Sukhoi Su-25

I'm pretty sure a good number of "corner cut ERA plates" are Ukrainian tbh. It's the same country that was selling Russia a million or two artillery shells a year from its own stockpiles between 2006 and 2014. Viktor Bout probably sold a fat chunk to Afghanistan or Libya too, and used the proceeds to buy a dacha in Siberia. Both are ultimately corrupt countries, but it's important to remember that only Russia had the guys with actually modern equipment at the start of 2014, and Ukraine had cops with Soviet surplus vests instead of its own army (because the army defected).

Russia is also the only one to mass produce and manufacture modern tactical airlifters (modernized IL-76s, Su-80s, etc.) while Ukraine dawdled with An-70 for 20 years. Russia produced 250 T-90Ms for India between 2000 and 2007, while Ukraine took the same amount of time to manufacture a quarter as many T-84 Oplots for twice the unit price. There is little reason to believe that Ukraine's situation, on the whole, is substantially better than Russia's in the materiel realm, and a lot of reason to believe it is worse.

What Ukraine's advantages are is that it has accurate intelligence and does not need to lean on its own materiel weaknesses through reconnaissance or awful radios. Russia might be issuing Baofengs (a very good SDR that can be made to do essentially anything you want) and Soviet SINGCARS but that's not much different than America and its various busted-ass JTRS-GMRs and SRWs that barely work and actual SINGCARS lol. That's just saying that both Russia and NATO have neglected radio communications for decades, and when they try to address it they pretty much fail, which is no huge surprise. How many modern radios does Ukraine have per dude? Oh wait they rely on a commercial satellite receiver because they literally cannot talk to each other.

America is also giving it orbital and aerial reconnaissance for free. We know what happens when a NATO country provides aerial reconnaissance: materiel and ground reconnaissance limitations disappear. Chad defeated Libya and Iraq defeated Iran, despite both of those being equipped with technologically and mechanically inferior equipment than their opponents, because neither Iran nor Libya could muster sufficiently capable ground reconnaissance to counteract the effect of Chadian or Iraqi movements. There's a fairly famous example of the Iraqi Army road marching three tank divisions with tank transporters, simultaneously, along the Basra highway to bisect a Iranian field army and shatter it with an armored assault. This was only possible because the Iranians had no clue what was going on while the Iraqis knew exactly where the Iranians were and where they were going.

In some cases the Relikt kits were issued without their explosive liners and they were filled with sand instead, which was done because Russia tried to pull an Operation Danube and didn't tell its troops to retrieve wartime stocks. They didn't go in expecting a fight, they expected another Crimea with massive local support and general overthrow of the government by the civil population, however it's not a big deal. It would not change the statistical losses of tanks that much if they had been issued ERA. Maybe a fraction of a percent I suppose, because ultimately, body armor (and vehicle armor barring artillery shellfire for SPHs and machine gun or light cannon protection for tanks) isn't that important in a major war.

The primary benefit of armor beyond "splinter and cannons" is moral and that can be substituted with massive amounts of firepower. How do you think Ukraine is going to make use of those surplus Leopard 1s, a tank barely armored against 20mm cannons on the front? How do you think the Bundeswehr would have?

The Ratnik equipped paratroopers of the Guards Airborne brigade who went into Kyiv probably died at near identical rates as the steel helmet and 6B3 wearing police officers in Mariupol in 2014 when facing rocket launchers and T-64BM.

Russia would plainly be better off giving everyone SSh-68s and load bearing vests, at least to stop light fragments, but if hard hat helmets and paintball vests are all they have, it'll do. It won't make a difference if they had 30 lbs of body armor versus three to a 155mm splinter, because that will cleave through a 12.7mm protected APC, much less a .30 cal protected body armor plate. They'd only die tired and with early onset spinal arthritis.

After all, the primary purpose of the helmet isn't to stop you from being amputated by a field gun fragment, it's to keep your head from getting beaned by a pebble or small rock tossed into the air by a shell burst 30 meters away. A plastic helmet will do this as well as steel or Kevlar. That was the whole lesson of helmet design in WW1, and it remains true today. In Ukraine especially as it is a trench war resembling WW2, rather than a colonial war/insurrection resembling St. Louis or Iraq.

Perhaps if this were Syria or Georgia with the only threat being small arms, snipers, and the occasional land mine once every other week, body armor would make a meaningful difference. It isn't. This is a war that chews up bodies and spits out corpses. A tiny little SAPI plate won't change that and might actually, counter-intuitively, make it worse. Guys with 30 lbs of body armor on top of their 60 lbs fighting loads probably can't dig trenches as fast as guys with just the fighting load.

There is little reason to believe a power line strike shaving off a vertical stabilizer is significant when the same thing happens with the Warthog. There is little reason to believe an A-10 missing both stabilizers would be any more controllable than a Su-25 missing the entire stabilizer. There is a lot of reasons to believe an A-10 missing part of a stabilizer and an engine nacelle is less controllable than a Su-25 missing part of its stabilizer and an engine nacelle, though.

There's also very little reason to draw any significant conclusions regarding a pilot hitting a power line with a Su-25 than an American hitting a power line at Stockon State Park except that the pilot fucked up for some reason. I live around there and I've seen A-10s fly out on the freeway. They used to use the freeways to practice low altitude flights, and the guy who hit the power line was probably blind or stupid. Those are the two main reasons pilot hit power lines: their eyes are failing them or they're doing stunts.

This guy in the Su-25 hit a power line. He shaved off his vertical stabilizer? Why? Who knows. Give him an eye test when he comes back and make sure he isn't going blind. Look at the flight plan, ask if the planners told him to fly at that altitude. Ask him what he was looking at before he crashed. Was the cockpit panel beeping? Was he checking a GPS or a map? Was he distracted doing some other task? Who can say. Who really cares. It's not a big deal lol.
 
Last edited:
Kat Tsun said:
The fact that it is in a museum for something as banal as surviving an Igla, something four of its cousins didn't, is rather telling...

How many Su-25 gate guardians proudly display their battle damage from Blowpipes or Redeyes? None, because it's not something worth talking about. Eating a man portable missile is a casual Tuesday for a Rook driver.

Why does an A-10 deserve a museum for a damaged nacelle? How many A-10s display their battle damage from machine guns or AKMs? Probably none. Is that why this one is in a museum? Because it's so rare for them to come back from missile hits? Perhaps because their widely dispersed and highly offset from centerline nacelles combined with the close proximity of the vertical stabilizer makes corrective actions difficult? Because it was a highly challenging flight for the pilot to maintain control with an engine destroyed and being lucky enough to retain his starboard stabilizer to give sufficient corrective yaw to maintain control? Possibly.

What the pilot did in an aircraft which is inferior to protection against man portable missiles and engine-out situations is impressive, but it doesn't have to be, and it arguably shouldn't be. A-10 is just bad to fly if you lose an engine and worse if you lose an engine and a stabilizer. Su-25 can fly with two damaged nacelles because its engines are buried in the fuselage and protected by a titanium armor bulkhead. If one engine dies, the other is fine, and the stabilizer is above them and unlikely to be hurt.

That's the implication at least. Whether it's intended or not is an open question, but at least we have more evidence of Su-25s surviving Iglas and whatnot, and actual video evidence to back it up, whereas A-10 has several magazine articles and a museum display.
Click to expand...
YouTube wasn't around in 1991, neither were Go-Pros.
 
Polaroids did.

Still, no one has yet put a Su-25 hit by a Stinger in a museum. Curious. Almost as curious as no one putting a bullet ridden A-10 in a museum. The last time I saw a destroyed US aircraft in a museum was the F-117A in Belgrade. It's almost as if people put destroyed aircraft in museums because they are notable events or something in of themselves.

Su-25s come back from taking Redeye/Blowpipe/Stinger/Igla/Strela so often we have multiple images from multiple wars of missile hits on the things. They're clearly more survivable when actually hit, even if they perhaps get hit more often. It's almost as banal as A-10 eating 23mm and 14.5mm shells and laughing them off with their Swiss cheese wings with half the skin missing. Not particularly noteworthy and not worth detailing. There's plenty of pictures of that if you want to see it, almost as many as Su-25s that have been hit by Stingers...

The implication of putting a MANPADS damaged nacelle of an A-10 in a museum is that A-10s rarely come back from missile hits.

What's the more common air defense threat on a modern battlefield? MANPADS or machine guns? Oh...
 
Kat Tsun said:
The implication of putting a MANPADS damaged nacelle of an A-10 in a museum is that A-10s rarely come back from missile hits.
Click to expand...

I doubt very much if that is the implication for displaying a damaged nacelle from an A-10 in a museum - have you already asked the curators of museum why they have done so? If not, send them an email.

Still, no one has yet put a Su-25 hit by a Stinger in a museum. Curious.
Click to expand...

If it's true, possibly curious. Again, you may need to ask someone in the Russian museum sphere why they haven't displayed a combat damaged aircraft in any of their museums.
 
Levsha said:
Kat Tsun said:
The implication of putting a MANPADS damaged nacelle of an A-10 in a museum is that A-10s rarely come back from missile hits.
Click to expand...

I doubt very much if that is the implication for displaying a damaged nacelle from an A-10 in a museum
Click to expand...

It is the actual implication. Implications are unstated, sometimes unintentional, and should be clarified when the latter is the case.

Museums preserve notable artifacts of significance. Why is it significant that an A-10 made it back to base after a Strela/Igla hit? Because the other four hit by Strela/Igla didn't I guess. Were it an everyday occurrence, it would hardly be museum worthy, after all.

Whether that's intended or not is an open question. Because museums often have unintentional implications behind them. Perhaps the explicit reason is one of the museum owners flew the airplane? Who knows. It's not very important, because I'm speaking to the implication of putting a damaged airplane in a museum. Evidently, A-10 crashes when hit in the nacelle by Iglas. Perhaps it has an issue with asymmetric thrust when one of the engines dies? I guess you'd have to ask the dead pilots why they crashed in Desert Storm.

All we know is that over half the A-10s shot down between 1991 and 2003 were shot down by MANPADS class missiles with warheads between 3-5 kg in mass, it's apparently such a notable event that an A-10 which survived a hit from this class of weapon is in a museum, and it is rather unfortunate for A-10 considering the modern battlefield is saturated with many more MANPADS than 14.5mm machine guns or 23-30mm cannons.

Perhaps the YA-9 would have been able to save more Americans' lives, but its own similarity to Su-25 is pretty clear, and Su-25 has a pretty good track record of surviving missile hits, mostly because its engines are centerline meaning asymmetric thrust is minimized when one engine is destroyed (like from a missile), the engines are protected from damage by a titanium armor bulkhead that prevents fragments in one engine from hurting the other(like from a missile), and the vertical stabilizer is protected by the fuselage because it is on top of rather than besides the nacelles which prevents the stabilizer from being damaged or destroyed (like from a missile).

A-10 probably has better survivability against cannon fire and automatic weapons, since it was mostly designed for frontal attacks at short ranges on tank and motor infantry units, but this is evidently not very useful against rear aspect missile hits.

Conversely, MG A.V. Rutskoy's Su-25 was shot down by an anti-aircraft cannon, but survived the initial Blowpipe attack, over the Pakistani border. Very likely the plane would have limped back to base were it not for the cannon.
 
Last edited:
The fact that an A-10 survived with a blown-up nacelle means it made it back to base while being torn up. That makes it *badass* and something people will want to look at. Unlike an SU-25 brought down after getting swatted by *anything* that is now a field of smoking debris. The only museum that might end up in is the Vlad Putin Memorial Museum of Military Failures somewhere in the expansive region of Greater Ukraine, perhaps in St. Javelinsburg.

Planes that are destroyed? Not museum-worthy. Planes that are *almost* destroyed but made it back? Yeah, museums might want that. That's a good story.
 
Yet Su-25 comes back to base almost destroyed by <insert missile here> basically every other day lol.

At some point you have to realize that museums aren't about surviving airplanes, really. They're about one-off events. There's a destroyed American aircraft in Belgrade's Aviation Museum. That's a good story: the invincible stealth plane shot down by an ancient S-125 Neva manned by plucky Serbian missile men. It only happened once, which makes it an even better story. Things that are novel are more interesting than things that are typical.

Likewise, the A-10 that made it back after tanking an Igla has a museum piece, because it made it back despite having massive asymmetric thrust that needed to be compensated for at low altitude. Something that sent four other US aviators to their deaths, of course, but that needn't clutter the plaque because this isn't about losers. It's about winners, and it's evidently rare that A-10 survives missile strikes precisely because it's in a museum. After all, a museum is about one off stories, not casual Tuesdays.

If Su-25 gets put into a museum, it does so with a plaque that says "it's really tough" and a hallway filled with images from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine full of tanked missile hits to prove it.

A-10 won't get that treatment because there's probably no "Museum of the Hog Pilots" in America, but if it did it would have a plaque that says "it's a flying bulletproof tank" and a hallway filled with images of bullet ridden Hogs coming back to base after being chewed up by more Iraqi flak than the Eighth Air Force to prove it.

The casual Tuesday of A-10 is flying through a wall of flak and coming home with half the skin missing but still structurally intact. The casual Tuesday of Su-25 is taking a Stinger or Igla in the tail and coming back with half the left engine nacelle missing but an intact vertical stabilizer and barely functional right engine.
 
Last edited:
Kat Tsun said:
Yet Su-25 comes back to base almost destroyed by <insert missile here> basically every other day lol.
Click to expand...

Maybe they'd better stop flying them into regions where people shoot at them all the time.



At some point you have to realize that museums aren't about surviving airplanes, really. They're about one-off events.
Click to expand...

Yeah, no museum would want an intact, say, P-51 Mustang.
 
Not sure why you're trying to make this political, I'm merely speaking to the technical characteristics of the Su-25.

It's simply a superior ground attack aircraft for a similarly outdated model of air warfare. A-10's gun only confers advantages against motor riflemen and it has relatively poor anti-tank capability compared to something like Su-25T with the Vikhr missile, of which 16 can be carried vice the six AGM-65 of the A-10.

So not only is A-10 inferior in practical terms of surviving a modern battlefield it's apparently inferior in killing tanks. Unfortunate.

Of course, Russia as doesn't have as many satellite guided bombs as America, it still needs to fly low, so Su-25 is still useful for it. America just chooses to do so on occasion and, for some reason, keeps its ancient scrapyard plane around instead of replacing them with F-16s. A bit odd that.
 
Su-25 is relatively less torn up by man portable missiles than A-10 on a per-engagement basis. I guess America needs heroes for the war memorials?

Perhaps the fact that A-10 has been less engaged in combat or in particularly dangerous threat environments skews this, and it would turn out to be just-as survivable as Su-25 in combat in a MPADS heavy threat environment with proper electronic or anti-missile countermeasures, but this hasn't been shown to be the case yet.

If you're hit by an Igla in a Su-25, you turn back onto target and loose your rockets, then RTB with the ass of your jet shredded. Someone takes a picture of the plane back at base and it becomes the basis of a song. If you're hit by an Igla in an A-10, you go into a flat spin, because you can't correct the thrust disparity, and die. Typically, of course. Perhaps the four A-10A pilots in Desert Storm shot down by Iglas and Strelas were just poorly trained for handling and correcting in-flight hits though, and they're the exception? That's possible.

Who knows though. Since they're dead we can't ask them.

However, there are clearly more pictures of Su-25s returning to base with missile impacts on their rears than there are of A-10s, because something keeps A-10 pilots from returning to base, whatever it is. Whether it's bad training, bad design, or a combination of both, who can say? A-10 simply hasn't seen enough combat in contested air environments for it to be easily determined to be a flaw of the plane, flaw of the pilots, or whatever, but we can say that Su-25 has probably been shot at enough to determine its proper battlefield survivability characteristics.

Su-25 is a tad more likely to return home, at least when hit by a MANPADS, than A-10 as it stands.

Perhaps America should be fighting more fairly with third worlders by giving them Stingers and RBS 70s so they can test the A-10's survivability characteristics for the next generation of ground attack jet though? That would be a good method of gathering data at least, as adequate data are lacking for A-10's capabilities against MANPADS. I suspect you can count the number of A-10s struck by 3-6 kg warheads on two hands. Perhaps one. That speaks a lot to the USAF's ability to not fly over MANPADS but very little to A-10's actual ability to be controllable when damaged.
 
Last edited:
Kat Tsun said:
Perhaps America should be fighting more fairly with third worlders by giving them Stingers and RBS 70s so they can test the A-10's survivability characteristics for the next generation of ground attack jet though?
Click to expand...

See, now that's just silly. Fighting fair is for childish games, not warfare. So, yeah, maybe the SU-25 is better at handling MANPADS... but the USAF seems to be better and wiping out air defenses in the first place. The USAF could be flying Piper Cubs into ground attack missions if they had Reapers overhead dropping LGBs on anyone dumb enough to pop up with a MANPAD. That's fighting war *smart,* not *fair.* Of course, a smarter way to fight is to not start a needless fight in the first place.
 
Orionblamblam said:
Kat Tsun said:
However, there are clearly more pictures of Su-25s returning to base with missile impacts on their rears than there are of A-10s, because something keeps A-10 pilots from returning to base, whatever it is.
Click to expand...

Maybe the difference is fewer A-10s getting hit in the first place.
Click to expand...

That just begs the question why A-10 has airframe survivability characteristics to begin with though.

Orionblamblam said:
Kat Tsun said:
Perhaps America should be fighting more fairly with third worlders by giving them Stingers and RBS 70s so they can test the A-10's survivability characteristics for the next generation of ground attack jet though?
Click to expand...

See, now that's just silly. Fighting fair is for childish games, not warfare. So, yeah, maybe the SU-25 is better at handling MANPADS...
Click to expand...

Yes, that's all that matters. I'm glad we came to the proper conclusion.he USAF could be flying Piper Cubs into ground attack missions if they had Reapers overhead dropping LGBs on anyone dumb enough to pop up with a MANPAD. That's fighting war *smart,* not *fair.* Of course, a smarter way to fight is to not start a needless fight in the first place.

Orionblamblam said:
Kat Tsun said:
Perhaps America should be fighting more fairly with third worlders by giving them Stingers and RBS 70s so they can test the A-10's survivability characteristics for the next generation of ground attack jet though?
Click to expand...

The USAF could be flying Piper Cubs into ground attack missions if they had Reapers overhead dropping LGBs on anyone dumb enough to pop up with a MANPAD.
Click to expand...

That's interesting because I recall the USAF killing new MQ-9 Reaper production due to a certain Houthi MANPADS incident.

It's rather unlike an air force that has a rational view of what materiel effects are, and rather more one that is concerned with embarrassing news headlines, tbh. Of course it would be quite clever to utilize drone aircraft to suppress SEAD and simply have walls of cheap robotic planes flying around, but the USAF isn't quite clever enough to grasp the intricacies of XXI air war. It's still stuck in the 1990's, much like Russia is stuck in the 1980's, and the only true XXI air forces seem to be Turks and, however glacially, the Russians and Chinese.

USAF strikers will just be JSFs initially followed by F-16s/F-15s flying at =>20,000 feet forever, but that's not particularly important to a discussion about A-10's survivability against missiles versus Su-25's survivability against missiles.

Had A-10 and Su-25 went to war in 1990 or something I suspect Su-25 would come out on top in surviving the MANPADS battle.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Had A-10 and Su-25 went to war in 1990 or something I suspect Su-25 would come out on top in surviving the MANPADS battle.
Click to expand...

If recent incidents are anything to go off of, any battle between USAF and Russian ground attack aircraft would have had the A-10's roaming freely while all the SU-25's - and anything else in the air - are taken out by the F-15's and F-22s. Russian military doctrine does not seem to give a fart about "air supremacy" these days.
 
Yes, the current Russian near abroad adventure is Vietnam-esque, but F-22 didn't exist in 1990.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Yes, the current Russian near abroad adventure is Vietnam-esque, but F-22 didn't exist in 1990.
Click to expand...

F-15s and F-117's did, though. And the USAF was smart enough to trounce air defenses and turn enemy air forces into wreckage worthy of neither museum nor song. Had an SU-25 popped up, it would have been turned into a smoking hole long before it got close enough to a US ground target to catch a MANPAD.
 
Practically speaking the VVS would secure air superiority by striking every fighter base from Lakenheath to Ramstein with tactical nuclear weapons from TBMs, tbh, but that's a bit beyond the scope of Su-25. Its job would be supporting ground troops in their nuclear backed advance to the Rhine. Neutralization of the F-111s and the F-15Es in Lakenheath and Ramstein would be a hugely important operational-strategic objective to defend the strategic missile forces in Dombarovsky and other missile fields from being hit by bunker busters or something, which was a tremendous fear of the Strategic Rocket Forces and the General Staff.

A few thousand nuclear weapons can close a substantial amount of technological disparity since they're about two orders of magnitude more effective than conventional weapons and an order of magnitude more effective than PGMs. This disparity really shows itself when we compare attacking a hardened airbase, as only two or three nuclear weapons are needed vice thirty or forty laser guided bombs, or more.

Short of escalating to a strategic exchange it's unclear what the US would be able to do stop this as it simply did not view nuclear weapons in the same manner, and the Red Army would probably still come on top on that one, at least in Europe. This is not something the USA would be inclined to do though.

The VVS was ultimately more dispersed than the US European fighter bases so there were more nuclear targets to hit, yet the US had significantly fewer tactical nuclear weapons than the Soviets, and significantly more targets to hit. Besides that, the VVS also wasn't as instrumental to the Soviet fighting capability, with a greater emphasis on land artillery and long range missiles, whcih is partly why the DRA lasted longer than the RVN in lieu of superpower backing.

That said, I suppose the A-10s would make a valiant effort to take off before being hit by a few kilotons of ground bursts on their runway though. Maybe a few would even manage to get airborne.

Ultimately Su-25 was designed to fight a nuclear war on a nuclear battlefield and employ nuclear weapons in support of ground troops, and occasionally conventional weapons, such as laser guided missiles and bombs. It did this far better than A-10, which was stationed in a handful of bases in Germany in wing-size elements, and would have required a single battery of Okas to defeat. Given there were more assault aviation regiments, and the VVS dispersed attack aircraft by squadron in wartime, it's unclear how NATO would be able to gain air superiority by hitting bases, unless it attacked first with overwhelming nuclear firepower.
 
Last edited:
Kat Tsun said:
Practically speaking the VVS would secure air superiority ...
Click to expand...

And yet they didn't. And rather than secure air superiority, the VVS allowed the Ukrainians to run hither and yon and resupply at will and blow up Russians on the ground using drones bought off Wish.com. Shrug. What should have been a job of days or at most weeks is now a slog lasting months with no end in sight and winter coming. That'll be fun for all involved.
 
The "Soviet VVS" hasn't existed for over 30 years my dude.

The current shenanigans are rather different and neither side is particularly competent since they're both decayed Soviet armies. Still unsure what that has to do with Su-25 being a more forgiving and better protected aircraft to fly than A-10 though. It's only a decade newer, so it's natural it would be the better plane.
 
Last edited:
Kat Tsun said:
The "Soviet VVS" hasn't existed for over 30 years my dude.
Click to expand...

I invite you to re-read the conversation. The "Soviets" weren't the topic of discussion; the "Russians" are. Last I checked, they still call their air force the VVS, and things are happening *today,* not 30 years ago.

As to the SU-25 being better protected, that's still up for debate. Sure, some SU-25's limped back to base after being hit with *something,* the Russians claim Big Bad Missiles. But they're currently claiming a *lot* of things that just aren't so. Wouldn't surprise me that they're getting hit with vodka bottles chucked out of retreating Mils. As the inappropriately deleted videos showed, the Russians supply their troops with armor that ain't armor, their tanks with garbage non-reactive armor. Why assume that their air force is any better off?

Feh. Going around in circles. Probably time to change subjects and argue pointlessly about something else.
 
It's only going in circles because you're trying to turn a discussion regarding purely technical distinctions of the Su-25 into something political, for whatever weird reason lol. A guy ran into a power line, suddenly the Su-25 is worthless? Damn, guess the A-10 is awful because a guy in Missouri almost crashed for literally the same reason a decade ago. Oh, of course you probably never heard about that.

The Su-25 is substantially better designed for surviving in the low altitude regime because its thrust is centered, its vertical stabilizer is large and well defended against blast-frag and continuous rod warheads due to its placement above the engine nozzles and thus protected by fuselage, and because of the titanium bulkhead that protects both engines from internal fire and fragmentation damage.

The A-10 with one engine out has a lot of asymmetric thrust, the vertical stabilizers can get damaged from a missile hit (even lightweight missiles), and A-10 pilots are trained to break at least 90 degrees off target axis when attacking, to avoid flying over the target. The four A-10 pilots hit and killed by Iglas or Strelas (which are not "big bad missiles", rather they wimpy and tiny missiles any attack jet worth its salt should be able to shrug off) in Desert Storm probably cartwheeled into the ground after breaking from an attack run. No can say this for certain, because the pilots are dead, but it's probably the most dangerous part of an attack to have any sort of major thrust diversion. I can't imagine a Hog pilot not being able to trim out unless their stabilizer was completely shredded or something (which is a possibility), so it's a combination of poor training, poor placement of components, and poor armoring of the engines.

It's that simple.

Su-25 drivers are generally better trained for modern methods of attack and conduct attacks in diving/swooping movements from several thousand feet, rather than breaking attacks at low altitude, which is what was done in Afghanistan onwards. Because the primary weapon of the Su-25 is laser guided missiles and bombs, not the gun or 70mm rockets. Had they employed the JAAT-style low altitude run and break that A-10 drivers do, they would probably have tumbled into the ground too I guess. So that has merit on its own, because pilot training matters more than machine design.

If A-10s are flown similar to Su-25s, who knows why you would do this, then I imagine being level and climbing, the problems of being hit by a missile in the rear would be greatly lessened, even if both engines end up damaged you can probably recognize the issue and bail out in time at the least. Perhaps they do this now, I don't know, but it wasn't ordinary to overfly the target after impact in an A-10 in Desert Storm or the entire Cold War.

A-10C removes this problem entirely by integrating Sniper pods, satellite guidance systems, and laser designator capability, allowing A-10s to strike from the same altitude as F-16 or F-15E, and avoid needing to go down into the weeds. Pilot training requirements probably dropped a bar or two since combat missions would become "swat the thing on the ground with the Maverick/Paveway/JDAM from 20,000 feet".

Of course it's important to remember that the A-10 is from 1976 and Su-25 is from 1986, so there's a decade difference in weapons systems and tactics, something that didn't quite percolate down to the USAF though because the Cold War ended well before more modern attack jets could be fielded. It's why Su-25 is much closer in employment than A-10C and this, along with its hefty armor scheme given to it by its extremely muscular engines, helps it survive occasional missile impacts.

In a perfect world you wouldn't need to fly at low altitude but unfortunately modern air defense systems are rather robust and require a few multi-billion dollar investments per year in a reconnaissance-strike complex to organize air attacks across a major theater. Alternatively you can just ignore that and use jets as fast artillery. The latter is slower sure but also far less demanding of extremely costly reconnaissance-intelligence systems like spy satellites and radar equipped battle management aircraft.

If you want to argue the actual technical characteristics of the Su-25, rather than what you think they are, at any time, feel free.
 
Last edited:
I know, it's really hard, nearly bringing tears to our eyes, but nevertheless, we all should rise as one man and
resist temptation to mix too much politics into a thread, that principally is just about an innocent aeroplane.
Ok, it may be firing guns and rockets, or dropping bombs on the wrong people, but it's men, not the apparatus, who's doing wrong !

 
Levsha said:
Kat Tsun said:
The implication of putting a MANPADS damaged nacelle of an A-10 in a museum is that A-10s rarely come back from missile hits.
Click to expand...

I doubt very much if that is the implication for displaying a damaged nacelle from an A-10 in a museum - have you already asked the curators of museum why they have done so? If not, send them an email.

Still, no one has yet put a Su-25 hit by a Stinger in a museum. Curious.
Click to expand...

If it's true, possibly curious. Again, you may need to ask someone in the Russian museum sphere why they haven't displayed a combat damaged aircraft in any of their museums.
Click to expand...
Well as it seems, the Russians are far more interesting in displaying captured and destroyed enemy equipment in museums
 
Do we have a top trumps thread? Because thats where such arguments belong. In the real world integrated armed forces work hard to avoid ending up in a meatgrinder. I was lucky enough 30 odd years ago to be in a bit of a scrap, we spent weeks hitting airfields, then individual aircraft on the ground, then we moved onto hunting scuds (Didnt really work) then onto individual tanks.
All to ensure our tanks and troops, when they went in, mostly made it home again.

F16 v Mig29, Abrams v leo v T14, are meaningless.
 
I reckon the 'bitchin' Betty' equivalent would have blown his ears out were that the case.
 
TMA1 said:
...I feel for the mods. Aerospace, civilian or otherwise, is inextricably linked to politics on multiple levels. Hard not to have an opinion, even if you try and stay neutral.
Click to expand...
I try to stay apolitical…hoping any warriors from either side in Ukraine would pass by the AN-225 as something sacrosanct…
 
On 19 January, Mali received new aircraft from Russia, including L-39ZA and Su-25.
On the pictures of the event, we can see one called 'TZ-25C'. The aircraft delivered last year, which was apparently destroyed, was called 'TZ-20C'. This would mean that the Malians had 5 Su-25 in service ?
Possibly: TZ-21 C to TZ-25C.
Malian Su-25 (TZ-25C) at Bamako Int'l (19 January 2023).jpg
It is interesting to note that on the photos, TZ-25C carries 4 additional tanks. An ilustration of the size of Mali !
 

Attachments

  • Malian Su-25 (TZ-25C), L-39ZA & Mi-8 at Bamako Int'l (19 January 2023).jpg
    Malian Su-25 (TZ-25C), L-39ZA & Mi-8 at Bamako Int'l (19 January 2023).jpg
    67.8 KB · Views: 33
F.L. said:
On 19 January, Mali received new aircraft from Russia, including L-39ZA and Su-25.
On the pictures of the event, we can see one called 'TZ-25C'. The aircraft delivered last year, which was apparently destroyed, was called 'TZ-20C'. This would mean that the Malians had 5 Su-25 in service ?
Possibly: TZ-21 C to TZ-25C.

It is interesting to note that on the photos, TZ-25C carries 4 additional tanks. An ilustration of the size of Mali !
Click to expand...
Two clearer pictures of "TZ-25C".
 

Attachments

  • cRJvpHNPmGA.jpg
    cRJvpHNPmGA.jpg
    84.2 KB · Views: 37
  • Malian Su-25 (TZ-25C).jpg
    Malian Su-25 (TZ-25C).jpg
    140.7 KB · Views: 36

Similar threads

Please donate to support the forum.

Back
Top Bottom