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India's First Stealth Fighter To Fly In 4 Months
xmpcray writes "Less than four months from now, India's first stealth fighter will fly for the first time. It is called the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft, or FGFA, and is being developed in Russia by Sukhoi. Several of the technologies being developed for the stealth fighter have evolved from those used in the Sukhoi 30 MKI. Considered the most maneuverable fighter in the world, the Sukhoi 30 MKI uses thrust vectored engines, which deflect the exhaust from its engines to extreme angles, enabling the jet to pull off violent maneuvers like a flat spin — where the jet literally spins around on its axis."
Although I'd rather everybody were coming to American companies for such technology — rather than to Russia, as the Indians did for this fighter — a strong India is good for US.
Their values are the closest to ours in that neighborhood and it is good to have a counterweight to the ambitious China.
And, hey, maybe, the Indians will share some of the load world-wide, that Americans (and the British) are currently managing almost entirely on our own. Perhaps, people will even begin blaming them (and burn their flag), when they screw up...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
But I wonder is how much longer this will matter. The Lockheed video on their DAS [youtube.com] for the F-35 pretty much asserts that the system makes maneuverability irrelevant. I realize that it's a vendor sales presentation, but at the same time I know off-bore-sight missiles are pretty much a done deal. Stealthiness helps some, but I doubt it would be enough as these systems keep improving. It seems soon the primary factor in air to air combat will be the quality of radar and missiles that are available.
Something Lockheed makes makes India's planes' maneuverability irrelevant? How so? We're going to be fighting each other or something? Is Lockheed going to be selling their stuff to Pakistan?
Since the beginning of the Cold War, people have kept predicting the end of dogfighting ... and they've kept being proven wrong.
More generally, people keep predicting that whichever type of war is being fought at the moment is the future of warfare and all other types are obsolete ... and they keep being proven wrong.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
we now only have a guy like Hugo Chavez who tries to rig elections
And... sends troops across borders, and provides weapons and cash to murderous FARC militants, and jails his political opponents, and provides support to places like Cuba (who jail their own people for trying to leave). Chavez is a lot more than an election-rigger. He's a totalitarian socialist thug who has oil cash to play with.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yeah man, talk bad about Chavez all you want, most of it's deserved, but once again, if you consider how much better the region is compared to some of the other leaders in the past, he's like a little kitten.
I mean, come on, has he destroyed entire villages? Has he tied up his own son in a bag and thrown him in the river as punishment for insubordination? Has he killed nuns? These are the kinds of things you expect from a good latin American dictator. I don't even think there's any evidence of him torturing people. The dictators have gotten soft.
Qxe4
Hahaha! Spoken like a true gringo! Dude, get your head out of your arse for just a second and ask, well, just about ANYONE from just about anywhere in South or Central America who was born before 1980, about your country's wonderful record in that region over say the last 100 years. From arming, funding and training murderous bastards to propping up dictators that "disappeared" thousands of their own people, to rigging elections, to assassinating elected leaders. Oh yeah, Hugo has a wonderful precedent, in fact, almost "template" to follow that was created by your country.
Tthere's only so much hypocrisy the rest of the world can handle. Or is this yet another case of do as I say, not as I do?
Jeez Louise!
The whole thing is rather disconcerting as we seem to be developing better ways to kill just as quickly as all our other tech is advancing but I don't see leaps in our ability to live peacefully or get along keeping up with it all.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
In the paragraph you quoted, there is no mention of India. It says "makes maneuverability irrelevant." India isn't the only ones looking at this sort of capability.
the last 100 years
Oh, silly me. I was referring to the actual present. I keep forgetting that it's OK for the dictatorial head of a murderous socialist regimes to name himself president for life, shut down not-propogandizing-for-him media, "disappear" elected officials that disagree with him, and all of that cool stuff now, because in the past, something else happened.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
About all I can say about that is, you really don't know anything about India.
But since you think you know something about India... you'll never learn anything.
First of all, these drones are drones. There's still a pilot - who isn't in the plane.
Second, you can get MORE piloting skill using drones. AND you can push the aircraft much harder. The reason is obvious. Your ace pilots won't get killed. Morover, even in a hot shooting war, a fighter pilot won't be in an actual dogfight more than a few minutes of a mission (most of the time is taken up getting to the combat zone, finding a target, etc). So, you could have your weaker, less talented pilots handle flying the drone fighters to the battle and have your ace pilots take over when the aircraft is in range of an enemy fighter.
Finally, the cost difference
Imagine a piloted aircraft up against 5 or 10 to one odds (because the country that pays for drones and doesn't have to pay for all those costs I mentioned in the post above can spend that money buying more drones). Every one of those drone aircraft has a pilot at the stick just as good as he is, or better. The drones can pull as many Gs as their airframe can take.
Outcome is obvious.
When was the last time you saw a major naval battle between surface ships, particularly battleships? It doesn't happen anymore because submarines and aircraft carriers made it obsolete. When was the last time you saw two armies face each other across a field in two long lines and start firing at each other? Not since the invention of the rifled barrel made that tactic obsolete. Similarly, in theory better smart missile and radar technology will eventually make dogfighting obsolete.
Trench warfare was once the future of warfare. Standing in a line firing muskets at each other was once the height of battle tactics. Weapons and tactics become obsolete in warfare all the time. Virtually every war is fought differently than the previous ones. So, while people may be wrong about any particular thing becoming the "future of warfare", they're very often right about tactics and weapons becoming obsolete. If you hold on to old and outmoded battle tactics and weapons and prepare for the next war as if it will be fought like the last one, you get run over.
Something Lockheed makes makes India's planes' maneuverability(sic) irrelevant? How so?
I very much doubt that maneouverability will become irrelevant. The last time someone put all their trust in weaponry at the expense of maneouverability it did not go so well for them.
Why does it matter if it is "worse"? I get really tired of this more equivalence people try to pull. "Oh there were bad thugs in the past so that excuses this thug now!" No, it doesn't. NEITHER is excusable. Did the US do some bad shit in central america? You bet your ass. However that doesn't mean that it is a good thing that there are now people doing bad shit there that aren't associated with America. They are still thugs, still assholes.
I mean this would be like saying you can't criticize Bush for his spying on Americans because people like Putin, Kim Jong Il, and so on do it worse. Ummm, just because they do it worse doesn't make it ok.
What amazes me are the people suckered in by his "socialist" stance. The guy is NOT a socialist. He's a totalitarian thug. He just uses socialist propaganda to get power. However because he spews rhetoric people like, they completely overlook what he actually does.
If the F22 didn't appear to have all the hallmarks of a lemon, there would be no problem.
The US had it right in the 50s and 60s by not putting all its eggs in one basket, so if some of the aircraft turn out to suck, at least you have something else to fall back on. The F22 is a monumental gamble, and all we get from Lockheed is talk and more talk.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
Whatever one thinks of Chavez, your post is seriously misleading.
1. "OK for the dictatorial head of a murderous socialist regimes to name himself president for life."
(a) It's a strange dictator who wins by free and fair elections, multiple times.
(b) Who has he had killed?
(c) I know he calls himself a socialist, but he's more of a New Dealer.
(d) In what universe is changing the law so that you can run for election any number of times the same as making yourself president for life? Not everyone thinks term limits are a good idea. The US did not used to have them.
2. "shut down not-propogandizing-for-him media, "disappear" elected officials that disagree with him"
(a) If a major US television station had (i) collaborated in the (unconstitutional) attempted military overthrow of the United States government, and (ii) consistently referred to Obama as "the nigger" on air, do you think that such a station would be allowed to continue to broadcast? I have a bridge for sale if you think so.
(b) What credible reports are there of Chavez having people offed? I haven't seen any.
If you don't like the guy, then fine. There's no need to make shit up.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
Intelligence isn't just about being right. It's also about having the mental flexibility to try new ideas out, not just the party line. Maybe I'm wrong...but I'm at least posing my ideas in a rational framework and seeking feedback. You have no ideas of your own : what you are probably going to respond is the same argument given in 1960 why drones won't work. Thing is, it isn't 1960 any more, and the electronics grow ever more sophisticated while human bodies remain the same.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, they may have been murderous bastards, but they were our murderous bastards.
In air to air combat, killing your opponent before they get anywhere close to you is the goal. Aviation Week wrote years ago about the ratio of losses "at the merge" (i.e. when the two opposing forces actually pass each other and engage at close range). The goal of the F-22 is to end the battle before the merge. Launch radar guided missiles from well outside the opposing force's missile range, clean up the remnants with infrared missiles at closer range, and not need to deal with a messy knife-fight. All the while, your stealth prevents the opponent from getting a good missile shot.
What if enemy also has stealth?
Also, keep in mind that stealth didn't prevent one F-117 from getting shot down by a missile in combat. It can't be 100% stealthy in the end, so there's always a way around.
So far as I know, AA missiles are the end-all-be-all mostly in theory so far; in practice, even in more recent conflicts with fighter jets on both sides, most air fights tend to end in close-range dogfights using cannons mostly (well, unless you have a major generation gap - like a MiG-15 on one side and an F-16 on another).
Still, when all is said and done, F-22 is 5th gen, while Su-30 is "4.5". I've no doubt which one would win a dogfight - missiles, cannons, whatever.
The Su-30MKI was jointly designed by Russia's Sukhoi and India's (HAL). The MKI's airframe is a development of the Russian Su-27 while most of the avionics were developed by India
source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-30MKI#cite_note-13
You overreach.
Technology will continue to be a giant advantage for the next 30 years or so, at least. I question your understanding of military technology portfolios.
World War I was a war of attrition. WWII, also, but to a lesser degree.
IT is not so predominant among the worlds' armies that it dominates. Understanding a technology doesn't mean the ability to solve engineering/production challenges, weaponize it, train troops, and then operate the new capability.
In fact, we are coming to a moment in time where the sophistication of our capabilities may render obsolete various styles of warfare. The "fog of war" is dying a slow death.
Well, the moment people believe it can't happen, it will.
We'd need F22's in Afghanland? Since when do our enemies have jet fighters to begin with? We could use biplanes with modern ASM's with around the same effect as an F22 in Afghanistan.
They said the same thing about parachutes in WWI.
And a tank costs a lot more than a pickup truck. So what? If the F-22 can maintain, say, a 20:1 kill ratio against other aircraft, then the 5:1 cost disparity is more than justified. Not to mention the fact that you can reduce operating costs since you no longer need to maintain such a large fleet, so you long-term costs may be more like 2:1 or even lower.
The battleships were as large as they were merely to store the shells and powder necessary for those guns. When you start talking about railguns, you can deliver the same amount of kinetic energy in a round a fraction of the size, using just a couple gallons of oil. Since you're delivering the KE through velocity rather than mass, you produce considerably less momentum and don't need such a large ship for stability reasons either. Add a couple additional generators and now you have a cruiser with more firepower (in artillery) than one of those old battleships.