The Sukhoi Su-57 is a twin-engine stealth multirole fighter aircraft developed by Sukhoi. It is the product of the PAK FA (Russian: ПАК ФА, prospective aeronautical complex of front-line aviation) programme, which was initiated in 1999 as a more modern and affordable alternative to the MFI (Mikoyan Project 1.44/1.42). Sukhoi's internal designation for the aircraft is T-50. The Su-57 is the first aircraft in Russian military service designed with stealth technology and is intended to be the basis for a family of stealth combat aircraft.

A multirole fighter capable of aerial combat as well as ground and maritime strike, the Su-57 incorporates stealth, supermaneuverability, supercruise, integrated avionics and large payload capacity. The aircraft is expected to succeed the MiG-29 and Su-27 in the Russian military service and has also been marketed for export.

After repeated delays, the first Su-57 entered service with the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) in December 2020.

Origins

In 1979, the Soviet Union outlined a need for next-generation fighter aircraft intended to enter service in the 1990s. The programme became the I-90 (Russian: И-90, short for: Истребитель 1990–х годов, lit. 'Fighter of the 1990s') and required the fighter to be "multifunctional" (i.e. multirole) by having substantial ground attack capabilities, and would eventually replace the MiG-29 and Su-27 in frontline tactical aviation service.

Though not a participant in the MFI, Sukhoi started its own programme in 1983 to develop technologies for a next-generation fighter, eventually resulting in the forward-swept wing S-32 experimental aircraft, later redesignated S-37 and then Su-47.

Due to a lack of funds after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the MFI was repeatedly delayed and the first flight of the MiG 1.44/1.42 prototype did not occur until 2000, nine years behind schedule.

Because of Russia's financial difficulties, the programme aimed to rein in costs by producing a single multirole fifth-generation fighter that would replace both the Su-27 and the MiG-29. Further cost-saving measures include an intended size in between that of the Su-27 and the MiG-29 and normal takeoff weight considerably smaller than the MiG MFI's 28.6 tonnes (63,000 lb) and the Su-47's 26.8 tonnes (59,000 lb).

In April 2002, the Ministry of Defence selected Sukhoi over Mikoyan as the winner of the PAK FA competition and the lead design bureau of the new aircraft. In addition to the merits of the proposal, Sukhoi's experience in the 1990s was taken into account, with the successful development of various Su-27 derivatives and numerous exports ensuring its financial stability.

Design

The Su-57 is a fifth-generation multirole fighter aircraft and the first operational stealth aircraft for the Russian armed forces. In addition to stealth, the fighter emphasizes supermaneuverability in all aircraft axes, capacious internal payload bays for multirole versatility, and advanced sensor systems such as active phased-array radar as well as the integration of these systems to achieve high levels of automation

The aircraft has a wide blended wing body fuselage with two widely spaced engines and has all-moving horizontal and vertical stabilisers, with the vertical stabilisers canted for stealth; the trapezoid wings have leading edge flaps, ailerons, and flaperons. The aircraft incorporates thrust vectoring and large leading edge root extensions that shift the aerodynamic center forward, increasing static instability and maneuverability.

Designed from the outset as a multirole aircraft, the Su-57 has substantial internal payload capacity that allows the carriage of multiple large air-to-surface ordnance. Weapons are housed in two tandem main weapons bays in the large ventral volume between the widely spaced engine nacelles and smaller side bays with bulged triangular-section fairings near the wing root.

The first aircraft in Russian military service to emphasize stealth, the Su-57 employs a variety of methods to reduce its radar signature. Similar to other stealth fighters such as the F-22, the aircraft aligns the planform edges to reduce its radar cross-section (RCS); the leading and trailing edges of the wings and control surfaces and the serrated edges of skin panels are carefully angled to reduce the number of directions the radar waves can be reflected. Weapons are carried internally in weapons bays within the airframe and antennas are recessed from the surface of the skin to preserve the aircraft's stealthy shape, while radar absorbent material (RAM) coatings absorb radar emissions and reduce the reflection back to the source.

As with other stealth fighters, the Su-57's low observability measures are chiefly effective against super-high-frequency (between 3 and 30 GHz) radars, usually found on other aircraft. The effects of Rayleigh scattering and resonance mean that low-frequency radars, employed by weather radars and early-warning radars are more likely to detect the Su-57 due to its size.

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  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 days ago

    Anyone else who feels that they've outgrown gratuitous violence in videogames, or is it just me? I'm replaying The Last Of Us right now, and some of the scenes and gameplay are excessive. I remember playing this game when it just came out 10 years ago when I was 16 and thinking it was the best thing ever, but 10 years later it just seems like too much, and I certainly don't remember it being this graphic. The game still holds up very well, and some of the writing and gameplay choices are still great. Like cutting to black just before you die a gruesome death in the game. The unseen is always scarier than what is plainly visible. The game certainly does a good job at terrifying you once you "buy into" it and immerse yourself, I'm way more scared now than I was when I first played the game 10 years ago.

    Maybe I've just mellowed out a ton in my 20s, maybe I'm more aware of the fragility of life now, maybe I'm just no longer an edgelord teenager, who knows. Just my thoughts. Also please no spoilers for the second game, part of the reason I'm playing the first one again is to refresh myself on the plot for the second game, which I haven't played yet.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      3 days ago

      I would say there are two kinds of gratiutious violence. There's TLOU, which I would call violence porn or misery porn. In TLOU the violence is supposed to be impactful but the designers made the game a silly action game anyway. There's no way to talk your way through, avoid people, or really do anything but shank and brick lots and lots of people. But the devs, instead of making them cardboard game baddies, try to make the killing "meaningful" by giving them barks and death sounds like they're real people actualyl suffering. And it just totally fails. The game wants you to feel bad about slaughtering the people it forces you to slaughter in a way that feels deeply disingenuous and unfair to the audience/player. It's gratuitous in that it's unnecessary and ineffective.

      And then there's Darktide, which is just like "We have lovingly crafted every drop of the thirty gallons of rotting black plague blood that is going to explode out of this guy's head when you blast him with enough laser energy to power Toronto for a week". It's gratuitous and it's glorious.

      Like, you can have an impactful story where death and violence have great weight and horror, or you can have a murderhobo game where your little John Doomguy slaughters his way through hordes of faceless mooks that have no retreat or surrender behavior, but you can't usually have it both ways.

      • combat_brandonism [they/them]
        ·
        3 days ago

        you can't usually have it both ways

        borderlands kinda does but it gets there through ironic detachment I think

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
      ·
      3 days ago

      My tastes in games have drifted far from caring about graphical realism anyway so gore has been a kinda whatever thing for me since my late teens when fallout 3 was doing the bloody mess thing and gratuitous gore for it's own sake kinda was the norm. Also it's cgi gore and once it got to the ps3 level I stopped.beimg impressed by cgi. I really like gore in old movies cause I love practical effects and the amount of horror movies I got to see at a young age cause as a kid it's what I wanted to do when I grew up and my folks are down to nurture a thing and kinda concluded that if I'm already seeing the artifice in a scary movie to.the point I wanna replicate the effects myself, it's probably not gonna scar me. I think they were right cause I've seen liveleak shit and real violence is a lot different and does nothing at all for me. Even the most 'realistic' gruesome movie stuff is usually stylized to either undersell it or go so far there's a small enough break in disbelief that you don't register it as an actual torn apart corpse or whatever. Your brain can tell the difference at least a little between fake and real gore and you should react different to it, hopefully you do.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        3 days ago

        I have, like, a weird relationship with it. Like, I love super-duper detailed lovingly hand crafted gore like Darktide has, where it's just this completely cartoonish spectacle of people exploding in to like twelve gallons of blood as chunky giblets go everywhere. It's so over the top and un-serious and it fits the extremely serious grimdark silliness of good 40k games perfectly.

        But then there's games that try to be "realistic" that just make me feel sick. Like reading about devs of one of the recent Mortal Kombat games getting trauma from looking at pictures of injuries and corpses to make it "realistic". THat's totally unnecessary and just gross. Pretty much always game devs are going for hyper-realism with gore and violence. There's no reason to really research real violence and injury. That's almost certainly not what they even want. And when the rare devs do try to depict realistic violence it often ends up ineffective. Maybe it's too realistic and on a small screen, without the smell, without the sweat and wearniess, it doesn't have an impact because real violence often isn't spectacular or visually dramatic. Other times they do a high fidelity depiction of violence and it's just grotesque and feels weirdly sadistic, like they expect you to enjoy something that's just awful. regardless, I think realistic violence very rarely is effective in video games. Like narrative games can use it sometimes, but action, rpg, adventure games, it just doesn't belong there.

        And I agree that folks can mostly tell the difference between real violence and theatrical violence. Real corpses don't look like actors in movies or characters in games. The uncanny valley effect is very well tuned for most people.In movies that are really trying to punch you in the gut with the horrors of violence and warfare it's the ones where the actor gets shot and just collapses that get me. No drama, no clutching at wounds. They just collapse like a rag, because that's what happens when someone takes a shot to the vitals. There's no drama, just the grim inevitability of death.

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
          ·
          3 days ago

          The mortal kombat thing is just abuse for abuse sakes. People want over the top evil dead gore from mk, there's no reason at all to look at real dead things. You can look at anatomy books and like, medical texts and stuff.

          I'm rewatching Twin Peaks The Return right now and an aspect of Twin Peaks had always been a reflection of the media landscape it occupied and how it depicts violence. The Return encapsulates everything you posted, really David Lynch in general tends towards pointing this out artistically. I react to the violence he depicts with the same repulsion that I do to it irl and I have seen some fucking awful shit irl. I've seen dead 4 dead people before, have seen some pretty bad intentional stuff not to get into much detail and have had someone who knew where I lived want me dead before. While I do have to admit, adrenaline comes with a thrill, it's made for that, real life violence is absolutely awful and vile and dirty. I've been willing to take a life to protect my own, I've barricaded my house and thrown a firebomb back through my window at the assailant and then ran out with a tire iron and taser with the absolute intention of killing them. It is the ugliest fucking thing, there is absolutely nothing that felt remotely good about it other than ending an imme threat. Eventually it was worked out that this town was way too small for this kind of beef and I still need to act nice to this fuck until he ODs, this was because he started sleeping with a woman who was staying with us and being a crackhead got paranoid we were fucking her. That opportunity was well presented to either of us well before they even knew each other but her wanting to break up was of course on us. She'd chaotic as hell and it would have been nice of her to not hook up with the most unstable and hardest to deal with guy possible while crashing on our couch but whatever, it's still his fault for yknow, being a homicidal stalker after. Anyway, Twin Peaks gets how to make fake violence hit like it does irl.

          Bringing it back, that's something you learn early on if you wanna do film in general things are tightened and dramatized cause it's drama. Realism is still a contrived realism and tends to evoke less real.feeling than a more traditionally dramatic piece, we take in performance very different than a real experience cause you're the observer and not a participant and that includes games, you're still an observer, you don't have agency in a choose your own adventure goosebumps books any more than any video game.