Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-29 Fulcrum - History, Design, Performance & Dissection

Context is important

You might have seen that I only said Mig29 and not Mig29 sniper

Why do you want a radar the sinper never had

In this case let’s remove Yak-141’s radar and RWR as well since it never received in real life.

See the logic in here?

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But did they plan to give Elta radar to sniper?

As far as I know they did although radar wasnt integrated with sniper upgrade.

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there is non because those two vehicles are completly differnet cases

first of all you are wrong it had a radar and completed weapons testing, it didnt had an IRST

second off all the romanian goverment / MoD decided they want to keep the N019 to reduce cost and complexity of the project,
that didnt happen for the YAK-141 unless you have a document saying that they want to put the 141 into service without a radar and RWR

but lets use your “logic”

then we would have to remove the turret of the E-100 since it never had it in real life
and put it down in br to 2.0 since it only has the hull machine gun, see the problem?
and after removing the rwr of the 141 lets put it at 11.0 since the BRs above that it cant effectively operate without an RWR

but lets keep going since the Su-27 was planned to originally have a pesa, instead of the N001, should it also get it ingame?

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they did at the start of the siniper upgrade but those plans changed

they kept the N019 to reduce cost and complexity

Wrong.

Radar on Yak-141 was never installed on airframe, it was tested in facility.

Doesnt change the fact that ELTA Radar was suggested in the first place.

Yak-141 in real life never had Radar,RWR, IRST nor countermeasures, all of them was planned but never installed, if anything Yak-141 is one of the best example in case of ‘‘what if’’ vehicle.

You need to remove entire weapon,radar and defence system of Yak-141 before talking about E-100, even then it wouldnt change anything.

And where is that radar? Cause unlike Elta PESA radar that was planned for Su-27 wasnt build in time.

Your claims doesnt work on me buddy, especially in Yak-141 cases.

you are unable to understand that plans can change the 29sniper was planned to have the elta at the start of the project, but those plans changed into the project, so even IF the 29 sniper entered service it wouldnt have had the elta

and in the “what if” scenario of the Yak-141 entering service it would have had a radar and rwr

that radar had to be scratched bc all the specs of that radar were leaked to the US

https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/d31HShpE4xIV

somewhat

The radar was never upgraded because the planes were already at their end of their life and in need of restauration, they would have to be shipped to Moscow for MiG to do maintenance on them. The project was deemed too expensive and on top of that the russian company did not want to collaborate because of the upgrade plans that would include western equipment (israeli made radar, etc). The Romanian MiG-29s required new engines which were only possible through Russia.
Keeping the MiG-29s in the Airforce was too costly already, improving them wouldn’t make sense either when the Lancer was already a finished product for the Airforce, while less capable the cheaper maintenance and upgrade cost were the big part of it

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I conducted a test on the MiG, and they got the speed curve half right:

Essentially, the higher the speed, the more accurate it is to the charts. However it is indeed missing a chunk of thrust at lower speeds.

This could also explain the laughable performance of the MiG Below 500km/h

Im making a bug report

Ill also conduct tests at higher altitudes

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Finished analizing the results, heres what i got:

Captura de pantalla (4012)

RD-33s should start at 8 tons, decrease thrust until M 0.3 @ ~7650 tf, then go up all the way to ~8600 tf @ M 0.6

In game the engines stay at around 6800 tf until M 0.2, and have a major divergence of thrust compared to the charts. From 1.4 tf at M 0.0 to around 350kgf at M 0.6; after that, the charts align better.

Ill start writing the report after im done eating.

In case anyone wants to confirm, heres the chart:

Screenshot 2025-06-08 at 12-52-48 Практическая аэродин...pdf

Tests done @ H = 0 km, highest curve.

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Report done, would appreciate your and community managers’ help to get this to the Devs before the patch goes live

https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/BfGxSPFx6T6S

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@SandMartin did a report on the underperforming acceleration
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/2SvPmiiBjK5j

The last time the acceleration and top speed was reported, the devs cited the Zhukovsky curves matched and that it was close enough. Perhaps they overlooked a 20% underperformance in acceleration according to SandMartin, combined with your observation of the thrust chart… which I and others have noted and reported before.

Maybe I’ll bring this to the attention of some tech moderators, there may be worth another look.

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Thank you for the observation. I’ll link his report onto mine to prove our point further.

istg if none of these works even when theyre releasing a Premium MiG-29 im actually dropping this jet. Haven’t played it since i got the Su-33. Months ago.

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On Su-27 radar you are a bit wrong. It was built and tested, but due to the level of technology at that time (around the world, not just USSR) PESA radar dish of that size, in terms of lock and scan range showed inferior results to the mechanical one. And then due to time constraints engineers just literally replaced PESA with mechanical Cassergain dish on a same exact radar, tested it and called it a day.
Later down the line USSR and Russia finished this project (technically) resulting in N011M (Base version of N011 is just N001 with Cassergain dish replaced with slotted planar dish and additional ATG channel, and N011M finally recieved PESA dish). And iirc, Su-27M programm tested N011M on one of the airframes, that was later used as a basis for the pre-production batch.

I noticed SMT got NCTR now, problem is that it is only available in STT. Is this realistic behavior?

Yes

Although I do agree that thrust would help the MiG tremendously, especially at higher altitudes, I don’t think it will change the inherent issue with its FM. The main reason it performs so poorly in relation to its competition is the bleed rate due to excessive fuselage & wing drag.

Comparing the wing & fuselage drag of the MiG with 2 larger aircraft (F-15C & Su-27), it comes off worse than both despite being 10-20% smaller in length & wingspan, along with having a wing area about 1/3 to 2/5 smaller.


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