and it could carry more than 30 of them.

Sound interesting, but would probably not be money well spent when it is easier to just load up smaller lighter missiles with potent warheads that can do the same or better damage.

At the end of the day even the best APS system will do fuck all to a 500kg HE bomb exploding 3m away from your tank... there is no defence from that sort of attack other than shooting down the plane... so for the Su-25 up against Chapparal and Stinger and some 25mm gatling guns and some ground launched AMRAAMs, things are not as bad as for the A-10 which has to face an enormous and increasing array of formidable air defence guns and missiles...

The Soviets were interested in something that could operate over a WWIII type battlefield front line, so long periods of loitering would just make it bigger and heavier and slower, but with little real value.

Soviet forces are advancing and then they start taking heavy fire from a range of cave complexes in the side of a small hill... their 40kg HE shells from their 152mm artillery isn't working so they call up a flight of Su-25s each carrying 8 x 250kg bombs to try to deal with the problem... Ka-52s will be there too but sitting back outside of MANPADS range observing the attack and monitoring any fire coming from the enemy position to help identify locations to target...

If you want something for a COIN op like Syria where a plane orbits a village for 8 hours while you attack the position and have bombs on call to take out specific buildings or bunkers or other things then some sort of large transport plane with bombs rolled out the back might be a better solution.

The small size and light weight and good speed of the Su-25 means it can be based in a forward area, so instead of a Mach 2+ Su-35 operating 500km away from a paved runway, you can have an Su-25 at 800km/h but waiting 30km away on a flat open piece of ground or motorway waiting for takeoff orders... they could wait for weeks if needed.

I said the size of a mig 31, not the cost, I was thinking more in terms of a high maneuverability turbofan/turboprop biplane that could fly around for hours and shell the enemy from any direction. Naturally such an aircraft would not be too amazing in a war with other major powers, but in smaller wars in say the middle east or eastern europe it's low cost, high loiter time and versatility could prove useful.

The Su-25 has already proven very useful in low intensity conflicts and against a peer enemy in the form of Georgia in terms of SAMs the BUKs and Spyders and other SAMs they had were better than what an American unit might hope to have defending them... with the exception of the American unit would obviously also have air power supporting them too.

It could for instance hunt enemy artillery, attack entrenched enemy tanks/ tanks behind a ridge line or just demolish enemy strong points. I think it would be well worth it to create a hundred or so of them. It would be a far cheaper and more practical way of deploying airborne artillery than say an ac120, aswell as ofcourse being far harder to shoot down.

Artillery radar and drones could already be used to spot such targets, and they have an enormous range of platforms for hitting hard targets from 203mm and 240mm artillery, through the range of aircraft from helicopters and multirole fighter aircraft as well as strike aircraft and of course rocket artillery and missiles like Tochka and Iskander et al.

With laser guided rockets of 80mm and 122mm calibre I would think the Su-25 could now be better armed than ever before... not to mention the new drones they are testing...