RadPig's Random Fun Facts
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post some interesting stuff, long or short or maybe somewhere in between, about anything that has to do with war, planes, and weapons, pretty much anything Smile. i'll start y'all out


Sidewinder History Fact

Compromised technology

The Taiwan Strait battles inadvertently produced a new derivative of Sidewinder: shortly after that conflict the Soviet Union began the manufacture of the K-13/R-3S missile (NATO reporting name AA-2 'Atoll'), a reverse-engineered copy of the Sidewinder. It was made possible after a Taiwanese AIM-9B hit a Chinese Communist MiG-17 without exploding; amazingly, the missile lodged itself in the airframe of the MiG-17 and the pilot was able to bring the plane and the missile back to his base. According to Ron Westrum in his book "Sidewinder", the Soviets obtained the plans for Sidewinder from a Swedish Colonel, Stig Wennerström, and rushed their version into service by 1961 copying it so closely that even the part numbers were duplicated. Years later, Soviet engineers would admit that the captured Sidewinder served as a "university course" in missile design and substantially improved Soviet and allied air-to-air capabilities. The K-13 and its derivatives remained in production for nearly 30 years. In the 1960s, the possession of the K-13 in the Soviet arsenal caused major changes in the USAF bombing tactics, forcing bombers from high-altitudes down to lower levels, below enemy radar coverage
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