A-10 vs. Su-25/39

Originally posted by nepok
The plane is designed that it could lose one engine or even one wing and still fly.

Same with vertical tail.

I wonder how many landings there has been done with one wing.

This surely qualifies as one!


tailslide.firelight.dynip.com...

Take a look at this impressive video. At the end, it shows a Su 25 and the damage that it took and it still got to its base.

www.youtube.com...

A-10 was scramble designed with “off the shelf” components as a stop gap measure to fill a giant gap on the Western European front.

Its main design parameter was cost. It had to be as cheap as possible to design, manufacture, operate and service.

Engines are General Electric TF34s, and were made for the commercial market.

For example they are used in passenger jets such as Canadair CRJ Regional Jet
Bombardier CRJ.

One only needs to really look beneath the A-10s skin to see that it’s put together with commercial parts, and was not designed grown up as a war machine. I do have to say that given the low budget, A-10s engineers did an excellent job working with what they had.

A-10 was literally built around the giant GAU-8 cannon, specifically to bust Soviet armored vehicles which were expected to cross East Germanys borders into the West. NATO forces were absolutely outgunned so a cheap armor buster was thrown together. That’s all there’s to it.

There are reasons why A-10 had such a difficult time surviving the bureaucracy and why it literally spends its entire service life on the budgetary cutting g block. If has too many problems to speak of, but the main one, get ready: survivability.

Why? It’s simply to SLOW and just doesn’t have the climb rate needed. A-10 needs over 4 minutes to escape the kill zone of AAA and manpads.

When clean it climbs at 6K fpm, when loaded, forget about it.

A-10 is a pure CAS platform, which can operate only against undefended targets, and that’s why A-10 has the highest loss rate in USAF.

Frogfoot on the other hand was specifically designed as a rugged war machine, from ground up. It’s fast and incredibly agile even when loaded. It is MUCH smaller then A-10, while delivering similar payload.

A-10 loiters above its targets and strikes from low altitude (NAP), while SU-25 makes quick diving attacks and quickly escapes the kill zone.

SU-25 is a basic CAS platform with limited sensors, it’s not a tank killer. SU-25T is a dedicated armor buster with advances sensors/FCS, and fundamentally differs from the vanilla SU-25.

SU-25 is also operated by the navy because it can attack shipping with dedicated ASCMs, and has the range to do it.

All in all, SU-25 simply outclasses A-10 in every respect because it was designed to do so from ground up, while A-10 was thrown together with parts that were available from the commercial market.

Considering the origins of A-10, it does its job well and certainly at a good price.

The A-10 win's hands down I am not even sure how this is a discussion.

1. The GAU-8 is much more powerful then the cannons on the Su-25.

2. A-10 carries slightly more payload.

3. Yes the Su-25 is a little more agile which is almost useless for the type of strafing run's the A-10 is intended for.

4. The A-10 has proven to take an incredible amount of damage. The Su-25....not so much.

5. The Su-25 is basically the inbred step-child of the A-10. Their is considerable evidence that the Russian's used the YF-9 which was the failing design against the A-10. www.wordiq.com...

reply to post by FULCRUM


hi,
When bringing up sensors please remeber there are 3 bassic configurations for the SU-25 and 2 for the A-10.
the orignal SU-25 did not and dose not have the sensors mentioned while an A-10C dose have some. rating on sensors alone I would ratethem from best to worse as
SU-39 -due to the radar pod.
SU-25T due to the ARM capibility I don't think the SU-25T would be the ideal sead platform but firing an arm might alow your wingmen to take some targets out
A-10C- It's an A-10 with a flir pod
A-10A- AGM-65 TV and IR so there some limited night attack before the pilot is left with NVG and flairs
SU-25 - a laser flairs and NVG not a single camera with any sort of zoom featrue at all.

A-10, with it big gun, which has only 34 mm of penetration at 1000 mts, and weight almost 2000 kg...the A-10 was designed arround that gun, which some consider useless even against top armor of the 80's tanks

The A-10 was not integrated (only lately) to more practical anti tank weapons like anti tank missiles, yes it had the Maverik, but that missile was way too heavy (300 kg!) an inpractical to use as anti tank weapon


The Su-25 was integrated from the start with the AT-6, and later with the AT-11/14, carring actually more weapons to kill tanks from better distances (4000 mts) than the GAU8 and more missiles and cheaper ones than the maverik load of the A-10, only recently the Hellfire was integrated with some A-10's

Weapon wise the Su-25 is better

The su-25 also has better flight characteristics at higher speeds

1) maximum speed

Su-25 "Frogfoot" 950 km/h
Il-102 950 km/h
Northrop YA-9 837 km/h
A-10A Thunderbolt II 805 km/h


2) rate of climb

Su-25 "Frogfoot" 3480 m/min
A-10A Thunderbolt II 1800 m/min


3) ceiling

A-10A Thunderbolt II 13700 m
Su-25 "Frogfoot" 10000 m
Il-102 10000 m


4) engine thrust

Il-102 102 kN
Su-25 "Frogfoot" 88.36 kN
A-10A Thunderbolt II 80.64 kN
Northrop YA-9 66.8 kN


5A) weapons payload

Northrop YA-9 8350 kg
A-10A Thunderbolt II 7260 kg
Il-102 7200 kg
Su-25 "Frogfoot" 4400 kg


5B) cannon rounds

A-10A Thunderbolt II 1350 (30 mm)
Su-25 "Frogfoot" 250 (30 mm)


6) maximum range

A-10A Thunderbolt II 4150 km
Il-102 3000 km
Su-25 "Frogfoot" 2500 km


7) thrust to weight ratio

Il-102 0.58
Su-25 "Frogfoot" 0.51
A-10A Thunderbolt II 0.36
Northrop YA-9 0.33


8) wing loading

Il-102 283 kg/m^2
A-10A Thunderbolt II 482 kg/m^2
Su-25 "Frogfoot" 584 kg/m^2


9) production

Su-25 "Frogfoot" 1024
A-10 Thuderbolt II 716
Northrop YA-9 2
Il-102 2