Hokum vs. Havoc

Two Soviet designs trying to find a place in the 21 century, who should hold the crown?
The KA-50 Hokum suffered from a reluctance of it's one pilot, "avionics will take care of fighting," approach and the MI-28 a very poor sensor suite.
but with the addition of a copilot (i.e. KA-52) and western european sensor suites/avionics (i.e. MI-28N, not necessarily all of the electronics) who should carry on the tradition?
the hokum-fast and furious
the havoc-carries on the tradition of the HIND, visually fearsome and deadly

This is a breakdown of not just the Hokum and Havock ! But also it compares Tiger and Apache.

Which Attack Helicopter is the Most Deadly?

Apache vs. Havoc vs. Hokum vs. Tiger. Which is the most deadly? Attack helicopters are fast moving, low flying and lethal combat aircraft. They are high-speed forces capable of delivering a heavy punch against armored vehicles – while not having to worry about impassable terrain. But which is the best attack helicopter in the world?

Contenders for this come primarily from the United States (AH-64 Apache) and Russia (the Mi-28 Havoc and the Ka-50/52 Hokum), and the Eurocopter Tiger from France and Germany. These helicopters are all lethal – they are capable of destroying anywhere form eight to 24 tanks in a single sortie – anywhere from 25 to 80 percent of a standard Russian tank battalion (31 tanks). They also can carry unguided rockets (usually 2.75-inch or 3.15-inch) for use against soft targets like trucks or infantry.

The Russians designed two top-rate attack helicopters. The Mi-28 Havoc is a direct successor to the famous Mi-24 Hind. The Havoc carries up to 16 AT-6 “Spiral” or 32 AT-9 “Vikhr” anti-tank missiles, up to four 20-round 3.15-inch rocket pods, or a mixture. It also has a powerful 30mm cannon, which is also used on the BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle. It can hit targets as far as 4 kilometers away. The Mi-28 has a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour, and a range of 460 kilometers.

The other Russian design is the Ka-50 Hokum. It also can carry 24 “Vikhr” missiles, four 20-round rocket pods, or a mixture. The Hokum also can carry the AA-11/R-73 Archer air-to-air missiles, which makes the Hokum a very capable threat against opposing attack helicopters. The 30mm 2A42 is also mounted on the Hokum, albeit more like a fighter’s cannon. The Hokum’s top speed is 350 kilometers per hour, and it has a combat radius of 250 kilometers.

The AH-64 Apache is slower that either of the Russian helicopters (296 kilometers per hour), but features more range (520 kilometers). It also only carries 16 Hellfire anti-tank missiles, 76 2.75-inch rockets, or a mixed load. It has a 30mm gun, but the M230 is not as powerful as the 2A42. That said, it holds more than twice as many rounds (1200) as the Ka-50’s mount (500), and nearly five times as many as the Mi-28’s (250). The Apache has been exported to the UK, Israel, Greece, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the Netherlands. It also has proven itself in Desert Storm, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Eurocopter has built the Tiger, which is a versatile helicopter for both observation and attack duties. It carries eight anti-tank missiles (Trigat, HOT, TOW, or Hellfire). One version has a 30mm cannon with 450 rounds. It has a top speed of 322 kilometers per hour and a range of 800 kilometers. It is in service with France, Germany, Spain, and Australia.

Which is the best of these? Judging by performance specifications, the Ka-50 is the best – barely edging out the Tiger. That said, the AH-64 Apache, however, has a combat record in four conflicts, and unlike either Russian helicopter, it has secured a wide variety of export orders. Only the Tiger comes close, but it lacks the firepower and the combat record of the Apache. The Apache is probably the most proven design of these, and has the fewest question marks regarding its weapons or electronics.


Also there was this discussion on ATS back in 2003 :

www.abovetopsecret.com...

140th CES,

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Two Soviet designs trying to find a place in the 21 century, who should hold the crown?
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What are they trying to do? If you're limited in your PGM inventory and targeting options, then the simple fact of the matter is that two men do little more in delivery of dumb munitions (rockets and gunfire) than one does and you'd damn well better have a fully articulated or composite hingeless rotor able to handle the 'dynamic' elements of a close in fight. Along with a very advanced ASE suite and great crash hardening.

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The KA-50 Hokum suffered from a reluctance of it's one pilot, "avionics will take care of fighting," approach.
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Single pilotage does an ENORMOUS number of things for you in terms of reconfiguring the nosegunner and EO package to lower weight and improve performance. While most people don't care to believe it, a decent cabin-cruiser like the S-76 or indeed even a micro like the MD-500 class can EASILY outperform a dedicated gunship, despite having nominally huge fuselage drag indexes. Why? Dead Weight and Extraneous Carriage Drag plus much better (lower loaded) rotor systems. For both cruise and dynamic maneuvering. U.S. Army tests proved this, embarrassingly, during the 1980s.

Thus a system like the KA-60, with internal drop-fire weapons carriage and a cabin-operator could theoretically do more to effectively maintain monitoring and control over /which/ targets are hit. While never exposing the pilot to the kinds of task saturation which could kill him in direct attack. i.e. It's not the crew but where you place them and how you empower them that counts.

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And the MI-28 a very poor sensor suite.
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In truth, the Soviets would be far better off designing a single sensor suite with a variable mount interface for ALL their attack aviation. So that they can achieve some kind of sequenced economies of scale, once they have the money to do so. In this way, a system that installs on a Hind is transferrable to the AH-X based on availability of funds to start airframe production rather than paying for both the MEP and the bus platform to carry it.

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But with the addition of a copilot (i.e. KA-52) and western european sensor suites/avionics (i.e. MI-28N, not necessarily all of the electronics) who should carry on the tradition?
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I don't like rotary wing aviation. As a bus platform it suffers from huge maintenance and reliability issues for relatively low payload throw weight. As a pure performance driven airframe, it is not even on the charts as a function of either sortie:radius lag. Or ability to deny as much as survive threat envelopes.

That said, if I was going to do up a proper new-paper design, it would have to be one with a cabin and a sufficiently innovative (cheap, robust, economical, 200 knot cruise and 250nm radius) design as to take the _commercial_ market by storm. What most people don't understand is that the civil to military market fraction has always been huge everywhere BUT the U.S. and Soviet Union. And thus programs like the HU and LOH competitions basically put Bell and Hughes on the map with the B204/B206 and H500 series as civil followon subsidies to milspec baseline requirements.

Comparitively, systems like the Hind and Cobra only exist today (as massively antiquated aero-mechanical solutions) because it would be just too costly to replace them as a total inventory with something that could, again, only function for combatant roles. Roles whose success or failure are largely determined today by the munitions and targeting. Not the carrier platform.

Given how awful the overall gunship market is around the world (name the number of Tiger customers, the number of Roivalk customers, the number of RAH-66 customers etc. etc.), then compare it to says of the Eurocopter or NOTAR series MD-600. Thus, IMO, the only real hope is to design something FIRST for the civillian market and only then try to expand the range of sales. The question then being whether corruption in the FSU is so widespread that you can even attempt to develop such a airframe or if you would lose it all to mafia.

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The hokum-fast and furious.
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Nonsense. The Hokum has a soft coax. You take that airframe much above 130-140 knots and try to turn against the disk separation axis and you will 'mesh', in a disastrous fashion. Ever since the Red Book first announced it, people have tried to make out the Hokum (which means 'bogus' or 'nonsense' in English) as some kind of ABC XH-59 wondercraft. It's not. It's a tired retread of the Ka-25/27 utility platform whose rotor mechanics selection was entirely dictated by stability in the hover for ASW/CSAR and small deck footprint reasons. Ask any Hind driver who flew at high power settings and high-hot conditions in AfG and he will tell you, quite explicitly, how little faith he has in the platform's ability to keep from losing it's rotor if not tail in dynamic (high-low-neg G change) maneuvering at speed through those canyons.

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The havoc-carries on the tradition of the HIND, visually fearsome and deadly.
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Aesthetics are rarely a reason to judge the military capabilities of a platform but even so /ugly/ doesn't help on the sales-over-sense level.

Myself, if I wanted to design a platform, it would be one biased towards a SIDELOOKING mission aperture system like the Mi-24VP (duuuh, it's been awhile) 'artillery spotter' variant. Ram the biggest damn set of optics/radar and comms channel possible in the aft cabin as you can in one ship. And then make it's flight twins dumb-shooters with an internal dropfire set of stacked mini-munitions as standoff bus systems. Throw in a cheap recce drone for peaking behind buildings or taking closeups of faces and start the engagement from a minimum of 1,500ft and 20km out from any target. Whether Russia has the technology to craft a LOCAAS type minimissile I don't know. But even they have to see that not being able to buy huge fleets of /anything/ means you had bloody well better hold onto the new-tech silver bullets you do manage to scrape together.

Look at the Hind. Realize that half it's 'reload' munitions were carried in the cabin anyway. Build up the dogohouse to provide better clearance for a rigid rotor. Now chop out the gun turrets and must-fly-towards-target optics. Push the CPG aft into the cabin and pull his cockpit. Use a more refined version of the SHADOW pilotstation scabon to blend back into the troop compartment. Now lower and chop in half the rear boom to install a ringtail fan. Remove the weapons wings and arch the fuselage shoulders outwards to form a blended lifting body shape while faceting the sides inwards just a tad. Put in full length doors on one side, able to be replaced by sensor apertures, litters or RORO pallets of equipment and munitions at will. You now have a chopper roughly one third as long as the Hind with THE SAME cabin length, if slightly less wide.

Sell this 4 million dollar machine as a straightup 200knot-to-250nm replacement for the quite pterodactylian Jetranger/MD-500/BK-117/Eccureil derived designs in the same weight class.

NOW you are designing to that market base that would make FUNDING the specifics of the weapons system packaging happen for military equivalents possible.

It may be that the Kasatka would be a better starting point for this. But the principals must remain the same: smaller, lighter, faster, further, more generic bus platform. Using COE to maintain standoff and letting missiles close through the trashfire while the shooters remain above/beyond it.


KPl.

ch1466, have to admit that I do enjoy reading your responses,and that you have a
liking to aviation .And also just a tid bit (you said you did not like rotary A/C) But shure you no that (ch) stands for Combat Helicopter) lol..just kidding ..I do agree that there are some nice platforms out there if they were made into (notar) and Bell ..But were would the Military Manufacturing world be if they didn't have an over priced ,over weight rotary winged A/C .