by LesterBoffo » Thu Nov 05, 2015 6:29 pm
Technically and historically the TU-95 is a partial jet/turboprop.
When Russia was over-running the Eastern parts of Germany at the end of WWII, they acquired the old Junkers Jumo jet manufacturing plant as part of their spoils of war. That included most of the design team of the Junkers Jumo 004 jet engine and the still in blueprint design Junkers Jumo 016, an up-sized version of the ME-262 jet engine, being for a planned swept wing, jet engined Amerikas bomber. The captured design team was soon pressed into making a Russian design jet engine for the Yak-15 to replace the short lived and limited supply of captured Jumo 004's.
The engines that power the TU 95 are evolved from the larger axial flow Jumo 016 design that was estimated to make over 6000 pounds thrust if Junkers was able to continue in it's construction. And as Russian designed engine go, the Kuznetsov NK-12 is a direct descendant of the Junkers axial flow jet and is pretty inefficient, and a small part of what makes the Bear so fast is that it's aided in a small way by the exhaust flow of the 4 paired Kuznetsovs. It's also the world's loudest operational plane because the propeller's tips exceed the sound barrier at cruise.