The uprated SU-27s are every bit as agile as the F-22, probably MORE agile. However, the F-22 has vastly superior avionics and, of course, stealth, which makes it a devastating threat (which may never be realized, unfortunately).
However, the Su-27 variants are every bit as good as the current inventory of Air Force and Navy fighters. Put a good pilot in a Flanker, and you've got one seriously bad news weapon system.
I find it interesting that non-Americans think that there's only one "Americans". Guess what! America is HETEROGENOUS. That means that different people are free to express different viewpoints. I understand that this freedom might be difficult to understand, but it's one we prize greatly.
For our next lesson, I'm going to tell you that Slashdot readers are also not a monolithic ideological block. Bring a pencil.
Huh?! European nations are the ones drafting this treaty, and allowing themselves to be the cat's paw of the FBI. How exactly is moving to Europe going to INCREASE my freedom?
I'm asking seriously. I am TIRED of people not caring about the Government's abrogation of their rights. Is Tibet any better? Maybe I can move there...
Airline-like servicability is the Holy Grail of SSTO. I don't know if it's feasible. If it were, I'd like to see those principles applied to Shuttle first as a technology demonstrator. (like replace that goddamn heat resistant tile system...those things SUCK to refurbish!)
One interesting proposal I've read is to use throw-away rockets, but have the engine and avionics sections (the expensive parts) be designed to be recoverable and reusable (IE sorta like the Shuttle's SRBs, only cost effective).
Again, reusability isn't the driving factor. If I design a rocket that costs $1000, and it costs you $2000 to refurbish your SSTO craft for a mission, I win. Does that make sense?
No, there are two valid schools of thought on the subject. I happen to disagree with the people you've talked to...but that's OK. : ) My primary interest is low cost per thrown mass. That favors large, efficient spacecraft (Energia and the big Ariane boosters). I believe that the same engineering advances that make SSTO possible (and don't get me wrong...it IS possible. It CAN be done. I think it's going to be hella expensive though) will allow us to make cheap, expendable heavy lift boosters, with off-the-shelf technology (like Shuttle main engines, which are about the most efficient rocket ever devised).
If you're interested in this subject, check out Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars". He describes a heavy lift booster that can carry 1.5-2x the payload of the Shuttle (which is currently the USA's heaviest lift vehicle) and cost much less per shot. I didn't want to believe he was right, but he defends his case admirably.
Rockets are very unsexy, and not very interesting to me. I think they require a sort of brute-force unsubtle engineering approach that doesn't pique my interest the way SSTO craft like VentureStar and DC-X do. However, the economics and efficiency of large rockets for heavy lift are tough to beat.
I do believe that there's a niche for a small, three to six-person reusable spacecraft for moving crew (and passengers?) to and from LEO. I hope that the X-Prize brings some more designs into that arena.
Surreptitiously monitoring the traffic on my network is spying. Listening to radio frequencies that I am broadcasting in the clear is not. Monitoring the missile and air defense radars of a potentially hostile foe is a damn good idea, and it's what the military gets paid for.
Apples are not oranges, even if you wish they were.
SSTO is not a solution in and of itself. Whatever magic launch system is developed, a staged rocket WILL be more efficient than an SSTO vehicle, in terms of the ratio of fuel weight to payload weight. See, with SSTO, all the plumbing and tanks and stuff that get thrown away from a staged rocket take up weight that could be used for payload.
So, if you can decrease the weight of your structure by an order of magnitude (possible with smart composites engineering, but OBSCENELY expensive) or make enormous strides in engine efficiency (not easy...rockets are pretty damn efficient) SSTO will be possible. SSTO is supposed to win on the maintenance front...it's supposed to be cheaper to refurbish the spacecraft for its next flight than to build another rocket of equivalent power. This goal is the second key to SSTO, and it is far from being realized.
SSTO is not an end in itself. What we REALLY need is inexpensive access to orbit. Some very forward-thinking individuals argue that SSTO is the way to do this, and in the long run they're probably right. I belive that inexpensive rockets are the better alternative, certainly in the near term.
And I AM a rocket scientist. I've got a bumper sticker to prove it. : )
Yup. I was very disappointed that NASP and VentureStar were basically boondoggles, although I hope that aerospike engine technology continues to develop. There's a concept that makes a hell of a lot of sense. DC-X did amazing things with vertical landing technology, but I don't buy it as a viable SSTO system. And landing on a rocket in Earth's gravity well Flash Gordon style is totally stupid. The atmosphere is REALLY good at slowing things down...use it!
I make no claims whatsoever about alternative propulsion technologies. I'm not sure I'm ready to believe that giant railguns are going to be a viable launch system, but in conjunction with laser launch systems...mebbe. The Earth's gravity well is a BITCH.
Yup. I'm an aerospace engineering student...I'm down wit' da rocket equation, yo. : )
Schlepping all the dead weight of fuel tanks and structure to contain them up to orbit is a huge pain. Staged rockets are (unfortunately) the way to go until we see some radical (like a couple orders of magnitude) increase in engine efficiency. I don't see where that increase is going to come from. Aerospike is great and all, but it's not THAT much better than conventional engine bells.
I wanted so badly for SSTO and air breathing rockets to be viable...then I did the math. Not gonna happen any time soon.
25 minutes? I think you've slipped a decimal there, bud. More like 2.5 minutes. (Twice that if you've got external drop tanks, and thrice that with drop tanks and FAST packs)
The SU-27 is one fully bad-ass aircraft. Its agility is totally unheard of for an aircraft its size. Its fire control systems, however, are outclassed by the American gear. In a dogfight, it'd hand you your head. In a long range engagement, it's meat.
Note that Soviet pilots were not NEARLY so well trained as American pilots in close-range fighter combat towards the end of the Cold War. In terms of airplane vs airplane, though, the Su-27 and its variants are all superb fighters.
You're a nutbag. The sonic boom occurs when the cone-shaped shockwaves coming off the nose and tail of the aircraft cross your eardrums. On most aircraft, you can actually hear two booms...one from the nose, one from the tail, in very quick succession.
The MiG-25 was pretty fast, but it couldn't turn AT ALL. It was a mediocre, and very unreliable, interceptor. The MiG-31, with better avionics and uprated engines, was a much less bad interceptor. A crackhead could splash either one with an F-15 though...the Russian avionics are just totally outclassed.
An Su-27, in a dogfight, now THERE'S a good airplane. Payload like an F-15, turn performance like an F-18, I'll take two.
1: The P-3 Orion is a plane. Its mission is to spy on people, which is what it was doing at the time of the accident. How is this not a real "spy plane" Its a plane that spys isnt it?
Nope. That's a surveillance aircraft. Spy planes are operated by the CIA and piloted by spies. (most U-2 and some SR-71 missions) By definition, a spy does not wear military uniform, and does not travel in vehicles with military insignia. So, no, the P-3 is NOT a spy plane.
Wouldn't this be useful as the first stage of a two-stage system?
Hellz yeah!
Hellz no. The frontal area of a scramjet is much higher than the frontal area of a comparably powered chemical rocket. Wave drag is a bitch, and it's the factor that will continue to kill air-breathing high speed flight for the forseeable future. The engine is also much heavier than the oxidizer that a regular rocket would use. Remember, you still need a conventional rocket to get this thing up to the point where it can light up...
KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. Scramjets are interesting technology, but they're not going to get me to Mars any faster. Heavy lift orbital insertion is 0wn3rzd by chemical rockets.
Have you any idea how complicated it would be to open a DOOR in the bottom of an aircraft moving at Ludicrous Speed (tm) and drop a BOMB out of it? I'll bet you this shiny nickel that the bomb would bounce right off the shock wave into the aircraft.
GPS guidance for munitions is trivial. JDAM and JSOW both use it, and both are, I believe, either in service or very close to service. JDAM is an iron bomb with a GPS guidance package attached to it, and JSOW is essentially a modest-range air launched cruise missile (~150-200 miles).
Why not just use a rocket the whole way? Assuming the same fuel mass for the scramjet and for the rocket (the efficiencies are way way better for rockets, but we'll give the jet the benefit of the doubt) the oxidizer isn't going to weigh more than the separate engine and fuel system the scramjet's going to require.
Air breathing orbital vehicles are not going to happen anytime soon. The efficiencies just aren't there. Chemical rockets work REALLY well.
If a laser system can intercept an ICBM, it can intercept this contraption. Their velocities aren't that different.
Keep in mind that the computational fluid dynamics you need to get a scramjet to actually WORK are, well, rocket science. By that I mean really really REALLY phenomenally complicated. There's a reason this has never been done successfully before...computers aren't big enough yet to model this stuff well.
You raise an excellent point. Fortunately, I think that the US military can deal with China's threat with surgical, conventional strikes...just like Desert Storm. The security problems, particularly near the San Diego naval installations, will be an interesting challenge.
...which would last about nine seconds into a conventional war. You think that a Chinese diesel missile boat is going to be just hanging around in the Pacific without a few 688 class attack subs ready to jumpfuck it at the slightest provocation? Please.
We don't need to bomb the country. Just their military industrial complex. It's really fucking hard to hide a factory, smart guy.
And the F-111 is being taken out of service. I predict strikes by Navy F/A-18's, along with Air Force strikes by B-2's and F-117s. Oh, and a metric asston of Tomahawk cruise missiles.
We could move the 10% of China that lives in the 20th century back 200 years in about twenty minutes. Iraq's ability to make war (remember they were the third most powerful military on Earth at the time) lasted about forty seconds after hostilities commenced.
Ah, so. Too close for Chinese comfort. And the Chinese, always so solicitous of America's comfort. Good thing China didn't attempt to suborn America's democratic process. Good thing China doesn't keep uniformed hostages. Good thing China didn't employ spies to purchase American missile technology. Those Chinese, they sure are nice to us mean ol' Americans.
Good thing that America has international law, and a VERY scary Navy, on their side. Anybody who tells you that might does not make right has never read a history book.
The US military did not at that time operate Boeing 747s. (Currently, I believe that the President's aircraft are the only ones in service, with the possible exception of the experimental airborne laser testbed) If you can't tell the difference between a 747 and an American military aircraft at visual range, you have zero business sitting in an interceptor.
Slashdot Mirror
The uprated SU-27s are every bit as agile as the F-22, probably MORE agile. However, the F-22 has vastly superior avionics and, of course, stealth, which makes it a devastating threat (which may never be realized, unfortunately).
However, the Su-27 variants are every bit as good as the current inventory of Air Force and Navy fighters. Put a good pilot in a Flanker, and you've got one seriously bad news weapon system.
I find it interesting that non-Americans think that there's only one "Americans". Guess what! America is HETEROGENOUS. That means that different people are free to express different viewpoints. I understand that this freedom might be difficult to understand, but it's one we prize greatly.
For our next lesson, I'm going to tell you that Slashdot readers are also not a monolithic ideological block. Bring a pencil.
Huh?! European nations are the ones drafting this treaty, and allowing themselves to be the cat's paw of the FBI. How exactly is moving to Europe going to INCREASE my freedom?
I'm asking seriously. I am TIRED of people not caring about the Government's abrogation of their rights. Is Tibet any better? Maybe I can move there...
Oh, no, that's China now. My bad.
Airline-like servicability is the Holy Grail of SSTO. I don't know if it's feasible. If it were, I'd like to see those principles applied to Shuttle first as a technology demonstrator. (like replace that goddamn heat resistant tile system...those things SUCK to refurbish!)
One interesting proposal I've read is to use throw-away rockets, but have the engine and avionics sections (the expensive parts) be designed to be recoverable and reusable (IE sorta like the Shuttle's SRBs, only cost effective).
Again, reusability isn't the driving factor. If I design a rocket that costs $1000, and it costs you $2000 to refurbish your SSTO craft for a mission, I win. Does that make sense?
Are you morally entitled to the shirt off my back? If not, there IS a superior moral justification for selfishness.
(course, that's going to bring all the Randian objectivists out of the woodwork, and those people are NUTS! : )
No, there are two valid schools of thought on the subject. I happen to disagree with the people you've talked to...but that's OK. : ) My primary interest is low cost per thrown mass. That favors large, efficient spacecraft (Energia and the big Ariane boosters). I believe that the same engineering advances that make SSTO possible (and don't get me wrong...it IS possible. It CAN be done. I think it's going to be hella expensive though) will allow us to make cheap, expendable heavy lift boosters, with off-the-shelf technology (like Shuttle main engines, which are about the most efficient rocket ever devised).
If you're interested in this subject, check out Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars". He describes a heavy lift booster that can carry 1.5-2x the payload of the Shuttle (which is currently the USA's heaviest lift vehicle) and cost much less per shot. I didn't want to believe he was right, but he defends his case admirably.
Rockets are very unsexy, and not very interesting to me. I think they require a sort of brute-force unsubtle engineering approach that doesn't pique my interest the way SSTO craft like VentureStar and DC-X do. However, the economics and efficiency of large rockets for heavy lift are tough to beat.
I do believe that there's a niche for a small, three to six-person reusable spacecraft for moving crew (and passengers?) to and from LEO. I hope that the X-Prize brings some more designs into that arena.
Surreptitiously monitoring the traffic on my network is spying. Listening to radio frequencies that I am broadcasting in the clear is not. Monitoring the missile and air defense radars of a potentially hostile foe is a damn good idea, and it's what the military gets paid for.
Apples are not oranges, even if you wish they were.
SSTO is not a solution in and of itself. Whatever magic launch system is developed, a staged rocket WILL be more efficient than an SSTO vehicle, in terms of the ratio of fuel weight to payload weight. See, with SSTO, all the plumbing and tanks and stuff that get thrown away from a staged rocket take up weight that could be used for payload.
So, if you can decrease the weight of your structure by an order of magnitude (possible with smart composites engineering, but OBSCENELY expensive) or make enormous strides in engine efficiency (not easy...rockets are pretty damn efficient) SSTO will be possible. SSTO is supposed to win on the maintenance front...it's supposed to be cheaper to refurbish the spacecraft for its next flight than to build another rocket of equivalent power. This goal is the second key to SSTO, and it is far from being realized.
SSTO is not an end in itself. What we REALLY need is inexpensive access to orbit. Some very forward-thinking individuals argue that SSTO is the way to do this, and in the long run they're probably right. I belive that inexpensive rockets are the better alternative, certainly in the near term.
And I AM a rocket scientist. I've got a bumper sticker to prove it. : )
Yup. I was very disappointed that NASP and VentureStar were basically boondoggles, although I hope that aerospike engine technology continues to develop. There's a concept that makes a hell of a lot of sense. DC-X did amazing things with vertical landing technology, but I don't buy it as a viable SSTO system. And landing on a rocket in Earth's gravity well Flash Gordon style is totally stupid. The atmosphere is REALLY good at slowing things down...use it!
I make no claims whatsoever about alternative propulsion technologies. I'm not sure I'm ready to believe that giant railguns are going to be a viable launch system, but in conjunction with laser launch systems...mebbe. The Earth's gravity well is a BITCH.
Yup. I'm an aerospace engineering student...I'm down wit' da rocket equation, yo. : )
Schlepping all the dead weight of fuel tanks and structure to contain them up to orbit is a huge pain. Staged rockets are (unfortunately) the way to go until we see some radical (like a couple orders of magnitude) increase in engine efficiency. I don't see where that increase is going to come from. Aerospike is great and all, but it's not THAT much better than conventional engine bells.
I wanted so badly for SSTO and air breathing rockets to be viable...then I did the math. Not gonna happen any time soon.
25 minutes? I think you've slipped a decimal there, bud. More like 2.5 minutes. (Twice that if you've got external drop tanks, and thrice that with drop tanks and FAST packs)
The SU-27 is one fully bad-ass aircraft. Its agility is totally unheard of for an aircraft its size. Its fire control systems, however, are outclassed by the American gear. In a dogfight, it'd hand you your head. In a long range engagement, it's meat.
Note that Soviet pilots were not NEARLY so well trained as American pilots in close-range fighter combat towards the end of the Cold War. In terms of airplane vs airplane, though, the Su-27 and its variants are all superb fighters.
You're a nutbag. The sonic boom occurs when the cone-shaped shockwaves coming off the nose and tail of the aircraft cross your eardrums. On most aircraft, you can actually hear two booms...one from the nose, one from the tail, in very quick succession.
MiG-25:F-15::dump truck:Ferrari
The MiG-25 was pretty fast, but it couldn't turn AT ALL. It was a mediocre, and very unreliable, interceptor. The MiG-31, with better avionics and uprated engines, was a much less bad interceptor. A crackhead could splash either one with an F-15 though...the Russian avionics are just totally outclassed.
An Su-27, in a dogfight, now THERE'S a good airplane. Payload like an F-15, turn performance like an F-18, I'll take two.
1: The P-3 Orion is a plane. Its mission is to spy on people, which is what it was doing at the time of the accident. How is this not a real "spy plane" Its a plane that spys isnt it?
Nope. That's a surveillance aircraft. Spy planes are operated by the CIA and piloted by spies. (most U-2 and some SR-71 missions) By definition, a spy does not wear military uniform, and does not travel in vehicles with military insignia. So, no, the P-3 is NOT a spy plane.
Wouldn't this be useful as the first stage of a two-stage system?
Hellz yeah!
Hellz no. The frontal area of a scramjet is much higher than the frontal area of a comparably powered chemical rocket. Wave drag is a bitch, and it's the factor that will continue to kill air-breathing high speed flight for the forseeable future. The engine is also much heavier than the oxidizer that a regular rocket would use. Remember, you still need a conventional rocket to get this thing up to the point where it can light up...
KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. Scramjets are interesting technology, but they're not going to get me to Mars any faster. Heavy lift orbital insertion is 0wn3rzd by chemical rockets.
Have you any idea how complicated it would be to open a DOOR in the bottom of an aircraft moving at Ludicrous Speed (tm) and drop a BOMB out of it? I'll bet you this shiny nickel that the bomb would bounce right off the shock wave into the aircraft.
GPS guidance for munitions is trivial. JDAM and JSOW both use it, and both are, I believe, either in service or very close to service. JDAM is an iron bomb with a GPS guidance package attached to it, and JSOW is essentially a modest-range air launched cruise missile (~150-200 miles).
Why not just use a rocket the whole way? Assuming the same fuel mass for the scramjet and for the rocket (the efficiencies are way way better for rockets, but we'll give the jet the benefit of the doubt) the oxidizer isn't going to weigh more than the separate engine and fuel system the scramjet's going to require.
Air breathing orbital vehicles are not going to happen anytime soon. The efficiencies just aren't there. Chemical rockets work REALLY well.
If a laser system can intercept an ICBM, it can intercept this contraption. Their velocities aren't that different.
Keep in mind that the computational fluid dynamics you need to get a scramjet to actually WORK are, well, rocket science. By that I mean really really REALLY phenomenally complicated. There's a reason this has never been done successfully before...computers aren't big enough yet to model this stuff well.
You raise an excellent point. Fortunately, I think that the US military can deal with China's threat with surgical, conventional strikes...just like Desert Storm. The security problems, particularly near the San Diego naval installations, will be an interesting challenge.
...which would last about nine seconds into a conventional war. You think that a Chinese diesel missile boat is going to be just hanging around in the Pacific without a few 688 class attack subs ready to jumpfuck it at the slightest provocation? Please.
We don't need to bomb the country. Just their military industrial complex. It's really fucking hard to hide a factory, smart guy.
And the F-111 is being taken out of service. I predict strikes by Navy F/A-18's, along with Air Force strikes by B-2's and F-117s. Oh, and a metric asston of Tomahawk cruise missiles.
We could move the 10% of China that lives in the 20th century back 200 years in about twenty minutes. Iraq's ability to make war (remember they were the third most powerful military on Earth at the time) lasted about forty seconds after hostilities commenced.
P-3 Orions can not turn sharply. Simple aerodynamics. It's not possible. That's like saying that a Greyhound Bus or an oil tanker can turn sharply.
Ah, so. Too close for Chinese comfort. And the Chinese, always so solicitous of America's comfort. Good thing China didn't attempt to suborn America's democratic process. Good thing China doesn't keep uniformed hostages. Good thing China didn't employ spies to purchase American missile technology. Those Chinese, they sure are nice to us mean ol' Americans.
uhh...no.
Good thing that America has international law, and a VERY scary Navy, on their side. Anybody who tells you that might does not make right has never read a history book.
The US military did not at that time operate Boeing 747s. (Currently, I believe that the President's aircraft are the only ones in service, with the possible exception of the experimental airborne laser testbed) If you can't tell the difference between a 747 and an American military aircraft at visual range, you have zero business sitting in an interceptor.