It covers all bands.

If nothing else helps, then quote Bill Sweetman that you will surely regard as a reliable source huh? Sorry pal, but reality is “all bands” are A-M (some MHz to 100 GHz) to cover only those that are of possible interest for military applications. To do so you need a large number of antennas of different design and size and you need them several times to achive full spherical coverage in all bands. Whether 30 antennas are really related to the AN/ALR-94 only is already questionable, but unless there is some more specific info out there from someone who knows and not a programme manager who can’t tell a LINS from a TACAN I don’t buy this. That being said you make great claims about what others can’t do while you know little to nothing about it.

The “if it emits it dies” mantra is a rather generalised exaggeration for many reasons. First brief transmissions like an IFF interrogation can’t be tracked, only detected and that’s insufficient for employing weapons. Second DF accuracy depends not only on antenna design but on the frequency band, the rules that apply to radars also apply to RWR/ESM. So even if we assume that the AN/ALR-94 can detect the transmissions of these systems, it won’t be able to track them or track them with sufficient accuracy to target them. It’ll work against certain frequency bands typically used by FCRs, but much less against IFF and COMMS.

The situation with the AESA is that industry funds the initial demonstrators and development. When the nations finally commit they can continue with further development of new hardware and software beyond the baseline package and recover the money invested in advance. Argueably the UK MoD has funded the demonstrator that is being fitted to IPA5 at this moment.

I’m confused, perhaps someone can clear it up for me.

Is the AESA they’re looking to integrate (seems to be called E-Scan at the moment, its hard to keep up with the word soup) based on one of the earlier projects like CAESAR or Bright Adder? I remember there were 2 separate development efforts going on with Bright Adder apparently having a lot of EW functionality. Have these now fuse together?

E-SCAN simply means electronic scanning, which is the same as phased array or ESA (Electronically Scanned Array). Add a P for passive or an A for active and you got it. Why Eurofighter settled with the E-SCAN term is beyond me, but I would guess it’s somewhat easier to pronounce. The essential part is that when Eurofighter representatives talk about the E-SCAN radar they mean the AESA radar and when they talk about the M-SCAN radar they mean the current one with the mechanically scanned planar array.

WRT the rest, CAESAR was an industry funded technology demonstrator ran in parallel to the government funded CECAR programme. Both were concluded around late 2008 and formed the base for the development of Captor-E. The E is the logical letter in the sequence, but coincides with “Electronic”. That’s why they often call the original Captor-C/D radars the Captor-M (M for mechanical).

Bright Adder was launched as a UK only programme and is sponsored by the UK MoD. The goal of Bright Adder was to accelerate the development of an AESA radar for the Typhoon. When Selex was awarded with the contract in February 2010 it was regarded as a backup plan, as the quadri national Captor-E development programme wasn’t formally launched. It was always the intention the Bright Adder would feed into a quadri national AESA programme if it materializes, but the UK pursued it to have a plan B in case the Captor-E would not be developed as a 4 nation programme. It will certainly be used for developmental testing of some capabilities specifically required by the UK.

The 4-nation Captor-E development was formally launched in July 2010 and runs in parallel to bright adder. The later will feed into the 4-nation programme, not to say that it will directly support it. As of now development activities are solely funded by industry in hope that the investment can be recovered later when orders are placed by the core customers as well as potential export customers.

Captor-E development will be split into multiple phases starting with “radar 1”. Radar 1 will establish the initial hardware base and it will be developed into two versions, the first targeted for export customers that require early delivery of an AESA capbility and the second for an operational assessment by the core customers. Radar 2 will start with the 3rd version that will introduce new hardware options and introduce additional software capabilities. The 4th version will be a future variant that might be called radar 3 or not and which will introduce further hardware and software enhancements. The Captor-E development programme thus takes a phased approach with different “modules” being developed and integrated at various stages. The customers will be able to choose which hardware options they want, while the new hardware will always be backwards compatible, but specific software capabilities will be developed for the new hardware baseline, i.e. you can use the new hardware with the old software or with the new software. To what extend the radars will distinguish is dependent on individual customer requirements, but the modular approach is meant to ensure that there is a common development stream and that there is compatibility. It will be possible to upgrade older radars to the newer standard and a range of new hardware options will be developed including a new multichannel reciever and a new antenna, among other things.

Hope that clears up any confusion and doesn’t create any new confusion.:highly_amused:

Regards

Why until now, no F-15 operator has ordered the PW100-232 or GE110-132 for their F-15s?

Because the F-15 has already plenty of thrust with its available engines. The F100-PW-232 or the F110-GE-132 would have to be qualified in actual flight trials and that’s pretty expensive. It was the stated reason why even the latest F-15 Silent Eagle proposal is still being offered with the -229PW or -129GE respectively.

I am puzzled by the bays full stop.

I believe what we see is not the finished bays at all, but just a placeholder for testing.

Why have the bays split in 2 longitudinally? Why not have long doors running the entire length of the bay? It means you have so much more flexibility in terms of what you want to carry. The Russians aren’t given to doing (on the face of it) stupid things that limit their flexibility – and I don’t see them starting now.

A huge bay would increase drag considerably if opened and the loads it would have to bear are enormous. The loads on the door attachment points and actuators eould be much higher.

Yes again DA7, the aircraft has been photographed with lots of weapons around 2000/2001. there are also a couple of shots of DA2 with diverse weapons. I’ll check my archives, but they should be available on the net.

That first picture is interesting EEL, Sidewinders on the outer stations. Presumably fairly old?

DA7 somewhere around the timeframe mentioned by EEL.

@PhantomII

With regard to the photo of the Italian Tornado, should I assume that was a more recent photo due to the fact that Meteors were onboard or was that an earlier photo with dummy missiles?

This shot is from 2008 showing IPA2 in support of the Meteor development campaign just before the aircraft was upgraded to a T2 equivalent standard. IPA4 was used for similar trials at the same time.

@EEL
The RAF intends to become fully operational with P1EB in 2015 that’s why they want to accelerate the induction. Factually seen P1EB is late, but its content has grown such as that of P1EA viz a viz the original requirements.

@Nic
The Swiss evaluation report is is not current and thus not fully representative anymore. All aircraft involved has evolved and while a new evaluation of the aircraft in their current form would certainly not turn the results upside down, there will be a couple of differences. The Captor’s radar software alone has seen 3 new major software revisions since then for example, there were several updates to MIDS, IRST and sensor fusion has improved as well. DASS has made some considerable progress since then as well, new IFF hardware, new radios and several other hardware and software enhancements has been introduced on the T1 Typhoon and the changes are even more significant hardware wise and soon software wise as well.