Su-34 Tactical Bomber: News #2

My understanding g was MAWS was supposed to be added to the newest variant of Su-34's? One mentioned by Hole. Yeah, MAWS is present with Su-35 so shouldn't be hard or expensive to add.

Anyway, more jets please. Love these birds (all Russian birds honestly).

I wonder...

The PAK DP is going to need decent flight range and at high speed and rather high altitude and with internal weapon bays able to carry long range AAMs.. I would think a high flying very fast platform like the DP could loft glide weapons to enormous distances without entering enemy held airspace... your operational costs then become the glide weapons themselves or missiles launched from high altitude and very high speed which should massively extend the effective range of most missiles, and the jet fuel to take off and climb and accelerate and then launch and then land...

Something like S-70 could be used to enter enemy airspace to get the enemy air defence to light up and interceptors into the air and a mix of long range AAMs and glide bombs to take out aircraft and SAM sites respectively as they make themselves known... and a few Zircons to hit the primary targets you wanted to hit with the strike.

Basically a new airplane that is related to the Su-57 in the same way that the Su-34 is related to the Su-27.

Something like the S-60 strike aircraft that was supposed to replace the TU-22M3 except based on the Su-57 stealth design perhaps...

I have to say that I thought the idea of a drone carrying drones was redundant... a bit like the old idea of a bomber carrying parasite fighters to protect it over enemy territory. Obviously in this day and age the cost of even a simple fighter as well as weight would mean carrying an air to air missile instead makes rather more sense in terms of weight and space... but the Russians showed a drone that could take off vertically but with a fixed wing able to fly in forward flight at decent speeds that could carry small FPV drones with short range datalinks which are much cheaper and smaller and lighter and use less power... the signal relayed by the carrying drone to much greater distances.

An electric drone flying at 5-6km altitude would be impossible for MANPADs to reach or get a lock on with an IR sensor... about the only threat would be weapons like Kornet or TOR or Pantsir... and that would be expensive.

Being able to carry a half dozen to a dozen FPV drones you could fly to the enemy lines at altitude and scan for targets and drop attack drones on targets so the FPV drones don't need big powerful long life batteries or powerful datalink communications equipment and therefore could carry heavier payloads... looking at the new Euro super tank I would say an AI programme that automatically targets turret bustle ammo with an RPG level warhead would be a kill most of the time... and your drone could attack half a dozen to a dozen targets and then return to friendly lines for a refuel and loading up more drones or tiny glide bombs depending on the targets.

A scaled up version with strategic range could be useful too... but hitting serious targets like bridges and strongpoints could be achieved with super heave glide bombs and missiles... actually flying over the target and dropping conventional bombs is just too risky.

In comparison imagine the defensive problems of protecting a bridge from a low and fast bomber flying over, with a mach 4.2 bomber that releases glide bombs 250km away at 35km altitude where the air is rather thin and a bombs ability to glide would be a bit limited, but its drag would be very low and as it descended its lift would kick in and even a jet booster motor from a cruise missile to maintain speed and altitude to extend range...

Those 300mm diameter glide bombs would be optimised for supersonic flight because they can be launched from Smerch rockets so altitude and speed are already part of their design... you could probably pack quite a few internally on a MiG-41... or in this case perhaps the MiG-42?

High speed would allow these drones to reach targets much faster... in fact a new design one of those 300mm drones with only a 20kg warhead and the rest is fuel to reach max speed and range because when a HIMARs attack is taking place the Orcs will likely be launching from different positions all at once hoping to disappear before all of the launchers can be hit... having a bomber in the air like a Tu 22M3 that is loitering during a period when an attack is expected can accelerate and release large numbers of glide bombs to attack multiple launch positions at one time very quickly... putting ramjet engines would maximise their speed and range...

lancelot wrote:
I think the tandem dual seater Su-57 will replace this just fine.

and the non-tandem dual seater Su-57 will replace Su-30SM

Tsavo is a loser, plain and simple. His position on this forums is to troll and Gary has made a point of trolling but hasn't acted.

Tsavo does this quite often. Posts Ukrainian sources, no evidence because he can't count bort numbers, and then hides behind the veneer of "but it was posted and I am just reposting what was reported". This works on people with room temp IQ.