Certainly on my Bucket List but never saw them
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Cold War revisited
- Thread starter HeyJoe
- Start date
Certainly on my Bucket List but never saw them
That is a very casual observation. In the world of supersonic fighters, if you mean that they are both swept wings with pointy noses and v-tails, then sure -- along with a lot of other planes. As a former windtunnel engineer, I would strongly argue the two are aerodynamically very dissimilar. There is a lot more going on here.
The J-20 is a standard delta wing with a canard. This is extremely significant in terms of aerodynamics and center of gravity. Not only is it fairly tricky to design, but a canard directly reduces longitudinal (pitch) static stability. The F-22 is a clipped delta wing with lots of reverse sweep and a standard eleron. If you walked into a room of engineers and said "Let's build a fighter with a canard" they're all going to wince and say "Are you sure?" It's a lot more work. So why would they do it? Well, as it currently stands, the Chinese are still testing vectored thrust on the J-20 and the original design doesn't incorporate it. A fully movable canard adds boatloads of maneuverability in the same vein as vectored thrust. It's a design trade-off much like anything else.
That said, every design team does significant amounts of research on other planes in their category and plenty of aerodynamic concepts are rehashed from one manufacturer to another. They'd be doing themselves and their company/customer a disservice by designing in a vaccum -- it's their responsibility and the first step in the design process to do this research. If anything, I think we would be better served to take the J-10, Dassault Rafale, and Eurofighter Typhoon into account when discussing the J-20:
The J-20 takes a lot more cues from their J-10 and our French friends than it does the F-22. If we're having a look-a-like contest, the SU-57/T-50 wins hands down. And here's some canard porn from my former life...
Point taken, but if you had everyone else's design specs, then you wouldn't require a tremendous amount of R&D to build from someone else's design, right? That's the point I was making is that while the PRC does spend some money on R&D, it's not nearly as much.
Israelis were able to build Nesher/Kfir that way from purloined Daussalt Mirage V blueprints. In both cases, that’s a lot of NRE you don’t have to invest if you are merely tooling up to build to print!
Um, no. Just because they don't spend money on the same things we do doesn't mean they aren't spending to do development, testing and fielding a whole array of new and exciting things. While CSIS might have a okay grasp on China's defense spending even they probably get quite a few things wrong on just what they and the Chinese categorize as 'defense' spending. One example would be GPS, bought and paid for courtesy of the US military. BeiDou? Probably not in their defense budget.
With a GE J-79 for us to still have muscle in the game.
Thought this video might fit in from the movie World War 3. Reforger and the Battle of the Atlantic around the 45:00 minute mark
Very much so. Sled Driver was an "I love me some me" present. I wanted it, I could afford it, so I bought it for the price. I don't mind spending money on books, though.
Max the Mad Russian
Hands off Ukraine! Feet too
Oppositely to Badger, on a Bear this underbelly turret could be controlled by ELINT operator directly as well as tailgunner remotely (this guy could control all turrets simultaneously but lacked radar or radar-equipped gunsight, having just optical sights - akin to an old battleship gunnery officer;-)), but average Soviet NavAir WSO was definitely not a marksman, and generally, when NATO interceptors weren't in sight, the tail guys were playing cards. Some stories went for chess, but it is extremely doubtful, it may be rather for the forward cockpit. All Bears had enormous range and could actually make the globe with one intermediate land refueling (Cuba, Vietnam Сam Rahn, or Angola) or two midair refuelings from noted Bisons. If the flight plan went to a Bison, then the short conversation in forward cockpit could have taken place: if the flightpath contained the Cuban or Vietnam airfield as emergency strips, the decision to simulate the "air refueling system suddenly fails" could have been made, then the crew made overnight stop on one of these foreign bases, each of which had special Soviet shops trading duty free alcohol of famous brands (fuck this vodka, let's buy gin/tonic or bourbon), some stereo tape sets (Sony, Grundig, LG), some blue jeans (Wrangler, Levi's and so on), some shoes etc. - everything for special currency ("bones") which all Navy personnell getting out of USSR territorial waters got surplus to month salary. Of course one with "bones" could spend them for similar goods back in USSR (special trading net "Birch Tree"), but the prices within the country were considerably higher than on Cuban or Vietnamese air bases. So that watches on a wrist of ELINT-O from your previous picture was evidently some Omega from Cuban field. Every Soviet Shoe (and merchant sailor as well, though in lesser amount) overseas was paid with the "bones" too, but it would take months for him to return with this money or "luxury" goods of free West. Quick bringing some this stuff back to USSR as a gifts for noted local chicks made the Bear JOs so popular that it was a problem how to NOT get laid after such mission
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Max the Mad Russian
Hands off Ukraine! Feet too
Look, what is of considerable interest: this experience achieved with conventionally powered carrier. Another one of early 80s was with the same Jerry Tuttle riding IKE off Norfolk, while the brilliant USN Shoe, ADM Henry Mustin, had been put in charge of USS Forrestal CBG, another conventionally powered carrier, off Gibraltar. He let escort free, directing them to steam west in search of IKE, switched everything on Forrestal off and started to creep slowly and silently along the Biscay shore. Eventually Tuttle hadn't been able to find Mustin while two DDs from the latter's escort found IKE off Azores and reached this nuke carrier within surface Harpoon's range. Tuttle lose that time - according to Mustin - and the conclusion was made that if the Soviets will do the same, they don't need the tattletales to find and hit the carrier which is in active search for enemy and conducts intense flight ops. I'm far from sticking with Mustin's opinion, eventually he had always been the Brown shoes hater, but the tactics deserves to pay attention on.
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Max the Mad Russian
Hands off Ukraine! Feet too
The Soviet naval strategy for overall Cold War had one birthmark that was quite diehard to overcome. Back in 1946 when the Iron Curtain didn't fall yet and a lot of Lend-lease American equipment was still in use by Soviet military, and the first analyses of the recent war appeared, Soviet highest staffs suddenly realised that the nuclear weapon, which USA only possessed then, could generally be delivered to blast the Soviets off by two ways: via big land-based bombers and from the carriers' decks. They had very little interest in a problems USN faced fighting with newborn USAF and legislators for nuke control, but found both ways were real threat, and if radars and fighter aircraft able to get high altitude were available, the strategic problem of eliminating a crowd of B-29s becoming tactical, but similar relief for the carrier problem was not even in sight: generally, in then-actual configuration of Soviet military simply there weren't the means to neither find the carriers nor destroy them. As one admiral in early 50s pointed out: we can forget all Mahanian tenets with no harm to us, we are almost landlocked, but what can we do with the carriers, remains unclear. The first anti-carrier weapon was actually that same B-29 aka Tu-4, being armed with one 9.000 kg freefall bomb, winter 1948-49. All in all, that was first almost unconscious reaction against nuclear war, not against carriers as such. And all the time USSR was alive, they had believed that each USN carrier always has at least couple of N-bombs. When the Northern Weddings began, this was received as a sign that Soviet SSNs became eventually very proficient in tracking USN SSBNs so Yanks are returning to old good means of nuke the Soviet land targets: carriers (of relatively new Nimitz-class then) and B-1 Lancer bombers, brand-new then. Indeed, there is just one thing harder to do than to put the new thought into admirals' mind - to drew the old one out...
A-7's even got to occasionally escort the Bears. Don't remember much about this except that the pic was taken sometime while I was with VA-86 ('78-'80) with a camera that we checked out from the intel guys on the boat when we were likely to see anything Russia-related. I didn't keep detailed records of pics like HeyJoe and my memory is definitely slipping.