GarryB wrote: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...
Goalposts were moved several times in fact:
1. When the US conceived the F-22 and then they made a huge fuss about supercruising being a crucial characteristic of the 5G
2. When Europeans and essentially anyone producing aircraft with marginal supercruising capability started talking about them having that crucial capability too, distorting the meaning of the term.
3. When US created the F-35 which didn't have that capability despite its monster engine and then it was established as a common truth that supercruising is not relevant for 5G and networking capabilities are king.
Russians on the other hand always were true to the relationship 5G => Supercruising => VCE
Being able to cover more airspace than other aircraft without needing to use AB and greatly shorten your flight radius is a good thing.
Cd increases very strongly reaching speed of sound and then starts getting lower, but it does not start improving before 1.2-1.3 M (it actually depends of sweep angle), so if you don't go clearly beyond that speed you are just spending MUCH more fuel and in fact stressing the airframe for no significant increase in speed.
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...
Bombers have huge amounts of fuel compared to their frontal cross section, plus in the case of Tu-22 and -160 variable sweep wings, that allows them to use AB in a completely different way compared to a tactical fighter, even the MiG-31 uses it very differently despite not being as big as the Tupolevs. Not saying that all those planes would not benefit from supercruising engines...
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.
What you refer is the deployment of the variable ramps to modify the position of the supersonic shocks necessary to slow down the airflow and improve the pressure recovery of the intake.
There are two competing effects influencing the airflow the engine receives in flight:
> Airspeed, the engine receives more air the faster it flies
> Altitude, as increasing altitude reduces extremely the air density.
Which effect is dominant depends on the design point of the engine / intake.
So back to the ramps you mention, they are not deployed to reduce the amount of air but to improve the intake performance. If the design point of the plane is placed at very high altitude and speed, you would need very big intakes due to the rarefied air and the fact that you are increasingly choking the intake's throat the faster you fly... interestingly this is the case of the Su-57, plus it includes variable design (supposedly impossible to combine with stealth requirements until the Russians did it) intended for operation at high Mach numbers. I think the design point of the Su-57 is significantly higher and faster than any other fighter with the exception of the MiG-31, if I have the time I will try to prove this. In fact I think this holds the key to know the performance of izd. 30 and the real concept of operation of the Su-57...
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...
Yes, but it also allows you to detect those threats from far away and reduces substantially the engagement zone of their SAMs against you, as we discussed. If "SAMs" are someday placed in space it will work differently, but not yet
Air dominance is not a game played by planes flying low & slow...
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....
I meant that the Russians could deploy a VCE, even if it is a two streams one, as a successor of the izd. 20, and not only close the gap to the F119, but actually leave it far behind in terms of performance and very specially SFC, I was not referring to the US leapfrogging the F119. In any case the adaptive engines are in a very advanced state of development in US and you can bet all your money they will invest all the resources needed and then some more to get them operational asap, that is the only thing that can save their asses after the terrible fighter force planing they have done in the last decades...