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Russia Wants a Hypersonic Bomber
derekmead writes "Hot on the heels of the U.S. Air Force's most recent failed test of an unmanned hypersonic vehicle, Russia now says it wants to jump into the hypersonic game with a long-range bomber. Will Russia's newest Bear fly at 4,500 miles an hour? The Russian military sure hopes so. 'I think we need to go down the route of hypersonic technology and we are moving in that direction and are not falling behind the Americans,' Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Russian television. 'The question is will we copy the Americans' 40-year experience and create a [Northrop] B-2 analog or will we go down a new, ultramodern technology route, looking to the horizon, and create a machine able to penetrate air defenses and carry out a strike on any aggressor.' The Russians want their plane operational by 2020, which doesn't seem particularly realistic — we are talking about five times the speed of sound here, and Russia is just starting engine development. The U.S., meanwhile, has been investing in its Waverider program since 2004, and the last test of the X-51A scramjet-powered missile failed after just 15 seconds."
another hypersonic bomber
Perhaps it's time to get the SR-71 out of mothballs.
Despite being ancient and retired, it still seems to be the best thing going.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Glad someone else is stepping up to the plate. Development on such equipment could easily lead to civilian hypersonic aircraft, getting rid of 15 hour flights to Australia and such. Also sparks research on better ways of space travel, as the scramjet is closer to being space capable than a traditional jet engine.
sudo make me a sandwich
"doesn't seem particularly realistic"?
Huh? Sun Tzu: Never underestimate your opponent
With the Military Industrial Complex as The Winner. Gotta insure that nothing stops the river of cash flowing into "defense" (on either side.)
XB-70 Valkyrie on our side, and the Soviets had something along those lines as well.
Then surface-to-air missiles showed up, and it became clear no bomber could hope to outrun them, so we went with low-observable and/or terrain-following tech. Remember, it's easier to make a missile capable of X speed (just a motor, a warhead, and fuel for one quick interception) than a bomber flying X speed (many warheads, release mechanism, crew, and fuel to carry all that stuff a thousand miles), so you need a massive technological edge to win.
So... does Russia really think they can make hypersonic bombers, but some enemy that's worth using them on can't make even faster hypersonic SAMs?
You know, because a dictatorial kleptocracy with no political ideology to speak of and which is ranked #53 in per capita GDP needs to defend itself against brave young women in punk bands with these.
>> Wouldn't you rather play a nice game of chess?
No. Let's play thermonuclear war.
>> Fine.
There's been enough time and technological progress for the XB-70 to be successful. Fly-by-wire would fix the stability issue, modern materials would create a lighter airframe, and modern engines would make it more reliable. And since they're Russians, I expect the plane to be able to take off from a dirt road or ice sheet (Firefox).
Given that the ISS is ~360 km from the Earth, and it has a 92 minute orbital period, it seems that bombs could be lifted into space, then launched from there. With sufficient supplies and advanced notice you could get enough stuff in position over the long term and deploy in minutes 4500mph = 2km/s and therefore could be at the surface in 180 seconds (3 minutes) once launched. Then there's the issue of changing orbit, which lets assume takes 1 orbit. So you can stike anywhere in the wold in 95 minutes. Can you fuel, prep and deploy a plane in that time? I think not.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Why do you want a million dollars?
Wouldn't it make more sense to develop hypersonic nuclear armed cruise missiles instead? Why do they want to pack meat in a tin can with wings these days?
Life is not for the lazy.
...that they're still a world power. That means building a lot of expensive, useless weapons, because that's what world powers do. Ah, for the good old days, when you could just round up the slaves and put up a pyramid!
The Russians are quite good at iterative design and have been for decades. They'll built a jet, make improvements, build another, make more improvements, and so on. The end result is they tend to have programs that operate at a fraction of the cost of the US analog. But what they have at 2020 won't be anywhere close to what the US has. It may never be anywhere close to the US as they have always had trouble with collecting the intellectual capital to compete with high paying US Defense contractors. In the past there wasn't enough incentive. Time will as they have had more privatization in the last decade.
Russia Wants a Hypersonic Bomber
What a coincidence! I happen to be selling one on Craigslist right now.
I believe it. Russian Engineering always seems to have its house in order. They have experience with Super Cavitation and perhaps there is some applicable cross over tech. Lets not forget that a rocket plane is feasible. If it was me, I'd remove the hypersonic engine as a dependency from the get go and allow design to progress in that area once other issues are proven by flight testing and there is a solid platform to test and evolve the engine upon. Even if the platform never gets an upgraded engine, an actual plane generates better press than arm waving and exploding engine tests.
Brilliant!
It's Star Wars 2.0 and were going to bankrupt the commies into self destruction once more! They took the bait and will sink billions upon billions trying to do something that /should/ work.
Let's get Clint Eastwood to steal that bad boy.
U.S., meanwhile, has been investing in its Waverider program since 2004, and the last test of the X-51A scramjet-powered missile failed after just 15 seconds
So with the Russians just starting on hypersonic engine design, looks to me like they are only 15 seconds behind the US :)
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I want a million dollars so I can buy the best oats for my pony.
The Russians want their plane operational by 2020, which doesn't seem particularly realistic — we are talking about five times the speed of sound here, and Russia is just starting engine development. The U.S., meanwhile, has been investing in its Waverider program since 2004, and the last test of the X-51A scramjet-powered missile failed after just 15 seconds.
Maybe they'll be funding computer hacking/espionage methods instead of scramjet or hypersonic airplane development- that way, they'll have a hypersonic bomber (plans, at least) soon after we do, at a fraction of the development costs.
Or maybe they'll just think they have the plans.
Of course, that timeline depends on them discovering alien technology in 2019 and not destroying it until 2020.
Why is this post moded down to 0? This is exactly what is wrong with the military industrial complex; has slashdot already been taken over by Pentagon Propaganda Contractors?
Please, don't do it with rounded wings, not sure how much it will cost to build it, but the lawsuit could be in the order of billons of dollars.
Just buy the technology from an unemployed engineer.
I am sure the Russins mothballed all the German rocket scientists after the Apollo progam beat them to the moon.
All they have to do is pull them out of cryogenic suspension and put them to work on hypersonic technology.
vi +
Why do you think they had Kasparov arrested?
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/08/18/0020243/kasparov-arrested-by-russian-police
Early 1970s technology, 0 to Mach 10 in 5 seconds, intercept at 30,000 meters in 15 seconds. There is just no way a modern hypersonic jet could outrun even that 40 year-old tech.
Considering that the Tu-95 is a turboprop and thus not even capable of ordinary supersonic flight, that'd be a pretty neat trick!
you have to think in Russian to fly it
I think this could spur hypersonic development and scramjet technologies. Scramjets could be a viable way to launch payloads into space without total reliance on rockets and thus reduce launch costs. So some cold-waresque competition could help in this area.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
But Putin is bound and determined to get the band back together for Cold War 2.0. Dick.
Manned hypersonic flight is a long ways off.
An 'unstart' on a hypersonic vehicle would decelerate ridiculously fast, potentially crushing the occupants (10's of G's). This is one reason why the US scramjet experiments have faced difficulties. The break even pressure ratio in the combustor is very difficult to achieve. If you aren't at a break even pressure ratio, you can't produce enough thrust to overcome drag; this means the vehicle begins slowing down (fast), making it even harder to achieve a break even combustor pressure ratio, etc. This failure happens in a matter of milliseconds: a sudden loss of thrust while travelling at speeds that generate fantastic amounts of drag, meaning fantastic deceleration follows.
For the Mercury capsules, for example, if the main engines were to suddenly stop at maximum pressure velocity, the entire structure would decelerate at nearly 15G's. If the capsule alone were to be released at that point, the loads would increase to cause the occupant to be unambiguously crushed from deceleration due to getting rid of the momentum of the rest of the rocket. The Mercury rockets included an escape tower that not only got the capsule away from a malfunctioning rocket, but provided thrust to allow the capsule to decelerate at survivable levels.
Unstarts with supersonic test planes and production planes have resulted in some injuries from the sudden loss of thrust at high speed.
When the first plane flew it didn't use an unprecedented amount of energy by commercial transport standards.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
To feed the pony. Damn things are freaking expensive: shoeing, feed, stabling, vet costs, ...
I mean, really.
Bombing is done much better with cruise missiles or ballistic missiles.
For spying there are satellites or drones (if you need to get close quickly).
I'm pretty sure that we *won't* see a hypersonic bomber for quite a while, if ever.
Essentially, all fly-by-wire planes fly you. Not only in Soviet Russia.
And I want a pony. A pink one with a party cannon.
But as a wise, learned man once said, "You can't always get what you want."
So they just better vent their frustration, or they're gonna blow a 50 amp fuse.
Kinetic space based weapons aimed at all the cities would solve this dilemma. No radiation. 100% retaliation. Play nice or else.
I, of course, will hold the controls.
and I want a PONY!
no, wait, a UNICORN!
a well-hung unicorn.
As a rescently minted BA in History I really hate to point out that while dropping and hitting targets at these speeds is impressive. It really doesn't help with the age old problem of "holding the ground taken". Why does it feel like so many of the latest in remote controll drones, million per charge hand held missle lauchers and similar would be of more use to the "EVIL" terrost rathern then a large army attempting to control a upset and radical forgien localation? Historicaly blowing stuff up wasn't even all that big a thing because you, the soilder/general/other military leader, got paid by the amount of booty taken. War historicaly made money for the invantion force if they won (slaves to sale, new land to grown crops on, metal/art/cloth etc) ; today it's unprofitable there seems to be a problem with the cost model here with the tools of death.
Life is like untied shoe laces; it always tripping you up and getting in your way.
Create something new, and let us steal from you, for a change!
A single syllable code name would denote a prop driven aircraft.
Just as America predicted before Sputnik that the USSR would be incapable of going into space before it (and was wrong), it seems that the OP is making the same mistake.
There is just one small problem they haven't worked out yet - slowing down before landing...
War is good for business, and science.......
Maybe this time we won't blow our "peace dividend" on one financial bubble after another that only enriches those engaging in arbitrage, producing nothing.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
His magic underwear will protect us all, didn't you hear?
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Sarah Palin will keep an eye on them
Drill baby drill - on Mars
You need to look up this word, "failed". Neither of those aircraft models were failures; they were superceded.
What makes you think that you could possibly fuck up a country that had just won over Germany, and that had its military and industry going in full gear at that point, and with several million active duty soldiers and officers with fresh combat experience?
(a couple nukes wouldn't have helped)
If you look at where most Axis casualties occurred, ~2/3 of them were on the Eastern Front of the European theater of WW2. Which would seem to imply that people primarily responsible for winning WW2 were actually in the USSR.
Russia can "want" anything, but over the past 20 years they've pissed away all of their scientific and technological prowess. Their space launches fail _several times a year_ these days. Their latest passenger jet (Sukhoi Superjet) has been a failure. Their army is mostly equipped with gear made 20-25 years ago. You can only pay pittance to your scientists and engineers for so long.
The crooks and thieves who run that country don't actually need any science or technology. They just need to be in the close proximity to government spending and/or oil and gas cash flow to saw off their share while nobody is looking.
No, not really. They were softened up nicely in 1941-43, but by the end of 45 were pretty much fully recovered as far as war capacity was concerned. In fact, the USSR was in a better shape by then, because it had all its heavy industry restored and running at full capacity, but this time tucked away safely at Urals, where no German (or American) bomber could have reached. 10 million in casualties sounds pretty bad, and it was, but there were still considerable manpower reserves - we're talking about a country with a population of 170 million (as of 1946).
It also had officer corps that had learned through bitter experience on how to properly run massive defensive and offensive campaigns on land, something that US military didn't have because of the different nature of its conflict with Japan. Due to the geography of Soviet Union, any invasion against it would be focused primarily on land, with naval warfare not playing any considerable part in this equation. Coincidentally, this is also why Russia and USA would have a hard time taking at each other even today - one is a naval empire and the other is a continental one, so they're each strong at something that is precisely the wrong thing to use against their opponent: one has a massive land army, the other an overpowered navy.
I bet they want an economy too.
If it were US alone (or even with UK) versus Germany, then yeah, I'd say the same thing. The only reason why Germany was defeated was because USSR was there to bear the brunt of land warfare in that fight. You can't win the war by strategic bombings alone, and there's no way an amphibious assault in France could have been successful if Germans didn't have to keep most of their units on the other front. And even then the Allies only went for it after the Soviets has been steadily pushing Nazis back for a year (from the Battle of Kursk on). To put it in context, in 1944 (i.e. coinciding with Operation Overlord), only 15% of German casualties for that year were on the Western Front, as opposed to nearly 70% in the Eastern Front.
Simply put, neither US nor UK had a land army big enough to take on the Soviets and win (if you define "win" as "completely occupy"). By the end of the war, USSR was in fact more powerful than Germany was at its beginning, and there was no other USSR to take on it - what Allied country could have actually borne 20 million in casualties to win an offensive war, without the will to fight collapsing? You need a totalitarian state with good brainwashing and propaganda to pull off that kind of thing.
The only way I can see that kind of war won is basically stalling it until you get enough nukes, then going all in with them to wipe out all the enemy's infrastructure. That would have worked against Germany, but at a cost of millions of civilian deaths - so a good thing that didn't happen, either. And I doubt it would have worked against USSR, since the factories were behind the reach of any strategic bombers the Allies could have fielded, nukes or no nukes.
Just because something "needs to be done", doesn't mean that it can magically be done.
From space you do not need a nuclear bomb. A big rock will do more damage.
ok, sticks not so much...
Russia might want one, but I need one.
I prefer Classic Slashdot.