A few days ago while replying to that Asian guy you said stealth is not of much use (your quote below)
For many stealth is everything and is a critical thing, for others it is useless and too expensive.
Look at the Israeli F-35s. Those planes are expensive because they are stealthy. Their performance is limited to keep them stealthy so only weapons that will fit in their internal weapon bays are carried to maintain stealth levels.
The thing is that Israel needs aircraft it can use, they are not for show... they use them often, so the F-35 clearly can't operate safely in Syrian airspace because it is not stealthy enough, but if it was a PAK DA delivering long range cruise missiles from 1,000km away then the level of stealth is reduced.
The F-35 needs to operate in contested airspace to do its job, and while it might cost 120 million an aircraft, a cheaper plane like an 80 million dollar F-16 would need all sorts of support aircraft and enemy defence suppression aircraft and weapons too to operate... so if the F-35 could work on its own in enemy airspace safely it would be worth its high price.
It clearly can't. They are using the same standoff attack from outside Syrian airspace that they were using with the cheaper simpler F-16s which can carry more and further and at a fraction of the price.
That is not to say stealth is useless... stealthy munitions are more difficult to deal with and some stealth on an aircraft makes it harder to engage with radar guided weapons.
But stealth does not make things super invincible...
But you haven't explained why Russian aircraft like the PAK-DA will have what you described as "very good stealth".
Stealth is about shaping and materials and design.... when the MiG-29 was developed stealth wasn't an issue.... if you look close at early models there are gaps in the skin you could put your finger in... they were cheap and easy to make and surface airflow means bumps and lumps actually improve airflow over skin surfaces rather than cause aerodynamic problems... golf balls are dimpled to create turbulence over the surface of the ball so the airflow attaches to the surface and sticks to it so it curves around the ball to reduce the area of turbulence from being the full width of the ball (with a smooth ball) to hugging around and detaching further around the surface creating a smaller drag area increasing the distance the ball will fly for a given force hit.
The level of stealth you make an aircraft depends on where the plane is at in terms of design and production and how much you want to spend to make it stealthy.
An existing design limits what you can do for a given amount of money. The bare standard MiG-29 for example, you could spend a million dollars in changes and make a serious reduction in RCS. You might reduce the RCS by 10 times simply by finding all the reflectors and covering them in RAM or redesigning them so they don't reflect so well. But nothing you can do will be that effective... you can spend another 100 million and reduce the RCS by 2 times, and a billion more to reduce it by another 20%, but by that stage you are reaching the limit of what you can do with an existing design with external weapons.
With the PAK DA you are designing from scratch so you can make the RCS small to start with and include internal weapons and stealthy sensor fairings... then when you add composite materials and stealthy antenna and RAM you can make further reductions, but unless you want to spend trillions you are never going to make the plane invisible and the more stealthy you make it the more expensive it is going to be to maintain that level of stealth... a single screw sticking up 2mm could ruin the RCS and change the RCS of the aircraft from 0.00001m to 0.1m which is enormous...
But the PAK DA is not going to be flying over active enemy air defences... most likely it will be launching a cruise missile attack with missiles that might have enormous ranges... they might be nuclear powered unlimited range 12m long weapons carrying 20 warheads each at hypersonic speeds for all we know a nuclear ramjet would be a scramjet because there would just be heat generation rather than actual combustion...
Meaning, Russian stealth aircraft will face this same issue.
Very true, but there are not that many long wave radars in the west for it to worry about, and by the time the PAK DA gets to its launch position most air defences will already be destroyed...
Longer the range of the air to air missile the more easier it will be for the aircraft being attacked to adopt evasive maneuvers
The only effective evasive manouver an AWACS platform could perform would be to leave the battlespace, which means the missile achieves its goal one way or the other.
That won't bring the cost to the level of the b2.
Stealth is a feature and capability but not a purpose, which means it wont make the design orders of magnitude more expensive like it does in the US.
Pak-Da and B-21 will operate along same pattern BUT would be two engined plane and so be economically convenient to operate (almost in comparidon to huge Tu-160 and B-2) but also able to perform tactical mission mission much more better than Bear and Buffs.
The Bear can carry bombs if needed, but it makes rather more sense to use the PAK DA as its internal weapons bays will be optimised for large conventional loads to be carried aerodynamically efficiently as well as stealthily...
In theatre roles the aircraft will fly at medium to high altitude at an efficient cruise speed, using bombing systems that make them accurate enough so that cheap dumb bombs can be used for most targets... while the odd moving target could be engaged with more sophisticated bombs (KAB-20 maybe... a laser guided 20kg bomb with perhaps 5kgs of explosive to take out any truck sized IED vehicle or similar)...
The same bomb could be carried by UCAVs to reduce costs of course, but for the initial attacks a stealth bomber can get closer before being noticed...
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