But lmfs I think said something counts as supercruise only if its 1.8m+ like the F-22. Su-57 allegedly will only be able to achieve 1.6m with izd.30, and currently its below that.
That is called moving the goalposts... when you are selling brand X toothpaste and you say yours makes your teeth 5 times whiter than other brands and then find out that brand Y toothpaste actually makes your teeth rather white too, you have to modify your claim to still be the best... better than any other brand on the market perhaps even though their product is a quarter the price of yours and doesn't use bleach like yours does and makes the average persons teeth almost as white as yours without damaging their stomach linings...
I wonder what are the drawbacks of supercruising and if it's worth it.
The drawback is probably requiring new generation engines which are not cheap to develop or likely to buy.
Being able to effectively move much faster than other aircraft without halving your flight range and flight time is a very beneficial thing.
If it destroys the engine 2 or 3 times faster than normal cruise speed it's useless. Same for fuel consumption.
The primary advantage of supercruise is being able to fly at speeds you could only otherwise fly at by using AB and therefore essentially burning two to three times more fuel to achieve.
In full AB you are burning a lot more fuel and only going moderately faster, so it should not increase wear and tear on the engine... just burn less fuel.
It for sure destroy RAM coating faster on f-22 faster than normal cruising. It's not cheap to repaint it after every flight.
And on the F-35 too.
There are and have been other planes capable of flying faster than 1 M on mil thrust, but what would be the use of doing that, unless the increase in speed is substantial?
Being able to cover more airspace than other aircraft without needing to use AB and greatly shorten your flight radius is a good thing.
For a bomber it is amazing because the only aircraft that can catch you need to use AB which automatically halves their flight radius which means the gaps between airfields gets much bigger...
If new engines for the Tu-160M2 had 35 ton thrust in full AB and a dry thrust of 22-24 tons thrust the Tu-160M2 should be able to supercruise... which would effectively mean F-35s would be unable to intercept them most of the time...
> The intakes of the Su-57 are notably bigger than those of the F-22, and they are adjustable, needed for flight speeds between 2 < M < 3. Pressure recovery of fixed intakes is not really good approaching 2 M. That should mean more air should be available to the engine at high altitude and speed.
At high speed air intakes are closed and narrowed because the air coming in is supersonic and would choke a turbofan or turbojet engine... The only time it would need big wide open intakes is for takeoff for volume of air at low speeds... the intake suction relief doors on the Tu-22M3 and Tu-160 are for the same purpose... to increase airflow to the engines when the aircraft is not moving fast acting like a big air scoop.
Flying high and fast is equivalent to having high ground on a land battle, it allows you to hit the enemy while the enemy cannot hit back at you. It is the kind of unfair advantage everyone wants to count on when battling...
It gives your missiles more range, but you can't hide from anything... S-400s and S-500s will be looking for F-22s on top of the hill...
Im sure they have some super classified superalloy that can withstand supercruise without shortening engine life much.
Funny you mention that because the Russians revealed a new material that has pretty impressive heat resistance performance...
The issue for US is that when Russia fields the second stage engine, they could leapfrog the F-22 in terms of propulsion.
You mean they might have developed a hypersonic scramjet engine... man that would just blow the Russians away... I hope they can steal the technology and make something useful with it....
Also why would engine life be shortened during supercruise compared to afterburner?
The tail structure life of the F-35 is dramatically reduced and its stealth is compromised if the AB is run for 90 seconds or more...
Russia truly had achieved parity in engine construction in the late 80s, but the collapse of the USSR has kept it 20 years behind, and I honestly am skeptical if it will bridge the gap without acquiring western tech like what
they did with the nene. Modern material science is too complex to be quickly mastered.
They have mastered modern material science... they just need the compositions... if the Russians were bloody idiots saved from stupidity by the Nene and Derwent engines the British sold them then why did they improve them so quickly... why were they flying faster better aircraft than the British so quickly?
By the time the British delivered the engines the Soviets already knew the composition of the metals being used... the men they sent to the factory had special shoes and they stood in the metal shavings at the machines where the engines were built so they knew the metal alloys before they were shipped.
The F135 truly has no analogues and is far more advanced than even the izd.30, being able to achieve a whopping 195kN with AB and run at the highest temperatures of any engine in the world.
NK-32 operates at 245 kN... Even the engine planned for the Yak-141 had version in the 20 ton thrust class...
I guess the Americans became so advanced in engine construction and material science that other aspects of aircraft design regressed. even more perplexing is why the americans havent built a fighter with 2 F135s yet.
Better question is why the B-1B has four such shit engines... they could have put two F-135s and made their own Backfire...
Thankfully there are ways to maximise aircraft performance with weaker engines, and the soviets did that throughout the cold war and WW2,
Most of the WWII fighters had fairly weak engines... so they made them smaller and lighter and put big guns in them.
Besides DIRCM, jamming and pulling kulbits if a missile tails you are there any other countermeasures this aircraft has like chaffs, flares or mini missile APS?
We hear titbits about a short range self defence missile to be used across the services... ie as a CIWS missile for the navy in their Redut launchers... four per (9M96) missile tube. It is used on the S-350 ground based TEL as a short range self defence missile for the AF and presumably for the Army too, but it is reported to be used as a self defence missile for both fighters and bombers and helicopters. It is akin to the R-60 which was a small light self defence weapon rather than a dogfight weapon like an R-3, R-13, or R-73.
The missile is described as an IIR guided missile with lock on after launch capacity so it can be launched vertically from Redut or S-350 and then fly by intertial guidance towards where its target is supposed to be and get a lock on target in flight. For aircraft it means it can be carried in an internal weapon bay and fired in the direction of a target without needing a lock before being launched.
Afterburner gives you the same advantage but only when really needed and it doesn't really change the outcome of the battle.
If your aircraft can supercruise even if it has to use AB to get supersonic then you can continue to fly around at supersonic speeds for much longer without needing to use AB.
Planes that can't supercruise need AB for a long time to accelerate to supersonic speeds and need to continue burning fuel rapidly to maintain that speed.
For lower drag aircraft being able to maintain supersonic flight without AB means moving faster but without burning fuel at a high rate.
IMO it's like having a car of 500hp in a city full of red lights. At the end the small car with 80hp does the same job at the same speed but the 500hp car cost 10 times more...
Not really... in combat there are no speed limits so get rid of the city and the traffic lights. Think of it as a giant flat salt plain... an the planes we are talking about they all have the same top speed but have different ways of achieving that top speed... the better analogy is that a normal fighter has a liquid fuelled rocket attached to the car so for very short periods it can go very very fast, but the liquid fuelled rocket takes its liquid fuel from the fuel tank so when you use it you dramatically reduce the driving range of the car so you only use it when you need a burst of speed. If you use it all the time it takes you 20 minutes to get to full speed and by the time you get to that speed you are burning fuel so fast you can only drive for another 40 minutes and then you run out of fuel. If you don't use the AB and just use engine power you can drive for 5-6 hours, but move much slower so you really end up going 300km with the rocket burning... you cover it in 40 minutes driving time. With no rocket boost you can drive 600km.
So essentially with the rocket motor going you can drive at 300km/h, but only for one hour, but without the rocket booster you can drive twice as far but it takes longer to do... say with a normal engine you can drive at 100km/h but you can drive for 6 hours.
The advantage of supercuise is that you can go faster than other normal cars but you are not burning fuel at the rate that rockets burn fuel... so it is like a turbo supercharger that increases the power of your engine so you don't need to use the rocket... you might get 200km/h out of your standard engine without using the rocket. The increased power means you do burn more fuel... you don't get AB speed with dry power fuel efficiency because you are essentially adding the extra power you normally get from AB but you are getting that extra power in dry thrust instead of by an after burner which is just pissing fuel into the exhaust to get extra thrust.
The difference is that in one hour you can cover 200km and because you are using your fuel more efficiently than with AB then you can drive 500-550km still...
The practical difference is that the only other cars that can keep up with you are using their rockets so their driving range is much shorter than yours... it takes 20 minutes for them to accelerate from normal speed to supersonic speed so you get plenty of warning they are coming and if you decide not to fight you can turn and leave and they wont have the range to catch you... for a bomber I suspect you can see the advantages too...
Supercruising means reaching high speeds above the mach 1 without afterburner which is more complicated than staying at mach 0.8. That means the engine is more stressed and pushed to its limits.
Engines at mach 1-1.6 that are designed to go at Mach 2.4+ will not be stressed.
Driving your car at 170 when its max speed is 180 is gonna destroy it faster than driving it at 120 and sometimes push at 170.
These engines are designed to operate at these speeds.
1.) Chaff and flares would be apart of the DIRCM suite, that's why it's called Direct Infrared Counter-Measures.
D is Directed... ie an infrared counter measure that is directed... literally like a laser beam in fact.
It needs to detect and orient towards incoming optically guided weapons so you would link flares and chaff to it I suppose.
Do you have a source I cant find the morphei missile APS anywhere? We have too many Su-57 threads and when I try to search for it there are like a bunch of users talking about it and I never heard of a morphei missile on a su-57
Morfei is the light 9M100 missile in the S-350 system and is also part of the Redut Naval SAM system too.
o the Russian level of aircraft engines is at the US level.
There are a lot of gaps in the range of engines the Russians make and quite a few foreign engines are currently used from the US and France to fill those gaps.
They have invested in new technology and new generations of engines to help solve the problems and over the next couple of years new engines will get into service including families of engines that can be used for a range of different weight classes of aircraft and vehicles.
People talk about this or that country being ahead, but it is a broad field if technologies and capabilities... the Russians are on the verge of introducing a whole new range of new engines so they are stepping up. I don't know that they are getting ahead of anyone completely but in some areas they are very competitive...
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