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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."
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
Except for being the wrong plane for the job.
It is a surveillance plane, not a bomber and not a fighter.
It takes pictures and goes fast and there is no room for carrying ordnance. It can't even take off with it's fuel tanks full.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
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?
It can take off with full tanks, it just doesn't because it's single engine performance (needed to be considered incase you lose one on takeoff) is poor - they used to fly with full tanks from Kadena regularly, depending on the mission profile.
Also, there is plenty of room for weapons bays in the payload bays aft of the cockpit - that's where the YF-12A had its Aim-47A missiles stowed. Yup, there was an interceptor variant of the A-12/SR-71 tested.
It's still the wrong aircraft for the job, because it's been out of service for nearly two decades, and the jigs and tool sets have been destroyed for nearly twice that long.
...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!
Russia Wants a Hypersonic Bomber
What a coincidence! I happen to be selling one on Craigslist right now.
Hypersonic is Mach 5+.
There are other uses to a hypersonic aircraft than simply dodging missiles. The ability to arrive on target in minutes instead of hours, for example. Plus, even if the bomber isn't technically faster than the missile, missiles have limited fuel capacity and require a certain reaction time before they can be fired, so if you can build a bomber fast enough, by the time the missile is fired it can't reach you before it runs out of fuel. This is even more true if you are traveling at extremely high altitudes. If you have a bomber traveling at Mach 5 (1 mile per second, roughly) and a missile traveling at Mach 6 launched at the bomber when it is 20 miles away (easily possible for a high altitude bomber to hit a target that far away), it will take 100 seconds to hit, in which time the missile must travel 120 miles, which is outside the range of, say, a Patriot missile (which travels at Mach 5). And the higher the speed, the more fuel it takes for the same distance. A bomber can afford that. It's a lot harder for a disposable missile to do the same.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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.
It's almost like the conditions at mach 3 and mach 6 are pretty different or something.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I remember reading that if you where to update the SR71 engines with modern alloys (rememberer that the SR71 is a 1960's era plane) that it was possible for them to reach around the Mach 6 range.. as the limiting factor in the fitted engines was their ability to withstand the heat they produced..
Now that would be something to see!
"Early 1990s studies of inlets of this type indicated that newer technology could allow for inlet speeds with a lower limit of Mach 6.[46]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird
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