JSF, nor F-22, never was going to rule the skies over the Soviet Union.
There was this little thing called mutual nuclear deterrance.
They may have ruled the skies over ancilliary countries used as proxy conflicts.

wow, moving target capability now with laser designation…
i can`t help but think of this in combo with the inert/concrete dummy rounds
for use when collateral damage is too likely with conventional explosives…

any idea on what a hammer/laser kit (will) costs with dummy round only?

also, i had a question about AASM flight profile… it`s widely touted as having more flexible flight profile, etc, does that mean the user can direct it to take a vertical descent profile, for instance? or a 10* ultra-shallow approach from a specific direction? (not necessarily in-line with plane`s movement) Is there some function to reject approaches that won`t work, e.g. in combo with plane`s actual direction and speed?

L1 baby, it´s all about ELLLLL-WUUNNNN….
IAF selected the contestants that it thinks meet it´s requirements… (good A2A, good payload/range, AESA, ToT possibly considered)
At this point, it doesn´t care about comparing anything but price.
How hard is this to get? There isn´t even any points for extra capacity if within 1% ala USAF tanker tender.

@Jo: Rafale would not have been short-listed if IAF was unwilling to purchase it. Come on.

Yes, IF IAF had specified all these little details to be ´necesities´, that could have excluded Rafale from being down-listed.
But they didn´t… Maybe because they aren´t so necessary,
along with the fact that doing so would mostly likely lead to a one-plane down-select,
which isn´t very conducive to a L1-based purchase decision.

Ain that case India has full partner status, so it also gains full technology transfer.

They’ll be recieveing a hell of a lot of tech by these companies just as much as the Eurofighter consortium members would/are with them being a full member.

I´m pretty sure that Eurofighter is not a technology transfer club.
Rolls Royce isn´t giving out it´s engine knowledge, Selex isn´t giving out it´s AESA experience.
All parter companies cover their areas of expertise… With alot of wasteful overlap in production, etc.

I think it´s absurd to on one hand rave about the ever-almost-ready AESA radar, and then claim that India will get so much more tech transfer out of this than a Rafale deal because of co-development. The tech transfer will essentially need to be ironed out thru bilateral deals with each Eurofighter company, though it´s highly likely that partner countries have delegated to Eurofighter to authorize sharing what they are willing to part with… The partnership process is such a mess, that India will not realistically use it when negotiating all of it´s requirements, but negotiate with a unitary Eurofighter GmbH representative. If it actually behaved like a partner, that would mean negotiations working like already seen in Europe, and needing to wait for every partner country to sign up on the contract themselves.

Further, how in the hell does this affect L1 bid evaluation? It doesn´t, just like airshow reliability doesn´t, just like who gave the most dramatic airshow performance doesn´t, or which plane matches Manmohan Singh´s turban the best. This is like the US´ tanker comp, except there is no proviso for ´points for exceeding requirements´ even if prices are within 1%.

Using an AESA radar that way is an option, smaller AESA apertures are power constrained.

That could be one of those interesting appliations of the main FCR, I guess…
I was more thinking of an appropriate RF frequency laser/maser….

Paulo Rezendo one said Rafale enjoyed an unquantified superiority over the competitors in Leh, for example using half the runway distance needed by the S Hornet.

That contradicts the tests in Switzerland.

I share your doubts about Rafale outperforming the Typhoon in regard of take off distance.

Who said anything about take-off distance. You also need to land, and wouldn´t be unsurprised if Rafale dominated Typhoon in that regard, Naval Typhoon aside. :rolleyes:

DIRCM would be nice…
It makes me think, why can´t a high powered narrow-beam microwave jammer be done,
(to be used against terminal phase radar in missile itself)

Yeah, I was aware of the OSF-IT situation (does that make Rafale rely on Damocles for IR imagery?),
any idea what exactly is being planned for the -NG IR imager, technology-wise?

Acknowledging that AN-148/158 is suitable for badly equipped airports begs the question, what about the market servicing areas with WELL equipped airports? The vast majority of the world population who can afford regular air-travel after all probably DO have access to a high quality airport, so pretending that Siberian air-strips are the be-all end-all of regional jets is just cutting yourself off from the world market. Do you really think An-158 has better sales prospects than an SSJ 130/NG offering BOTH PurePower and PD-14? An-148 has been flying for how many years, and still doesn´t have more sales+orders OUTSIDE OF CIS than Superjet already has on order for it´s low-end model with a so-so engine.

Superjet already has orders from Interjet in Mexico and a leasing company in Malaysia.
How does Malaysia not count as operating in Asia, which you said SSJ can´t do? :confused: (why not???)
If Superjet is not cost-effective, why has Interjet bought it?

Yes, of course Armavia signed up to buy it early because of Russian-Armenia relations and concessional loan terms, but so what?, Brazil did the same thing with Embraer, and the US runs state-subsidized export programs as well.
Further, for all the complains about Western content, that is what it´s competitors on the world market use,
if it´s claimed to be so horrible, how can it´s competitors not be equally as horrible based on the same or older tech?

SSJ is the teething toy for if Russia can make and sell world-class airplanes, or be restricted to the smaller-than-USSR and Warsaw Pact CIS market (+Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Venezuela to an extent). By all signs, it has everything it needs to be as successful in it´s market segment as Sukhoi can handle…