PAK-DA: News

So stand off strategic weapons will be used so the bomber does not have to penetrate enemy air space supersonically.

One suspects the stand off missiles will be hypersonic scramjet powered cruise missiles and long range subsonic stealthy cruise missiles...

They have had to make a choice about aircraft speed before, there was a Sukhoi design that had a top speed of mach 3 at the time when the US was working with the Mach 3 Valkyrie.

Very simply the design considerations are that speed is useful but adds cost to the design and operational costs to the aircraft.

Making a Mach 3 plane makes it 100 times more expensive... making a mach 3.5 plane makes it 1000 times more expensive to operate etc etc.

The problem is that making it faster means it can cover more ground faster but doesn't make it safer.

Making it faster means it is a high altitude plane only, when sometimes flying lower is actually safer.

The Tu-160 and Tu-22M3 are designed for wing swept forward subsonic cruise to the target area to maximise range and then swept wing high speed flight into the target area to launch missiles or drop bombs respectively and then fast egress and finally subsonic cruise home to what is left.

The Tu-95 is still in service because carrying 3,000km range cruise missiles means the Bear can launch its strategic payload before entering enemy airspace so there is no need for the supersonic dash.

Now that they all can carry 5,000km range cruise missiles the need for supersonic dash is greatly reduced and the future potential for hypersonic cruise missiles of long range also mean a more expensive delivery platform makes even less sense.

A subsonic plane doesn't take longer to get to the target because even the supersonic Blackjacks and Backfires fly that component of their route at subsonic speeds.

Currently the Bears are their most cost effective bombers... a standard subsonic bomber to replace them all further reduces costs without taking away capability.

Any design mixes capabilities and advantages and disadvantages... having a hypersonic design would be awesome in terms of capabilities and advantages, but many of those capabilities and advantages are not relevant to the job at hand and the disadvantages would be significant.

Capabilities would include serious potential for recon missions, and rapid delivery of theatre and strategic payload, and the technology needed for such an aircraft would have applications in a wide variety of military and civilian areas. Advantages include few enemy fighters could cope with a mach 5 plus aircraft and many western SAMs would have greatly reduced engagement ranges because they couldn't catch it from behind beyond certain ranges.

Disadvantages would be enormous costs and of course time... it might not be ready for a decade or more and would require investment and a few breakthroughs in several areas of technology including heat resistant skins and new fuels and of course new engines.
Another disadvantage would be that higher speeds mean less manouver capability so it would fly in much straighter lines than other aircraft and it would be restricted to high altitude operations only... plus even when the technology is mature it will be expensive to operate just in terms of fuel consumption alone. IR signature will also be a problem and the simple fact remains that high speed doesn't make you safe... even satellites are vulnerable so no air breathing aircraft would be safe either.

At the end of the day a nice conservative subsonic flying wing with huge fuel and payload capacity makes rather more sense.

Would be interesting to develop a straight winged flying wing with a tail and enormous internal volume for fuel, weapons, and very large radar antenna arrays... they could make a version for AWACS operations... and inflight refuelling, and Maritime Patrol, and recon, etc etc

relatively cheap to operate it could be widely produced in less stealthy versions to keep costs down.

RTN wrote:

GarryB wrote:
Would be interesting to develop a straight winged flying wing with a tail and enormous internal volume for fuel, weapons, and very large radar antenna arrays... they could make a version for AWACS operations... and inflight refuelling, and Maritime Patrol, and recon, etc etc

Or have a tail gun like the B-52 that can shoot down incoming missiles.

Russia already has a B-52 with a tail gun - it's called the Tu-95.

Actually don't make fun... the twin barrel 23mm cannon offers something other defensive systems don't... the ability to rapidly deploy a Chaff and flare cloud.

Normally chaff and flare launchers create a string of decoys which are not very convincing.

At 3,500rpm the 23mm twin barrel cannon can fire a half second burst that would launch 50 x 23mm shells with flare and Chaff dipoles in a cloud of decoys that could be directed to the rear or to either side of the aircraft... it would take less than a second to create a cloud of radar and IR returns that would look rather more like a real aircraft than any string of decoys.

Equally fitting a single 6 barrel 23mm gatling firing 23mm shells (the same weight as those fired by the ZSU-23-4 because they use the same projectiles) at 12,000 rpm should actually be pretty effective at shooting down incoming missiles.... but I suspect the Morfei IIR short range guided missile would actually more effective and efficient in that role.

Which already their soviet bombers can do.. that is standoff fighting.. they talk about PakDA subsonic as a feature when is a limitation.

Not entering an enemies airspace and defence areas is an advantage, not a limitation.

Using standoff weapons makes sense, when it makes the delivery platform cheaper and easier to produce and keep in service.

it will not allow escape any PAK_DA bomber to escape from any NATO country that happens to detect the plane .

When flying fast does not make you safe firing your weapons from a distance is the best solution.

even if the next generation US bomber flys at mach 10 that still means S-500 will be able to shoot it down... 7km/s targets fly at just under Mach 22... even S-400 can deal with targets flying at up to mach 15 (4.8km/s). Flying faster doesn't make you safer any more.

For stand off fighting they can do well with their soviet bombers. they don't need any other
plane for that.

Both aircraft need replacing and to replace it with a low cost aircraft makes enormous sense... it can be afforable and usable... a flying wing offers long endurance low drag that can be used for a range of other roles including inflight refuelling tanker and maritime patrol aircraft, and even AWACS and JSTARS type options.

If they just focused in Pak_DA from the start and screw Pak-FA , they will have the budget to develop a real
state of the art bomber

Their primary role is deterrence, for which a strong fighter force is rather more use than some unproven hypersonic bomber that is no safer than a subsonic bomber with hypersonic missiles.

By the time the PAK DA is ready for service they should have at least the Zirconium hypersonic cruise missile in service.

BTW it is not the country with the coolest bomber that wins.

Even the US could not afford a hypersonic bomber.

They were going to spend an enormous sum on the Valkyrie but the crash led them to re-evaluate the design and they realised that speed would not make it safe in the 1970s...

Interesting attempt, but if the PAK DA is going to be subsonic and with strategic range it would need much larger wings with rather less sweep.

I would start with a Tu-160 and push the nose back into the main wing area and fix the wings in their forward sweep angle but with a straight angle from the tip of the nose to the wingtip.. ie no kink.

then I would remove the whole tail area on the Blackjack, and without the supersonic flight requirement I would probably replace the engines with very high bypass versions of the NK-32 and remove one or two...

Morfei is like R-77 and R-37 (and R-33 for that matter) in that their standard pylon has a built in hydraulic ram to throw the missile down on launch to make sure it is clear of the aircraft when the engine lights up.

This means that the internal weapon bay doesn't have to be underneath the aircraft... it could conceivably be on the upper surface.

What killed that idea with the PAK FA was the problems with reloading the upper fuselage weapons at standard ground units and airfields.

With a strategic bomber however, you could have preloaded rotary magazines custom designed for the small short range missiles with extra powerful ram arms that really throw the missiles clear of the aircraft.

Fairly large doors would allow loaded rotary launchers to be loaded like preloaded cylinders for revolvers... say two missiles per cylinder and 10 cylinders per rotary launcher... remember morfei is a very small very slim missile with thrust vector control engine so control surfaces will be a minimum.

Just one rotary launcher on the back of the aircraft and one below in addition to the two large existing rotary launchers for cruise missiles would be plenty.

Conversely you could go for rather fewer missiles and make them much smaller but have four of them...

I rather suspect the upgraded electronics of the new models likely takes up rather less internal volume than the older heavier electronics so there should be plenty of scope for fitting new things internally.

Equally they could explore making the new Blackjacks rather faster with upgraded engines perhaps allowing high mach supercruising... it is all very interesting...

Of course most likely of all will be DIRCMs and no AAMs, but why restrict ourselves to the practical... 

Or just have the 9M100s inside the big main bay and use their thrust vectoring to go whichever direction they want.

During testing with their older missiles (R-27 and R-73) they found that the R-27 stalled when fired backwards because when the airflow is zero or negative there is not enough lift generated by the butterfly wings to keep the nose pointed at the target so the missile lost lock and just dived down into the ground. With the R-73 however the TVC allowed the missile to maintain its nose pointed at the target so it was able to be fired backwards without modification... though fitting it backwards on the launch pylon led them to develop an aerodynamic fairing for the tail of the missile to reduce drag.

With Morfei its lock on after launch capability means it wouldn't matter if it stalled being fired backwards as it could accelerate after the stall and then recover from the stall and direct itself back towards the target. With TVC however it would not stall in the first place so it should be able to be fitted to the main weapon bays facing forward or backwards and still work OK.

In fact if fired backwards having a parachute to slow it down would be more efficient than burning the limited amount of onboard rocket fuel to stop the missile... the rocket motor could then light up and the parachute discarded and the missile is directed at its target with more energy than if it just fired up its motor initially.