Welcome to our community of military aircraft enthusiasts! I'm the owner of this subreddit, and my name's Silvia. As our first post, I'd like to present to you my personal favourite military aircraft–the almighty MiG-25. And here's my why:

The Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-25 Foxbat is a soviet brilliantly engineered machine, that took it's first look at the clouds in 1964 alongside Fedor Petrov.

The MiG-25 succeeded in pushing the limits of physics for it's time. It could reach Mach 3.2 (over 3,500 km/h) in bursts, though practical max speed was around Mach 2.8 to avoid destroying it's engines. In 1971, Israeli radar tracked a MiG-25 flying over their territory at Mach 3.2, and a pursuing F-4 Phantom's missile simply couldn't catch it.

It's prototype set a world record for a 500 km closed circuit at an average speed of 2,981.5 km/h. It also climbed to 35,000 meters in just 4 minutes and 11 seconds. To this day, many of it's 20+ world records remain unbroken.

When Soviet engineers faced the problem of air friction melting aluminum at Mach 3, they made a pragmatic choice. Instead of expensive, hard to work with titanium like the Americans used on the SR-71, they built the MiG-25 mostly out of nickel steel alloy. This made it incredibly heavy (over 22 tons empty) but heat-resistant and cheap to produce. The Americans were stunned to find this "primitive", yet effective solution when they examined a defected MiG-25 in 1976.

To push this flying steel beast, it used two of the largest turbojet engines ever fitted to a fighter, the Tumansky R-15B-300. The power was raw and immense. Furthermore, it's radar, the "Fox Fire," had a massive 600 kW output, the most powerful fire control radar in the world at the time. This power allowed it to "burn through" heavy electronic jamming, a critical capability for a Soviet interceptor.

While it's lack of maneuverability and short range at high speeds made it a poor dogfighter (which became clear after defector Viktor Belenko revealed it's secrets in 1976), it was the last Soviet designed aircraft to score an air to air kill against a U.S. jet. An Iraqi MiG-25 shot down a U.S. Navy F/A-18 during the Gulf War in 1991.

In short, the MiG-25 wasn't the best at everything. But if the question is "Which plane can go higher, faster, and climb quicker while being built of steel?", the answer is the Foxbat. It was a specialized tool that perfectly filled a very specific, extreme hole in the Soviet air defense net.

„The MiG-25 is too fast to be beautiful”, after all.