Sry for late answer

my thoughts exactly, ship defence systems have used guns and missiles for missile interception for decades, I don’t get why aircraft don’t employ such tactics
especially as 70mm missiles are being reintroduced, using these for defence would be a very intersting strategy, allowing you to trade BVR missiles at very high rates

The capability hasnt really been there before. IRIS-T is the first missile that actually might be up to the task. Also, sensors havent been good enough before.

Preferably we will see even smaller smaller and cheaper IR-missiles for self defense. So maybe 10-15 years down the road this may be a reality?

but I think stealth will also become irrelevant as long range weapons mature. a prime example of this is the rail gun
considering most conflicts take place somewhere near water, ships with long range rail guns able to devestate entire city blocks or airfields at $25,000 per shot would make aircraft irrelevant in both effectiveness and efficiency.

The thing with fighter jets is that they are designed to ensure air superiority. If you dont have air superiority your ISR-assets (like recce aircraft or drones) are less likely to survive. That means you need boots on the ground. But boots on the ground may effectively find you targets within 20km from their starting position on foot or up to 200km if they are on vehicles and encounter no resistance on the way to the target and the width of the search pattern is roughly 2km to the sides in good conditions.

This means boots on the ground can cover 80km² to 800km² per recce unit. An aircraft flies a one way trip (even in hostile territory) of 400-1000km+ on recce missions and can scan a width of 4 km or more to each side. Giving a scan sector of 3200-8000km²… in a <4 hour flight. An F16 can do 1,2 flights per day… AND carry bombs to destroy the targets right away if they are small enough.

And they also help in getting the air superiority thanks to BVR and WVR missiles as well as being effective in SEAD. So a fleet with multirole fighters are needed in order to make se of the cheaper weapons.

Vnomad, could you explain to me how 4.8 billion euros in 2008 translates to 6.2 billion euros in 2014? Inflation wasn’t THAT high.

I think it must be a typo, the EUR/USD exchange rate was approx 1,3 –> 4,8bn € = 6,2 bn $

That’s equivalent to about €6.2 billion today. Which puts the SAAB’s offer at about $100M per unit. (Doesn’t appear to include spare engines, HMDS, LDPs though).

The price quoted to Brazil and Switzerland is $125M and $140M respectively. This includes ToT and offset costs. The balance cost (if any) can probably be explained by a simple underestimation – the NG was still in early development back in 2008.

It’s the same type of offer as the F35 had in the same tender. In Switzerland they wanted more stuff included and thus the price was higher.

6,2 bn $ for 85 Gripen gives a unit cost of 73 m $.
5,8 bn $ for 37 F35 gives a unit cost of 157 m $.

Now, if we compare other tenders they will have a different set of requirements. For instance the Brazilian and Swiss offers also include a lease/renting of Gripen C, a lot more spares and so on. That is why you have to compare costs within the same tender. Period.

Now, if we include life cycle costs the difference is very likely to increase even more.

You can extrapolate your pricces as much as you want from the LM PR department, but it is whats on the dotted line that counts. And that is what the customer gets when the contract is signed. If I buy a 50ft yacht without interior, I can’t compare that price to a 50 ft yacht with interior and support contracts for 30 years. That is basically what you are doing here and that is why your numbers differ from mine.

Have a nice evening.

There is a physical limit on the horsepower and bleed extraction available from a single F404/F414. I question if it is sufficient to simultaneously power and cool a full suite of sensors, avionics, communications and displays during peak demand.

There is also an APU. This is what the Gripen A got.

The FCS, which is the most critical system, can get power from five sources:

The FCS generator
The 40 kW main generator on the RM 12 engine
A 12 kW backup generator on the APU
Ordinary batteries
Emergency thermo batteries which last for a minimum of 9 min
It is possible to glide with a Gripen and land, provided there’s an airstrip in range.

Current PS05 is rated at above 10KW peak power, with a power supply of 52KW (this also controls FCS etc). I think it’s likely that we will see a more powerful APU and a lot more excess power from the engine (after all, it flies well with 18% less thrust)

I think the power supply will be sufficient.

Someone said that all the ones that complained where ppl who hadnt flown the F35. That was obviously bs.

But sure. Most problems are block specific. And as ive said several times before… The F35s biggest problem isn’t performance. It is the cost and logistics and the fact that it isn’t the best choice in the most common uses for it’s smaller customers.

Lesson learned was to fly at medium to high altitude at night only. In those circumstances the A10, F16 and F117 where just as survivable as the other. Over 2 wars (Allied Force + DS) we see that F117 was actually less safe than the F16 and A10 per sortie where the casualty was due to enemy fire when flying similar missions.

For instance A10s performed CAS-support in the exact same area as the F117 was shot down during the same night.

Package Q proved that low alt daytime strike packages over dense IADS areas where dangerous, mostly due to the large amount of IR-based SHORADS and Manpads as well as AAA. By going to medium altitude one only had to worry about radar guided missiles and that’s where ECM will work. And it did. Pretty much flawlessly.

Another lesson was that SEAD is effective as hell if applied in numbers.

Not surprisingly the radar jamming had little effect on IR-sensors.

But this has nothing to do with the topic. Topic is if stealth will be irrelevant in the future. I believe it wont because you always want to get a tactical advantage over your enemy. However, future fighters will be less optimised in RCS reduction because…

High absorption –> HEL will be more lethal and you give the enemy much greater effective range. (Effective range is relative to how much energy is absorbed by the target in a given time, by having absorbant coatings and structural materials you are more likely to melt faster the more energy you absorb.)

So shaping may stay but materials will change a lot.

The days of the f-117 relying on just radar sig are over. The USAF and others realized this a long time ago. Newer fighter rely on ir reduction, secure transmissions

F117 was relying on IR stealth as well. Probably better than both the F22 and F35. (No afterburner, subsonic only, low T/W and “dispersed” exhaust/flattened nozzles shielded from the ground)

Modern stealth fighters arent better in the IR-part of stealth than the older 4,5th gen (like Rafale and Gripen) where the aircrafts havent needed to make the same sacrifices for all aspect low RCS.

Don’t forget that the goal of a laser weapon is to transfer enough energy to the target in the minimum of time. Hence the very highfrequencies of the Laser as the E is an inverse function of the Wavelength.

Then there is the absorption level of the substrate. That what the diag depicts.

Future jets will be shiny like curved mirrors while being shaped to be stealthy anyway 😉

jokes aside, having RAM coated composites may not be the best solution for the next gen when survival is relative to the ability to not absorb any energy at all.