can you imagine how frustrating it is when all the posts you see goes something along this line:
RUSSIA IS BEST. ITS PROVEN EVERYTHING. LOOK AT VIETNAM AND IRAQ, US LOSES. IT WILL FOREVER LOSE AGAINST RUSSIA. THERE WERE 100S OF AIRCRAFT DOWNED IN YUGOSLAVIA. I DONT HAVE THE SERIAL NUMBERS THOUGH. I DONT HAVE A NAVY BUT I KNOW THAT IT CAN BEAT THE US NAVY. RUSSIAN AIRFORCE IS 1/4 OF WHAT IT USED TO BE BUT IT CAN STILL BEAT USAF. SU-37 WAS A PROTOTYPE AIRCRAF THAT HAS NO WEAPONS SYSTEMS BUT IT CAN STILL BEAT THE F-22. PLASMA STEALTH WORKS BETTER THAN REDUCING RCS, EVEN THOUGH YOU NEED HIGH TEMPERATURE, WHICH MAKES IT A TARGET FOR IR OR IIR MISSILES.
ALL THE STATS ABOUT THE F-22, I REFUSE TO BELIEVE, BECAUSE THEY HAVE NEVER BEEN SHOWN IN AIRSHOWS. IF I HAVE NEVER SEEN THE SR-71 PERFORM, I WOULD HAVE NEWVER BELIEVED THE CLAIM THAT IT CAN DRUISE AT MACH 3+, WHICH WAS 45 YEARS AGO.
THE SUKHOIS ARE SO MANUEVERABLE, THAT THEY CAN OUTMANUEVER AAM.i'm sorry to tell you buit the R-72 is CRAP. The French acquired a number of R-73's for testing. Turns out the R-73 is a great flare eater- trajectory based rejection only.easy to spoof with a programmed flare sequence. 20 year old Russian IR tech.really low grade optics on the seeker.
Advertised range of 30km is just ballistic flight path. Actual range is more like 11km. Dead zone around the sun is 15 degrees compared to 5 for AIM-9. Lousy flare/target discrimination, delta-h is only 3000m compared to 5,000m+ for AIM-9. Service life only ONE year after it's removed from storage.
Development seems to have stopped for no funding, no IIR seeker and no digital processing as yet.The RDM2 is still just a paper version, all the exports are standard R-73E's. No great shakes, that's why nobody is ordering them in quantity except India. And even they are just getting 100 here and 100 there until they can get Pythons (rumor says they already have them).
Oh, super-maneuverability alone won't mean squat when an AIM-9X pulling 40-50 G's at higher speeds than your Su-3X is flying, is coming at you. You'll never outmaneuver this baby, so you can spout all the garbage you want about super-maneuverability, cobra maneuver, kulbit, etc. all you want. It's a waste of time, stress on your airframe; AND going slow is the ONLY way you're going to perform these maneuvers! Guess what? Going slow is NOT the place you want to be in a REAL WORLD combat situation. Air shows are TOTALLY different. lol It's funny how these Russian's try to hype up these maneuvers, as if it's the only thing that matters in air-combat. Pretty slick, nice trick though. lol Silly Ruskies. Keep this in mind: Only way to do these is at slow speeds, that's not where you want to be in real combat situations. They're air-show crowd-pleasers, nothing more. But I must admit, I love watching'em myself.
And, don't act as if U.S. aircraft couldn't match such maneuverability. Go check on Google for the F-16 MATV, F-15 ACTIVE, F-18 HARV, X-36 super-maneuverable stealth UAV flown in the mid-90's by NASA (which I believe will be the basis for our new jet fighter stealth UAV), HiMAT UAV flown in the early 1980's, X-31 flown by NASA, etc.
Now, am I discounting 'super-maneuverability' altogether? Certainly not! But if that's your MAIN reason to fly such a jet into REAL combat against the stealth jet fighter such as the F-22 Raptor, then you've got big problems on your hands; especially when you're showing up on the opposing forces (F-22's) radar almost as big as a Boeing 747, and the AIM-9X flying in on you. In BVR, you're dogmeat against the F-22 Raptor. And that's where we want to take out the enemy: BVR.
Just like imagining someone holding a knife coming at you from 300 yards away, but you have a sniper rifle and spot him first; do you want to drop that sniper rifle and take your knife out, then fight him? Of course not. You shoot him before he gets within range of even spotting you. This is war, not a game where you'd want to compete on equal ground