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Comment by olympusultra | Hacker News Reader

Western propaganda is so boring... Yes, Tu-144 wasn’t the biggest success story of the Soviet civil aviation, but it gave birth to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-160 And 35 years later the West is still unable to match Tu-160. The wise would say that every coin has a flip side, and every story about a Soviet “failure”, however one-sided coverage it usually receives in the Western propaganda, normally has too...

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There have been countless numbers of articles about 737Max's failures or A380's financial woe, and yet a single article about Tu-144 and you call it propaganda?

> And 35 years later the West is still unable to match Tu-160

Unable to match what? Aircraft is designed to serve a use case. B52 is planned to remain in service until at least 2050s, despite not winning any records. SR71 is a dazzling aircraft that is universally admired, yet none are in service today.

buffs not so shabby record-wise. A simple search for “b52 record” returns plenty of gold.

There were actually aircraft designed by the US to match the Tu-160. See the XB-70 Valkyrie, which was a complete failure that never gave suite to anything. So yes, the US never matched the Tu-160, despite trying.

The Valkyrie was wound down because missile technology made it obsolete before it was even done. The USA instead focused on the supersonic B1. And even that project was almost cancelled as obsolete if Reagan hadn’t had intervened, and gone for a low flying B1B instead that had much less chance of being shot out of the sky before dropping its bombs. To be honest, even the B1B isn’t that useful, ballistic and cruise missiles do the job much better. Even Russia doesn’t fly its supersonic bomber very often, flying the less expensive to operate TU-95 a lot more.

War isn’t a pissing contest to see who can have the fastest X, it is rather one where you find a bunch of most effective tools for the job.

The main reason the XB-70 and B-1A were shutdown was yes missiles advancing, but mostly price.

Low flying approaches and cruise missiles were strongly reconsidered at the the because the MiG-31 had look-down shoot-down capability. We don't know if it would have been a better or worse option, we're dealing in counterfactuals.

Russia has few uses for the Tu-160 anymore. It's main use was to penetrate hostile airspace of near peer opponents. Since the fall of the USSR yes there is not much more use for that.

Valkyrie was a different class of bombers, one that never came to be. Rather than the Blackjack, the Russian answer to Valkyrie was actually the T-4. The SR-71 was a spyplane, but there was also to be an SR-71-class interceptor meant to shoot down incoming Valkyrie/T4-class bombers. That entire field of mach-3 bombers and fighters was stopped by advanced in missile tech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_T-4

There were actually aircraft designed by the US to match the Tu-160

At the risk of “arguing with someone on the internet”, I think you may have your chronology backwards, since it seems the Tu-160 was designed to match the US aircraft you mention.

The Valkyrie was a late 1950’s to early 1960’s design with physical prototypes existing and flying by 1964.

The B-1A design began in 1965, with the first flight in 1974. This would have been the closest western analog to the Tu-160, since the B-1B derivative had a different focus - low-altitude terrain following - since it was believed that the high-altitude/high speed designs like the B-1A were vulnerable to newer Soviet missile designs. Stealth was also becoming increasingly important to US command due to the same concerns about missiles.

The design competition that begat the Tu-160 began in 1972, with a first flight in 1981. I’m not saying it’s not a great plane - by all accounts it is very capable - but US designs were not done in response to it.

The Tu-160 was made obsolete by anti-air missiles and radar (also the reason all work on supersonic interceptors stopped in the 60's). SR-71 by satellites.

The equivalent match on the western side was the B-1, which was built earlier and served a roughly similar role until it was mostly replaced by the B-2 and now both are being retired in favour or the upcoming B-21.

The B-1B was not an equivalent to the Tu-160. One could go above Mach 2, the other could barely go above Mach 1. The B-1A would have been a match if it wasn't a failure.

By your premise any plane that flies even 10% slower doesn't match up, even if it's superior in every other way.

You don't have to match exact speeds to match outcomes when it comes to bombing. What matters is what the platform is meant to achieve and how effective is it at its mission. A slower supersonic plane may be the superior overall platform, depending on the other aspects of the plane.

Russia made a hyper expensive show pony, when they could have built a cheaper, more effective platform at a lower speed. That's usually the kind of mistake the Americans make. The relatively high max speed of the TU-160 turned out to be entirely meaningless, they would have been better off building a different plane.

The TU-160 has a $200m+ price tag. That's $1.2b scaled to the US economic terms. It's something beyond hyper expensive for the Russians in relation to their economic capabilities and military spending.

The B-1A was cancelled. The TU-160 should have been cancelled.

What do you mean 10% slower? The B-1B was essentially half the speed. That's a huge difference.

Scaling prices of Soviet inventions to US economic terms using Russian prices is really, really absurd.

Interesting that the Tu-144LL was fitted with the Tu-160 bombers engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznetsov_NK-32 ; The Tu-144LL did test flights for Nasa and Boeing, when they tried to design a supersonic jet liner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144#Use_by_NASA ; at least someone was trying to learn from the design of this bird.

What’s “the west” and how were they trying and weren’t able to match tu-160?

The West being the US and Western Europe and the attempts were mainly the B-1A and the XB-70 both of which failed.

Cancellation isn't failure. By that point it was clear that non-stealth high altitude bombers were going to be completely useless within the next few years due to advances in missile technology.

Actually, no it wasn't. What was clear was that low altitude bombers were going to become useless due to look-down shoot-down radars. High altitude and high speed bombers were and are the best non-stealth alternative.

>High altitude and high speed bombers were and are the best non-stealth alternative.

Which are carried by interceptor aircraft - meanwhile the long-term shift was clearly towards anti-aircraft missiles., and stealth was only a few years away. At this point the F/A-117 was already pretty far along in development.

I'm not very familiar with the Tu-160, so I'm curious to hear your opinion. It seems like it was a Soviet success at building something like North American attempted (unsuccessfully) with the XB-70. I'm not suggesting it was a copy, just that it seems like the same class of aircraft?

Tu-160 can't cruise supersonically unlike Tu-144 or Concorde and they really have very little in common.

Tu-144 was doomed by the whole system of socialism - and not really in a bad way. In a classless Soviet society there were no people for who paying 5x for the ticket to get 2.5x speed would be justified just because there was no mass inequality. In the west, there were some of those people and for a while (1980s and 1990s) that was enough for profitable operation of planes that came for free - but even then, that wouldn't work out if the airlines had to pay for planes.

If was an expensive toy West could somehow afford for a while, but Soviet Union couldn't.

I’d suggest the book red plenty for an interesting set of perspectives on the Soviet system. The Soviet Union was not a classless society by any stretch.

It's worth remembering that one reasons for Concorde's limited success was regulatory manipulation by companies like Pan-AM, TWA and Boeing to initially block the most profitable transatlantic flights to the US.

That limited initial orders and almost killed the project until it was slightly relaxed enough to allow some flights to New York.

As someone who grew up in the USSR at the very bottom, it was definitely not classless. It was the epitome of corruption - get into a position of power by any means possible, and start lootin'.

This sort of cynical approach to government and lack of dedication to public service is exactly what I see now taking root in the United States. Get to the feeding trough and grift your heart out. It's f--ing tragic.

> And 35 years later the West is still unable to match Tu-16

Does it really need to?

Carrying 100 tons of bombs at mach 2... where?

A single F-18 can easily carry a 2Mt nuke, or two, mounted on some standoff missile with decent range on itself.

And USA, unlike USSR, has a network of friendly countries to host their airforce, and aerial refuelling infrastructure spanning the whole world.

Especially since payload of Tu-160 is much smaller than B-1B and supersonic capability it can provide works only on very short distances - it's not for delivering bombs faster, more for running away from fighters.

It is not delivering bombs it is delivering cruise missiles.

Which makes the supersonic capability even more pointless. If it's going to release missiles from far away there won't be any fighters to evade.

you are a military genius

That's the thing: original plan was to make Tu-160 capable of sustained supersonic flight, to actually get bombs (X-15 missiles - Russian clones of SRAM) - to the target faster. That didn't work out.

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