KovyAre there any information available wrt to employing the DDM-NG in another role than missile warning?
hints at best.
KovyI think the important points to remember from this debate are
We should look at a fighter as a homogeneous system tasked for missions rather than the superposition of different systems working separately.
More powerfull radars allow early detection of stealth target, right. But the good questions to ask are :
1- how much early ? if it is after the IRST detection, it brings no advantage and worst it can even help the stealthy target to locate you.
2- What about the tracking range of your BVR missile’s tiny radar against a stealth target ? The missile has to acquire the target at the end of the interception with its own radar. In this case an IR BVR missile like the mica, will always have a far better PK than any amraam.
RBE-ASEA, might be smaller and fixed but it is there (First production Rafale with the radar, C137, has been delivered to the Air Force for validation trials) AFAIK, Captor-E in its early form (no repositioner, no ECM) will not be delivered before 2015… and the complete version is not expected until 2018, at best…
The AESA system of the Rafale has its own roadmap that will certainly not wait for the Captor-E to fulfil all its promises.
Despite what Shiv stated, ECM and larger aperture is being studied for the Rafale aesa array. The only difference is that this array is not limited to the nose anymore but seen as the merging of spectra and RBE-2 arrays. IMHO, that’s a much elegant/smart way to manage active detection/jamming than to have separate entities which will be more tricky to managed efficiently.
As far as IRST is concerned, I’ quite confident now, that the long range detection function will also merge with the DDM-NG system and that the OSF will only serve for long range all weather ID and tracking.
The future of the Rafale sensor suite is aiming toward more efficiency through simplicity.
Kovy@Bluewings
You consider yourself being knowledgeable about the Typhoon, funny enough no one else appears to consider your person to be overly well informed about the aircraft. From what I have seen over the past few years your knowledge about the Typhoon is mediocre at best and your judgment is to a large extend based on prejudices, pre-made phrases and arguments which look just too familiar and the absence of factual knowledge on the Typhoon. You are knowing a fair deal about the Rafale, but the same can not be said about the Typhoon as you have repeatedly proven with your claims about Typhoon’s MMI, EWS and other aspects. I don’t respect your Typhoon bashing wrapped around “hey it’s a good aircraft and I like it” phrases. You are one of the first to pop up in the defence of the Rafale and feel personally offended when someone is criticizing or bashing it, but yourself are not any better when it comes to other aircraft types, the Typhoon in particular. If someone would call your beloved Rafale a Mirage 4000 which got rid of its steroids or a souped up Mirage III NG you would certainly protest and complain, but you don’t mind to come up with such claims about the Typhoon.
If you don’t mind, I will copy/paste that for the next JL article, just swapping the typhoon/rafale words 😉
KovyNo, he didn’t admit farting, instead he claimed it was the “experts” at FAB,
that after extensive research came to this astonishing result,
no doubt to put extra credibility to his statement,
on the odd chance some infidels wouldn’t simply take
“not only a journalist, but also a Brazilian Legislative Government officer’s word for it”
This smell corruption from Pepe, or incompetence at FAB
While every “experts” were dismissing the Rafale as the weakest of the challengers in the MMRCA contest, he was the first to bring accurate insight on the IAF eval putting the Rafale as a front runner.
All his predictions proved right.
That said, he acknowledges that he is not a technical expert, therefore he could have misunderstood the RCS thing. That certainly doesn’t make him a corrupted man
KovyI would also add that it is now a known fact that the “leaks” in the Indian serious media after the eval were organised by the Indian Mod itself. It was their modus operandi in order to quiet all the false rumors spread by lobbies.
KovyAnd there were many credible reports indicating that Typhoon led after the technical evaluation, and then fell down when the L1/L2 decision was made.
The Indians and the Swiss evaluated the aircraft at different times, and were looking for different things. One of the Indian tick boxes was the helmet, for example.
You will repeat that all you life as you do for Singapore.
The fact remains that your sources are weak compared to those (with real insight from the IAF) stating that it is in fact the Rafale that emerged as the overall preferred aircraft of the IAF after the flight eval.
Eventually, the pathetic British attempt to reverse the Indian decision with the naive argument that the EF was a better aircraft was dismissed immediately by the Indian Mod cutting short any more complains from Mr Cameron. May be they showed him the IAF eval report…
KovyI’m a bit sceptical about the F-35B being less risky than the C version.
KovyWill the AdA now cancel all potential exercises with the IAF for Rafale bashing?:dev2:
Apparently, you missed the part(s) where the guy is bashing the IAF.
KovyThe Swiss report certainly does give that impression, though to be picky it does not actually ‘prove’ anything. I’m not disagreeing with your fundamental point, though, and would absolutely concur with your conclusion that Rafale is one of the best machines available today.
Neither you nor I have seen the Indian report, and there is disagreement as to what it said. All that we know in India is that Rafale was the L1 choice (the lowest bid).
The L1 choice of the 2 remaining contenders.
The technical evaluation before that, proved that the Rafale is not the inferior aircraft describes by this … errr…expert wannabe, but a top of the line and mature multirole fighter (otherwise it would have been rejected after the flight tests).
Besides the numerous and hilarious mistakes and untruth filling this article, the author argumentation is also fatally flawed and biased. The references used are mostly pointless or distorted.
An incredible piece of ….crap (A funny one though)
KovyI quote the report :
http://www.ipcs.org/pdf_file/issue/SR126-NSP-IndiaandtheRafale.pdf🙂
lol,
This is not the first time this guy bashes the Rafale like that.
It reminds me an other poor article of him 1 month ago.
http://atlanticsentinel.com/2012/04/eurofighter-the-great-german-backstab/
With hilarious quote like :
“The [Eurofighter] loss in India was galling however given that the Rafale is considered the lowest performing of all modern western warplanes.”
That make me wonder why countries like India and Switzerland spend millions evaluating warplanes and writing technical reports proving that the Rafale is one of the best machine available today.
I wish him good luck for his Phd 😀 (I hope that it is not related to Fighter jets, a subject that he has obviously no clue about.)
KovyKovy,
But there will be times when you need to fly a one hour sortie, which either aircraft can do with internal fuel, and when the pair of Typhoons could take six EPWII each. Or when you need to fly an eight hour sortie, and when you know that you’re going to be going to the tanker anyway.
The point is that for some missions, the ability to use a cheaper dual mode weapon will be an advantage, and others where it will not.
Just as there will be many occasions where stand off capability is a really vital advantage, and others where you are going to want to be able to engage targets that are directly below you. I read one article criticizing AASM for not being able to spiral down against such targets – a relatively unimportant shortcoming, admittedly, but a shortcoming in some scenarios.
And my point is that you call “superiority” a particular case that you chose because it doesn’t require the advandages of the Rafale and artificially hide the shortcomings of the Typhoon.
Anyway, with the GBU-49 a “dual mode” Rafale flight will always be cheaper than a Typhoon flight with EPWII/PWIV.
So currently, you have the choise between
Rafale + GBU-49 + damocles =
pros :
cons :
Typhoon + EPWII + litening =
Pros
Cons
That’s a far more balanced way to assess the 2 systems than just picking up the features/conditions that suit your agenda.
KovyHonnestly I’m seriously questioning the low cost argument of jacko.
In a real 4 hours mission, I’m not sure that 2 Rafale with 6 AASM each (ie 12 targets) is that much more expensive than a flight of 3 Typhoon with 4 EPWII each and a tanker to compensate for the much lower fuel capacity (3 times less)
I would not be surprised if the global cost difference in that kind of practical scenario turns out to be only marginal despite the fact that the rafale is using a more expensive(/superior) weapon… The Typhoon cost per flight hour is indeed said to be awfully high (ask India).
KovyTMor,
That contradicts what eagle1 was saying in his post No.690 at the bottom of page 23 of this thread. It also contradicts what we know of F3 versus F3O4T contents.
Things are moving fast in the Rafale Program…
Better, in the view of the RAF, than sacrificing one of the MRAAMs.
I’m not sure it was the main concern of the RAF. But never mind.
No, it doesn’t. Rafale does not have a dual mode weapon (excepting the IN/GPS & IIR version of AASM) and will not have one until GBU-49 and SBU-64 come on stream.
So it does indeed.
dual GPS/laser mode is a matter of weeks (if not already validated if we refer to the first Raids Aviation issue)… so nothing to argue on.
Litening is a better LDP than Damocles, which is why the AdlA looked at procuring it, or Sniper, instead. It’s more a matter of resolution, quality, stability and handling than parametrics, and it’s widely acknowledged.
Besides resolution, I disagree.
So “widely acknowledge” is all what you’ve got ?
KovyThe price I gave for AASM (not my price, as I made clear, but a price that appears in a number of pretty reputable sources) was €200,000 ($300,000).
That’s nowhere near the full unit cost including R&D.
According to the figures of the Comité des Prix de Revient des fabrications d’Armement (CPRA) cited by the daily La Tribune and posted by Xman, the unit price for AASM including R&D is €360,306 ($465,481.56).
360,000€ is the total unit cost including R&D for a planed production of 2346 units for France only.
200,000€ is the total unit cost including R&D for a planed production of 4148 units for France only.
The French order book is currently 3400 units, so the 360,000€ figure is already obsolete by a fair margin.
Anyway, those are simply 2 different global unit cost forecasts depending on the total production but have nothing to do with the “fly away” unit price of an AASM as stated by H_K
KovyAFAIR, the 57 km AASM shot performed by a rafale in Libya on a tank was possible thanks to the Damocles ability to extract GPS coordinate at long range.
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