Nope ‘wolf Hermes is pretty much on the ball here.

What you’re describing here is akin to finding this forum by typing ‘aircraft’ into a search engine and going through every single website that is generated one at a time. Will you find this site doing that – probably but by no means definitely!.

All that the SAR setup on the satellite (a low-earth orbiter by nature) will ever do is to scan a line of configurable width across the earths surface as it orbits. While it is overhead a patch of ocean it will scan ships and image interpretation software will, doubtless, be able to identify rough vessel types (using a broad resolution) and probably individual vessels (narrowing the resolution). This is ONLY if it happens to fly across a patch of sea that contains a desired target group.

Again as Hermes puts it so eloquently – that detection “occurs only IFF the CVBG permits the passage of the info”. The tracking and plotting of orbital routes and timing of such satellites is childs play for any serious power. Carrier groups have successfully dodged all manner of satellite surveillance for twenty or thirty years – at times where such surveillance was undesireable.

The problem of finding a highly mobile group from an RF imaging LoE bird are a great deal larger than you allude to – this is where RORSATs come in.

First off, you may have misunderstood me. Where did I say that you will need to have people physically checking every square inch of the world’s oceons with a magnifying glass? With modern supercomputers and image recongising software, you can easily have a computer do that for you and only flag out the possible SHIPS that might be a carrier.

You can greatly reduce the number of hits by adding in additional parametres like a minimum size to weed out the vast majority of small ships; a shape parametre to weed out container ships, oil tankers, cruise liners and the like that have markedly different huls from warships.

Then what you are left with would be a very small number of possibles for your human analysis to check through.

Of course, all this is assuming that modern supercomputers and recognisation software hasn’t already made it possible for the computer to mark out the carrier itself. After all, a carrier has a very distinctive look to it, and even it will not be hard to write a programme to look out for it.

Also, I think you are placing way too much emphysis on the ability if the carrier. Just because it might know when a sat would be overhead will not necessarily mean that the CVBG will be able to get out of the way in time, as if memory serves me right, a sat moves a bit faster then a carrier. 😉

You can try and evade the search by staying just outside the scan area of one pass, and then trying to make a quick dash into perviously scanned area to throw off the searchers, but the difficult in predicting the scan area and getting the ship in the right place and right time would be formatable. And even then this tactic can be easily defeated with 2 or more SAR sats doing overlapping scans.

As for sucessful evading detection in peace time, well the method of dectetion I have described requires a great deal of manuvering from the sats themselves, and so would greatly reduce their useful lives. I doubt that any government or militrary would sacrific so much just to show-off. But just because carriers have been able to avoid casual watchers does not necessarily mean that it can avoid a determined hunter.

As for RORSAT, will that, if I understand it correctly, if just basically the equivilant of a search radar in space. It too will only be able to illuminate a carrier by flying within radar range. The RORSAT may have greater scan area then SAR, but it will only be able to tell you that there are ships there, not what kind of ships they are. So you would end up with a blizzard of contacts. The only advanatge that I can see from RORSAT is greater scan range. But more SAR sats will more then compensate for that.

Good information ‘wolf. The type of radar satellite you’re describing here though is not a Radar Ocean Recon SATellite (RORSAT). Its a radar imaging sat and has similar functionality to a visual spectrum EOSAT.

If you already know where the target is the SAR radar will allow for imagery of the target group through cloud obscuration – which is the advantage that this bird would offer over an EO sensor platform.

The problem is, though, that the challenge is basic localisation of a CVBG (the assumed target in this case) thats trying very hard to be elusive. For that you need a RORSAT (or perhaps a fleet of first-class SURTASS boats) and a damn good theatre-wide ISTAR backend to cue in the SAR platform.

Any hints of such search assets (or the ISTAR infrastructure?) in the Chinese inventory?.

I have no detailed info on PLA RORSAT assets, but with regards to the PLA, outsiders like us only get what the powers that be decide to release, so the lack of material does not necessarily mean that there is no such project.

RORSAT tech is pretty ancient tech wise (first appeared in the 1960s and 1970s), and SAR is a far more complicated system. If the PLA can develop SAR with 1m res, then they can develop, at the very leasy, rudermentry RORSATs. But whether they have put serious effort into it is a totally different matter.

But even with just EO and SAR sats, it is possible to find something as large as a carrier battle group, especially if the threater of combat is defined, meaning you don’t have to check the entire oceon.

There are serveral fairly basic methods that I can think off OTTOMH.

You can decrease resolution to, say 50m or 100m to increase area scanned per pass(just a number i plucked out of thin air, can be anything within reason depending on how much manpower you have and how long you have), and scan an area a few hundred or thousand miles in circumfrence from your own carrier group or the hostile carrier group’s home base if it recently left port. Then use a fairly basic computer programme to filter the imaging with known comercial shipping lains and ship route logs to flag the ones that are out of the way. And/or use a programme designed to spot ships traveling in formation or unusually close to each other. You can narrow the number of hits with all kinds of additional parametres like number of ships within a given area, speed they are traveling at etc. Then you can have humans sort through the flagged images to see if they can make sense of it, if they can make out a carrier battle group, hurha! If not you re-direct your sats to take more detailed look at the most probable ones.

Hell, with all the new developments with face recognition software, if might even be possible to just run all the imaging through a supercomputer to check against images stored on file and it will tell you where the hostile carrier group is within a few seconds or minutes.

Once the hostile carrier group is located, tracking it with sats would be a fairly basic excerise.

Info on Chinese spaceborn SAR.

Sorry it took so long, but I was unable to find the pages where I first saw the info reguarding PLA SAR, and it was only recently that I stumbled across some new posts on the subject.

Unfortunately, the data do not have any dates on them, but it is the specs for a recently launched disaster relief SAR. so from that you can deduce that if the tech is being used for civil purposes now, military grade gear would have been operational for quite some time, and the resolution will almost certainly be better (heard rumblings about 3m res, with 1m recently achieved, although it is unclear if 1m res SARs have been put into space yet).

Well, if they are building a pre-production batch as early as June/July, then chances are the planes will use conventional flight controls as primary to by-pass the FBW software development phase. Although fully FBW systems may well be built into the planes ready to be used as soon as the software is ready (which may well be before the planes are delivered if they are aiming for induction in 07).

The radical changes made to the 04 airframe will likely mean that any software developed for 01 and 03 will need to be radically changed if not scrapped for 04. The changes will also likely alter the FC1’s flight charateristic, which may need to be re-discovered with more envolop developed flights.

We are unlikely to see FC1 full scale production for at least 1 more year. The pre-production batch are most likely for pilot convertion so that the PAF would have pilots ready to fly the FC1 as soon as production models are delivered to them.

Gentlemen, can we please keep this thread clean and not stoop to mockery.

Bharatheeyan did raise a valid point even if the manner in which he did it leaves much to be desired.

16 minutes is nowhere near enough time to certify the design as ready for mass production considering the extent of the mods done to the original design. Far more test flights are needed to write the new FBW software alone, and a great deal of flight envelop testing would likely to also be needed.

I think it is either a case of a reporter getting slightly ahead of themselves with their predictions, or they are getting the production of additional test prototypes and/or pre-production planes mixed up with full mass production. Or it could be a mix up of the two.

The plane might not be ready for the lines just yet, but it won’t be long now.

Is additional pylons needed? I think fairly simple to make double pylons like those used on F18Es would do. After all, if a hardpoint is cleared for drop tanks and bombs, it can certainly handle the weight of two AAMs.

Since when? The fact that our economies are becoming more and more interdependant goes against that belief.

Since when indeed. The US might be ’embracing’ China now, but not too long ago, the US were using rehtoric and treatment now reserved for the DPRK on China. It would appear that you have the cause and effect in this relation backwards. The US is ‘chumming’ up to China now because China’s economy is too big and too important to ignore.

The US government certainly has some issues with some of the human rights issues in China, but they certainly aren’t under any kind of trade embargo or anything.

Really? You think you can set up a company in the US and sell any commercial hi-tech products to China? Good luck to you mate. And its not just the military gear that is embargoed, not too long ago, boeing got into all sorts of trouble for having the audacity to put modern civilian-grade avionics in some of the planes they sold a Chinese airline instead of antiques.

Or not. We could easily take out North Korea but you don’t see us doing that, and we’re still technically at war with the DPRK.

‘Easily take out NK’? That hardly seems likely if some of the projected casaulty figures for a land war in kosovo are to be beleived.

No, I strongly suspect that NK own more to its million strong army, probable nukes and support from Russian and China for its continued existence then American bonevolence. If ‘taking out’ NK would, say, cost 100 american lives at most and the SKs would do the clean up afterwards, and China and Russia didn’t object, you think the DPRK would still be around?

I didnt say anything about planning and planning related policy. The current US planning doesnt exclude china as a future potential threat (i dont think anyone in their right mind would not do the same if they were in US’s position) however what the strategy and policy is aimed at is that in the absence of a super cold war like USSR threat (somewhat unipolar world-if u can call it one) the US should instead prepare itself against all possible threats ranging from Al Qaeda lika organizations to moderate military powers such as iran and NK to super military powers like china etc etc. However to suggest that the US’s procurment policy reflects an eminent preperation for towards china hostility would be neglecting the facts that in almost all aspects the procurment nos are going down rather then up .

Did you get that off the pentagon website? Its a load of empty words with little substance, nuclear weapons can be used to fight terrorists, that does not mean that it is the best, or most likely use for such weapons.

Again, I ask you to look at what the US military is buying, and more specifically, what it is forgoing in order to buy them. The priorities of the pentagon should become fairly self-evident. The point is that the scale and scope of US military planning and procurement goes way beyound mere ‘generic preporation’ and has a clear focus, and that has nothing to do with the war on terrorism or even NK and Iran.

PS, in regard to decreasing numbers of weapons systems bought, well that is hardly pursuasive evidence and can be easily explained by the general reduction in military spending following the implosion of the USSR, escalating costs of the wars in afganistan and iraq and spiraling spin-off costs of key projects.