RUSSIA’S PAK DA STEALTH BOMBER IS A BIG, POWERFUL PAPER PLANE
Posted on 02/01/2022 11:30:27 AM PST by RomanSoldier19
ere’s What You Need to Remember: When and if the PAK DA becomes operational, it would put an important arrow in Russia’s quiver—a theoretically very capable stealth bomber.
Most military equipment in Russian arsenals today is legacy Soviet hardware. Russian bombers are no exception. Although some airframes in Russian inventories are quite old, they remain potent thanks to airframe, electronics and radar upgrades, along with improvements in standoff missiles and precision-guided munitions. Here are Russia’s most dangerous bombers.
Tu-95 “Bear”
In 1950, Andrei Tupolev was tasked with designing the Soviet Union’s new long-range heavy bomber, the Tu-95. It was to be able to carry a 24,200-pound payload with a range of nearly 5,000 miles—and thus threaten important targets in the United States.
Tupolev needed to balance speed and performance with range. Jet engines at the time would given a long-range strategic bomber the needed speed, but guzzled fuel, limiting range. Although Tupolev was already a highly successful designer, he tasked a group of German and Austrian aircraft engineers that had been captured after World War II with the design. They designed the most powerful turboprop engine ever made, the venerable KN-12.
Using two sets of contra-rotating propellers, the KN-12 is still used on the Tu-95 today. Although the engines are extremely powerful, the are also incredibly loud. Still, when mission requirements are massive payload rather than stealthiness, the Bear can do the job.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
“Can someone explain how the B-21 is even useful?”
Bombers are still needed to do the job that missiles cannot do. Missiles are easily detected even if they’re not easy to intercept. That gives people on the ground (at the target) precious time to get to shelter or perhaps launch missiles of their own.
Stealthy bombers can be above a target and drop smart munitions on an unsuspecting target.
That said, the B-21 ideally gives the US a chance to neutralize enemy nuclear forces in a surprise attack. If TSHTF and a B-21 means your city/town isn’t vaporized then the B-21 should be considered very useful.
All the BS aside here, that’s what stealthy bombers are ultimately intended to do is to penetrate enemy defenses and to kill an enemy’s nuclear forces if things get to that point.
B-2 cost $2 billion per unit. B-21 estimated cost is $0,6 billion.
Bombers can also be recalled, mission scrubbed. Missiles, not so much.
That’s the experimental Northrop YB-49 “Flying Wing” from the late 1940s. It was tested at Muroc AFB in the Mojave Desert of California. On one of its test flights it crashed, killing the crew, among whom was Captain Glen Edwards. Muroc AFB was renamed Edwards AFB in his honor. I spent my last months in the USAF stationed at Edwards.
yup, and to ride in that bubble??? OH Hell YEAH!
Lots of conspiracy theories about why the YB-49 was canceled.
Beautiful airplane.
For the B-2, the development costs were enormous on each aircraft because they were spread over only about 25 bombers produced. Had Congress ponied up for the 125 or so B-2s planned the unit costs would have been much less.
True.
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