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Russia Tests World's Largest Non-Nuclear Bomb
mahesh_gharat writes "Russia has tested the "Father of all bombs," a conventional air-delivered explosive that experts say can only be compared with a nuclear weapon in terms of its destructive power.The device is a fuel-air explosive, commonly known as a vacuum bomb, that spreads a high incendiary vapour cloud over a wide area and then ignites it, creating an ultra-sonic shock wave and searing fireball that destroys everything in its wake."
It's on Russian TV news channel web site:
http://www.1tv.ru/news/n108915
To play, click on a bomb's image in the right upper corner shown after flash loading.
The Buran may have been cosmetically almost identical to the Space Shuttle, but functionally, the two couldn't have been more different.
Look at their feature sets, among other things- the Buran was designed later, had quite a few key design decisions made that increased its design effectiveness immensely, and, sadly, never really flew.
If the Soviets copied it, they did it by taking pictures of the outside and them using their imaginations to fill in what they thought the inside looked like.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Comparing these things to nukes really underestimates the power of a nuke. Consider the wikipedia entry on the Moab.
It's got a yield of 11 tons of TNT. That means the Hiroshima bomb, at approximately 15 kilotons, was about 1300 times stronger. And a Minuteman ICBM, at 1.2 megatons, is 109,000 times stronger. The Tsar Bomba weapon had a yield equal to about 40 Minutemen, or around 4.4 million Moabs.
I know there's additional factors when it comes to amount of destruction inflicted, but still, it's clear that these fuel-air devices are a drop in the ocean compared to a nuke.
The phrase "weapon of mass destruction" annoys me because it equates so many lesser things with nukes, which are, in my opinion, the only WMD, other than perhaps a really vicious plague weapon the likes of which we haven't yet seen.
Seriously though, Russia has for many decades going back to just after WWII had a predilection for one upping the West in terms of military hardware.
I'm not sure they've really one-upped the US here.
This is a fuel-air bomb. It would be physically almost impossible for it to have the raw destructive power of the high explosives in the MOAB. Predictably, there are no actual specifications listed for the bomb in the Bloomberg article (ok, I didn't read it all the way through, but usually those things are at the top), just vague assertions like it being the "most powerful fuel air bomb" and "four times more powerful than the MOAB". That could mean a bunch of different things - it has four times the vacuum power? A four times larger radius pressure wave? (Note that fuel air bombs often have larger but slower - and therefore less destructive - pressure waves.) It doesn't mean that it has four times the explosive power of the MOAB, because that would be pretty ridiculous.
Fuel air bombs look really impressive when they explode but they don't do a hell of a lot of damage. They mostly just char a lot of stuff and clear the area of life. High explosive bombs like the MOAB, by contrast, are just the opposite - they don't look very impressive (no big mushroom cloud) but they do massive amounts of damage. If you're anywhere near a high explosive bomb when it goes off, you may not get burned, but you will end up in about a thousand different pieces, as will everything else around you that isn't buried 100 feet below the ground.
Nuclear bombs sort of combine the worst effects of both high explosive and fuel air bombs. But if you're going for destructive power in a non-nuclear bomb, a fuel air bomb is not what you want to use.
http://www.deagel.com/Land-Attack-Cruise-Missiles/Kh-15_a000869001.aspx
May I suggest you stop using Wikipedia as the source of your "expertise"? Or just shut the fuck up. Whatever works for you.
Fuel Air Devices aren't really that interesting, from a fundamental engineering standpoint. Scaling them up isn't that hard -- you just add more fuel. Eventually you run into delivery problems. Like the Tsar Bomba (the Russkies giant H-bomb), it's more of a question of priorities than design ability. You can scale a hydrogen bomb up pretty much arbitrarily, by adding more tritium; similarly, FADs can be made bigger simply by adding more fuel and then changing the dispersion calculations accordingly (so that you achieve the right fuel/air mix at the right target altitude). The real question is 'why would you bother?' It's probably easier to drop twice as many bombs of half the size, than one really monster bomb, in most combat scenarios.
I don't really doubt that you could make a FAD that's bigger than the MOAB. They have more real-world experience in the area than other nations -- they used FADs extensively in Chechnya -- and have shown a propensity in the past for building "the biggest" simply for the penis-length factor. That doesn't mean that the rest of the world should be rushing out to do the same thing, or really care.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What's interesting is *who* is getting pushed for the elections which will happen soon, not the ordinary and mundane mechanics of parliamentary democracy.
Yes, during WWII it was actually quite common for planes to attack surface ships with iron bombs, or even just strafe them with machine gun fire. That became problematic with the availability of air cover from aircraft carriers and better ship-mounted defensive systems, so it went out of style until cruise missiles were developed and standoff attacks were made possible.
The Russians seem to think so.
In 1999, the Russian Army evacuated the city of Grozny of civilians, leaving (obstensibly) only the dug-in insurgents in the city. Russian forces then cordoned the city and laid waste to it with massive barrages of fuel-air munitions, delivered via TOS-1. The city was totally destroyed.
That was using Fuel-Air Explosives (FAE's), which use aerosolized hydrocarbon-based fuel. Judging from the mass-to-yeild ratio reported for this new bomb (~5.5x that of TNT), it's an aluminum-based thermobaric munition. Thermobarics use aluminum (or less commonly boron) based fuel, distributed and usually detonated by high explosive charge. Compared to fuel-air bombs this results in greater reliability, more energy released per unit mass, and much more energy released per unit volume (since 75% aluminum + 25% composition-B HE is about 2.5x denser than hydrocarbon-based fuels).
For what it's worth: (1) the old-generation american fuel-air explosives used ethylene oxide as their fuel, which increased reliability but at the expense of energy density. (2) the american armed forces have aluminum-based thermobaric munitions in their inventories, too.
And yeah, comparing FAE's and thermobarics to nukes is misleading. Thermobarics can offer up to ~8x the energy density of conventional high explosives, but even small nukes generate thousands times more boom per unit weight. Nukes are the cheap and easy way to destroy a city, but the Russians decided the political price would be too high, and used FAE's instead (which are much cheaper than equivalent-yield high explosives, but nowhere nearly as cheap per unit yield as nukes).
-- TTK
Tu-160 has nothing in common with B-1A. To an amateur they may look similar. Tu-160 is considerably larger than B-1A, twice as fast, carries more payload, and has far better range.
I agree, Tu 160 does not have anything to do with that. Now TU-22M Backfire is a completely different matter. It was designed as an antifleet weapon, built as an antifleet weapon and is still considered by the USA to be the most dangerous antifleet weapon in the Russian arms inventory.
As far as what is feasible to attack with what here is a nice diagram: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/bomber/range.gif
As you can see most of USA is within range even without considering the use of cruise missiles.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Bombers, carrying cruise missiles, do quite well at attacking naval formations. The Russians maintained hundreds of bombers specifically for the purpose. (And the F-14/Phoenix combination was designed expressely to combat them.)
Except for one little problem - the Russians didn't have any small fast aircraft that could strike naval battle groups in the GIUK, let alone deep in the North Atlantic. Though normally I am loath to send someone to Tom Clancy for military information - dig up a copy of Red Storm Rising and read his and Larry Bonds' take on what a WWII Battle of the Atlantic might have looked like in the 1980's. He gets it pretty close.
Bombers are not designed to attack navy ships.
Wrong. Take Tu-22M for instance. Or the Tu-16. Or even the B-52. Some of these aircraft served in hundreds in dedicated anti-shipping regiments.
Battle carrier groups are heavily fortified structures.
Wrong again. Heavily defended? Yes. Fortified? Hell No. Not since world war 2 when the armored battleships went the way of the Dodo. Modern warships dont have anything more than splinter armor.
Even back then, they would use small fast aircrafts to hit our ships, not monsters aircrafts that make inviting targets
Wrong two more times again. One, Small aircraft lack the range, endurance and payload to effectively hunt the carrier battle groups. Two, These "monster" aircraft are not quite the easy target you think they are because they have stand off weapons.
Finally, you are wrong when you contradict the GP that Tomcat/Phoenix was a direct responce to these bombers. The Tomcat was specifically designed for intercepting heavy cruise missile carrying bombers.
And you have the gall for berating the GP and mods about modding without a clue!!!
I would. A aircraft that can cruise at mach 2.35 and dash at 2.8 making it immune to most threats. Carries multiple long range missiles coupled with a powerful radar. Can take off and land from a dirt strip while being maintained by semi-skilled conscript labour and flown by relatively unskilled pilots counting on its excellent autopilot. Plus cheap enough to mass produce. And all that in the sixties! The Foxbat is an outstanding success outside of Tom Clancy novels.
Yes, the jets may of been able to out run the F-15's of the day, but their maintenance requirements were extraordinary
Actually they werent. No more than say the F-14. The soviets just had a different maintanence philosophy.
A high speed run above mach 2 required them to be fully rebuilt. A high speed run above mach 2.8 for more than a few minutes generally resulted in the destruction of the engines.
Routine mach 2 flight did not result in the engine having to be being rebuilt.
That, coupled with the Mig-25's short effective combat radius (~180 miles with full load out), poor maneuverability (typical G loading limited to around 3 depending on fuel and load out), doesn't make it an effective interceptor.
I don't know where you are getting your numbers but MiG-25 with four missiles and some supersonic flight (few minutes in combat) had a range of about 600 miles. Range under full load is a meaningless term in real life. At maximum weapons load a F-16 runs out of fuel by the time it taxies for takeoff. It doesn't mean that F-16 is a ineffective aircraft in real life.
And poor maneuverability is a quite acceptable limitation for a interceptor. These aircraft are not intented for dog fights.
Mig-25's have kills associated with their name, but none have ever intercepted an SR-71 (one task it was designed to handle)
Actually it wasn't designed to intercept the SR-71, but the high altitude fast bombers like the B-58 and B-70 which it was more than capable of doing.
In a head on engagement (ie, F-15), their only defense is their speed
You mean other than their longer ranged missiles or their electronic warfare gear?
which results in massive maintenance or destruction of the engines.
Between destroyed engines and engines-destroyed/airframe-destroyed/pilot-dead it would take the former every time. Wouldn't you?
They weren't. During Soviet times, the twenty or so that were actually deployed were based in Priluki, which is in Ukraine, about 100 km east of Kiev. Not far from Chernobyl, incidentally, and not exactly northern Siberia. After the breakup of the USSR part of those planes were scrapped, the remainder were given to Russia in exchange for gas debts. The Russian Tu-160s are based at Engels-2, which is on the eastern shore of the middle Volga opposite Saratov, south of Kazan' in European Russia, also not exactly northern Siberia.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)