ZareUltra-waste, i say. If they streched their resources (devoting much of GDP to the military) and foreign affection to the last bit, they could afford 20-25 light 4th generation fighters.
25 F-16s vs 500+ Flankers?
250 F-16s vs 500 Flankers would be almost laughable. Ten times less…jesus.
They should invest in special forces, attack helos and highly mobile netcentric anti-air defenses. Their airforce should consist only of helos and transport aircraft. Any CAS or fighter jet is out of the question.
Then again, 160 Tu-22M3 backfires?
Any kind of military build-up by Georgians is stupid. They had the chance to diplomaticaly resolve this conflict.
ZareModern Su-27 variants are surely the best looking.
ZareBut (and I asked this question many times on that forum) do you know that in Kossovo, US and allies fired hundreds oh anti radiation missiles (HARM, ALARM) on Serb radars. These missiles were fired against ground, imobile targets, from above at distances of around 40-50 km. Still, less than 10 % hit their targets!
They were fired at preprogrammed targets. That’s not same as seek & destroy wild-weasel mission.
However, according to some naive guys that give the Russian SciFi brochures 100 % credit, there is no doubt that a “mighty” 172 will have no problems in finding, tracking and destroying an AWACS flying at 900 km/h from 300 km !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yet, some other people don’t have problems believing AMRAAM’s allmightyness, even if it was only fired under total domination conditions, towards obsolete targets from maximum distance of not more than 30 km.
A Su 35 won’t be able to find the range to an AWACS; no doubt the bearing would be easy to find; however, finding range requires some more sophisticated gear, found on a few EW planes (EA 6, F 18G, F 16 CJ with HTS) I don’t doubt that Russain dedicated EW planes have the same capability, but not a fighter like Su 35.
ALR-94 can range the threats, without radar pings. Fighter threats. Ok, i believe. Let’s say i do. Why wouldn’t L-175M be able to do the same?
yes, it going to wait for the Russian missile
No, it’s going to hit 9G manuevering.
Pfft…it’s a bulky airplane which probably doesn’t even know of the missile.
Do you really believe that a Su 35 will be able to track a F 22 from 70 km????
That’s maximum engagement range for 120-C7. Engaging a fast manueverable target with high jamming potential will decrease that range.
So we’re talking about some 50km rmax here. And yes, i believe that Su-35BM can track Raptor at 50km of distance.
Zare@sferrin, Su-35 can shoot AWACS down without radiating a single beam.
L-175M will pick up AWACS’ signal and that data is all it’s needed for R-172’s launch authorization. R-172 features it’s own multimode seekerhead, and one of those modes is PR mode. While R-172’s small antenna won’t pick up the radiation from 300 km away, it will eventually. Until then, it’s going on inertia, thus no datalink, completely passive.
Midcourse updates and command correction are not really needed. AWACS ain’t going anywhere.
Upon positive lock with the PR seekerhead, AWACS is…basically dead. If those F-22’s are in front of it, let’s say 150 km, they are still 100 km short from engaging the Su-35 with AMRAAM. If they visually detected the incoming Novator (it’s a pretty bulky missile!) AWACS may try shutting down the radar system.
But again, it won’t do much. Upon signal loss, R-172 will just switch to AR guidance, and point to the last known location. The xxx sqm AWACS won’t be a hard target to lock from 100 km with AR.
In any case, letting Su-35 come at 300 km from the AWACS is a suicide.
You all seem to forget the AIM-120C-7 range. F-22 will be long detected by Irbis, before he gets L.A. with the AMRAAM. That is going to change with the -120D, but we’re not there yet (nor we are with the Su-35, but it will be a gap, VVS will get first types before USAF gets -120D).
Regarding plasma stealth, it’s not the cloud all over the plane, for god sakes. It’s layering the radome, from inside. It’s only purpose is to cover the radar antenna, and since the radome is radiotransparent, there’s no need to put the plasma layer outside to have direct contact with air. 🙂
ZareYeah, i think that Garry overlooked that factor. Rotodome itself wastes a lot of power, now add everything else…
ZareOh i forgot to say that we’ll build a carrier for whole fleet of 2500 MiGs. And convert them into VTOL aircrafts.
(did you miss the “now for real” part after the 2500x MiG-21 ;))
ZareCroatian Air Force.
2500x MiG-21-93.
Now for real,
8x Su-35BM, with all the long-range goodies that come with it – so we can be sure no-one around can dream to touch us.
16x Yak-130D/133, to provide pilot training, flying hours, close air support, aerial point defense and maritime recon.
20x Mi-171Sh, for all rotary-wing ops.
4x C-130, some modern variant.
ZareYou’ve missed my point. If the ALR detects hostile emissions, but doesn’t have an entry in it’s database on that particular emitter, it can’t approximate the range, without using the APG-77, of course. It can only sense the relative position and signal level.
So if I’m sitting on the other side of the room looking at you with a pair of binoculars I’m invisible? (Besides where did I suggest trying to detect a passive system passively anyway?)
Eyes and humans are a rather complex analogy.
The only way for someone’s IRST to detect another IRST, is to detect the platform carrier, and then to conclude there’s IRST onboard. But let’s drop this, and stay on topic.
ZareSferrin, thank you for elaborating, my assumption seems proven. However, the big drawback of the system, not talking about ALR-94 in particular rather about the general principle, is if you don’t have the emitter characteristics in your database, you can conclude little. Talking about single aircraft scenario here, so no triangulation and similar techniques. Using signal levels alone to determine the range will get you nowhere; RP-25 has twenty times more powerful output than N035E, while the latter has four to five times more detection range in any kind of scenario against any kind of target.
And by the way, you can’t passively detect an passive system 😉 At least not in newtonian frame of reference.
Rayrubik, first to say that i’ve given out the wrong radar set. In order to use R-60 on the MiG-21, you need to have at least the MiG-21bis variant, which features RP-22 radar set. The maximum detection range for a fighter sized RCS in frontal aspect would be 14 km, again inside the visual range at clear skies. The original issue still stands; detection matters, not locking. Using the radar’s greater FOV to cue the R-60 won’t do no good, because it’s not a LOAL missile, you’ll still need to acquire a positive lock with it’s own seeker.
I’m still one question short 😉 The N035 at high distances vs. RWR’s. Anyone?
ZareThe L175M features it’s own new display inside that pit, so i would agree with scorpion82.
ZareSealordlawrence,
The frequency of the plasma screen should equal the frequency of the radar, and the timing of the screen should be putted in between the two radar phases, so you have tingling/flashing like radar-screen-radar-screen, and so on…that would work, in theory.
In reality, you always have lower and higher cutoffs in any kind of flashing, and that cutoffs would interfere with the “second phase”, be it radar or screen. Those cutoffs would be easily evaded if they were same in both phases…in that case, you would leave an “error zone”, much like in digtal theory where the 0-0.7V signal equals binary zero and 4.3-5V signal equals binary one while the 0.7-4.3 range equals error in coding, but cutoffs are different for both types of radiation, therefore that would require precise synchronization.
If you leave cutoffs as they are, you are efectivelly degrading both radar precision and screen efficiency. In trans-phase region, “remains” of the screen would interfere with reactivated radar, and vice versa, degrading exactly (n) percent performance of respected regime equal to how much cutoff interval has it’s share in whole working interval.
In my work on high-powered electrostatic fields which needed to interact with other sources of radio emissions, i haven’t managed to drop-down cutoff beyond 5-8 percent average. I was using COTS components, they’re going to use milspec stuff, they’re 1500 times combined more smart and have more expirience than i have, but i’d say that whole system would degrade the performance of both the radar antenna and the screen for 1-3%.
It doesn’t look like much, but it’s degrading. However, in this case, the ends justify the means.
ZareYes, the ER has IN and MCCU. It has a datalink, and it works just as i described, so the platform can lose lock, and regain it, missile can still hit in that kind of scenario, just the PK drops down.
The ET has no MCCU, no datalink. It requires a positive lock before launch. It’s ideal for high-speed tailchases against afterburning targets, where the R-73 range drops down to couple of km’s. If the target is breaking away with high transsonic speeds, and you’re following it, R-27ET rmax should be around 15 km’s or so.
ZareThe R-27R and R-27ER are lock on before launch and as far as I know have no capability to reaquire a target in flight.
Garry, i think you’re wrong on this one. For LOBL, seekerhead needs to acquire the contact upon launch, and it’s impossible for the R-27ER seeker to do that from, let’s say 80 km distance. Even the R-37 seeker, 40 kg heavy and 38 centimeters in diameter, does 70km against 5m2 RCS.
R-27R(ER) uses MCCU and IN for the stages until the seeker picks up bounced radar beams. And, the answer is yes, if the Su-27 lost contact on initial stages, the missile will lose MCCU and go for IN regime. Depending on the timeframe of reacquiring, the missile will see the contact once again, if it’s far away, the platform will start sending MCCU again, and correct the trajectory, if it’s near, seeker will just pick up beams and go in SARH. It’s also possible for the R-27ER to reacquire contact even if the contact got lost in final stages. Everything depends on the N001, missile is timed to selfdestruct at 60 seconds (or something similiar), it’ll always listen to MCCU and contact from the seekerhead. Missiles will guide themselves just on information of N001/equipment that belongs to platform that launched them (coded pulses).
In any case, every contact loss reduces PK. Especially in terminal mode, where the missile is working on the semi-active radar regime.
Zare24 Su-27SM’s are active, another 24 are on the way from KnAAPO to VVS. The total requirement is 200 aircraft.
Regarding reduced RCS Flankers, i got the same info too, about cca 100 Su-27S(M)’s being “refubrished”. Hope someone has more info about the program.
ZareStill at Stage 1, are we?
Ignorance is bliss. End of discussion.
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