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But why sir, I mean wouldn't all those aerospace designers and engineers still be working for Russia now? Or wouldn't they be in demand in other countries? Just trying to understand, because I think of the parallel post-WW2, where German rocket scientists moved to the US and kick-started the developments in space launch vehicles there.

I have read this before, but why would avionics based on valves be more resilient to jamming?

Jeroen

What an eagle eye you have! Thank you for this info! Curious to know why the same style wasn't used on both sides of the tail.

This might go off topic, if so, Mods may feel free to remove.
From my exposure into Russia and having been friends to few Russians, the Soviet era technicians & scientists fell into dismay immediately after the break up of USSR. What happened after is, due to severe financial crunch in the smaller countries, the various individual component manufacturing companies went bust. A lot of such technicians and even patents were bought over by western countries and companies. Few moved back to mainland Russia, but Russia as an immediate aftermath of the break out of USSR fell into anarchy and sadly into the political and economic washout in the hands of a few so called oligarchs. Well this narrative is a balanced one not from western point of view, but logical Russian point of view. Some friends I have, still work for very very advanced scientific development, specifically in the field of Chemicals and advanced manufacturing such as carbon fibre composites, and with my slight exposure to German manufacturing as well, I can tell you the Russians even now at work are pretty impressive, if not superior to the west. The major problem with the Russians now is the alienation from western participation of various collaborative work places, which even before the 2022 was was not as good as other western countries have. Another major point of their being laggards in recent days, are language barriers, most of my Russsian friends who are incredibly good technicians and scientists speak very bad English or no English at all, again causing them to be at a distance from the fast paced eco system development of the west. Even in Germany if you see, a lot of scientific work is carried out in english, or at least sharing of studies are done in english language, while the Russians are left mostly by themselves. This alienation has exponentially increased after the 2022 war. This narrative is completely my personal view, and has no political influence.

Spot on! I havenstad the pleasure of visiting aircraft (system) manufacturers in both Russia and China. China has the same problem. The vast majority of their engineers don’t speak or read English. They and their Russian colleagues are also deprived of international internet. So they are not exposed, nor are they part of the international scientific/engineering/aviation/pilot community.

Personally I think that is a huge disadvantage that can not compensated for.

Jeroen

Yes, this is a major issue not just in the aviation industry but to the entire scientific community as a whole, maybe other streams too. One example I would not explicitly describe here, but would like to put forward a glimpse was in 2023 I was at Moscow in a very prestigious university with some colleagues and we were working with some variations of Carbon, and I was left extremely surprised, even questioning myself about my knowledge, because I found some top Russian brains unable to practically refer to an international standard (western) on a specific parameter of testing for a carbon product related to oil & gas industry. I had to break it down to them word by word with my colleague from their international wing translating to their colleagues word by word. Imagine such a thing for a testing standard. Obviously their product outshined any other western product of same configuration, but imagine the pain. Same thing with China as rightly pointed out by Jeroen sir. I dont know if this alienation does any good to the westerners or just buys them time seeing the present situation. In any case, there is no doubt about superiority of Soviet technology, and we can only hope the Russians keep pace, well the Chinese seem to have been making significant progress.

And yet China and Russia are far ahead of India in the field of aviation, although English is virtually the official language in India.

Sometimes it's the simple things that gives you a perspective.

And to me, it's the distance between the cockpits on the Foxbat. It's essentially a spacecraft from some cold war era novel, which it almost literally is.

That is a great question and I honestly do not know. I do recall my father {who was one of the foremost electronics experts in the Indian Navy of his generation} explaining to me as a boy that jamming has two components - the cleverness bit at the jammers end and the sheer wattage at both ends. And that Russian electronics {then largely valve oriented} resisted running on large watt power were more immune to certain types of jamming. How I do not know - I'm not an engineer and can't explain any further. Also military grade valve electronics are less vulnerable to the EMP. Sorry I can't explain further.

V. Narayan is on the dot. Valve based systems are almost immune to the powerful Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) which is released when nuclear weapons are detonated. Unless fully protected, IC/transistor based avionics will literally get fried due to over-voltage in the circuits.

Soviet institutions of research, design & manufacturing collapsed after 1991. Top end employees, super skilled employees scattered to make two ends meet. Some got lured by China and very few by USA both of which countries made an active effort to attract Russian scientists. I do not know what their success rate was. The Russian State tried to save what it could from the collapsing eco system and at least in aeronautics consolidated under the United Aircraft Corporation which houses all the old bureaus - MiG, MiL, Sukhoi, Tupolev etc . Similarly, all engines were consolidated under United Engine Corporation and all exports under Rosoboronexport

This has brought back some measure of stability in production and co-ordination. Two plus decades of lost time has put them on the back foot. which is why even today we only see modernized versions of Soviet era aircraft and no new design of consequence in over 33 years has reached squadron service. This could change. I would never ever write off the Russians and their ability as a nation to rise up from the ashes. Also, the tone of Russia towards India has changed in the last 5 to 7years and I believe will continue to get better.

However, we Indians should not view the Russia of today with the rose tinted lens of the USSR of the 1960s to 1980s. We have changed, the world has changed and by God the Russians have changed. Having dealt with, briefly, Rosoboronexport I would any day go for dental surgery without anesthesia.

Yes, that is well understood. I just like to understand why Valve electronics are less susceptible to jamming. I can only take a guess at it. It might have been applicable during the early days of the introduction of modern electronics in planes/ships. Military-grade valves were likely far more robust than electronics. I doubt that is still the case. Not sure if any modern aviation/military kit uses valves?

But then again, I know very little about jamming. :)

You can still find valves in some specialised audio amplifiers. E.g. audio-nerds will tell you nothing compares to valves! And maybe some high-power radio (AM?) applications.

I do know they are still being produced, but in very small quantities and have become expensive. Russia used valves for a long time in all kinds of applications and produced them till a few years ago on a pretty large scale I believe?

Jeroen

I am not qualified to answer this, but let me post what l know. This is what my understanding (IIRC obtained from an old IEEE Spectrum magazine):

Jammers need to overwhelm a signal to suppress it. Valve-based systems consume a lot of energy and while some this is wasted, they do emit very powerful signals. A jammer would therefore need to emit a signal that is more powerful than the original signal. This is pure powerplay and the very trait of solid-state systems is actually the opposite. Use minimal power and optimize signal generation.

Also solid state systems (SSS) are susceptible to signal noise variations and signal alterations which can be created by external interference. Their design is usually very precise and whatever tolerances included are also part of the design - envisaged scenarios.

Valves are designed to operate with more flexibility (means less precision including unanticipated signals) and therefor an unexpected interference that can :eek: a SSS can hardly make any adverse effect in the core function of a valve system. :cool:

This is the best summary of the Russian predicament that I've read anywhere. If I may share a small anecdote, a friend of mine recently moved to Russia to work for a company that specializes in fabrication and automation. He's the first foreigner in the company and the problem seems to be that the Russians with prerequisite skills have left the country. This combined with Russia's appalling demographics with low birth rates combined uniquely with high death rates (video below) means the skills needed to build high-end industries are fast disappearing.

https://youtu.be/CXfNGcMSwzU?si=NZvFEdcq3Q-34Dot

In the 2000s, Russia was uniquely placed to develop its own high-tech economy, dare I say even better placed than other resource-dependent economies like Australia & Canada but unfortunate developments in the last 10 years which has cut off Russia from global talent, cooperation and capitals has stymied the development of such industries, relegating the economy to survive on fossil fuels and weapons manufacturing.

Looks like some Mig-25s are still flying even today!

Algeria got a couple of its MiG-25 Foxbats flying again to help celebrate the November 1 Revolution honoring the 70th anniversary of Algeria's liberation struggle against French colonizers on November 1, 2024.It was thought these had been retired, as they were the last MiG-25s operational anywhere in the world.



Source:
https://x.com/thenewarea51/status/1852550767942471984


Also finally someone made a digital reenactment of Iraqi Air Force Mig-25 pilot Zuhair Dawood's shoot down of a F/A-18C flown by Lt Cdr Scott “Spike” Speicher on the first night of “Desert Storm”, 17 January 1991.

Interestingly he would have shot down 1-2 A-6 Intruders also but was prevented from doing so by ground control because they thought they might be friendly Iraqi Air Force Mig-29s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajxRrY8_hKM