I know it’s not that easy, but you sure need to think twice before scanning the skies with such big radars now. Even if you don’t allow for a passive shot for EW, you give a lot of options to the opponent, including the one to lock you very quickly with radar or IRST since he knows where you are, or ask an AWACS/ground radar to provide him a lock, or even get your wingman into position to either lock or shoot him, or if it’s bomb ladden to avoid the fighters and continue their strike mission.

Air combat has always been about who sees the other one first, and that isn’t about to change. It beats me why everyone keeps talking about how the bigger the radar and so on. I’m completely sold on the theory that your radar only needs to be big enough to bear your longest range weapon.

Nic

It certainly depends on the mission and requirements. In some situations it might be useful to stay silent, in others it is probably better to go active. If you have sufficient support (AWACS or similar means) staying silent is certainly a better option to cope with at least until you switch it on for a missile launch (could be a sensor in the background passing data to the shooter in the front). For strike missions it’s most likely better to keep the radar silent and avoid a contact, in an air defence or air superiority mission you are required to go offensive. If the RWR alone could offer a good enough range estimate the pilot could decide to stay silent, but if its range estimate is too inaccurate, you have no 3rd part support and your IR/EO system have still no contact you could be in deep trouble, as the enemy may already track you and even launch a missile whereas you may believe that he’s possibly still far away.

In this day and age having a big radar is not necessarily a huge advantage. SPECTRA or DASS will pick up the signals from a F15 / MKI radar much earlier than those radars will get a lock or even detect them, and they will do it accurately enough to shoot a Meteor up its radome.

Nic

It’s not necessarily as easy as that. Ranging a moving emitter is a quite tricky task, especially aircraft which are quite fast and at long ranges even a slight deviance will produce an error margin, which might be unacceptable and how do you support the weapon at such long range? The pk is going to be quite small if launching a Meteor at let’s say some 150 km and don’t provide MCG. That’s why at least 3rd party support is required if you don’t want to use your own radar. Long range shots without MCG have a high probability of flying blind straight into nowhere. It would be interesting whether MCG could be provided by the AESA radar for example, without it being active spare for occasional updates, that might be a solution to live with. At the end the radar is still useful and important as it offers greater accuracy at range and as it can gather much more data than passive sensors could (altitude, speed, closure rate, accurate range, heading of the target…). These data are necessary to generate a good firing solution, like ever there is no perfect solution and the “if it emits it dies” claim is somewhat exaggerated. The circumstances must be right and the conditions must be met, otherwise you maybe aware of an enemy and his direction, but not much more and that’s not enough to set up a missile launch.

@EELightning

Can something be done about this user because he has nothing what so ever to contribute.

Yes edit your ignore list and add him instead of replying…

The “rumour” that Air International reported a short while back, I’ve mentioned a couple of times, of Eurofighter offering a favourable price in India could possibly be true.

What’s favourable in this case, in which relation does it stand etc. Thus far that statement alone doesn’t tell you much, if anything.

That table appears to show the costs are from 2000, thus not represent for virtually any of the contenders now. Gripen NG didn’t exist back then, not even on paper.;)

@PELICANO

The MMRCA winner will use Meteor/Mica (depending if is EF or Rafale) or will get the indigenous Astra Bvraam?

That’s an interesting question, I could well imagine that the IAF will purchase the Meteor and will supplant it with the ASTRA instead of MICA EM or AMRAAM (depending on which platform is chosen). Would make sense for me at least.

It’s already quite confusing how many weapons they will operate. R-73 for its Russian fighters, ASRAAM for the Jaguar if I’m not mistaken and Python 5 for the Tejas. So will they introduce another SRAAM with the MMRCA?

The same is true for the BVR department where they have R-27 and R-77 for the Russian fighters, Derby for the Tejas, ASTRA for possibly most of the IAF’s fighters and probably at least one additional BVR AAM for the MMRCA (I think Meteor is most likely here).

Please, let’s not get into the radar performance comparison, i beg you !! 😉

Don’t worry that’s not my intention. Just wanted to point out something which is obviously lost in times of great claims. 😉

Scorpion :

It is 1/10th , the number I believe to be correct . The 1/20th was only a very wild guess of mine .

You believe it to be 1/10th and that’s it, whether it’s true or not is yet a different story. And interestingly you left out the “data base” part of my question, leads me to believe you used the “very wild guess of your self” as a data base.

Based on various known French pilots but you seems to discard them while it is all we have . Nothing I can do here …

Cheers .

Oh it’s “various”. I would really like to know how many of them, what was their exact wording, at what occasions and how they did know that they wasn’t being detected themselves at that range! Most of you chaps were whining and complaining about the “evil” Mr. Lake for quoting unnamed sources, yourself do the very same, what kind of double standard. And why do I have the feeling that the 40-50 km earlier is at best based on the unreliable RCS figures, without taking the performance difference between the radars into account…:confused:

That’s where the disputes begin, mainly because both aircrafts (Rafale and Eurofighter) look similar at first glance. Gap sealing or planform alignment are almost irrelevant because we’re not talking about VLO designs. The benefits would not be significant compared to the overall RCS.
Efforts were made instead on major contributors of RCS (intakes, for instance, or smoother blending of some elements). But there’s a distinctive feature that anyone can see on a Rafale : the sawtooth patterns placed almost everywhere (I should say “where that matters” because that’s usually where the radiations bounce back to the illuminating radar). That’s certainly not as effective as gaps sealing, but the net effect must be significant otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to put them there, adding to maintenance costs. So when you write “There isn’t much if anything which would indicate a significantly lower frontal RCS.“, that’s a bit far fetched, don’t you think ?

The sawtooth patterns have without doubt an effect I agree, otherwise they wouldn’t be there, but I seriously doubt that the effect is THAT big as suggested. In the end of the day I’m open for more information and don’t exclude the possibility that this may have a greater effect than I think it may have. Who knows. I don’t think that the sawtooth patterns add much to the maintainance workload at all, though it somewhat looks like they are just thicker layers of RAM paint and not part of the structure, I could be wrong on this but that was my impression when looking at it close up.

@Eagle,
agreed thus far there are more proposals than actual developments, but one shouldn’t confuse the lacking commitment for AESA radar thus far with the overall development efforts. The RAF and Luftwaffe have a clear requirement for AG capabilities and are subsequently forced to push ahead. At the moment the question is how the partner nations will proceed, everything points into the direction that major block upgrades will be given up in favour of incremental developments, not unlike what we have seen wrt the weapons integration on the F3 Rafales. But we’ll see, given the pace of the programme up to date I’m not overly optimistic, though hope dies last.