Oh, it gets better. These Russkies doing civilian research into MWNTs found them to be not only highly absorbent in HF radar waves (micro/X-band), but also “almost radio transparent for [the] low frequency region”. In other words true ‘broadband stealth’:

Hi Jō, what I could make out from the article is that the material is radio transparent at the 0.01 – 4GHz. It means the material essentially has low values of relative permittivity (εr < 10 ). So it will not be able to prevent the incident EM waves from returning to the source since the EM pass through it and reflects from the subsequent material afterwards. This seems rational since longer wavelengths (Lower frequency) are much bigger than the MWNT structures. So surface conductivity, skin effects are more pronounced than the absorbance.
Also the author investigated around 29 – 34 GHz and found considerable absorption. However this is towards millimetric band which is pretty short range due to higher attenuation.

Being a former subscriber to ‘New Scientist’, I should’ve been more wary of the outlandish claims they sometimes make- by their estimations we should all be driving inter-dimensional, time-travelling, flying cars by now.

I stopped reading New Scientist a long time ago.
Oh! those differences between a scientist and an Engineer. 😉

[IMG]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UvcqvsAfC4M/UB9sk-8hTxI/AAAAAAAAbcs/ahVN1jAFV…]

1Saludo

Which Missiles are those, Harpoon?
Beautiful aircraft…

Edit: Never mind… They are Harpoon

According to Boris Obnosov, the RVV-MD and RVV-SD air-to-air missiles displayed at the show this time are designed for external carriage so far, but are, essentially, prototypes that will have spawned refined versions by 2014 to fit the PAK FA. They will become the backbone of its weapons suite in the dogfight and medium-range air-to-air missile classes.

Improved R77 derivatives may well be what will arm the PAK FA.

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But then some of our Russian posters mentioned that Obnosov is one of the most tight lipped in the industry.
There are a total of 11 Missiles in different stages of development.

As I mentioned to WinterStars, the adapter has the added advantage that you can purpose design a new one to accommodate MRAAMs which might have to be staggered to fit, without having to adapt the airframe attachment points. So there might be method to the madness after all!

a la Picatinny Rail.;)

Whether or not it’s a disadvantage from a military point of view is debatable, but it would be a very weird decision considering the size of the weapons bays. The space is there for the taking thanks to the need to carry bulky AGMs – why not use it, even if the official requirement is for only 4 MRAAMs? More to the point, why on earth put two additional missiles (that you could theoretically fit inside the main bays no problem at all) in external fairings which can potentially cause non-trivial drag and RCS headaches?

Exactly. But I think the smaller bays can release the missiles faster.

Yes, I think we’ve established that now, emile’s drawing provides further evidence, nonetheless here’s my own sketch, which is of course to scale. In case 3cm of clearance between the R-77s seems a bit tight, consider that those boxes contain mostly air (the actual body is only 0.2m in diameter) and that in the F-22 they would be *overlapping* (see paralay’s drawing)! Or compare to this rather striking picture of the SDB launcher inside a Raptor bay:

What would it be if the Indian AF wanted the Meteor. I heard they are interested in the Meteor. Meteor is amlost an inch smaller than the R77. Meteor seems promising too with no over ambitious design goals.

Do you think there is no merit in discussing why the plane can only carry 4 missiles?

I agree. PAK FA may carry 4 missiles. Fine.
But discussing whether 4 missiles are more than enough is also fine.