Nope. Pogosyan only said something about comparable RCS. Frontal aspect, I’d assume because the bird does not look to be built with overall stealth in mind. Not that I think overall stealth is good for anything except throwing money out of the window, especially if you must count with a Russian and not US budget.

So far it looks that Russians made a right thing and only built a fighter stealthy and sophisticated enough to serve as a potential deterrence, not trying to beat the Raptor at all cost.. If they handle the afordability part sensibly enough, then that would be as good at it gets for them, much better than some hypothetical Raptor beater with $200mil price tag, serving in two squadrons.

He never said anything about RCS. He said that the PAK-FA will be a match for the F-22. That is all. Make of it what you want.

OK, here goes. Basically this is a case of side mirrors’ ‘Objects may be closer than they appear’. I don’t believe the photo’s a fake.

Well clearly it’s not the 117 comp.-face due to dimensions, alignment, that long spinner etc. The key is how far into the inlet the device is located, so here’s my take.

What everybody missed thus far is that the front section of the intake has a pronounced ‘droop’ in it (see pics below), reminiscent of the YF-23’s droop. This ‘droop’ will appear as a ‘trough’ in the now infamous ‘PAK-FA in the night’ pic- it will give an illusory sense of distance.

The trough is why you can’t see the air-bleed louvres (actually you can just make out the last line)- which means that device is far nearer to the intake entrance than previously thought- actually in-line with that hole/bulge speculated wheel bay placement- i.e. before the MLG structure, just over 2 metres from the intake’s lower lip.

This puts it ~2.5m infront of the real comp.face- incidentally the same distance djcross stated would be required for the S-duct (but remember, this is not a full-on S-duct).

I now believe that device is some sort of combined air-flow management/FOD screen. Your thoughts?

I couldn’t follow what you were trying to say 😮

And you’re missing the point still. The way LPI works is by not looking like a radar, to a RWR. Are you suggesting that the simple solution is to just look for everything that doesn’t look like a radar? Modern RWR/ECM systems have digital threat libraries that they compare incoming signals with. They also filter out signals that don’t appear to be threats/background noise, etc… to cut down on false alarms. LPI works by using very short bursts, with discreet beams, using random and very rapidly changing freqs/waveforms, etc…, so it’s not a simple task of merely raising the sensitivity. That’s not to say it’s impossible to detect, but it’s by no means guaranteed to be something that can be taken for granted.

So what does it look like? Gamma rays? Microwaves? X-rays?

LOL…

You need to do some more reading about both LPI techniques, and how RWRs work, if you think “radio waves are radio waves.” You also need to read up on what it is that filters actually do(i.e. look for things that don’t look like background RF, so that you’re not getting false alarms, and look for recognizable PRF waveforms, etc…). That’s the whole idea behind LPI- to look like background RF to an RWR. Low power is but one piece of the pie. Unrecognizable PRF waveforms, rapidly shifting frequencies(>1000 per second), are some of the other factors. It’s not just a matter of detecting the presence of RF energy.

I’ll say it again. Radio waves are radio waves. There’s little more to it.

They are directional, and an RWR with powerful enough processing, especially one that knows the basic actions of LPI, would in all likelihood be able to pick up the LPI signal given enough time.