Su-57 Stealth Fighter: News #6

But Su 57 unlike the Su 35 doesn't have super cruise engines.

First of all the definition of supercruise is just bullshit... the key feature of supercruising is being able to fly at supersonic speeds without needing continuous afterburner to maintain speed... whether you need to use AB to get to supersonic speed or not is immaterial because the real key is being able to fly supersonic speed at dry thrust increasing your speed but not doubling your fuel consumption like you would if you had to keep your AB on all the time.

AFAIK both the Su-35 and Su-57 can fly at supersonic speed without needing afterburner to maintain supersonic speed... which is no shock because the MiG-25 and MiG-31 can both do that too... they do need after burner to break the sound barrier but can return to dry thrust if they are not trying to get anywhere as fast as they possibly can.

The test plane Tu-144 with the NK-32 engines from the Blackjack can also supercruise effectively giving it flight performance better than Concorde (it was always faster but was less efficient because it needed AB to maintain supersonic speeds unlike the western aircraft).

Most Long - medium range AAM's will follow a "Low-high-low" profile - ie. from their fired altitude (low), immediately climb to a much higher altitude (high) and then dive down on their target from height trading altitude for speed since by this time the rocket motors have burnt out during the climb phase (low) - ie. they coast to target. The only exception are missiles like the MBDA Meteor which have a turbofan motor giving them power flight all the way until impact with the target. This gives them much higher pk with a single engagement. Modern short range AAM's are extremely manuveorable (50 g+ turns), have a high bore-sight (90 degrees+ from the central line) and using IIR (Image Infra-Red) together with a UV co-linked system which collectively are extremely difficult to fool with flares and other decoys. This tends to give them extremely high pk's (0.9+) even against a highly manuveorable jets like the Su-27 series (read Su-35) and Su-57.

Firing a long range AAM from low or medium altitude would be a bit of a waste... most pilots launching a long range AAM shot would give their missile the most possible energy by climbing and accelerating as much as they can before launching the missile.

When the target is close... ie a 20km shot at a target using an AMRAAM or R-77 then the missiles will likely go active radar straight away and not bother climbing very much at all.

Thus a Su-35 and Su-57 may dodge a single AIM-9X or Phyton-5 (less than 50 - 50 chance), but after that he will be either very slow or low in height or both.

Their DIRCMs lasers will blind the seekers of IR and IIR guided missiles, so such optically guided weapons would be relatively useless most of the time, which makes manouver performance and the number of shells carried for the gun important...

The second AAM launched will then most likely get him. If such misslles are salvoed in a volley, the opponent is pretty much toast.

If the DIRCMs defeat the first missile they should also defeat the rest too... besides the 9M100 is supposed to be a small compact self defence anti missile missile used as a CIWS for ships in Redut launchers, and on land in S-350 launchers and by aircraft as a short range self defence AAM. Carrying a dozen of those means you could shoot down the entire payload of any F-22 or F-35 and still have plenty to deal with the launch platforms, but as I said eventually DIRCMS will defeat all IIR guided weapons so again it is guns.

Add to that a Helmet Mount Display sighting system (HMD helmet) and the shooting pilot can look anywhere (even back over his shoulder), shooting his missile at any angle from the plane towards the opponent.

Does the F-22 or F-35 even have high off boresight capability... neither are intended for dogfighting... they are stand off snipers in camouflage that is supposed to make them invisible.

Shooting a missile over your shoulder merely reduces the energy it has to attack the target.. if the first thing your missile has to do is a 180 degree turn to attack an enemy behind you all of a sudden that 20km range missile is now a 2km range missile because all the time it was supposed to be accelerating and climbing to attack its target it has just been executing a hard high g turn which burned up most of its speed.

Missiles are small and rely on velocity for performance... a sidewinder or an archer has tiny control surfaces so if it was flying at 600km/h it wouldn't be able to complete a 180 degree turn without stalling and falling... it needs to have completed its 180 degree turn before it runs out of rocket propulsion... the Archer would do this much better than the sidewinder would because the archer has a thrust vectoring rocket motor so it can turn at low speeds much harder than any physical control surfaces could turn it without stalling and just creating drag...

Even still it is much better to pull hard on the flight stick and point your nose at the target before launching the missile because then it will accelerate directly at the target and have much more energy and speed and if the target tries to out turn it it has free movement of turn to follow them... imagine you are pulling a hard turn to get into position to face a target and they turn so you have to turn even harder to follow them... it is their best chance of avoiding your attack most of the time...

Given that these modern short range AAM's are all-aspect (ie. do not need to be fired from behind an opponent, but also from front with a high pk value) this all combines to mean that when two so equipped jets get into a short range fight are likely to mutually down each other within the first 10-15 seconds - no matter how manuveorable they are. Hence USA and NATO's focus on BVR (Beyond Visual Range) and stealth. This combination really works

During tests against East German MiG-29s western pilots that did not have high off boresight missiles lost every time... forget all aspect missile seekers... when you have a heat seeking missile you get on the tail of the target before launch when you can to maximise kill probability. Even though the lightly loaded F-16s managed to get on the tails of the German MiG-29s forced to carry centreline tanks for the tests which reduces their g manouverability to 6 g about 60% of the time the MiGs were still winning because by the time the F-16s got to a fire position the MiGs were judged to have already launched their missiles and were judged to have shot down the western aircraft... of all types (the F-16s did the best with getting to the best shooting position 60% of the time, but all the other types were beaten by the MiG).

The simple fact is that the thrust vectoring R-73 can turn its nose to follow even a crossing target or a head on target about to blow past the MiG-29 and keep its nose pointed at the target and keeping the lock while the rocket motor powers it towards the target.... making it a very capable dog fight missile...

Of course these days its IR sensor could be blinded by DIRCMS, but you never know what tricks they perform...

And the missile has been upgraded multiple times with the current model being all digital...  

I'm a little bit confused. I didn't say their idea is stupid. It's the opposite actually. I answered to his statement that there is no solution to make poded engines stealth and said they found a simple and effective solution.

My apology was not directed at you LSOS... after rereading my response to Jhelb I felt I was being a bit harsh with my responses...

You on the other hand were making perfect sense to me...  

From what I see the su-57 is facing upward and the missile goes at 90° and under the aircraft. The position seems to not allow the pilot to aim with helmet mounted sight at the target because it is under its belly.

R-73 has very good manoeuvrability and can lock at high angles but in this position the pilot can't see the target. Maybe it already lock before going up or maybe they use some sort of camera to target under the plane.

French pilots use the Mica IR detector as a cheap irist maybe they do the same with the r-37.

The Su-57 has a distributed optic system that allows targets to be shared between optics and radar system, so a target out of direct vision of the pilot could still be tracked by the IRST or radar with the target location being passed to the missile. Note the R-73 is not ideal for the Su-57 because the original model needs a lock on target before it can be launched which is difficult with internal carriage... perhaps those wing mounts are designed to lower IR guided missiles down so they can see the target and get a lock before launch?

The 9M100 has a datalink and an IIR seeker so it can be launched and then fly towards the target before getting its own lock... the TOR missile is launched vertically and then commanded to roll toward the incoming targets direction and then accelerate away, though it is command guided so it never actually gets a lock on the target anyway.

Yes. I've seen that. But that seems to be an artist's rendition. I was wondering if you have an image of the entire aircraft that shows the radar blockers. I did carry out a Google search but couldn't find one.

Do you want the schematics for the internal computer network they use too?

These are secret features they will have no interest in sharing with the world any time soon.

IIRC, Boeing lost out in the F 22 competition because their prototype the Y 23 was using radar blockers. USAF didn't like that idea.

The F-22 won because it is effectively a stealthy F-15 and therefore it is just a stealthy MiG-25... the American military might pretend to be pro high tech but ultimately they are ultra-conservative... the F-23 was too radical for them to consider... ironic really because the FCS and Zumwalt were probably too radical.

TURBOFAN ENGINE on Meteor!

The problem with a ramjet is its speed restrictions keep it roughly on par with rocket motors... scramjet motors opens the door to much higher speeds and smaller missiles than you could manage with solid rocket fuel... even high energy stuff... because high energy rocket fuel can be translated to high energy scramjet fuel too...

The point is YF-23 has a lower RCS than F-22 even it has partial serpentine shape like SU-57 , if they didn't like something it doesn't mean everyone should do the same .

More to the point at one point they claimed the round engine exhausts were not stealthy, which was why the F-22 has rectangle shaped engine exhausts... but the reality is much more mundane... the F-35 shows round nozzles can be stealthy, but when they made the F-22 they couldn't make them round AND thrust vectoring so they made a choice.

Their poor expertise with thrust vector control jet engines means they put both engines together like the F-15 and F-22, but by spacing them out on the MiG-29 and Su-35 and Su-57 you get much better performance in roll control with TVC engines using differential roll control of the nozzles... even the Typhoon and Rafale have their engines together.... and the Gripen and F-35 only have one engine so roll rate can't be achieved when stalling even with TVC engines fitted...

Whether a target is stealthy or not it comes down to what do you kill it with... and with modern ESM and ECM and decoys and jammers and DIRCMs odds are the missiles are going to do as their name suggests and miss and it will come down to guns and my money is on Russian fighters in terms of manouver and gun performance...

Well it would be consistent.... with their bombers it seems they are going to keep their ancient B-52s and go with new B-21s and get rid of their B-1Bs and B-2s... so in that case the fighter equivalent would be to put F-15s back in to production and get rid of the F-22 and F-35s and make a new revised version of the F-35 called the F-351...

Well as ar as missiles go I simply cannot see the Russian airforce abandoning them only to go back to guns.

Only an idiot would go for one or the other and not both... the Americans didn't put a gun on their F-4 Phantom because they believed AAMs would do everything and guns would be a waste of space and time. The British didn't both even designing a fighter plane because they thought SAMs would do everything aircraft could do and much cheaper.

The Russians/Soviets are much more sensible... the still have anti aircraft guns and anti aircraft missiles, they keep guns on their aircraft, they don't replace tube artillery with rocket artillery... they use them together...

At infantry level they kept full calibre rifles (SVD) in platoons together with assault rifles and light and medium machine guns... in their navy they have far more guns than the west normally fit to their ships and their CIWS include guns and missiles and where a British carrier might have a phalanx or goalkeeper on the front and another on the back, the Soviets had about 8 combined gun/missile mounts and a half a dozen other gun mounts and of course missile batteries as well based on TOR.

Besides considering the track record of western anti missile systems their planes will probably fair about as well as HMS Sheffield or that one saudi refinery.

Missile development is measure, countermeasure, counter countermeasure... a process that never ends.

But when it comes down to guns the Russian ones are apparently very accurate and they carry very little ammunition so little infact that they can only afford to fire when the know that they will hit the enemy and are unable to fire against manouvering enemies at range like lets say a shilka would.

The MiG-29 and MiG-31 have computer controlled guns that only fire when the target is in a position where it will be hit, and the burst length is also controlled by the computer based on the target type.

Very simply they lock a target and pull the trigger and then manouver their aircraft to point the gun at the lead position where the target will be when the shells arrive. When the target is lined up properly the computer fires a burst whose length the computer controls... Obviously with the MiG-31 these bursts are very carefully controlled because while it carries 250 shells the 6 barrel 23mm gatling fires them at over 200 rounds per second so the bursts are kept rather short.

Meanwhile pindostanski planes have rotary cannon with a large amount of ammunition storage meaning that they can fire clouds of shells at thier targets accounting for multiple possible positions of the target at the time of impact and allowing them to fire on more occasions.

Yeah, those guns are not ideal... their electric motors means they never really fire at full cyclic rate because it takes half a second to spool up to full rate of fire speed and a half second burst means firing off too many rounds. In comparison Soviet and Russian guns use gas power and reach cyclic rate almost immediately and are a fraction of the weight of the US guns... not to mention the weight and space their electric motors take up.

If you fire 2 or 3 at a same target you have good chances to hit because the ECM and evasive manoeuvres will be good against the first but not against the next one because ECM don't cover 360° around the aircraft so the first missile will expose you to the second whike you make evasive manoeuvres and the second to the third.

Lots of excessive manouvering is bad for the kill probability of BVR missiles... ideally you want to hit with the first one that he doesn't see coming...

If your su-35 is very low at very low speed with a typhoon equiped with 4 ASRAAM coming at mach one from above the sukhoi is dead.

A very bold assumption.

Speed is critical in dogfighting because below certain speeds you can't perform a lot of manouvers without stalling or departing from controlled flight... with thrust vector control engines the Su-35 wont stall or depart from controlled flight...

That's why range and number of missiles carried are important factors.

Tell that to the western Air Forces... the F-35 has poor missile capacity while maintaining stealth... and if you arm its external weapon positions its stops being stealthy yet still cannot carry what an F-16 could do all day for a fraction of the price.

That's why the Sukhoi Flanker variants equipped to carry between eight and twelve BVR missiles so they can fire more than one, three or four BVR missile salvo during the opening phases of an engagement, the aircraft being targeted has a problem as it must jam, decoy and outmanoeuvre three or four tightly spaced inbound missiles.

That is a little different.... western aircraft that are not French and therefore only have one type of BVR missile option generally don't launch more than one BVR missile at a time because anything that jams or decoys the first missile will probably do the same to the second or third.

The Soviets use different seekers on their bvr missiles so for instance they would fire an IR guided R-27ET missile and then a SARH R-27ER and perhaps an R-77 at one target... the target would detect the illuminating beam and know a SARH missile is on the way but wont detect the IR and ARH missiles till rather later... the efforts to evade the SARH missile will force it to use up energy or engage AB making an IR missile kill much more likely... any attempt to jam the SARH missile will provide a signal for the ARH missile to passively follow...

Firing three R-77s on the other hand would be of little benefit.

As far as I was aware the Mig-31 was no longer equipped with the ГШ-6-23 but I do not really know mutch about this at all.

You might be confusing it with the situation with the 6 barrel 30mm cannon in the MiG-27... a much more powerful weapon...

However regarding the armament of Russian airforce fighters it is usually the ГШ-301 with a handful of rounds, it does not matter how agile, fast or otherwise superior the CУ-57 is if it has only enough ammunition to shoot down 3-5 enemy aircraft.

The ГШ-301 while a good weapon with in its standard configuration seems to exist primarily as a small small and convenient token presence of autocannon on Russian fighter aircraft.

The gun is completely computer controlled... during gunfire tests the gun would automatically shut off after firing between 5 and 7 rounds, but as the designer said the targets were still being destroyed. At 7 rounds per target, that means just over 20 targets could be engaged. The designer said if he had known it was going to be this accurate he would have halved the gun ammo capacity to 75 rounds instead of 150.

The gun is only fired when the shells will hit... no spraying all over the place...

But also if we armed the whole outside hard points the RCS will increase , or may be it's a minor increase which will not make a significant change .

The usefulness of the missile would far outweigh any tiny difference in RCS you might get for not carrying it.

You might be confusing it with the aerial use of the Gsh-6-30; it stopped being used (for fighters) when the MiG-27's were withdrawn from service.

The gun is mounted under the belly of the MiG-27 about 5 metres back from the tip of the nose of the aircraft... but they fitted it with fins to reduce muzzle flash for firing at night...

A real dragon...

I have seen models of unmanned ground based gun platforms equipped with a 23mm gatling gun, but the 23mm round is similar in size to a big HMG round.... the 30mm is much bigger... the numbers are 23 x 115mm compared with 30 x 165mm... but side by side there is an enormous difference in size and weight (and power).

The cannon on a fighter jet is meant to be a self-defense dogfighting weapon (when the missiles are expended), the AAM's are the main armament against OPFOR aircraft. If your attempting to kill 3-5 aircraft with your autocannon in one sortie, then your tactics are fucked up! It's much better to integrate ground based SAM's with your aircraft interdiction before you get to the point of taking a autocannon to a AAM fight.

If you intend to fight with guns only then you are going to use a lot more fuel and have to cover a lot more ground... Missiles aren't totally hopeless though... certainly worth carrying a lot.

Fires the same shell Tunguska and Pantsir and the Kashtan and Palma land and naval air defence guns fire...

Broad range of ideas for discussion in that post mate...

The Americans and British liked lots of guns in the wings firing lots of bullets towards the target... the Germans and Soviets tended to go for fewer guns, heavier guns mounted in the fuselage or engine mounting.

The Sabre tended to have to fire almost its entire available amount of 50 cal HMG ammo for each MiG they shot down because planes became harder and harder targets... they certainly had better aiming equipment, but the MiGs had heavy hitting 23mm cannon (for fighters) and 37mm cannon for shooting at bombers, though obviously each was used when wanted...

The Soviets found the slower flying MiG-15 was better at ground attack than the faster MiG-21s and MiG-23 and was in the process of developing the Su-25 when the Americans introduced the A-10.

The Sabre also had the enormous advantage that a lot of the MiGs they were fighting were flown by inexperienced Vietnamese pilots, while most Sabre pilots were experienced WWII pilots...

The Americans like high rate of fire and high velocity for their guns so the Vulcan uses relatively light projectiles at high velocity with a relatively high rate of fire.

The Soviet equivalent is the 23mm Gsh-23-6 which is much lighter (the gun weighs about 73kgs) and has no electric motor to get it to fire, but it has a heavy for its calibre HE round and low muzzle velocity of about 700m/s.

On the face of it it seems wrong but shotgun pellets are subsonic and they are the best solution for small fast manuvering targets at short range...

The Soviets and Russians have a wide range of gun pods from rifle and HMG calibre and 30mm grenade launcher pods up to 23mm and 30mm guns.