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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."
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?
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
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.
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.
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
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, they may have been murderous bastards, but they were our murderous bastards.
Friend of mine served in the USN for about 14 years as a sparks. Much of that on the Onslo, not that that matters. But he said they tried to sink an aircraft carrier back when they were doing atmospheric nuclear tests, and they couldn't sink the bastard. Nowdays I hear nuclear carriers have an extremely high rate water flow across the deck they can start up that can minimise the damage by radiation of anything short of a direct hit by a large yield weapon, at least to the point where the carrier can remain operational to some extent. Yes, a thermonuclear weapon could probably kill it but I'd suggest that before that happened their weapons would be away and their ordinance spent. Bad dust up scenario, but I bet it will be a long time before carriers are actually irrelevant. This is very second-hand, but I'd be interested in hearing any counter or corroborative stories.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I am not so sure. You seem to forget that carrier fleets are as much a result of political posturing as necessity and are a direct outgrowth of US experiences in the WWII in the Pacific, which is to put it diplomatically a classic case of "fighting the last war". Also the US has never been truly tested on the seas against anyone but militarily 3rd-rate, impoverished countries. I seem to recall a saying the submariners are rather fond of, to the effect that in case of a serious modern naval conflict there would be only two classes of ships at seas: submarines and ... "targets"!
Something else to ponder: the Soviet Union never invested in the massive carriers, focusing rather heavily on fast, long-range submarines instead. Presumably they also had "people thinking about fleet deployment for a living", don't you think? Or do you suppose they were all idiots, far beneath the American Super-Men, The Masters of the Universe?