MAKS Mikoyan

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MAKS Mikoyan

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Finally, it's done! Thanks to Stas Bush from SD.net for help with the Russian. Govorite po russky, tovarisch!



MAKS Mikoyan

Real Name: Maksimilian Mikoyan

Age: 55

Origins:
The name Mikoyan is known to all households in Russia and the Soviet Union, belonging to two greats in Soviet history. The first is Anastas Mikoyan, renowned statesman, diplomat and ambassador to the world nations, the Soviet Union’s ‘traveling salesman’ who bridged the gap between East and West by introducing to the Soviet proletariat such Western things such as corn flakes, popcorn, corn on the cob and ice cream – feats that won him no less than six Orders of Lenin. The second is that of Artem Mikoyan, the man who headed the OKB-155 Mikoyan-i-Gurevich Design Bureau, the genius who designed the Soviet Union’s first jet fighters; who was behind everything from the likes of the venerable MiG-21 Fishbed, that continues to fly fifty years after its first flight; to the MiG-105 Spiral, the Soviet Union’s first space fighter – achievements twice earning him the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, the highest civilian honor in all the Motherland.

The third is Maksimilian Mikoyan. Grand-nephew of the brothers Mikoyan, he would come to inherit the most audacious attributes of his agile Armenian forebears, namely the visionary innovativeness and businessman’s cunning of Anastas, and the sheer technological brilliance of Artem. After graduating from Moscow State University at the age of eighteen, and at the top of his class in aeronautical engineering no less, Maksimilian would join the Soviet Air Force – the VVS – but he served not in the function of a combat pilot and did not see action in conflict zones such as Afghanistan. Instead, his proficiency in piloting aircraft together with his academic achievements would lead to his assignment as a test pilot in the very-same design bureau his grand-uncle founded, flying experimental aircraft in the A.V Fedotov Flight Test Center and taking part in the aircraft design process in the A.I. Mikoyan Engineering Center.

There, both Maksimilian’s skills as a pilot and his aeronautical engineering expertise would become extremely valued in the designing of new prototypes and in the refinement of aircraft already in service, like the MiG-29 Fulcrum and Mig-31 Foxhound fighters he was most intimately familiar with. The ability to not only test the experimental prototypes in flight and push their airframes to their very limits, but also to contribute to the design process with valuable scientific input gleaned from both a pilot’s perspective and that of an engineer’s experience would prove to be crucial in the creation of the latest generation of MiG aircraft. Maksimilian played a part in designing the new MiG-28 Flaggot fighters that acquitted themselves well against American F-14 Tomcats in a highly publicized incident in 1986.

With this success marking the start of his promising career, Maksimilian was given a position unprecedented for someone his age, that of chief test pilot of MiG’s next Projekt 1.42, a technology demonstrator that would serve as a stepping stone for the future 5th generation fighters planned for the VVS. In this capacity he would oversee and personally test emerging technologies such as high-mach supercruise, thrust-vectoring controls and modern avionics, and their integration into the airframe of the prototype aircraft. However, disaster struck before the plane even got into the air.

The design team was working on the Lyulka AL-41F supercruise-capable jet engine and Maksimilian was inspecting the plane to see how tight the massive engine would fit into the crevasses of his MiG’s fuselage. As he was doing so, the engine was accidentally activated by the rest of the design team who were in the soundproofed control room while he himself was in the test room with the engine. As he was sucked into the turbine, his frantic cries of help could not be heard over the sound of the Lyulka jet engine, and the noise of the jet engine itself could not be heard from the soundproofed control room where his comrades were waiting for him in, and despite desperately clawing onto and grabbing any miscellaneous objects he could, Maksimilian was eventually sucked into the turbofan’s turbines and swallowed whole.

It was a testament to Soviet personal protective equipment that Maksimilain even survived the ordeal, much less wholly intact with all his limbs and organs still in place. It was also because prior to being eaten by the jet engine, Maksimilian had the uncommon sense to throw as many foreign objects and tools and miscellaneous stuffs as he could in its face in an effort to disable or damage it before it ate him alive. This effort worked, partially, as the damaged engine flamed out while he was halfway inside it, before it could fully digest him and excrete him out of its 3D-vectoring thruster.

Despite being in possession of all his limbs and organs, Maksimilian was still heavily injured with many grievous wounds, fractures and burns. He spent months in the hospital and was unable unfortunately to continue participating in Projekt 1.42. Even after his discharge, he had to spend the better part of a year recuperating in the Mikoyan family dacha. There, he met many well-wishers, such as his good friend Olegushka Staneski, who was there on the day of the horrible accident; and the legendary test pilot Colonel Marina Popovich, whose acquaintance he had made some time ago; as well as his fellow Mikoyans, cousins and siblings and uncles and aunties who tended to him as he made his recovery.

When not being bothered by his guests, Maksimilian decided to brush up on his reading to pass the time, though in the Mikoyan family dacha it seemed that all the library had were boring political journals by his grand-uncle Anastas and obsolete engineering logs by his other grand-uncle Artem. Still, with nothing better to do, he pursued these entries and went through them voraciously. He learned much from them, and aside from those moldy old books he also found the occasional Western publications, probably collected by Anastas during his trips to America, and he found their funny pages most amusing.

Nonetheless, those days of being bound to beds, wheelchairs and crutches were tedious in the extreme for young Maksimilian. He was an ambitious man and his injuries were not only physical, but they also ensured that his once-promising career ended up crashing and burning like a MiG that had been hit by a maverick missile. As he brooded and as his frustrations grew, he had his first bout of alcoholism and grew mildly addicted to unhealthy things such as vodka cigarettes. His family chastized him for this, though, his mother nagging him and pointing at party apparachtnik Boris Yeltsin and asking Maksimilian if that was what he wanted to end up becoming like. Nyet, he did not.

So he got better. He gradually returned to health and with physical therapy was ensured a complete recovery. As his mood began to lighten, he remembered an idea he once had during a particularly drunken night. The concepts he developed in his idleness, the diaries of Anastas and Artem, and even those funny pages he read gradually coalesced into his mind and solidified into a concrete idea. A mad idea. But with a lack of anything to do, and with a bizarre compulsion, Maksimilian decided to pursue this idea with dogged determined dedication. Da, he did.

Maksimilian went into the Mikoyan family dacha’s garage, that had been preserved in the state grand-uncle Artem had left it all those years ago. In it, Maksimilian found all the tools he would need. Surely, they were old and quite outdated compared to the modern 1980s technology he was accustomed with, but they were nonetheless effective and functional, being made of solid durable Soviet construction and stainless steel. With imprecise tooling and machinery, he set about his great project. Consulting various reference material, from the latest in Soviet aerospace journals and even procured Western science and technology literature, as well as Artem’s discolored pages, over a period of months Maksimilian built himself a great contraption there in Artem’s garage. It was aeronautic, it was aerodynamic, it was ultramatic, it was a greased lightning!

Actually, it was a fully functional preliminary flightsuit prototype. Perhaps similar to the historic Mk.I Cherubs created by Skyhaven’s Gregory Banks, and the haphazard Rocketeers used by American Airborne soldiers in the Great Patriotic War, Maksimilian’s design was the ultimate in the rocket/jetpack’s technological evolutionary pathway. Not so crude as merely strapping a propulsion system onto the back of a man, or bolting on a couple of wings (be they fixed or ornithoptic), as Maksimilian used his considerable aeronautic expertise to fashion a fully-working aerodynamic fuselage that could be worn on a person’s back, together with the wings, engines, advanced avionics and all. The prototype was ready to fly. All that was needed was a test pilot, a real man brave enough (or foolish enough) to fly such a potentially unsafe and unsound design. And Maksimilian Mikoyan was that man.

The morning after the doctor declared him to have completed his recovery without any longer needing crutches or other assistive devices to walk, Maksimilian did his preflights, donned his flightsuit’s fuselage, counted down and, without a second’s hesitation, he launched himself to the skies. The mere act of running with his own legs to attain takeoff velocity was euphoric enough, but as the engines flared to life and took him faster and faster to the point where he no longer had to run because his feet were no longer on the ground was an amazing sensation – one of pure exhilaration, like actually being a jet aircraft as it took off the runway. This time, the runway was a nearby hill that Maksimilian was running down on, and like a jet he lifted off and soared to the heavens themselves, into the free air, the clear blue skies, the white clouds with their silver linings, up-up and away. The ground beneath his feet had grown tiny, his home dacha like an ant and the rest of the town like other miniscule insects as he gained altitude, and soon he began making some simple maneuvers – his test pilot’s instincts taking over as he sought to see what exactly his mean machine could do and what it couldn’t.

What it couldn’t do was stay in the air for too long, since it did not have a big fuel tank, and what Maksimilian had to do was land. So he did, landed on his landing gear and promptly breaking them upon hitting the ground. His landing gear was his legs.

They fractured on impact, and Maksimilian heard them snap like twigs over the sound of his dying engines. As promptly as he was previously given the clean bill of health, he was again returned to the hospital. They surgically realigned his broken shinbones, whose splinters were sticking out of his skin, and once more Maksimilian had to spend months in recovery. These months were spent perfecting the not inconsiderable shortcomings he had found upon his flightsuit’s first flight. He ordered new engines to improve the thrust-to-weight ratios and fuel efficiency, as well as increased capacity fuel tanks, and pondered the use of new lightweight alloys and composites to decrease his flightsuit’s weight, improved the fly-by-wire system and avionics, as well as the landing gear, of course. Examining the Ilizarov apparatuses stuck to his legs, he came up with a simple solution, the use of simplified powered ‘leggings’ to allow him to land without incident. A new helmet was also in order.

When he recovered, again, he once more took to the skies on his new and improved flightsuit. This time it went off without a hitch, the more powerful engines allowing him to take off just after a short jog and the improved efficiency and fuel capacity allowing him to stay in the air for more than half an hour. Improved avionics, fly-by-wire, navigation and control systems allowed him to do more than simple maneuvers, such as barrel rolls and spins, but Maksimilian did not want to press his luck. Cautiously, he landed, and this time the hydraulic braces supporting his legs allowed him to land without incident, or fracturing his tibia and fibula.

This successful test was followed by another, more daring one. Daring in that Maksimilian flew longer and executed more maneuvers and tested new features installed on his suit, and also because he had gathered himself an audience of fellow MiG co-workers who were eager to see what he had been up to, as well as some military officials who were convinced to spare their afternoons to see some private personal airshow. This third flight was a triumph, with the MiG and military men making a note of its huge success by creating a new division in the design bureau solely to pursue Maksimilian’s pet project. With him being naturally in charge, the program was called Легкий личный перспективный фронтовой пехотный истребитель, or Lyogkiy Leechniy Perspektivniy Frontovoi Pekhotniy Istrebitel, the Light Personal Perspective Frontline Infantry Fighter.

The LPPFIF immediately garnered the interest of the VVS as well as the VDV, the Soviet Airborne Troops. Feeling left out as the Red Army and the GRU’s own various Spetznaz units developed their own cyborgs and armors, the VVS and VDV saw the potential in the MiG LPPFIF and supported it heavily, sending a special request to Maksimilian with the requirements they needed for the personal infantry fighter he was designing. He fulfilled these in due time, and by the late 1980s the VVS and VDV had in their disposal elite Soviet Sky Spetznaz Squadrons outfitted with the latest iteration of Maksimilian’s flightsuit, the MiG-88 (NATO reporting name: Faceoff).

It was no longer some haphazard prototype built in a dacha garage with a box of spare tools. It was a lean and mean machine constructed in the A.I. Mikoyan Engineering Center with precision equipment, and by the same team behind aircraft such as the MiG-29 Fulcrum. It was designed to be a multirole aerial infantry platform, and thus had both anti-air and anti-ground capabilities and weapon systems, and to fulfill its role in the Spetznaz it was also equipped with laser designators to paint targets for other Soviet military systems – from cruise missiles to strike fighters to supersonic bombers – as well as various electronic countermeasure systems.

As chief test pilot, and as the inventor of the flightsuits as well, Maksimilian was the one who had to integrate these new weapons into the MiG prototype and ensure that they were fully functional and operational, he had to make sure all the systems worked out and when they didn’t, he had to fix it so that it would work the second time around, or the third time around, or the fourth or the fifth, or until the problem was hammered out through ingenuity or sheer trial-and-error. While this was very strenuous, Maksimilian nevertheless relished being back in the helm of testing and trying new experimental prototype aircraft – his own new experimental prototype aircraft, to add to that. Still, it was not an easy feat, and in the times he could not cope he sometimes had to fall back to his vodka cigarettes.

The MiG-88 completed its trials successfully, on schedule, and was ready to enter service. By virtue of having the most experience with the flightsuits, Maksimilian was also assigned to train the VVS and VDV Spetznaz in operating their newfound equipment. They had much to learn, for the MiG-88 was unlike any other aircraft or gear they had handled, but under Maksimilian’s tutelage they learned well. In due time, this new cadre of Soviet Sky Spetznaz Specialists would be shown to the world in the 1987 Moscow Victory Day Parade at the Red Square, where watchers were awed and dazzled by the precision formation of flying men with wings who streaked through the skies and left dizzying contrails in their wake. Amidst all the marching bands of synchronized soldiers, the tanks and the massive missiles being displayed that day, it was Maksimilian Mikoyan – flying at the lead of his formation of MiG men – who became the talk of the proletariat that day, with Soviet generals and spectating Moscovites alike being wowed by the daring display. It was the first time the world saw Maksimilian Mikoyan, who the West dubbed the MiG Man, but it would not be the last.

The next time was when Maksimilian dropkicked Mathias Rust out of his airplane, which had flown from West Germany and had intruded upon Soviet airspace, going so far as to infringe upon Moscow itself. Rust was preparing to land right on the Red Square before Maksimilian’s power-booted heel went through his cockpit windshield and stomped his face in. Maksimilian’s apprehension of the Western interloper caused quite a stir, and while Mikhail Gorbachev set about scapegoating and firing various military officers (in a ploy to speed up his reforms by removing those in the military who opposed his efforts) blamed for the lapses that led a single-engined Cessna’s penetration of Soviet PVO anti-air defenses, Maksimilian was instead portrayed as a sort of dashing hero who just defended Moscow from a misguided miscreant violating aviation laws. It was far from being a Soviet superhero, but it was an attempt to save the Soviet military’s face that nonetheless placed Maksimilian in the spotlight.

This minor act of ‘heroism’, coupled with his performance on the Victory Day Parade, caused public curiosity in Maksimilian to pique and Western military/intelligence’s interest in him to intensify just as well. The unexpected emergence of a new Soviet armor design, so fast and so sudden, definitely put the MiG Man in their radars.

By then, other branches of the Soviet military – including the Red Army and the GRU, even the Navy and the Special Defense Corps – along with the militaries of various other Warsaw Pact nations began inquiring about Maksimilian’s MiG flightsuit as well. All the attention, from the public, the military, foreign governments both Warsaw Pact and Western, sparked something in Maksimilian, namely that long dormant Armenian businessman in him inherited from old grand-uncle Anastas. After taking a gulp of vodka, or a drag of those cigarettes, Maksimilian began promoting his MiG-88 to all curious parties, strutting his stuff and showing it off in all sorts of arranged air shows and exhibitions and even in mock air battles staged by himself and his personal demonstration team. These displays sufficiently awed and wowed his audiences quite handily, and very soon the MiG-88 was set for export to countries like Poland, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Cuba. It was quite a great thing, and Maksimilian celebrated this with a toast and a drag of some more vodka, in both liquid and cigarette form.

The MiG Man’s mercantile manners and the Faceoff’s proliferation in WarPac definitely caused even more of a stir in the West, and there were those in various military and intelligence agencies just longing for a piece of the MiG Man pie they were so missing out on. While there was that matter of an attempted interception by an unidentified powered armor when Maksimilian was testing a navalized MiG-88K and ended up straying off-course and accidentally exiting Soviet airspace, entering international airspace in the Bering Sea that just seemed to have an unmarked power armor (that looked like one of those Tin Man designs he read about back in the dacha) flying around in the area at the same time, it was not the most surprising or most treacherous act of Western deceit Maksimilian had encountered, not by far.

The most surprising, and most treacherous, attempt at subterfuge by the West happened in East Germany, before an air show and the unveiling of a new MiG-88 variant – a heavier and faster Faceoff, a mature design with highly improved capabilities that turned out to be too tempting for the West to ignore. It turned out that his good friend, Olegushka Staneski, had in fact sold out to the West and had done so years ago. Olegushka had been the one who had turned on the Lyulka engine that nearly killed him, and there in East Germany he made another go at feeding Maksimilian to the engines of the MiG-88. Then and there Olegushka confided to him his intentions to make off with the advanced Faceoff, fly over quick to West Germany where he would proceed to sell the flightsuit to the capitalists, and use his own experience working with Maksimilian to patent his own brand of flightsuits to sell to the NATO nations. But nyet, Maksimilian would have none of that, and after a struggle both of them disengaged and went into their respective armors – Maksimilian in his classic MiG-88 Faceoff, and Olegushka in his improved MiG-88M Faceoff-F, the Super Faceoff.

The two would explode out of their hangar in East Germany and proceed to engage each other in an aerial duel between both men and their machines, Olegushka with his superior flightsuit, and Maksimilian in a basic suit but with his considerable experience as test-pilot and designer of the MiG-88. The newer suit was faster, more maneuverable, stronger and heavier and better-armed, but Olegushka was unfamiliar with its handling and his objective was to make it out of East Germany before the military could respond or the Stasi could get to him. Olegushka broke off and went for West Berlin, but Maksimilian intercepted him and caught up with the use of afterburners before Olegushka could reach supersonic speed. Maksimilian had spent his missiles, which Olegushka had easily dodged with his superior machine, but gunfire was enough to damage the traitor’s flightsuit, enough to slow him down. But Maksimilian was empty and could not get a gun kill, so instead he resorted to engaging Olegushka in hand to hand, in the sky, getting into close-quarters-combat and grappling Olegushka and his Super Faceoff as they soared at near-sonic velocities towards the Berlin Wall. Maksimilian disabled the Super Faceoff’s remaining engine by throwing a jettisoned fuel tank at it, and as Olegushka’s engines flamed out the two of them made a transonic tumble. Olegushka armed his own cannons and aimed it at Maksimilian’s face, but Maksimilian’s own Faceoff’s engines were still working and as they fell he maneuvered and drove the both of them right smack dab into the Berlin Wall.

They landed right into the Berlin Wall’s Tesla Coil tower that demarcated East and West, that marked the Iron Curtain. However, Olegushka landed on top of the Tesla Coil and Maksimilian landed on top of him, riding him like a surfboard and using his body with the Super Faceoff’s fuselage as a shield from the deadly electro-ionic discharges of the overloading Tesla-transformer’s reactor. The resulting explosion was brilliant, with lightning shooting up into the Berlin sky and lighting up the night. Olegushka Staneski died and there was not enough left of the Super Faceoff for the West to sift through from the remains of it that landed on the Western side along with Olegushka’s body. Maksimilian himself had the good fortune to fall off the Berlin Wall’s ruined Tesla Coil and land in the safety of the German Democratic Republic, where the Border Guards and Stasi men quickly rushed him to a military hospital.

The incident was hushed up by both sides, neither willing to admit to what had happened and instead perfectly satisfied with chalking it up to a ‘training accident’ or something or another, as such things were known to happen when squadrons were preparing before air shows. Accidents did happen after all, comrades.

But Maksimilian would have none of that. He took no satisfaction in hiding the fact that his friend had betrayed him and had defected to the West in one of their perfidious plots. He revealed to the public what had happened, and that he was indeed the one the West called the MiG Man.

The MiG Man would disappear for several more months. The attempted defection of one of the MiG design bureau’s men, the subsequent air battle over Berlin, and Maksimilian’s tacit admission of what had happened complicated things for both Berlin and Moscow. But it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s ultimate decision to spare him from any punitive measures. He had played no part in the Western subterfuge and had, in fact, fought to prevent a piece of Soviet hardware from falling into Western hands. In light of this, Maksimilian was commended with several awards and despite Soviet and German filtering of events, the public got the gist of what had exactly happened in East Berlin and was enthralled by the story. For a while, the MiG Man had again become big news in both sides of the Iron Curtain.

This would be a boon to Maksimilian. As he recovered from more burns and broken bones, MiG received more orders from the likes of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and even North Korea. The MiG-88 was selling like the hotcakes grand-uncle Anastas wrote about in his journals. While the design bureau made proletarian profits from its redistribution of fighter flightsuits, Maksimilian did what he always did when he was recovering in his dacha after another high-speed impact, namely reading up on the memoirs of old grand-uncles Anastas and Artem and working to improve his designs. He took lessons learned from his regretful battle with Olegushka, which despite the circumstances still served as a test flight for the MiG-88M as well as the first time his MiG fighter flightsuits ever engaged in air-to-air combat. He strove to apply them to his planned improvements.

Meanwhile, as he combed the Mikoyan family dacha’s library he found another interesting item. Neither Anastas nor Artem’s journals, it was instead an even more browned-out and ancient piece of literature. It was an obscure paper written by the Nikola Tesla, the other one who fell out of the sky and landed in Tunguska, Siberia after that translocation experiment that the West had thought was a failure. The document’s subject matter involved ionocraft, flying machines that could run without the use of airplane engines, wings, ailerons, propellers, that could run electromechanically. It was with this idea in mind that Maksimilian set about developing his first electrohydrodynamic thrusters, once more in the dacha’s garage – which was now considerably more modern, having been upgraded as per his request. The initial trails proved promising, though not exactly a revolutionary kind of propulsion method, it was still a fairly compact device that could have value as a simple stabilizer mechanism. Maksimilian decided to incorporate this design into the latest iteration of his MiG-88, with hand-mounted electrohydrodynamic thrusters that can blast out thrust pulses to aid in extreme maneuvers.

With this minor modification to show for his time in the dacha, Maksimilian returned to the public limelight fully intending to continue his research and development of the MiG-88, as well as being the Soviet Union’s traveling salesman to the other Warsaw Pact countries. But Mikhail Gorbachev had other ideas in mind.

The political situation in the Motherland and its satellite states was growing increasingly dire in those times, with instability and public uncertainty being the order of the day. Thus there was a propaganda effort, concurrent with Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika reforms, an attempt to boost the morale and spirit of the citizenry. Much like how public superheroes were being used in the American and Western media, Gorbachev aimed to harness Soviet superheroes in the same way. Gorby was there in the Victory Day Parade when the MiG Men first flew, he was amongst those impressed by the Maksimilian’s daredevil stunts, and had since kept a close eye on the MiG Man. He knew that Maksimilian Mikoyan would be the perfect man for the self-conscious publicity campaign needed to revitalize the Soviet Union to the proletariat’s perception.

As the Soviet Union neared its end game, state propaganda would broadcast the exploits of the Soviet superheroes in an attempt to distract the public from what was going on around them. While the likes of Comrade Felix, as great a Hero of the Soviet Union as he was, saw limited service in this campaign due to his status as a living nuclear deterrent with highly destructive radiological powers, and the Communist Manifester was similarly preoccupied in Afghanistan, Maksimilian was at the fore of the effort in the home front, taking part in highly publicized feats of Soviet superheroism. With him were his fellow MiG Men, as well as a cadre of second-stringer Soviet superheroes like the Justice Enforcer and many others. While blowing away counterrevolutionaries and dissident aggressors by blasting them in the face with an Amraamski was not exactly conducive to PR, Maksimilian Mikoyan went around this by avoiding using any of his military weapons systems on petty Soviet ‘supervillians’. Instead, he did to them what he did to Mathias Rust, namely hit them with a subsonic dropkick to the face. It usually worked against minor-villains and low-level metahumans who offered minimal resistance and who could have been put down by security forces anyway, but for the occasional West-sponsored freedom fighter with star-spangled vibro-shields or the advanced armored Austerlitz agents, Maksimilian had authorization to drop thermobaric warheads right on top their heads.

This was a brief respite from the testing and designing he had grown accustomed to, and perhaps it was a welcomed change of pace since it gave him a chance to deal with the personal issues he had since the incident with Olegushka’s defection. He was unable to overcome or resolve them however, and after a while stomping on the faces of dissident aggressors and having photoshoots with the state media became a tedious affair. Yes, these engagements against petty criminals with semblance of superhuman abilities still gave Maksimilian the datum needed to further improve his fighter flightsuit designs, and the rare engagements with Western proxies and Shadow Legion operatives provided even more valuable information on not only the MiG-88’s performance capabilities, but also gave an approximation of what potential and actual adversaries they could face out there. It was useful, da, along with the performance evaluations given by his MiG Men in the VDV serving in actual combat in Afghanistan and Anogla against technologically-outfitted Mujahadeen and Apartheid South African proxies of America. But things were becoming different.

Maksimilian continued his work, although despite his engineering efforts, and his conduction of the campaign to market Soviet superheroes to the masses, nothing improved the state of the nation. Not that he particularly cared for geopolitics, for his interests did not lie there, but the pressures from Moscow, the increasing politicization of his work, the mess the country had become and his separation from work and family and the sheer digression from his previous way of life contributed greatly to his dissatisfaction and depression. Somehow, he realized that he preferred the simpler times when he was bound in the wheelchair and recuperating in the dacha, with only the works of his grand-uncles and his doting family’s Armenian home cooking and the garage’s toolshed as company. He once more returned to his vodka, in both liquid and cigarette forms. It was not healthy, but nothing was healthy those days as cultural malaise gripped the whole Motherland.

It was perhaps fortunate that Maksimilian was barely sober by the time the internal instabilities of the Soviet Union and its satellites reached its peak. If he had been lucid then, as the Berlin Wall was dismantled, as the Iron Curtain fell, and as the Soviet Union ceased to exist, he might’ve decided to smoke an entire carton of his vodka cigarettes at once, shoving the fags in his mouth and lighting them up and taking one long asphyxiating drag. But he didn’t, and like the many times he sequestered himself in his dacha after suffering burns, bruises and broken bones, he got better.

His burns and bruises and broken bones were non-physical ones, emotional, psychological, and ideological in nature, and over time they healed and mended. One bright and cold April day, Maksimilian left his dacha and with the original flying flightsuit he had tinkered with, he once more donned his leather jacket, ushanka flight cap and aviator goggles and took to the skies. After running out of fuel, he landed in a nearby town and took a long train ride back to the A.I. Mikoyan Engineering Center where his comrade coworkers welcomed him back into their fold.

Then and there he filled them with his vision to revitalize Mikoyan-i-Gurevich, a plan to renew it and ensure its prosperous future in the uncertain times of the nascent Russian Federation. They still had contracts abroad, in the now-former Warsaw Pact countries and elsewhere, and they had an obligation to their customers to ensure and assure the continuation of quality MiG services and products. Or so Maksimilian reasoned.

Then he gathered his so-called MiG Men, former members of the Soviet Sky Spetznaz Specialist Squadrons, VVS and VDV the men and women who had first trained under him all those years ago, who had gone and served in the military and seen action in the various Soviet conflict zones abroad, both far and near, elite soldiers who were nonetheless left behind in the post-Soviet era. Again with this cadre of troops, and freshly recruited new blood, did Maksimilian Mikoyan and the MiG Men storm the skies in the International Aviation and Space Salon, Mosaeroshow-92.

There in MAKS-1992, soaring in synchrony and accompanied with the VVS Strizhi aerobatics performance demonstration team’s MiG-29 Fulcrums, with additional performances by a squadron of Russian Knights Sukhoi-27 Flankers, and Tu-160 Blackjacks from the 121st Guards Heavy Bomber Regiment, Maksimilian showed the world that Mother Russia could still fly, that her wings of steel were not yet clipped, that it wasn’t over yet - and with white contrails the Swifts and Knights and White Swans and MiG Men crisscrossed the blue sky in a dazzling display of formation flying, of high speed passes, barrel rolls and corkscrews, afterburning sonic boom-buzzes and gratuitous Pugachev's Cobras. The exhibition lasted from day to dusk, until the sky turned red in a final sunset to the Soviet Union of old. The Russian aerospace industry still had a tomorrow to look forward to, thanks to Maks Mikoyan.

The next morning was a brand new day, and Maks Mikoyan was met with offers for contract renewals from the post-Soviet states. Countries like Azerbaijan, Poland and Yugoslavia would continue their contracts with MiG, and the air forces of Algeria, Bangladesh, India, Syria, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Yemen were sufficiently impressed by Maks’ display to make initial MiG-88 purchases. It was not only the MiG-88 that benefited from this though, as other products – both military and civilian, and those in between - from Mikoyan as well as Sukhoi, Tupolev and Beriev, Illyushin, Yakolev and Myasishchev garnered interest and purchases. Even though the MAKS airshow was originally meant to be an entertainment event, it became a vital market place where Russian and neighboring countries could find export contracts – the lifeblood for the still-struggling aerospace industry that had to fight for its existence in the immediate post-Soviet years of politicosocioeconomic bankruptcy in Russia.

But they survived, and in time prospered. Though not without hardship and not without difficulty and adversity, as the outbreak of post-Soviet conflicts would profoundly affect the economy and export markets, complicating things for Maks Mikoyan. While the war in Kragoreshtan and the curbstomping of Georgia saw the Russian military drastically increase its procurement of military hardware, events in the Balkans would see the breakup of Yugoslavia and the end of the MiG-88 contracts over there, and the Great Famine of Kyrgyz likewise saw the nation put its handful of disused MiG fighter flightsuits in some underground bunker just like what Moldova did. In the post-Soviet fallout, quite a few even end up falling into the hands of the West, something that Maks found very irksome. Furthermore, there was the apparent expansion of NATO, wherein many post-Soviet states joined the ranks of Western nations’ alliance. While this was mainly a political development, it also meant that their new member nations would have to comply with standardized Western equipment, and that meant that they would have to buy from Maks’ rivals, the Western defense contractors instead of the good old Russian companies that had previously been their Cold War staple.

Still, the new markets in emergent Third and Second World nations as well as the Russian petroruble-fueled economic recovery gave the aerospace industry the profits it needed. Rising up to the challenge, Maks began to diversify from his fighter flightsuits and again briefly returned to his roots in testing and designing experimental aircraft, such as the Projekt 1.44 and the Skat UCAVs. With the Russian aerospace industry gradually consolidating into what would become the United Aircraft Corporation, which would encompass companies like MiG, Sukhoi and Tupolev, amongst all others, the interplay between the former Soviet design bureaus that were now fully-fledged companies was changing drastically. Vladimir Putin was putting into motion his plan to create ‘national champions’, wherein large corporations in strategic sectors not only seek profit but also “advance the interest of the Motherland.” Putin saw Maks as one of these national champions, much like how Gorbachev saw him as a Soviet superhero, and in the days before Yeltsin’s resignation the soon-to-be President of Russia arranged a meeting

Maks Mikoyan found a powerful ally in Vladimir Putin, who came after the considerably inebriated Boris Yeltsin and turned around his predecessor’s ineffectual policies, setting about strengthening Mother Russia and making it a great power once more. Maks found this pretty amendable, and whilst they smoked vodka cigarettes together, he signed in on Putin’s plans – while he was not much into politics, currying up a good friend who could provide him with the profitable contracts he needed was a definite benefit, and gaining a favorable position in Putin’s new order was only an added bonus. Grand-uncle Anastas would’ve been proud of his grand-nephew’s cunning maneuvers.


Current Status:
It was a rough ride since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Somehow, someway, Maks was able to make it through – and not just that, but make it through on top. With big shares in MiG as well as other aerospace companies like Sukhoi, Tupolev and Komsomolsk, not to mention Aeroflot, Smirnoff and Smirnov, GAZ and Gazprom, as well as certain caviar companies, Maks has become a fully-certified Russian billionaire in his own right. Still, his position in Mikoyan-i-Gurevich itself has always been in the test pilot and designer roles, though now he serves in a high-ranking senior capacity in the design bureau, and he has never been much of a manager and has never acquired a taste for more bureaucratic positions.

Aside from his engineering, design and testing roles he also serves as a one-man advertisement campaign for MiG and pretty much the whole Russian aerospace industry. Every other year he is present at the MAKS Airshow, since it is held on odd years, and is a regular fixture at the Paris Airshow and other exhibitions throughout the world. He flies with his MiG Men and often with the VVS Strizhi, the Swifts, in their MiG-29 Fulcrums, and together with other acrobatics teams such as the Russian Knights they organize the great formations seen in the Victory Day Parades at the Red Square.

Currently, Maks’ time is divided between his frequent publicity stunts, the luxuries being a billionaire entails, and serious business as a test pilot and designer. He is working on the successor to the MiG-88, a second generation fighter flightsuit that will feature miniaturized and optimized 5th generation fighter technology.

Base of Operations:
The Mikoyan family dacha, where he does a lot of his brainstorming and where he has, over time, turned Artem’s garage and toolshed into a fully-modernized futuristic design center.

Also, as in his first days as a test pilot and designer, he can be frequently seen in the A.V. Fedotov Flight Test Center and the A.I. Mikoyan Engineering Center, working on the latest fighter flightsuits and other MiG designs.

Powers and Abilities:
Maksimilian Mikoyan is a mere mortal man, but what has allowed him to live long and prosper in his current position are not any special metahuman attributes, enhancements or the like, but a personal prowess that comes from his keen intellect combined with his agile Armenian ancestry as the descendant of Russia’s two most influential individuals who have historically helped shaped both the Soviet Union’s political and military-industrial complexes.

Maks graduated at the top of his Moscow State University aeronautics engineering class at the young age of eighteen and received his pilot training in the VVS, quickly became certified in flying all manner of Soviet fighter jet and other aircraft, and went on to be a test pilot who combined his considerable flight experience with his theoretical background in engineering to optimize the research and development of Soviet fighter jet designs through the 1980s and the 1990s.

After the invention of his first flightsuit, which would become the basis for the MiG-88 Faceoff, the turbulent times that gripped the Soviet Union saw him placed in many positions where he saved his own skin not through piloting skill nor revolutionary aircraft designs, but through his innate ability to maneuver his way around the political situations of the times. That saw his emergence as one of Gorbachev’s Soviet superheroes and, currently, one of Putin’s so-called national champions.

Still, the centerpiece of Maks Mikoyan ever since his fateful formation flight over the Red Square has always been his MiG-88 fighter flightsuit, which is currently in service in the Spetznaz units of the various branch of the Russian military and the GRU, and has seen export to numerous countries in the former Warsaw Pact, India, Venezuela, and others as well. The MiG-88 come in many variants* ever since their production in the middle-late 1980s, and one way or another Maks has played a hand in their design, testing, trial and evaluation.

Maks reserves several personalized and personally enhanced variant for himself, and while they are unique in their own way they still share the general traits of the generic design. The special MiG-88MAKS fighter flightsuit have the following features: An aerodynamic fuselage worn on the pilot’s back where the advanced avionics and navigation equipment are located, with IRST sensors and the world’s smallest electronically scanned array radar (courtesy of Phazotron) in the nose cone; supersonic cruise-capable turbofans built into the fuselage, the latest Saturn engines a far cry from the first MiG-88s that could only reach transonic through the tiny Tumansky thruster turbines that they used, and capable of completely vertical takeoff without any jogging or downhill running; a centerline conformal fuel tank; advanced variable-geometry swept wings, with segmented ‘mechaerolastic’ joints and multiple control surfaces to ensure maximum maneuverability and aerodynamic adaptability; multiple hardpoints on both fuselage and wings to carry either additional fuel tanks or weapon systems, ranging from simple dumbfire rockets and unguided bombs to the latest in precision guided munitions and miniaturized missiles from Vympel or Raduga; a visored helmet with a HUD interface, datalink capability, laser-designators, helmet-mounted weapons sights (HMS) that allow off-boresight lock ons, and a ‘reactive-reflex’ control systems not seen in generic MiG-88s (and not quite dissimilar to the specialized apparatuses in aircraft used by the KGB’s psychic sensitive pilots, but probably without the same degree of mindcontrol); an oxygen mask and a Non-Newtonian Fluid-Filled (N2F2) skullcap to go with the helmet; a Hands-On-Throttle-And-Stick (HOTAS) control interface belt protruding from the ventral side of the fuselage, waist-level, ergonomic and easily accessible to the pilot’s hands; forearm bracelets with micro-missile wrist launchers and a mini-minigun; palm-mounted electrohydrodynamic stabilizers capable of generating thrust pulses, which can easily blast a person away (also not seen in generic MiG-88s); and hydraulic power-leggings to serve as landing gear.

The fuselage and other components are ‘worn’ over a bodyglove. Initially the MiG-88 flightsuits came in a selectively rigid exosuit with body-bracing capable of supporting the weight of the fuselage and other components, but recently an alliance with Saintly Concerns Limited has seen the most advanced MiG-88s equipped with modified ‘Periwinkle’ Light Blue muscle suits. The MiG-88MAKS also uses a Light Blue bodyglove with an integrated Saint Sight in the helmet.

All MiG-88s, from the prototypes themselves to Maks’ own personal planes, are equipped with ejectors and parachutes in the anterior chest region of the pilot’s bodygloves, while only some of the MiG-88 variants, such as the less expendable and more expensive ones ones, feature recovery chutes for the fuselage itself. Lately Maks is experimenting on a kind of autopilot that can safely fly and land a MiG-88 even when the pilot has ejected and parachuted to safety.

The MiG-88MAKS is a mature development of MiG-88 technologies. The MiG-88 in general, aside from being a supersonic, highly maneuverable and well-armed personal fighter flightsuit, has a small size that gives it a relatively low radar cross section, allowing it a modicum of ‘stealth’ despite not having any of the stealthy features of Western 5th generation aircraft. This grants it a degree of tactical flexibility valued by the Spetznaz units in the various armies of the former Soviet Union, along with its Warsaw Pact allies and other countries that have purchased the Faceoff. In Soviet and Russian usage they have seen combat many times, at first in Afghanistan where they served as forward controllers and recon platforms, and then in the various post-Soviet conflicts including the fight against the technologically-radical forces of Kragoreshtan where the MiG-88s took a more frontal role in designating targets for VVS fighters and bombers, even those heavily defended by both ray guns and ray shields, as well as directly engaging Kragoreshtani war machines with varied degrees of success. MiG-88 variants in service in the Russian military and across the world have all manner of specialization, from the basic VDV Sky Spetznaz who provide aerial sniper coverage with modified SDV Dragunovs, to Vympel counterterrorist units armed with nerve gas-dispensing cluster munitions and thermobarics, to PVO point-defenders equipped with laser guns and Teslatronic lightning cannons. In the years since its introduction, the MiG-88 Faceoff has become a favorite of special forces operators and elite infantry in not only Russia, but in her allies as well.


Weaknesses:
The MiG-88 flightsuits, for all their air combat prowess, still cannot surpass modern fighter planes by any reasonable performance margin. Their small personal design simply cannot match dedicated fighters in terms of range, speed, weapons capacity, payload, sensors or hardware. While pilot skill can certainly play a role in determining a situation, those who fly the MiG-88 Faceoff are still infantry. Unless the technological disparity is so great, then a MiG-88 can defeat a more primitive jet fighter. Thus the MiG-88 is generally not employed in an air superiority role, but as a tactical multirole platform for specialized soldiers.

It also goes without saying that the MiG-88 is not designed to fight on the ground, and its capabilities upon landing are diminished from its capabilities while in flight. On the ground, the MiG-88 is no match against ground-warfare armor designs.

Aside from the inherent limitations of his design, Maks Mikoyan has several weaknesses of his own. Most notably is his alcoholism problem, his on and off again affair with the infamous vodka cigarettes. Then there is also his age, since despite his keen mind and his extensive piloting experiences, he is still a man in his mid-fifties and is no longer in his physical peak. While he does still partake in regular aerial displays, he leaves the most complicated and dangerous aerial stunts to his more capable cadre of MiG Men (and, more recently, MiG Ma’ams).

For all that, he is content with his wealth, his celebrity status in the Russian and Eastern European public eye, and most especially with his position as head test pilot and chief designer in Mikoyan-i-Gurevich.

Relations:
Maks Mikoyan is the ultimate survivor, a success story for those who have truly prospered despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the cataclysms that came after it. While other former Soviet superheroes mope and grope at the demise of their once-great communist nation, he chose instead to take the drastic changes in stride and make the most out of it, adapting to the capitalistic lifestyle with unpracticed ease and coming out on top. His skilled in creating lean and mean MiG machines is almost matched by his innate acumen at positioning himself most advantageously in any political situation.

While initially supportive of Gorbachev’s reformist policies in the last days of the Cold War, even becoming part of his Soviet superhero publicity campaign, the two have recently fallen out when Maks cast his lot with Vladimir Putin after Gorby was exiled from Russia and subsequently went off on his Quest for Peace with former American President Jimmy Carter. To Maks, who was not particularly a loyalist or nationalist, this was still tantamount to abandonment as the former Premier left the Motherland in the hardest of times. Though he did drink with Yeltsin, he seems to have struck a more resonant chord with Putin – going so far as to go with the former KGB lieutenant on publicity stunts where Putin himself flew his own MiG-88 flightsuit (but only after practicing in a trainer MiG-88 together with Maks, with both of them strapped tightly together to the craft’s rigid fuselage).

Aside from his ties with Mister Putin, Maks also maintains excellent relations with the Indians and his counterparts at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and, for some reason, Hindustan Antibiotics Limited (HAL) as well.

Maks Mikoyan is not so amicable with the Americans, having not forgotten the bitter events of the Cold War. When Anthony Saint and his Saintly Concerns Limited began infringing upon the United States’ primary defense contractors, Maks eagerly got on with the program and allied with Saint and his massive megacorporation. This alliance of convenience has resulted in the incorporation of Saint’s armored muscle suit designs into the MiG-88’s pilot equipment, and comes parcel with MiG’s partnership with the French Thales Group and the Israeli Rafael subsidiaries of Saintly Concerns.

However, Maks Mikoyan is not all smiles and vodka cigarettes. He has had, and continues to have, his fair share of enemies – from the Americans whose subversion he directly experienced in the Cold War and the terrorist Paul ‘Nemesis’ Austerlitz’ agents in the Shadow Legion who he also faced during his days as a Soviet superhero, to post-Soviet adversaries like the rampant rabid Russian Neo-Nazi groups who seem to have banded together with political opposition parties in Russia, and, in an ironic twist, even resurgent communist revanchists seeking to bring about the return of the Soviet Union. Once, the Red Chord and his rogue band of Red Army Chorists interrupted a Red Square parade, with their cleverly hidden hardware emerging from underneath parade floats as they took the Square by storm and began filling people’s brains with their music. Fortunately, Maks Mikoyan and his MiG Men were in the area, pereforming aerial acrobatics, and they were unaffected by Red Chord’s music because they couldn’t hear it over the sound of their turbojets – which Maks promptly informed Chord of, but only after giving him and his band of Bolsheviks supersonic dropkicks to the face.

Other adversaries include the usual political and business rivals seeking to dethrone Maks from his favored position by Putin’s side; the occasional psychic spies from China (perhaps from the Dead Ghosts metahuman special forces group) probably out to steal the MiG-88’s design which has not been exported to the PRC, and unable to obtain the schematics with their hacker-splicers because for all of Maks’ technological genius he has been slow to catch up on the Internet revolution; the major organized crime syndicates of the Russian Mafiya seeking to perform blackmail or worse to Mister Putin’s ardent supporters, and also desiring to illegally fence MiG-88s and other weapons technology to shadier organizations; apostate Technotheocrats with various inscrutable purposes for him from the relatively benign acts of proselytizing their faith to a fellow inventor, to rogue Recalibrators thinking that he is interfering in their ‘theological matters’, whatever on Earth they may be; various counterrevolutionary and secessionist techno-terror groups sponsored by the CIA or serving as Shadow Legion proxies, all aiming at destabilizing Mother Russia and offing those on the top who Maks happens to have sided with; the Russian chess prodigy and grandmaster of crime Boris Galkine, who is bent on using his underworld contacts, superintelligent Deep Blue supercomputers, and robotic combat chess pieces for his own nefarious ends; and the Kragoreshtani Serpent Doktor Mors Totenkopf who, unbeknownst to everyone else (Maks included), is actually an evil brain in a jar.

Most recently, Maks Mikoyan was also participating in an airshow at the Extremopolis to inaugurate the year’s Bridge Limbo Tournament when, inexplicably, an aircraft that vaguely looked like an F-15 S/MTD or ACTIVE strafed them and transformed into a big bladed robot bent on mass slaughter. While Maks wasn’t bringing armaments into an airshow, he was able to distract the thing by jumping on its back and dumping his fuel tanks onto the rogue robot’s thrust intakes, doing some damage and prompting the angered machine to chase him across the Bridge Limbo race track. Antrozous, as it was identified to Maks afterwards, was all over his rear and came within inches of peeling the flesh off his bones when the timely intervention of another UCAV saved his life. This time, a gleaming shapeshifting polyalloy ornithopter-wing engaged the Antrozous and drove it off. The polyalloy plane was the Ophanim, Maks later learned, an escaped Technotheocratic experiment.

After that fateful day, Maks ended up meeting the Ophanim again at the Grimov Flight Research Institute, where MiG-88s along with other aircraft are offered for civilian flights. The Ophanim was apparently watching these military warplanes take off with civilian passengers on what apparently were paid-for pleasure flights, something that intrigued the curious UCAV greatly. One day Maks approached the hovering UCAV, himself curious of its intentions and its technological makeup, but it shied away from him, leading him to pursue it as it ‘played’ with him by turning around and chasing him in turn and performing complicated aerobatic maneuvers around him before disengaging and disappearing just as quickly. Ever since that unnerving experience, Maks believes he has seen the silvery silhouette of the Ophanim in a few of the airshows he has held. Sometime after this, he has been approached by a very stern and foreboding-looking Recalibrator from the Technotheocracy who proceeded to interrogate him. Or tried to, at least, as Maks blew him off by blowing some vodka cigarette smoke into his face before taking off for MAKS-2005.

How Maks has acquired such a distinguished list of adversaries, he has no idea. Perhaps they just see him as a very prolific and visible figure that they don’t necessarily agree with, or perhaps by allying with Mister Putin Maks has ended up throwing himself into the circus that is post-Soviet Russia. Unfortunately for them, a man who possesses fully armed and operational MiG fighter flightsuits is pretty entitled to his right of self-defense, which Maks has had to practice more often than he’d like to.

Misc.

*Several common MiG-88 Faceoff variants:

MiG-88A – Project 12, pre-production prototype

MiG-88B – Initial production version, entered service 1986. Subsonic only, basic weapons systems, issued to elite VDV airborne infantry who used a combination of on-board weaponry as well as the personal firearms they carried with them. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-A”.

MiG-88B-12 – Export version with simplified radar, ECM and IFF systems. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-A”.

MiG-88UB-12 – Trainer version, capable of strapping two people onto fuselage. No radar or combat systems. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-A”.

MiG-88S – Improved version for the Soviet Air Force, the VVS. Sports enhanced avionics, flight control, computers, conformal fuel tanks, sensors, radar, countermeasures and weapon systems. Also features a new swing-wing as opposed to the original MiG-88’s fixed wing. Designed to be dropped out of supersonic VVS aircraft such as the Sukhoi T-4 ‘Bullwhip’, T-4MS ‘Backblast’, and the Tupolev Tu-160 ‘Blackjack’. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-C”.

MiG-88K (Korabelnogo bazirovaniya / carrier based) – Navalized variant for Soviet Navy, similar to MiG-88S but with several modifications to make it ship-worthy such as anti-corrosion paint and provisions for night landings on carrier ships, and strengthened fuselage to withstand harder landings. Also sports enlarged fuel capacity and more hardpoints. More modern variants are also search and rescue (SAR) equipped with towable life-preservers and air-droppable inflatable life rafts. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-D”.

MiG-88T (Tankovy) – Variant for the Red Army and GRU, emphasizes close air support capabilities for anti-tank and anti-ground role. Modified avionics with sophisticated autopilot, TERCOM, laser rangefinding, and a FLIR that replaces the IRST. New weapons systems include anti-tank missiles and hardpoint-mounted thermobaric RPGs. Sports thicker armor to improve resistance against ground fire. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-E”.

MiG-88M – Advanced multirole variant with broad all-encompassing improvements to all systems, most notably in the engines with new supersonic turbofans. Faster, more maneuverable and survivable than all the previous variants, with improved offensive and defensive capabilities and true multirole ability. Designed for the VVS. Involved in attempted defection at East Berlin Incident. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-F”, also known as the “Super Faceoff”.

MiG-88MS – Late 1990s modernization of the MiG-88, incorporating new 4.5 generation technologies such as supercruise capability, electronically scanned array radars, and thrust vectoring. Improved computer systems, avionics, and datalink capabilities, drastically enhanced maneuverability, range, fuel efficiency, flight ceiling, and reliability and safety. New HUD and HOTAS interface for superior ergonomics, modern Phazotron radars with multimission modes allowing the MiG-88MS to switch from air-to-air to air-to-ground roles mid-flight, up-to-date ECM, navigation, and radio communication systems, with provisions for reconnaissance or targeting pods and additional hardpoints. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-G”.

MiG-88MSN – Early to mid 2000s version, for both the Russian military and the Indian Air Force. Difference from MiG-88MS include multi-segmented variable geometry swing wings for mechanical ‘aerolasticity’. Further upgrades allow the MiG-88MSN access to a wider arsenal of miniaturized air-to-air and air-to-ground weaponry from Russian, Israeli, Saintly and Indian manufacturers, with point-defense capability and enhanced hardening and protection against EMP and other indirect and direct energy weaponry. New engines also give the MSN unparalleled V/STOL capability, allowing it to be used from naval vessels without flightdecks. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-H”.

MiG-88R – Reconnaissance variant, capable of extreme altitude flights when stripped of all weapons system and carrying only fuel and tactical reconnaissance pods (TARPs) or other specialized instrumentation. Has civilian meteorological and scientific applications as well. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-I”.

MiG-88MSN2 – Improved version of the MiG-88MSN, with state of the art learning computers with analytical pilot motion capture capability and intuitive autopilot. Old MiG-88 bodyglove replaced with Saintly Concerns “Periwinkle” Light Blue muscle suit, increasing pilot weight bearing loads and allowing for more munitions or provisions. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-J”.

MiG-88MAKS – Maks Mikoyan’s personal MiG-88s with various special customizations up to and including ‘reactive-reflex’ control system and electrohydrodynamic stabilizers not seen in all other MiG-88 variants. NATO reporting code is “Faceoff-K”.

MiG-91 – Planned successor of the MiG-88, currently still in development. No assigned NATO reporting code, although Maks has called it the “Facedown” for them.
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Re: MAKS Mikoyan

Post by Siege »

:D That's a long-ass article you managed to whip up in literally no time at all, man. I like it, although I wonder about the MiG-28 and MiG-88 designations... Russian fighters typically are classified with uneven numbers, with bombers tagged with the even numbers. Also, I'm not sure about the inclusion of Saakashvili and Yushchenko at the end. That just strikes me as, I don't know, a bit too close to home or something. Not to mention it's kinda lame. I mean, he's a billionaire jetpack adventurer. How could Yushchenko possibly be an adversary worthy of mention?

I'm also wondering about the oodles and oodles of Russian high-tech thrown about in this article. I mean, T-4? T-4MS? I know we're giving the Americans all kinds of outrageous equipment too so this shouldn't be too out of the ordinary but still... Eh.
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Re: MAKS Mikoyan

Post by Ford Prefect »

Jesus Christ, this level of output is insanity.

In any case, I can see what you mean about your tribute to Soviet aerospace. But this is more than a tribute, it's an extended love song. However, I have to say I'm quite surprised that the MiG-88 was initially not really powered armour, beyond what was required to support the additional mass. That's a surprising dash of realism.
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Re: MAKS Mikoyan

Post by Booted Vulture »

Wows, that's a nicely detailed man. There's the obvious conotations; This man is heavily based on Tony Stark's Iron Man but in a good way. The story of his first suit also reminds of something in Iron Man comics; the 'recovery suit' a suit tony makes from spare parts that pretty much symbolised is fight against alcholism. And of course there also seems to be a fair amount of comparison on a very broad level that is with Jake Sullivan from Avatar part of the reason he falls in with the natives is that his avatar form saves him from being a cripple; there's a similar vibe with Maks first couple of suit flights. It would be interesting if he actually test flew the first suits before fully recovering, reasoning that the suits provided the extra support he needed for medical reasons.

Oh and he's russian, which is always good on this board for some reason. (Everyone likes russians?)

The M88MAKS suit; is that just a designation for a specific generation? Or is a designation like Air Force One; whatever suit Maks wears is the M88MAKS, a suit which is constantly updated to be a generation or two ahead of whatever the commercially available M88 is?

finally allow me to digress and plug: What's Maks relationship to the Oil Punk considering they're both in a similar age range and have the same schtick; riches and power armour! I imagine they hate each other. (They could come to blows if Maks has an interest in russian oil companies!) The Oil Punk suit is probably completely inferior to a modern power suit design: I imagine in the Comix verse; petroleum powered power armour is like a cat that can play the piano; its not that its does it well its that it can do it at all.
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Re: MAKS Mikoyan

Post by Magister Militum »

Good God, how long did this take you?!

This is an excellent article and a definite tribute to the Russian/Soviet aerospace industry. At first, I was a bit worried about the date of introduction for the first suit, as it appeared to contradict my notes on when the first Red Legionnaire appeared, but since his armor is a ground warfare-based one and Mikoyan's suit emphasizes aerial combat, I see no real problem.
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Re: MAKS Mikoyan

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Long replies!
Siege wrote::D That's a long-ass article you managed to whip up in literally no time at all, man. I like it, although I wonder about the MiG-28 and MiG-88 designations... Russian fighters typically are classified with uneven numbers, with bombers tagged with the even numbers.
Da, comrade, I am aware of this nomenclature of Soviet military hardware. However, the MiG-88 is not fighter plane per se, but is actually more like infantry equipment so it might not fall under the odd-even/fighter-bomber classification system. The MiG-28s are harder to explain, but that was not such big concern in great homerotic capitalist American movie Top Gun that simply portrayed fictitious MiG with repainted American jets. Da!

Besides, if I use odd numbers, I won't look bad if I named my hypersonic mind-controlled fighter a MiG-31 something-something and then MiG ends up introducing an actual-factual MiG-31 that's nothing like the fictitious design.
Also, I'm not sure about the inclusion of Saakashvili and Yushchenko at the end. That just strikes me as, I don't know, a bit too close to home or something. Not to mention it's kinda lame. I mean, he's a billionaire jetpack adventurer. How could Yushchenko possibly be an adversary worthy of mention?
Indeed. I just threw it in there for the lulz when I was thinking of possible general enemies of Russia and wondered which sort of people Russian guys like Stas Bush hated. It was also written in the wee hours of the morning when I was going crazy and desperately trying to just close the damn article.

Would it make it better if Mikoyan earned the ire of Yushchenko by dicking around in those gas pipeline squabbles between Russia and the Ukraine, with Maks going around doing some publicity stunts for Gazprom? Or some squabbles regarding Antonov, which was a major Soviet aerospace company but is now presently in Ukranian hands. Would this be workable?

Saakashvili, perhaps Maks also pissed him off by doing an airshow to celebrate the independence of South Ossetia/Abkhazia? Or supplying South Ossetians and Abkhazians with MiG-88s? I don't know, really. There's also Kragoreshtan to consider, since it is a post-Soviet state of uncertain state (I recall you saying that it is somewhere near/around/in Georgia).

If this fails, then I can just have someone like Gary Kasparov as Maks' arch-enemy! Gary Kasparov, master chess player, who uses his intellectual prowess and his supercomputer assistant to orchestrate the political opposition parties in Russia composed of Neo-Nazis and psychos! :twisted:
I'm also wondering about the oodles and oodles of Russian high-tech thrown about in this article. I mean, T-4? T-4MS? I know we're giving the Americans all kinds of outrageous equipment too so this shouldn't be too out of the ordinary but still... Eh.
If the Americans are throwing around giant Megaforts as strategic platforms, with B-70s and F-108 Rapiers, and if the British are also sailing sky warships, I think it would not be too far out of bounds to give the Russkies a couple of high-mach birds. It would not alter the game too much, I think.

Post-USSR the T-4 and T-4MS will probably be like the Tu-160 in real life, a precious commodity that is only being manufactured in paltry few dozens. As a plus, they'd be armed with anti-shipping missiles designed to take down Megaforts or British sky vessels! Imagine those mean Raduga Kh-whatever AShms but modified to hit air targets! :twisted:

Hah, T-4 and T-4MSes in Soviet Naval Aviation. Take that, aircraft carriers!
Ford Prefect wrote:Jesus Christ, this level of output is insanity.

In any case, I can see what you mean about your tribute to Soviet aerospace. But this is more than a tribute, it's an extended love song. However, I have to say I'm quite surprised that the MiG-88 was initially not really powered armour, beyond what was required to support the additional mass. That's a surprising dash of realism.
Thanks. I really wanted to have the MiG-88 in keeping with Soviet/Russian aerospace's rustic aesthetic. It wouldn't do to have him break out some kind of ridiculous Iron Man armor, and it was more thematic to have it designed more like an actual-factual aircraft. I still managed to fit in the repulsors there, though, but it's not like Maks is shooting pew-pew repulsor rays.
Booted Vulture wrote:Wows, that's a nicely detailed man. There's the obvious conotations; This man is heavily based on Tony Stark's Iron Man but in a good way. The story of his first suit also reminds of something in Iron Man comics; the 'recovery suit' a suit tony makes from spare parts that pretty much symbolised is fight against alcholism. And of course there also seems to be a fair amount of comparison on a very broad level that is with Jake Sullivan from Avatar part of the reason he falls in with the natives is that his avatar form saves him from being a cripple; there's a similar vibe with Maks first couple of suit flights.
Yes, I wanted to make Maks a troubled character like Stark but not too like him, and of course Russian/Soviet. And I also wanted to make parallels with his ancestors, who were pretty cool. I didn't have Jake Sully in mind, but yeah we do have Maks/Stark/Jake overcome adversity and deep personal issues by going beyond and overcoming whatever it was that was crippling them physically or otherwise.
It would be interesting if he actually test flew the first suits before fully recovering, reasoning that the suits provided the extra support he needed for medical reasons.
That's silly. Fighter planes aren't extra support for medical reasons, even IF you can wear them. :P

(It would be too much like STRAK's heart thinggy anyway, and Maks was born to be an aircraft designer so he probably doesn't need medical reasons to do what he loves to do best - build mean machines)
Oh and he's russian, which is always good on this board for some reason. (Everyone likes russians?)
Da, comrade!
The M88MAKS suit; is that just a designation for a specific generation? Or is a designation like Air Force One; whatever suit Maks wears is the M88MAKS, a suit which is constantly updated to be a generation or two ahead of whatever the commercially available M88 is?
The MiG-88MAKS are specifically the ones he personally owns, modifies, and uses. He can use any Mig-88 suit out there, but the ones in his possession are tinkered with so they're a notch above the generic and commercially available MiG-88s. The specifications of his personal MiG-88MAKSes aren't really known to the public, and they'd probably have all sorts of unique whatevers. So all his personal suits, the ones he keeps in his dacha garage, are just lumped as 'MAKS' to denote that.
finally allow me to digress and plug: What's Maks relationship to the Oil Punk considering they're both in a similar age range and have the same schtick; riches and power armour! I imagine they hate each other. (They could come to blows if Maks has an interest in russian oil companies!) The Oil Punk suit is probably completely inferior to a modern power suit design: I imagine in the Comix verse; petroleum powered power armour is like a cat that can play the piano; its not that its does it well its that it can do it at all.
They'd hate each other. Oil Punk does his shtick because he is remorseful of his family's heritage of pumping blood into the ground so the oil flows. While Maks, for all his emotional and personal issues and 'virtues', is still a guy who just plays to the current political tune of Russia and buddy-buddies with Putin and his cronies - and he's an active participant in the Russian military-industrial complex selling guns and shit to guys like Iran, India, and Hugo Chavez. He's not exactly a hero, not a villain either, but just a dude doing his own thing. He also doesn't like Americans.

Also, Oil Punk armor is optimized for kicking ass on the ground. While it's probably not military-grade compared to the Saint suits or the Goldstein armors, I think on the ground it's better than the MiG-88 that's also on terra firma since a guy wearing a MiG-88 is going to have some inconvenience with walking or moving around, or just carrying all that gear. The MiG-88 isn't an Iron Man armor blowing people away and tossing cars around and punching Obediah Stanes and shit.

But in the air, it's an entirely different matter. ;)
Magister Militum wrote:Good God, how long did this take you?!
The idea came to me last week, and I tried starting on the article somewhere round Thursday, but I got most of the work done on Saturday and Sunday. :mrgreen:

(It was obscene. I literally couldn't stop meandering on and on, even when I thought I should cut it down, until I finally had to figure out a way to finish him up.)
This is an excellent article and a definite tribute to the Russian/Soviet aerospace industry. At first, I was a bit worried about the date of introduction for the first suit, as it appeared to contradict my notes on when the first Red Legionnaire appeared, but since his armor is a ground warfare-based one and Mikoyan's suit emphasizes aerial combat, I see no real problem.
Thanks. The way I see it, I think the Soviet Union doesn't really have a bigass SDI-style super-organization filled with obscene and ridiculous machines (yes, there's that Special Defense Corps, but I don't think it's anywhere near as HUEG as the SDI). The Soviets have, mostly, IRL been pretty pragmatic, I mean even their military is subdivided into specific branches with TWO air forces (VVS air force, PVO anti-air force), with strategic rocket forces and armies and navies and GRUs and VDVs and what have you - contrast to the West's comparatively broader tri-services. In Comix instead of West-style superweapons like Megaforts or badass Goldstein-suits they might prefer to use more specialized platforms that they spread out in many specialized units throughout their military branches.

While the Russkies can definitely have badass supermachines, I think they'll usually be more specialized and dedicated to a particular role than their more multi-functional "one size fits all, do it all" American counterparts.

Of course, this doesn't mean the Russkies won't have really ridiculous stuff. Because, man, their Stalin was a friggin sorcerer. :D
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Re: MAKS Mikoyan

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Dear sweet God, mang. When you mentioned this over MSN, I had no idea it was gonna be this long. According to MS Word's word count, this baby is a whopping 8,996 words long! Holy crap, that's longer than the chapters in most of my fics. I am flatly impressed with all the effort and detail that went into this. Hell, I'm so impressed I'm willing to give the MiG-28 designation a pass (well, that and it's an awesome Top Gun reference). Perhaps, in universe, the USSR managed to get a hold of F-5 design papers and decided they wanted their own cheaper-by-the-dozen fighter to replace the aging MiG-21. Perhaphs the -28 designation is that their design is built to be a multi-role fighter/attack craft or something instead of just a fighter.

Now I'm wondering how some of the later Skyhaven VERTEX/APEX variants or the TANGENT would fare against one of his MiG-88s.
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Re: MAKS Mikoyan

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Malachuschus wrote:Dear sweet God, mang. When you mentioned this over MSN, I had no idea it was gonna be this long.
When I mentioned it to you on MSN, I was still having difficulty typing the first sentences of the article. But when I started going, oh man, stopping was difficult. :P
Now I'm wondering how some of the later Skyhaven VERTEX/APEX variants or the TANGENT would fare against one of his MiG-88s.
The MATH suits don't seem that sleek or aerodynamic looking. The fact that they're fully power-armored might make them heavier and more cumbersome in the air. In a dogfight a modern MiG-88 could outmatch them through sheer aerial performance and long-range missiles or other weapons. A MATH suit could kill a MiG-88 if it had long-ranged lasers or anti-aircraft weaponry, and acted more like a SAM/AA platform (using its power armor strength to lug around a bigass surface-to-air missile!). If the MATH had access to gnarlier Skyhaven tech, then the more conventional MiG-88 is at a disadvantage. Compared to other specialized and advanced power armors, the MiG-88 is pretty mundane technologically speaking. I based the Faceoff heavily on the MiG-29 Fulcrum. As FROD said, "dash of realism" and stuff. Makes it cheaper than the tech offered by Saintly Concerns or Skyhaven's contractors too. ;)

If they're both on the ground, a MATH suit would be able to punch his power fist through the MiG-88's fuselage owing to his power armor. The MiG-88 is optimized for its aerial roles, and when it's on the ground it's just as formidable as any 4.5 generation fighter plane that's still on the landing field (which is not very). The MATH suits, OTOH, were a design built from the "ground up" and even the specialized variants retain an "all terrain" capability.

Thinking about it, the MiG-88 is more like a weaponized Jet Man than an Iron Man.

I am also shamed that I forgot the Skyhaven MATH suits. While at the same time mentioning Gregory Banks and his Cherub in the article.
Perhaps, in universe, the USSR managed to get a hold of F-5 design papers and decided they wanted their own cheaper-by-the-dozen fighter to replace the aging MiG-21. Perhaphs the -28 designation is that their design is built to be a multi-role fighter/attack craft or something instead of just a fighter.
While this 'verse's MiG-28 might not be a mere repainted F-5, it can still be some cheap and very lightweight fighter quickly whipped out for pure export purposes. I believe MiG did have some plans for their own version of an F-16. As to how it got the even designation, dunno... yeah, perhaps it was also meant to be an attacker/light bomber/CAS thing. Like the Su-34, but lighter, cheaper and without the awesome indoor toiletries*. Yeah! :mrgreen:

[EDIT 2: Perhaps a cheaper, more expendable, lighter and mass producible MiG equivalent to the Su-24 designed for anti-naval purposes? A cheap naval attacker plane would explain why they ended up taking on Mavericks and Spruce Gooses and Icepricks!]


I'm gonna edit the article. Mention some of the safety features involved in ejecting from a MiG-88 and perhaps edit out the Ukranians and Georgians. I figure post-Russia's organized crime problem will be a big enough foe to tackle, together with shit like apostate Technotheocrats, business rivals, Austerlitz' continuing funding of counterrevolutionary and secessionist groups (without directly mentioning Chechnyans), as well as a chess master crime boss (think evil Gary Kasparov), and even Siege's Mors Totenkopf.

There's more to Russia than ugly polonium-poisoned Ukranians and tie-chewing Steve Carrell lookalikes! DA! 8-)

[EDIT: EDITS TO MAIN ARTICLE DONE! CHECK IT OUT!]

*Jesus, imagine you're a co-pilot in the Su-34 and your buddy takes a dump in the toilet. The smell of shit permeating in your fuselage! Nyet, comrade! They're all over my ass! :lol:
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Re: MAKS Mikoyan

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I think it is interesting with a Soviet, or well ex-Soviet superhero who isn't a Communist. I imagine there's much less of a generation gap between him and the younger generations in Russia than, say, Comrade Felix. However, I gotta wonder about things like the Vladimir Putin administration's less-than-savory treatment of its critics (e. g. Anna Politkovskaya) and what the MiG-Man's opinion on that is. Does he consider that a necessary evil, does he clash with Putin over it or some completely third option? Maybe he's not that much bothered by it, being a Soviet veteran after all...

Incidentally, on the similarities and differences between MiG-Man and the most obvious source of inspiration I would say MiG-Man comes across as much more low-tech than Ironman probably because his suit's less of a mech, and doesn't use anything like that fancy reactor. I actually think the more low-tech and down-to-earth engineering makes him more... Russian. Oh yeah, this also means we now have two Tony Stark analogues. (the other one is Anthony Saint, sort of)
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Re: MAKS Mikoyan

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Three! Oil Punk is a power armoured hero with a unique power source who uses his armour to right the wrongs done by his company! Sound like anyone we know?
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Re: MAKS Mikoyan

Post by Peregrin »

Oh yeah, forgot about him or just confused him with someone else.
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