I’d somehow missed this unit until now. But I don’t think the radar is crammed inside to give a false impression, the unit as such is compact – both the front and the rear end compared to the earlier displayed model. You can guesstimate the depth of this radar unit from the side view of radome I posted earlier.

I think it’s because the team’s poor job in building the model. Thus one cant really judge the depth of the radar based on that full scale mockup. Plus The mockup have no Inflight refuelling probe apparently. Thus the team building it might think the radar can go deeper without counting any possible space for the probe’s hydraulics or other related machineries or treatment for Radome RCS.

Why would that seeker have a diameter of just 100mm? Especially since its predecessor had diameter of 150mm? What sort of missile is it for, then? It’d be crazy not to utilize the whole width of the R-77 missile body, if it was for R-77 missile family.

The driver is probably the following :

1.Higher frequency. Im curious about Ku-Ka band being mentioned. Probably the original R-77 missile is working in lower frequency (lower Ku or X band) The designer wish to keep the beamwidth thus lower diameter.

2.The desire of lower drag and weight, as smaller radome is smaller drag which contribute to longer range. The seeker also shorter and lighter meaning that more room would be available for larger battery or more propellant.

3.Backfit to other missiles. We might see this seeker proliferate to smaller missiles like Tor or R-73. Or Russia is developing the analogue of CUDA

4.Last but not the least is cost as cost of radiofrequency equipment is a function of frequency. The higher frequency the more the cost as smaller wavelength requires more precision equipment to build the device.

The following Illustrate tradeoff of radar missile seeker wavelength choice. As seen as you go up in frequency, cost climb. The real magnitude however is of course depend on the technology base and amount of production. The graph is from “Radar Homing Guidance for Tactical Missile” It’s rather dated (1986) but it clearly illustrate the tradeoff.

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Nonetheless we might see larger variant for larger missiles such as R-37.

If I remember correctly, the plan was to have around 1064 t/r modules or 1016 t/r modules. And the Zhuk AESA radar installed on MiG-35 has around 1017 t/r modules on my rough counting. Don’t get fooled by the same airframe and radome, its completely different. You can see how much the backend has changed and how far inside the radar has gone inside,

Is the one recently displayed even a real flying airframe ?

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Indonesian Flankers. taking fuel from KC-130B.

How’s the plan to integrate Russian weapons on Rafale ?.

i’m aware of that spud, but we have to do with available numbers (and ways to compute them).

Plus regarding to those cost.. there are no real agreeable formula nor methods. Thus a figure of an aircraft may not be comparable… or even same aircraft owned by different country cant be really comparable either.

I developed an excel spreadsheet that address those cost.. but yeah as i mentioned above. With lack of agreeable formula (mine is based on commercial, which the result seems work on commercial better even when adjusted with typical military use) It’s very difficult.

So Zhukovsky-AE-AR only for the export MiG-35? VVS MiG-35s will continue to have the MSA Zhuk then?

AFAIK They desire something with 280 km detection range. Which unfortunately MiG airframe cannot seem to cool.