Unlike similar American jets, you can find Mig-25's in private hands today being maintained and flying.
It is one of the only private experiences where you can break Mach 2 and get close to 90,000' feet[0].
I love the Mig-25 - like the AK-47 there is something very admirable in a plane that is designed to both perform so well but to also be so easy to maintain and with such longevity.
[0] http://www.rusadventures.com/tour6.shtml
[1] "edge of space" flight - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCVMuxx7YKY
That's more because post-Soviet military establishments were more willing to sell surplus aircraft to private buyers than because of any quality of the aircraft themselves.
Completely agree. Some people in Russia in 1990-s were pretty inventive.
Another reason could be the number of MiG-25 produced.
It's hard to know where you came up with this. Starfighters Inc. came up in another thread recently: http://www.starfighters.net/fleet/
They fly F-104s, which I'd much rather be responsible for maintaining than something like a MiG-25.
If you see a dearth of ownership of newer American jets, it's probably because they're still valuable to an air force somewhere.
The B-52 is fifteen years older than the MiG-25 and is not only still flying, but carrying out combat missions to this day.
I suspect MIG-25's in private hands have been maintained at a flight ready level, but not significantly upgraded in the way the active B-52 has been.
a) long. b) thin. c) far from a ground plane.
In more detail: the induced current depends directly on the length of the conductor; a thin is more easily overheated and damaged than a thick one; and conductors running near ground planes make poor antennas for picking up pulses.
Now, all three of these factors describe vacuum tubes more than solid-state electronics. Vacuum tubes have to have very thin heated cathode wires, and the dimensions of vacuum tubes result in a substantial distance to the ground plane and in long conductors. Compared with solid-state electronics, which, especially in modern design, can practically live on or between ground planes, this makes for a lot of sensitivity to EMP and external interference.
One sanity check is to consider electromagnetic noise emitted by the device. Any device which is emitting substantial RF noise from its internal components is also going to be vulnerable to external EMP or interference, since antennas work both ways - anything which is good at emitting will also be good at receiving. Now, vacuum tube devices emit more RF noise than modern solid state devices, and generally need more shielding.
The components in the MiG-25 radar had more to do with what was available to the Soviet designers in the 1950s. The radar of the MiG-25 came from the Tu-128 interceptor which first flew in 1961, which means that the radar was designed in the mid-1950s at the latest. Wouldn't surprise me if the US radar of the same vintage also used vacuum tubes.
[1] one of his example projects was city-block-sized capacitor arrays that can temporarily provide power to an entire city.
What you are talking about is true only for inductive coupling caused by fluctuating EM waves.
As someone who works in Embedded Electronics and Software for Aerosopace let me drop a little knowledge bomb.
The problem isn't with induction, all the units can be easily shielded from this and they are in EMC chambers every day. A simply faraday cage, some bypass and reservoir capacitors a choke here and there an opto-isolator on box boundaries and bobs your uncle.
The real problem with High Energy Particles (Neutrons, Gamma particles, Protons, etc) is that they displace atoms in your semiconductor lattice and change the doping densities and behaviours of your junctions. Causing your semiconductor to fail... HARD.
When we buy in components, we tend to buy rad-hard devices which have special considerations taken into account when designing the semiconductors because when you're in space, you're bombarded with LOADS of high energy particles all the time, and its not just enough to have memory TMR, you need RAD-HARDENED semiconductors.
Source: burned plenty of transistors and vacuum tubes while studying electrical engineering.
I am quite surprised that we are not living in Fallout by now.
NB I'm having a binge of reading novels about WW3 scenarios in Europe at the moment, my favourite being "Chieftans" by Bob Forrest-Webb, mind you it doesn't end well.
[NB Rather hoping WoT gets to Challengers/Chieftans/M1s vs T-80s at some point...]
I think the whole EMP robustness thing is overplayed everytime something like this pops up - I think that at most the EMP robustness is just a side benefit to the analog systems.
"In 1963 Westinghouse was awarded a US Navy contract for the AN/AWG-10 to provide fire control for guns and Raytheon AIM-7 Sparrow and Raytheon AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles on the F-4B Phantom II. The first radars were delivered in 1966 and became standard equipment. The AN/AWG-10 was claimed to be the first interceptor radar to feature transistorised circuitry."
Meanwhile, the MiG-25 first flew in 1964, which would suggest that at that time it was developed western interceptors used tube-based radars too.
[0] http://wiki.scramble.nl/index.php/Westinghouse_AN/APQ-72
There is no mention what MiG-25 was designed for. Its task was to intercept nuclear bombers flying over Soviet Union and it did this task pretty well.
Because it used steel it was cheap and easy to service. At that time soviets had lot of experience with titanium (space, submarines), but expensive plane similar to SR-71 would not cover entire Soviet Union.
I think it was Max Hastings who pointed out in the context of WW2 that there isn't much point in having tanks that are six times better than your enemies if they have ten times as many tanks as you do!
Not particularly. A rough rule of thumb is that an interceptor needs a maximum achievable speed twice that of the cruising speed of its target in order to close the geometry of the interception. A Su-15 couldn't quite achieve that with its full complement of missiles against a Mach 0.9 B-52, but a MiG-25 could do so. [0]
The second problem is basing the interceptor in a location that the long-ranged incoming bombers can't just dog-leg to avoid. The Mach 2.8 MiG-25 barely had enough margin to intercept supersonic bombers such as the B-58, Mirage IV, A-5 and FB-111 but those all had much shorter endurances than the B-52 and V-bombers, and so ironically made easier targets; they had to follow much more predictable direct ingress routes and weren't equipped with air-launched decoys.
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[0] flip the actors around and you can see why the US abandoned the Mach 3+ YF-12 interceptor. The F-106 and F-15 were fast enough to intercept incoming Tu-95s that slipped past the SAM belts, and the faster Soviet bombers didn't have the range to threaten the USA.
Chances are it was intended for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_B-1_Lancer, which entered service around the same time.
Really? It _did_ this task? When that'd happen?
http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2360/what-are-th...
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-swept_wing#Return_of_t...
They do look incredibly cool though.
