henry (07/01/82)
People who criticize the Foxbat's electronics as primitive obviously saw only the mass-media reports on it. After the first wave of contempt, the people studying it were much impressed with what they saw. True, the stuff was much inferior to what the West can do, but it was an impressive use of the available technology. In particular, it is far cheaper to build than it would have been if it had been designed in the West, even to equivalent specifications. Remember, the total number of Mach 3.0 (or even Mach 2.8) combat aircraft in service in the West is *zero* -- and the Foxbat prototypes started flying nearly twenty years ago. That last point is worth emphasizing: the Western fighters that were being tested and built when the Foxbat started flying were among the first combat aircraft to use transistors instead of tubes. At the time, using tubes in the Foxbat was the only sensible approach -- Russia was of course behind in semiconductor technology, while tubes were cheap and available in quantity. It's also noteworthy that the Foxbat's electronics are (by design) much easier to maintain than those of its Western contemporaries, or even those of more recent Western aircraft. And while that radar may be crude, its power output is so high that it's virtually unjammable. The Foxbat obviously could do with more modern electronics, and there is considerable speculation that just this is in the works. Bear in mind that the Russians seldom hold up production of something that works just because something better is on the way (a habit that tends to plague Western defence purchasing). It would not surprise me if the computers on a hypothetical Russian shuttle were crude, barbarous, and primitive by Western standards, but worked well enough to do the job, and were carefully used so as to minimize the impact of their shortcomings.