hopsalot[ATTACH=CONFIG]237464[/ATTACH]
Russia developing Shtorm supercarrier
Russia’s Krylovsky State Research Center (KRSC) has developed a new multipurpose heavy aircraft carrier design called Project 23000E or Shtorm (Storm).
A scale model of the ship is going to be demonstrated for the first time at the International Maritime Defence Show 2015 in St Petersburg from 1-5 July, Valery Polyakov, the deputy director of KSC, told IHS Jane’s .
“The Project 23000E multipurpose aircraft carrier is designed to conduct operations in remote and oceanic areas, engage land-based and sea-borne enemy targets, ensure the operational stability of naval forces, protect landing troops, and provide the anti-aircraft defence,” Polyakov said.
The design has a displacement of 90-100,000 tons, is 330 m in length, 40 m wide, and has a draft of 11 m. It has a top speed of 30 kt, cruising speed of 20 kt, a 120-day endurance, a crew of 4-5,000, and designed to withstand sea state 6-7. Currently it has been designed with a conventional power plant, although this could be replaced by a nuclear one, according to potential customers’ requirements.
The ship carries a powerful air group of 80-90 deck-based aircraft for various combat missions. The model features a split air wing comprising navalised T-50 PAKFAs and MiG-29Ks, as well as jet-powered naval early warning aircraft, and Ka-27 naval helicopters.
http://www.janes.com/article/51452/russia-developing-shtorm-supercarrier
There are some more details at the link. I am quite skeptical of this becoming a reality. It would be a simply immense undertaking…
Still, interesting to see it even being discussed.
hopsalothttp://flighttestsafety.org/images/stories/workshop/2009Apr/Flynn.pdf
This is also corroborated by the fact that the earlier variants employing LANTIRN cannot go below 200 ft if the terrain is not flat. It’s a limitation due to the airframe, not to the system.
As I said before, it is plausible that there are limitations on where you can terrain following at 100ft altitude, but I don’t read that presentation the same way you seem to.
The part you are quoting was referring only to the DBTF system, not the radar. The presentation says both systems are capable of terrain following at 100ft.
I also don’t see anywhere where it says the airframe is the limitation (which doesn’t even make sense), and given that LANTIRN is a completely different system I don’t know why you keep bringing it up.
hopsalotThis capability has only be tested on all flat terrain, and it can be used only over such (like on LANTIRN). Thus, nothing better versus the 2000N/D or Rafale. Mirage 2000-9EAD also have similar capability, with digital terrain following modes.
I would like a source for this.
As already stated in the other thread, the F-16 Block 60 does not use LANTIRN for terrain following.
There are presumably limits on the terrain over which any low level flight system can be used, but what do you consider “flat terrain” and where did you see it reported that it had only been tested over flat terrain?
hopsalot…and in a brief departure from our normally scheduled bickering about the relative merits of various eurocanards…
WASHINGTON — Boeing could be the latest international aircraft-maker to garner a deal for more fighter aircraft, with word that the US government is nearing agreement to sell up to 40 F/A-18 E and F Super Hornet strike fighters to Kuwait.
The deal, first reported Wednesday by Reuters, has yet to be officially announced by either the US or Kuwait, but officials in Washington have confirmed an agreement is close.
Any deal will would require approval from the US Congress, but it’s unlikely a proposed sale to Kuwait, a staunch US ally in the Persian Gulf, would meet serious opposition.
…
In Kuwait, Boeing had been up against the Eurofighter Typhoon. Kuwait tentatively agreed in early 2014 to go with the Typhoon, but subsequently backed off.
It is not yet clear how many single-seat F/A-18Es and two-seat F/A-18Fs are involved in the Kuwait deal. Some media accounts reported a deal for 28 of the Boeing aircraft, while US sources indicate as many as 40 F/A-18s could be sold — probably under an initial deal for 28 aircraft with an option for 12 more. It’s estimated the value of the deal would be greater than $3 billion.
Pretty competitive pricing in this deal.
hopsalotRafale?
hopsalotIt takes time to get sufficient numbers and pilots trained. Having airplanes without pilots or pilots without airplanes is not having an operational system. And I think in this case one reason for the delay is that it is an estimation as well as the fact that two large operators will get their deliveries at roughly the same time.
Did you mean two small operators?
Neither 36 jets nor 60 counts as a “large operator” in my book.
hopsalotI thought it was going to be fully operational from the start. At least that was what I was told here 😉
Bit by bit reality intrudes into the Gripen NG party.
hopsalotA more recent source:
Thompson described a scenario where three EA-18Gs, using the ALQ-218, would be able to passively and precisely target a contact enough to provide targeting off board to a strike package. One lead Growler, as master station with two “slave” Growlers, would be able to formulate the target position and through the TTNT would be able to transmit target-quality positioning to a the strike package. The three Growlers would use a time difference of arrival algorithm for the isochrones — lines connecting all points having the same time delay — to precisely calculate the target track.
http://www.seapowermagazine.org/stories/20150413-advanced-growler.html
hopsalotModern EW systems can determine the bearing of a signal with a very high degree of accuracy. This can certainly allow BVR shots under some circumstances, but not with the same precision afforded by a proper radar track. Such a shot would need to be shorter ranged, and would suffer from reduced probability of kill. (not to mention generally reduced situational awareness if the shooting aircraft were really operating entirely passively. )
Boeing has also discussed using multiple Growlers operating cooperatively to passively triangulate a target, determining its location, heading, and velocity in real-time. The limitation here is that it requires multiple Growlers.
In the Growler demonstration, conducted during the Navy’s Fleet Experimentation 13 campaign out of NAS Patuxent River, Md., two EA-18Gs and an E-2D Advanced Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft were fitted with an additional Harris Corp. processor running Rockwell Collins tactical network targeting technology (TTNT) software and a Northrop Grumman time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) algorithm.
RF emitters aboard ships were detected by the passive electronic surveillance measures (ESM) aboard the aircraft (the Growler’s Northrop Grumman ALQ-218 and the Lockheed Martin ALQ-217 on the E-2D). By comparing the difference between the times of arrival of the signals at each platform, the system could precisely geolocate the targets. The system can work with two platforms, but can resolve ambiguities faster with three.
The most important advance, according to Boeing’s director of innovation and capability growth, Paul Summers, was to show that a target moving at 15 kt. could be located accurately “within the seeker bins for a variety of weapons.” The key to doing this is a multi-platform, low-latency, high-throughput data link that shares intercept data in near-real time. The demonstration also incorporated L-3 Communications’ Network-Centric Collaborative Targeting data link so that target data could be sent to Air Force assets such as the RC-135 Rivet Joint.
…
A proposed demonstration next year will apply the same technology to air combat, in a program associated with Boeing’s Advanced Super Hornet project. The goal is to add the TTNT data link and TDOA processor to a Super Hornet, using the fighter’s passive sensors—high-gain ESM, using the APG-79 active, electronically scanned array radar, the ALR-67(V)3 defensive ESM and the in-development IRST—to add air-target data to the picture. The IRST provides very high bearing accuracy and its capability would be improved as a result of being cued by the RF sensors.
http://aviationweek.com/awin/us-navy-aims-curb-enemy-jamming
So is it possible to employ the sorts of entirely passive tactics that people spend so much time here talking about? Yes… but we are talking about cutting edge stuff here that would almost certainly require multiple aircraft acting cooperatively using both very capable EW systems and very capable data-links and they would still probably want to supplement that information with an IRST or perhaps an active sensor.
Very cool stuff, but not a magic “win” button for air combat, especially if your adversary is using similarly advanced tactics where some elements in a flight are emitting, while others are operating passively.
hopsalotCarter to offer Scorpion to India under joint development plan
This would make a heck of a lot more sense than some of India’s other joint programs.
hopsalotIf you like the piece i cited plz click a “like” 😉
Did you just cite yourself?
hopsalotI think it is significant. The article from 2005 seems to contain several things which might have been changed / reconsidered since then. The order for REB22-AA only came in 2007 and the development wasn’t frozen until ~2010. To take data from 2005 as in-face value is rather disingenuous, I think the article from 2014 is far more accurate. Full development of EW capabilities remains deferred to later software builds which we won’t distinguish externally..
I didn’t say anything about taking data from 2005 “as in-face value.” I provided a source. As I already said once the main point of providing that source was that the AESA upgrade is only to the antenna and the software. The radar back-end is unchanged. (which is why it is possible to swap the new AESA antenna among different airframes)
Not that I disagree but then we both have to agree on that Gripen-E is another 10 years newer and as such having the opportunity to take advantage of the leaps in computing and networking technologies that took place in the 00s. Something tells me that you won’t like this idea as much as you like the previous one.
Not sure what you are getting at. The Gripen NG is newer and thus does have some increased access to technology.
Fair point, time will tell. Anyway, one quote about the Super Hornet says it all:
The APG-79 AESA radar demonstrated marginal improvements since the previous FOT&E period and provides improved performance relative to the legacy APG-73 radar. However, operational testing does not demonstrate a statistically significant difference in mission accomplishment between F/A-18E/F aircraft equipped with AESA and those equipped with the legacy radar.
Thou shall not expect wonders from buzzwords like AESA, these all are just small evolutionary steps.
What point are you trying to argue? We are discussing computing architectures and you want to talk about operational testing of the APG-79?
Whether or not the newer radar demonstrates a significant difference in “mission accomplishment” will inevitably come down to what the mission is and how success is defined.
hopsalotExcellent, thank you.
hopsalotThe sources seem to contradict each other… My best bet is that the Jane’s article (#1) is quite dated, around 2005-2006 and contains information no longer relevant in 2015.
#1
However, Dassault and Thales are not proposing to make the AESA the all-encompassing RF Cuisinart that Boeing (for example) envisages for the Super Hornet, with features such as passive detection, multi-beam operation and jamming. Nor does the team intend to exploit the AESA’s wide bandwidth, which would mean a new radome. (This suggests that the current radome is a bandpass design, transparent at the RBE2 frequency but stealthily reflective at any other.)#2
France has only ordered 60 AESA radars, but it should be possible to install them on any aircraft in the Air Force or Navy fleets. Once they have been upgraded to software standard F3.3 — which is now the case for all French Rafales — any aircraft can be fitted with an RBE2-AESA radar. Accordingly it was important to verify on a real aircraft that the radar complied with this “plug and play” requirement. The one change that is needed is a new radome to accommodate the new antenna, which comprises around 1,000 transmit/receive modules.
I noticed the contradiction, but it isn’t really relevant to the real point. The AESA upgrade to the Rafale is a new antenna for an existing radar back-end. That is significant when people start saying things like:
The F-22 and F-35 systems were integrated because they had to be integrated; the related tasks of EMCON and sensor fusion demanded computing power that (even in 1995) meant big processor banks that had to be shared because of practical space/weight/power/cooling limits. It’s easier now for each system to do more of its own processing. IIRC, even in 1995 I had to have a card in my PC to drive the printer via an effin big cable. Now we just send files.
The Rafale’s basic computing architecture is contemporaneous with the F-22. That doesn’t rule out sensor fusion obviously, but if we are going to discuss what was available to design teams in the late 80s when the F-22 and Rafale were being designed it matters.
(It is also worth noting that the F-35 is a roughly 15 year newer design. Lockheed didn’t receive the SDD contract for the actual F-35 until Oct 2001, making it the first new design with the opportunity to take advantage of the leaps in computing and networking technologies that took place in the 90s.)
As for the radome, perhaps the design changed, or perhaps there is an issue with wording. The reference to the need for a “new hinge” in the second article makes me wonder if the “new radome” is a fairly minor modification to the older one.
hopsalotAnother example:
France has only ordered 60 AESA radars, but it should be possible to install them on any aircraft in the Air Force or Navy fleets. Once they have been upgraded to software standard F3.3 — which is now the case for all French Rafales — any aircraft can be fitted with an RBE2-AESA radar. Accordingly it was important to verify on a real aircraft that the radar complied with this “plug and play” requirement. The one change that is needed is a new radome to accommodate the new antenna, which comprises around 1,000 transmit/receive modules. The new antenna, which is around 20 kg heavier than that of the RBE2-PESA, simply requires the installation of an extra hinge to attach the radome to the airframe. Royer explains that, as soon as the aircraft is powered up, it recognises the new antenna and immediately reacts like an aircraft equipped with an AESA radar.
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