Why do you think the chord length needs to be ten times greater than the wavelength anyway? Are you trying to apply the Mie solution?

Mie is a subset of Rayleigh scattering for spheres to solve the Maxwell equations.

Guess what – scattering doesn’t just apply to spheres.

I’m not saying it has to be 10x bigger. If its of the same order of magnitude, you will get resonance effects and you will also be unable to direct the return.

Stealth brigade sticking their heads in the sand? People have been “stealth is dead/doesn’t work” since it first became a topic of discussion publicly.

blah blah blah.

It works depending on what your fighting. If you think stealth is going to allow aircraft to operate with impunity against modern interlinked IADS then your nuts.

If you think its going to somewhat reduce the effective range of X and Ku band radar, then your OK. But that is one facet of the overall environment the aircraft must exist in.

Stealth works. It makes things harder to detect.

Stealth can work. It can make things harder to track.

Detecting fighter sized VLO aircraft using ground based radar is not hard… in fact, its pretty much no different from detecting non-VLO aircaft. Localising them to the point of missile guidance (from either ground or airborne radar) is somewhat more challenging.

Pass whatever you’re smoking, it must be good 🙂

True spud true…

There is no if about it. A modern VHF search radar will acquire any X-band only treated target at 400km (terrain permitting).

It all harks back to the abject and total misunderstanding of RCS on this forum (and to be fair, many other places too!).

Effective radar range is dependent on many things, some of the more pertinent being:
– Power of emitter
– Gain of receiver(s)
– Wavelength of emitting radar
– Suppression/deflection of signal at that wavelength by the prospective target at the position and attitude of the target to the emitter and receiver(s).

The issue here that some seem to be struggling with is that in this comparison the “truck” is substantially more efficient than the car, not the other way around.

No, its not.

Break the flight into segments.

1. Take-off until Rafale EFTs empty. F-35 has less drag and may have lower fuel fraction.
2. EFTs dropped till munitions release. Depending on load-out, F-35 may have less drag but now has higher fuel fraction.
3. Munitions dropped till landing. Rafale has less drag and has lower fuel fraction.

As to which is more efficient as a sum over those 3 segments, it’ll depend on mission profile, exact loadout and EFT details.

Andraxxus, i have a genuin question (i’m nowhere cloe to be aerodynamics). Considering that sentence

“For the next maneuver, I selected afterburner, banked some 75 deg. and pulled to the maximum allowable gs of 5.5, in the heavy configuration. Starting at 420 kt., the speed was 330 kt. after completing a 360-deg. turn.”

is it possible to calculate a rough estimation of jow many G the plane would sustain without losing speed (aka sustained turn rate)?

In a coordinated turn (i.e. constant radius, constant airspeed and without losing altitude), you must have 1g vertical, therefore the total G load must be 1/cos(75) = 3.86g

Similarly:
– 60degree banked turn is =2g.
– 80degree banked turn is ~5.8g
– 85degree banked turn is ~11.5g

Consider also that g = V^2/R [where g = g-load, V = airspeed in m/s and R = turn radius in m]

Therefore the manoeuvre you indicate was one of either decreasing turn radius, increasing altitude or some combination of the two (as well as obviously decreasing airspeed).

Also, I don’t see how the A suffer from the B stovl capabilities.

😮

– Shorter than ideal airframe length
– Smaller than ideal wingspan
– Longer than ideal undercarriage pickup points
– Mandated single engine
– Common airframe requires design space and loadpath consideration for lift fan so -A and -B variants are not too disparate.
– Mandated common engine with its accompanying limitations [i.e. no TVC, large fan diameter, large bypass ratio].

——————————–

Lets assume the USN and USMC did not exist for a moment.

Do you really think the USAF would have an F-35 the way it is to complement the F-22? Would they f___.

They’d have built the FB-22 as their deep interdictor and built more F-22. As part of the EMD in the mid-90s, they’d also have increased the weapons bay depth and added better A2G radar modes to the APG-77… and possibly a combined FLIR/IRST along with improved avionics for networking.

If they then needed a “low” to complement the F-22’s high*, they’d have licensed the Saab Gripen or commissioned a similar design and built it.

*with the price of the F-22 dropping due to scale anyway it might not have been wholly necessary.