Another Day, Another Bear (Russian Air Patrol)

[Sea Skimmer]

Anyone who claims that the Tu-160 is a "turd" or "less effective than B-1" is a USAF wanker or just ignorant.

As a nuclear strike aircraft the Tu-160 is certainly more effective, especially since the USAF was retired all its nuclear stand off missiles; but the B-1 is certainly a more effective conventional bomber. Once it gets its external targeting pod it will be even better.

[FSTargetDrone]

I find that Bear sexy, the TU-160 is a flying junkpile compared to it.

Is it wrong of me to think the Bear looks cooler than the Typhoon?



<ducks>

[TheMuffinKing]

Regardless of performance all these planes look beautiful! I especially love the Russian planes just for their 1950's pulp sci-fi designs.

[phongn]

No I am not wrong. Out of the 497 Backfire Bombers produced only 162 are operational and that is a paper number and doesnt represent how many can be put in the air.

That's not quite "very few," is it?

[Vympel]

No I am not wrong. Out of the 497 Backfire Bombers produced only 162 are operational and that is a paper number and doesnt represent how many can be put in the air.

Because of course, a Backfire is a Backfire is a Backfire and you couldn't possibly be conflating much older Tu-22Ms and Tu-22M2s with Tu-22M3s, right? The current Backfire fleet is Tu-22M3 only. 268 were manufactured until production stopped in 1993. A significant portion of that fleet was retained by Ukraine when the USSR broke up, and that portion was destroyed by Ukraine over the course of the next decade.

As for the Blackjack bomber there are only 16 of them in existance assuming that the last two were actually completed and not all of them have been continually operational so actual operational numbers on the Blackjack are hard to determine.

Rubbish. They're called START MOUs. As for "assuming" - this is all public record stuff.

[K. A. Pital]

As a nuclear strike aircraft the Tu-160 is certainly more effective, especially since the USAF was retired all its nuclear stand off missiles; but the B-1 is certainly a more effective conventional bomber. Once it gets its external targeting pod it will be even better.

Isn't the B-1 a strategic bomber initially? I'm comparing them as stratobombers where a heavier Mach 2 bomber clearly is superior to a slightly lighter, Mach 1 bomber...

[Sea Skimmer]

Isn't the B-1 a strategic bomber initially?

It was required to have a very large conventional payload from the onset; so no it was not strictly designed as a nuclear strike aircraft. If not for the conventional payload requirements, the plane could have had a lot more internal fuel.

Ironically though, it’s physically impossible to actually hang a full 75,000 pound bomb load on the aircraft. It just doesn’t have enough hard points; without using external bomb racks which where never developed.

I'm comparing them as stratobombers where a heavier Mach 2 bomber clearly is superior to a slightly lighter, Mach 1 bomber...

Mach 2 performance is nice, but the B-1B ditched the mach 2 performance of the B-1A so it would be vastly better at low level operations. This also allowed it to use fixed geometry intakes, significantly reducing the radar cross section.

The assumption was that a medium level-medium speed bomber was just going to be suicidal for penetrating enemy air space, while mach 2 performance was irrelevant when employing long range stand off missiles. Speaking of which, if not for the START treaty, the B-1B would be able to carry no less then 36 x SRAM or 36 x ALCM, more then any Russian aircraft.

[K. A. Pital]

So then, the B-1 just has a slightly different specialization than the Tu-160. In this case it's hard to say that one machine is better than the other, just that they have different roles.