Larger non-LO aircraft like the Su 35 will have much of its advantage with respect to bigger radar negated because of its higher RCS,

To what extent? And what makes you think that a Su-35 fielding force is not willing to put up with that RCS issue for the advantage that having a huge 1 mtr dia aperture dome brings you, and that too with a movable field of regard radar today, which the Gripen NG will field tomorrow.

Other fighters can stay silent, datalinked and soak up that data. Every bit as effective as what the Gripen claims.

As matter of fact the Su-35 is the one aircraft out there, with an already gimballed ESA as versus the in developed gimballed Raven, still in trials. And judging by NIIPs experience with PESAs & the upgrade path clearly established with the PAK FA, there is nothing to say it does not have excellent performance already, matching or exceeding what the Raven may bring and won’t go further up that path either to an AESA which will boost its performance even more.

Today, the USAF is finding out that its AESA equipped F-15s can effectively complement its limited number of F-22s, do think about why they are not just putting in larger numbers of upgraded F-16s instead!!

And RCS itself – Russia has a long history of RCS reduction programs, has a stealth program in development, enough EW houses now exist to provide you state of the art AESA equipped high ERP jammers to couple with your own specialized algorithms, so as to break the last mile of the kill chain & the weakest link, the RF part. Hardly such a big deal as you make it out to be.

add that with the compartively short ranged Russian AAMs (compared to the Meteor). I really don’t think its outside the realm of possibility that the Gripen would have a favourable exchange ratio with any flanker.

As it stands the only real advantage is the Meteor, and the RVV-BD may limit that advantage to some extent, besides which MBDA offers the Meteor to anybody willing to meet them halfway in terms of integration.

Brute force will not always win you air wars.

And who says its brute force. That is your inability to come up with any details of how the Su-35 is anyway a brute compared to the Gripen NG and not an equally sophisticated platform in its own right, which can be exploited to win air wars as well.

Don’t be silly, a heavy fighter has no advantage A2A wise,

I am not being silly but you certainly are. Which is why any argument with blind Gripen fanatics like you becomes a tedious exercise in ad hominems. See how easy that was? Want to avoid going down that path? Lets.

A larger fighter carries more space to carry larger, more effective sensors which translate directly into more capability to operate autonomously, has more growth potential on account of that very fact and can hence add more value to an AF which has limited number of force multipliers.

it’s A2G where it becomes an advantage

A2G and A2A BOTH. Carrying oversized or large amounts of ordinance are not the only things that matter, but the ability to do so can be an advantage in A2A as well, giving more payload/combo flexibility.

Let’s go through this. There hasn’t been any official explanation as to why the Gripen failed to meet the shortlist. The most likely cause detailed by many indian defense bloggers was that Saab was unable to provide enough evidence that their AESA was mature, would be delivered on time and with the intended qualities. I don’t find that too unrealistic. Apparently, both Eurofighter and Rafale had similar problems but managed to find temporary satisfactory solutions.

The fact that EF & Rafale moved ahead with in development AESAs should in itself tell you that WIP avionics were not the only issue. Frank fact is that Gripen NG always suffered in the payload to capability issue thanks to its smaller size, and from day 1 had to run an aggressive and at times ludicrous, media campaign to convince Indian decision makers otherwise.

Heck, at a public event a year or so before the MRCA, SAAB PR folks at the event could not handle pointed queries about how the Gripen NG was in anyway superior to the EF and Rafale. They all but admitted that it could not carry as much at similar distances, had lower performance overall, but argued it was cheaper and would come with transfer of technology – but could not provide any convincing point about how exactly the TOT would be superior to that provided by EF or Dassault either.

MRCA was targeted against restricted-capability Flankers and the Gripen in C/D incantation was fully capable with proposed solutions.

Thats just rubbish. The MRCA was not targeted against restricted capability anything. It was about specific performance benchmarks which eliminated all the airframes which were known to have either airframe performance constraints due to several factors (payload scope creep, size factor, originally intended for naval requirements) and ended up with the two most potent aircraft in the competition, airframe and performance wise, albeit sacrificing maturity versus in development targets.
The Gripen C/D was neither offered to India and nor would it be capable of facing the sort of emerging threats that are coming into play with the PLAAFs technology advances.

NG failed to meet the performance specifications like most competitors.

Bar two, which were clearly superior.

People are also comparing apples to oranges when showing NG costs. These arguments were put to bed in posts long since archived yet the same asinine arguments continue.

If you don’t like the NG, fine. Stop thread crapping about it.

If you don’t like people pointing out hyperbole about the NG is flawed, such as it being superior to the advanced Flanker on the basis of silly PR films or dodgy claims, fine. Stop thread crapping bringing up specious claims about topics you know little about (like the MRCA).
Try being civil and you’ll get the same in turn.

So all this should be viewed as your personal opinion then anything else ?

He has made a rancour free, information heavy post. Apart from sarcasm, what have you posted?

LRDE has updated its site.

Areas of Work
http://drdo.gov.in/drdo/labs/LRDE/English/index.jsp?pg=AreasWork.jsp

Activities

Design and Development of Radar Systems

Army

Multifunction Phased Array Radar and 3D Surveillance Radar for Akash Missile Weapon System
Low Level Light weight 2D Radar for mountainous terrain Air Defence
3D -Tactical Control Radar for Air Defence
Short Range Battle Field Surveillance Radar
Weapon Locating Radar
Multi Mission Radar (MMSR)
FOPEN Radar
Through wall detection Radar
Ground Penetration Radar

Air Force

Multifunction Phased Array Radar and 3D Surveillance Radar for Akash Missile Weapon System
Active Phased Array Radar for AEW&C
Low level 2D Air Defence Radar
3D Low Level Light Weight Radar
3D Medium Range Surveillance Radar for Air Defence
4D Active Array Medium Power radar for AD role
Airborne Electronically Scanned Array Radar for Tejas Mark II
Ground Controlled interception
SAR for UAVs

Navy

Maritime Patrol Radar for fixed and Rotary Wing Aircraft
Maritime Patrol Radar with RS and ISAR
3D Medium Range Surveillance Radar for ASW Corvettes
Multifunction Phased Array Radar for Air Defence Ship
Maritime Patrol Airborne Radar for UAV
Coastal Surveillance Radar (CSR)

Development of Radar Technologies

Slotted Waveguide Antenna in S, X and Ku Band
Patch Array Antenna in S, C, X and Ku Band
Multibeam Antenna in S Band
T/R Modules in L, S, C and X Band for Active Aperture Arrays
Semi Active Aperture Arrays
MMICs for T/R Modules
Central Unit
Space Time Management
Programmable Signal Processors
FPGA based Signal Processors
Radar Data Processors
High Average Power TWT based Transmitters
Compact Light Weight TWT Transmitters.
High purity sources
Multichannel Digital receivers
Digital Beam Formers
Solid State Transmitters
Radar Imaging through ISAR
Automatic Target Classification
Through Wall Imaging Radar (TWIR)
Ground Penetration Radar (GPR)
Array Group Receiver

Pretty much the entire gamut of radar tech bar a few niche areas (e.g. OTH radars etc)

Also, a small image of the new 300 KM class MPR for the AF. Prototypes have been developed per the MOD Annual Report last year and it should be entering trials in 2013-14
http://drdo.gov.in/drdo/labs/LRDE/English/index.jsp?pg=achieve.jsp

Interesting bit from the directors bio:
http://drdo.gov.in/drdo/labs/LRDE/English/index.jsp?pg=Director.jsp

Under his leadership and guidance, LRDE could complete the development of as many as eight radar systems in a short time. These include the portable and battery powered Low Level Light Weight Radars (LLLWRs) for air surveillance -Bharani and Aslesha, 3D Medium range surveillance radars – Rohini, Revathi and 3D Tactical Control Radar for all the three Services, Phased array radars-Weapon Locating Radar and Rajendra-III and the airborne Maritime Patrol Radar-XV 2004. All these Radars have been accepted by the Armed Forces and Production has commenced at M/s Bharat Electronics against firm orders.

He led the transmit/receive module (TRM) based fully active array technology with digital beam forming in S band, breeding (leading?) to a number of rotating electronically scanning array radars (RESAR) such as the Medium Power Radar (Arudhra) and the medium range Low Level Transportable Radar (Ashwini). He has initiated the development of SAR for UAV Payload; AESA based airborne Multimode Radar and Multi-mission Radar at ‘C’ Band (new development!).

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Ashwini is the vehicle mounted higher power version of the Aslesha…good times for the IAF/IA/IN with more and more needs met locally. Allows for forex to be spent judiciously..

I think you mean new Honeywell engines.
http://www.honeywellforjaguar.com/

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I wonder how capable those El-2032 radar sets on DARIN 3 will be. Hope they get full A-A functionality.

You are right about the engines, a mistake on my side.

The Jag radome at least on the IM is pretty limited. I doubt they will redesign for a larger radome. At best, it should offer respectable self defence capability (around the level of 40 km detection range for A2A targets; Kopyo has 57 km) which should be good enough. The Jags will either get ASRAAM or Python-V for self defence, that there’s no talk of RF missiles (to my knowledge) makes it clear that A2A is not a serious role intended for the improved Jags.

I can say with certainty that no YF-22 components went into F-22 and no X-35 components went into F-35. Having talked to guys who worked YF-23 and X-32, they had no plans to reuse parts for their operational airplanes either.

After flying a couple hundred flights to validate performance analyses, those airplanes were useless and sent to museums. There has been pushback within industry that questions the need for prototype fly-offs given the fidelity of performance models. Beancounters like fly-offs because it helps keep a program sold to Congress, but there really isn’t technical justification for fly-offs anymore.

The bottom line, at contract award F-22 and F-35 were still “paper airplanes” despite the prototypes.

But not all countries will do things the same way. Today, to meet compressed design-development schedules and save cost, even prototypes can feature initial variants of mission specific items. Take a look at the T-50. A prototype is getting the AESA radar & clearly other items all intended (in perhaps more refined versions) to be on the actual production articles.

In India as well – to save money/compress time/cost schedules, we tend to take on more risk by combining prototypes with some new mission specific items. It doesn’t always work out (and when it doesn’t, post failure analysis is very complicated), but its still a pretty useful method which delivers results when it works.

Your described method works when time is available, a liberal budget is present (to make many test demonstrators, prototypes of various types, LSP etc). And there are existing subystems to leverage en masse.
If everything is new, and other issues (time, money) are also in perennial short supply, then taking more risk is not uncommon

Guess what, LD-10 ARM will be the answer

http://i.imgur.com/hoyfl.jpg

Doubtful it has the range to go up against a S-3XX class system or a S-4XX system. Just compare it to the Kh-58s, newer Kh-31P variants.