The Soviet Union's Lethal MiG-25 Foxbat: A Business Jet?
nationalinterest.org
nationalinterest.org
We had a russian programmer on staff and he said "Oh, my cousin works for MIG, I'll just ask him.". So he uses his desk phone to call his cousin who designs planes or something at the MIG factory, they have a short conversation in russian, and he gets the info we need.
Later that day, MI5 phones our boss to ask what the hell is going on, having intercepted the call. Apparently it looks really bad to make an international phone call to a secret russian military facility and talk in russian! We tell the MI5 guy on the phone the story, which luckily he believes, so it all turned out OK.
I doubt MI5 would not be able to find anyone to translate it :)
Also, if they really thought you were a spy they wouldn't have called your boss. They're not in the habit of tipping off spies. And I don't think there's anything illegal in the story anyway. You were getting info from the Russians, not the other way around.
Perhaps they were fishing for more info to see if your Russian colleague could be recruited to obtain more info?
I'd imagine that if MI5 saw that a random encyclopedia company could verify this info, they would be quite interested in getting more.
It's really good to go to primary sources if you can, you catch a lot of mistakes that way.
That tube lives on today among HiFi enthusiasts.
https://blog.thetubestore.com/emp-its-np-for-the-6c33c-b-tub...
It seems like a very conscious choice to use only nuvistors and tubes in the whole system, particularly for such a powerful radar. They were much larger and needed much more cooling, which gets harder the faster you're going.
Not the same low power electronics.
If the plane needed to have a high power radio transmitter tubes might have been superior at that time too.
It was still pretty early in the history of the transistor and active radar and radio transmitters are very different than consumer radio receivers.
If you don't have Nebula, check out his main video on the fighter: https://youtu.be/W1L1sU0uI0o
Even so, the Blackbird could crank it up to about Mach 3.4- the Foxbat didn't have a chance to catch it. One could wonder- did the MIG design bureau know this, and suggest the biz jet version as a way to save the project? Either way, it was a success for the Soviet Union if nothing else as a propaganda machine.
The Foxbat doesn't necessarily need to be as quick as its targets. In one way you could imagine the Foxbat as a gigantic first stage for missiles. Soviet missiles were technically capable of outspeeding even the Blackbird, but the challenge was the time and energy it took to get to altitude. High speed, high altitude interceptors could help mitigate those problems.
There are lots of accounts from SR-71 pilots about this. At Mach 3 slight changes in course result in large changes in position very quickly. Mach 3 at SR-71 altitudes is > 30 miles per minute. The pilots could make course changes that would put the plane off the original intercept by miles within seconds and it was very hard for a missile to adjust for that, missiles run out of fuel very quickly and have to burn their energy to change course. And they weren't very smart in the cold war.
The Soviets never managed to intercept an SR-71 even to scare it off by most accounts. The Swedes apparently claimed to have done it but only because they were friendlies and the SR-71 wasn't changing course to evade them.
It is a quite good plane, and surprisingly silent.
>The pilots could make course changes that would put the plane off the original intercept by miles within seconds and it was very hard for a missile to adjust for that, missiles run out of fuel very quickly and have to burn their energy to change course. And they weren't very smart in the cold war.
No, that's not true. By the time the missile is fired, at a distance of, say, 30km, the SR-71 has anywhere between 10 seconds and 2 minutes before being hit.
From the SR-71 flight manual, we can find a turning radius of 105 nautical miles at Mach 3.2, and extrapolate to 140 nm at Mach 3.4. That means a 259km turn radius, and a 1700km turning circumference, meaning that every degree of rotation translates to, at 1180m/s, 4 entire seconds
So, the missile would have a very easy job. At a turn rate of 1 degree every 4 seconds, even in pure pursuit ("not very smart"), the missile would not have to expend much energy at all.
I suspect that getting to within 30km of the SR-71 would not have been easy for a single MIG. The MIGs would have had to accelerate to Mach 3 and also climb to altitude just the same as a surface to air missile aimed at the SR-71. In the time the MIG does that, the SR-71 could accelerate, climb, an|or change direction to evade the MIG.
Having intelligence as to from where and when the SR-71 was coming would probably be crucial. The MIGs could gain speed and altitude and time it to get to the SR-71 just as it arrived, giving it no time to evade. The MIG wasn’t going to loiter for long, and Mach 3 for the MIG was a one time use thing.
Lastly, the predecessor to the SR-71 did carry air to air missiles. That missile would have speed and altitude advantages over the MIG i.e. it would be launched from further away or reach its target first.
> The MIGs would have had to accelerate to Mach 3
Not really. In any realistic interception scenario, the 2.83 Mach safe maximum speed would be sufficient to intercept successfully. Going at Mach 3 or more would be most useful in case of emergency.
> could accelerate, climb, an|or change direction to evade the MIG.
We are assuming the SR-71 is already at maximum altitude and speed. Changing direction is a bad idea because the SR-71 turns very slowly at very high speeds, so it would have to slow down, which is counterproductive.
The MiGs were able to gain altitude around 4x as fast as the SR-71. They could get to the maximum altitude of the SR-71 and close to their maximum speed in around 10 minutes from the ground.
> the predecessor to the SR-71 did carry air to air missiles
The YF-12 never made it to initial service, it's production predecessor, the A-12, did not have armament. No version of the A-12 was ever made that could both do reconnaissance and carry weapons.
> Having intelligence as to from where and when the SR-71 was coming would probably be crucial.
Definitely. But again, you're just describing interceptions in general. Without having vectors and warning at least ten minutes (which means only 600km for the SR-71) in advance, you can't really intercept anything.
Of course, a single MiG-25 wouldn't have had the best of chances. But a pack of MiG-25s would definitely have very good chances. In actuality, SR-71s were indeed intercepted by MiG-25s in international airspace.
Most likely, unless the Soviet air defences didn't manage to detect the SR-71, it would have been shot down, which is presumably why it never overflew the USSR.
The SR-71 was fast enough to avoid surface-to-air missiles, but it was much too slow to avoid the air-to-air missiles carried by a MiG-25.
At the high altitudes and speeds the Blackbird would have to go to evade a MiG-25, it would have no hope at all of evading a missile.
I thought the SR-71 was faster than missiles?
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/forget-stealth%E2%80%...
> In effect, by the time it took a SAM system could lock onto an SR-71 traveling at Mach 3 and launch a missile, the Blackbird was already moving beyond the effective range of the missile.
It wasn't purely faster than the missiles, it was fast enough to get out of range of radar and tracking for ground based missiles and beyond the effective range of the missile before it could reach the jet. Fired from an already moving jet at altitude missiles would have a longer effective range as it would spend less fuel getting to speed and gaining altitude.
The Soviet Union at the time had the R-40 series of air-to-air missiles, that could got Mach 4.5 at very high altitudes if launched by a fast enough, high altitude aircraft, which is much higher than the Mach 3.4 the SR-71 could hope to achieve. The reason it could go that fast is because it didn't have to expend its kinetic energy to climb much, and because it already started up at Mach 3.
Given the context, the Tu-144 seems like a glaring omission here, and perhaps was one more reason why the government wasn't interested in a supersonic passenger MiG.
interesting that USSR kind of missed an opportunity here - it was the compressor that got damaged and thus switch to ramjet intake bypassing the compressor at those speeds, similar to SR-71, would have made that 3.2+ Mach a normal mode for MiG-25 (USSR did have 2.5 Mach ramjet missiles so the technology wouldn't be completely new)
> The Tu-114 used the basic wing, empennage, landing gear, and powerplants of the Tu-95 bomber, mated to a totally new pressurized fuselage of much larger diameter.
In the case of Russian planes, they weren’t ever really competitive on noise, fuel efficiency, range, or reliability. It’s why they (at least until recent events) switched overwhelmingly to Airbus and Boeing for civilian use.
And the article itself https://archive.ph/ekjAq
Leave it to the Russians to de-ice with vodka.
How much alcohol would just evaporate in these scenarios? To me the above sounds unlikely, unless there is something I am missing?
In that Netflix Mars-flight show the most hard to believe to me moment was when supposedly experienced Russian cosmonaut failed to repair water filter and they were going to die because of this - a Russian cosmonaut would have known about "braga"/"moonshine" distillation and would have been able to build a distilling device out of anything like it had been happening across all the USSR back then.
You get a seat.