Not bad frequency of flights at all. T-50-1 flew twice today and T-50-2 flew once. Now that T-50-5 is back in action, wonder why T-50-4 has been stuck for a good while. Pictures from today:

http://michaeldec.livejournal.com/34278.html

Surely must be way above 500 flights by now.

Is it my impression or the gap between the weapon bay doors seems to have ..”gone” ?

AESA Radars have (or can have narrow beam widths) -as you know. A generally good thing for a fighter plane radar so it’s able to have better target resolution. Generally speaking, optical systems can scan a larger area with their field of view (which isn’t a term suitable for the radar anyway). So although they may be moving slower, they can make it up by scanning larger volumes of sky.

that is what I meant.

First, the scan rates of an IRST vs a radar, especially an AESA or PESA are not at all comparable.

Second, saying that most shots come from 10-2 is pure supposition on your part.

The scan rates may be lower, but the field of view isn’t as narrow, nor does it have to be.

the 10-2 shots is not supposition, it’s basic, given the scenarios regularly executed and that the F-22 is tasked with either defending a package or defending against a package.

I would depend on the actual intelligence gathered in the field.

Kind of like the stuff that keeps the Raptor wiping the floor with everything that it comes up against in Red Flag/Northern Edge/etc exercises.

True, yet those confirmed missile kills are simulated and don’t account for misses or pilot responses. Essentially if the F-22 locks on you and fires, it’s a kill. The mere fact that IRST could have picked up the launch plumes and alerted the target pilot is never account for as far as I know. Kinda skews the plot on one side me thinks

Without range the missile has to fly directly towards the target. This is the most inefficient form of flight profile and severely impacts the “published” ranges of modern AAMs.

For example, the latest ranges for the Aim-9X and especially the AIM-120D rely on an arching profile to achieve their max range.

Besides, (as Trident said) without the range you do not know whether the target is even in range of the missile to begin with, regardless of the flight profile.

For the moment it’s a moot point because IIRC there are no IR medium/long range missiles been discussed about the T-50. But still by definition if a target is detected by the IRST you know it’s between say 3 and 90km.It can’t be further than that.

Stealth on stealth brings fighter aircraft closer together at launch, making the first shot even more critical and devastating. With the T-50 having the worst RCS of all stealth fighters and from all significant aspects, it needs to have the best engagement radar by a long margin.

Given the tennis ball vs marble comparison in frontal RCS for the T-50 and Raptor respectively, with equal radars the raptor (marble) will detect the tennis ball from over double the range it is detected ie. (0.0035/0.000143)^0.25 based on the basic radar range equation.

The T-50 effectively needs to have a radar around 24 times more powerful than the raptor’s to get the drop on it head to head. As Jo has kindly demonstrated, Russian HEMT manufacturers are falling a LONG way behind in this arena. The difference in the industries is easily visible just by looking at the range of products available elsewhere and the almost complete lack of products from Russian suppliers.

I am on my phone back from work but I am almost certain the equation indicates that the f-22’s pick up range for the t-50 falls within the latter’s IRST’s range. Against a VLO target I’d go optical rather than EM at this stage I think..

The picture above is really badly photoshopped fyi.

I heard somewhere that if one was to take a shopped image and invert its colours, the ‘shopping’ becomes apparent. I did it for the above image and it seems to be .. normal.

I could be wrong..