Why current? Is your AGM-88E already operational?

You said that these features are in development in current ARM.

Wrong. It is only the most recent approach. Do your homework and read about how fire-and-forget ALARM works.

You didn’t get it. Even the early Standard ARM in the ’70 can be considred fire-and-forget. The difference is the accuracy of GPS.

AGM-88 has cca 105km max range. I have found no indications about AARGM having the range improved.

There is no source about the range. Anyway it is probably clasified. It may have a bigger range or it may not. Better engine, better profile could help.

Quote:
Originally Posted by aurcov
Of course there were only 499 but still 10 years before the russians fielded a HMS

BS.

Why BS? It was installed in the hundreds. Hardly “experimental” as you said.

Let me sum it up, you got nothing, am I right?

In you opinion, why the Russians fielded a datalink after US?

:These features have been in development of current ARM missiles since years. AGM-88E is no way a pioneer, it only tries to catch up. BTW, lock on after launch is an old feature. Not sure what was the first missile to utilize it first but Kh-58U definitely has it (unike export variant Kh-58E). Turning off the radar won’t help against ALARM, too, which is already out of production (AFAIK, they use different approach than GPS).

Current ARM missiles with: 1)GPS aided INS, 2)milimetric wave seeker, 3)two-way datalink???? Can you name one of them? :p

I see that I have to offer you a tutorial about ARMs. Turning off the radar will help against all ARM, except the one that will have GPS guidance. In theory even the HARM, from the first version would hit a radar that stoped emmitting, because the INS will guide towards the target. But there is no guidance method that can bring a missile so accurately near the target as the GPS can.

As for the loft profile in order to increase the range is nothing new, indeed; the first missile with this feature was Shrike

Yes, those were the ones with provisions mounted. The ones that actually used the system were only some of them..

Of course there were only 499 😀 but still 10 years before the russians fielded a HMS 😀

LOL.. I would really love to see your proofs about that.

When CIA will open its archives 😀

Is that it? The old AGM-88 with some new boxes and one of those sexi name acronyms. Hardly a major leap..

:p :p :p Believe me, it is a major leap. Unlike the existing ARMs,the most used defensive tactic (i.e.turning off the radar) won’t help. First, the GPS aided INS will guide the missile accurate enough (3-4 m compared with 50-100 m in the case of a simple INS) up to the radar site, regardless if this one is still emmitting or not. The active milimeter wave seeker will do the last corrections.

Also, the two-way datalink offer 2 advantages: one is that the missile could be launched preemtivelly (lock-on after launch). Basically a strike package will fire a barrage of AARGMs in lofted trajectory, just when entering in the hostile area, and when the radars will start to emmit, the locations (in GPS coordonates) will be handed to the missiles. The time from the moment the radar is located untill the radar is hit shrinks considerably, so, again, turning off the radrs won’t help.The second one is that the missile will transmit, a split second before it will hit, an Weapon Impact Assessments (based on what the milimeter wave seeker “sees” just before the impact), so the launcher will know if the target will be hit or not.

Did any other ARM offer those? No, they don’t and thew won’t in the near future. But hey, it is a US missile, so it must suck… :p

Not quite. It was fitted to F-4J Block 45s and 46s. Provisions were latter retrofitted to earlier F-4Bs but VTAS alone was seldomly used due to occlussion of the outside vision to the right eye. IIRC, Honeywell had some version that allowed a see-through capability but with rather limited flight-test experience. The fact that is was never introduced on F-14 says it all..

For the number of VTAS aircraft, see: http://home.att.net/~jbaugher1/f4_25.html and http://home.att.net/~jbaugher1/f4_21.html. The number of each variant is mentioned. Do the math and you will see that there were over 500. The reason they droped it was not because it was not efficient, but because of the risk of fratricide (something that even today Russain HMS could not guarantee; only HMD can guarantee that the target is really hostile).

That is only one of many quotes. I won’t go this road..
Anyway, let us stick to your version, two years is way too little to replicate a technology that is kept classified. That suggests Russian datalinks having been developed completely isolated from US R&D, ergo no copying at all.

And who said that they had to start only after USAF fielded the SAGE system? They could start copying from the begining of the program in US, a few years before the program became operational.

A great many of the technologies you listed were developed independantly of America

Such as?

Hardly. Euro obsession with cheap nationalism is very limited compared to what Yanks perform these days. Such praying to the flag is completely foreign to my feelings, with some people as almost some sort of Baalism.. You won’t see that often in Europe, not even in France..

That could be called patriotism, not nationalism.

1. Detect
2. Manouver into favourable launch position -> where the supercruise does have an advantage
3. Attain favourable launch flight profile -> afterburners/supercruise, no real advantage
4. Launch
5. Disingage/Follow-up

Hmmm, let’s check:

At # 3. The Rapor is the only fighter that can climb in supersonic “from the deck”; any other plane shoud do a Rutowsky climb profile. I would call this an advantage… :p

Conventional fighters have their best time to climb using a Rutowski climb profile. That is, they start with a subsonic climb to the tropopause (about 36,000 feet) and then perform a pushover to supersonic speed and climb supersonically from there. The Raptor can dispense with this complex profile and blast off supersonic from the deck. This machine just likes to go fast.http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/2000/articles/oct_00/f-22/f22_1.html

At # 4. An AMRAAM fired at 1.6m instead of 0.8 M will increase its range, according to the Raptor chief test pilot, by 50 %…I would call this an advantage :p

The ability to move against an adversary at high speeds gives fighter pilots advantages they call “first look, first shot, first kill.” The first pilot to see an adversary is more likely to get off a successful shot and survive the encounter. The kinematic range of an AIM-120 AMRAAM, for example, increases by fifty percent as aircraft speed increases from 0.9 to 1.5 Mach (this assumes an altitude advantage for the shooter). That is, the missile can reach targets fifty percent farther away because its initial speed coming off an F-22 flying 1.5 Mach is much faster. The Raptor easily supercruises in this speed regime. This missile range advantage intensifies the F-22’s sensor advantage—the radar on a Raptor can see a bandit long before a bandit’s radar detects a Raptor.
The first pilot to launch a missile at an adversary is more likely to survive the encounter. The offensive “push” of supercruise creates shot opportunities earlier and at longer range.The Raptor’s higher cruise speed makes intercept more difficult and reduces enemy missile range more significantly. Higher speeds significantly shrink shot opportunities at the beam or front quarter of the F-22 because the missile winds up in a high-speed tail chase or it must make an energy-depleting hard turn because of the high line-of-sight rates.
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/2000/articles/oct_00/f-22/f22_1.html

At # 5. When disengaging, the supercruise will half the WEZ of the oponent in case that the AMRAAM missed, or the Raptor fired all its load. An R 77 could engage a target frontal at 40 km, but from behind at less than 15 km. If the target is supercruising, this distance shrinks at less than 8 km… I would call this an advantage… :p (by the way, Flex, this apply to SAM too 😀 )

The offensive “push” of supercruise creates shot opportunities earlier and at longer range. The effect of supercruise to subsequently deny the enemy’s shot is less apparent. Cranking after the shot always reduces the enemy’s effective missile range, but a supercruise crank places the F-22 way outside an adversary’s maximum range, even if it could detect the F-22. Supercruise also plays out in simply getting from point A to point B. Once the Raptor turns on an opponent, the Raptor’s speed places the intercept point farther from the start point. If the Raptor is protecting a strike force, the adversary fighters will be engaged and downed farther away from the strikers and long before an enemy missile can be launched against the friendlies.http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/2000/articles/oct_00/f-22/f22_1.html

Nope.. It never was optimized for that. BTW, 180 km at Mach 1.72 is some 277 seconds, ergo approx. 4,5 minutes.. Is that what the whole big boom about technological breakthrough is about?

:p :p Re-do your math: this is combat radius not range! Multiply with 3 to obtain the distance the Raptor will fly (as a rule, combat radius x 3 = ferry range) So we are talking about 540 km or 13.5 minutes of flying at 1.7 M (after your calculation, I didn’t check). Also, the average time of the actual engagement (I am not talking about sortie duration) was, in the latest conflicts (Iraq, Kosovo), about 3 minutes.

However, like many of the concepts introduced by US (IRST, datalinks, HMS, WVR missiles, high off-boresight missiles, BVR semi-active missiles, BVR active missiles, anti-radiation missiles, AWACS, Doppler radars, laser-guided bombs, TV-guided bombs, GPS etc.) attempts are already made by major aircarft producers to replicate supercuise… So this dispute (is supercuise important or not) is already been solved :p

I guess that immitation is the sweetest compliment received by US from its competitors… :diablo:

It isn’t about military capabilities of USAF vs whatever. In the next 100 years USA will have stronger military than let’s say Europe because Yanks are much more obsessed with national symbols than Euros will ever be and as such will be willing to spend more on programs no matter how useless they might appear.

Nope. Cheap nationalism is the Europeans department… 😀

I second that. This capability has been only exploited with recent engine technology. If you look into recent history, you will find many examples of rather fashionable design features – hunt for Mach 2 in the late 50s, hunt for Mach 3 in late 60s, variable wing geometry and mission adaptive wings in the 70s, low wing load and LERX design and artificial instability in the 80s. Now it is stealth and supercruise. Will these features last or will they slowly fade away just like swept wings have? I will tell you in 30 years.

Actually, stealth is more than a fashionable design feature, since it proved itself in wartime.

Even a clean F18 C with F 404 “big” engines can supercruise, not to mention the Viper block 50/52, the F 15E (even with CFTs). So the F 35 in stealthy configuration woud not have any trouble to supercruise, at least at the level of the EF (1.2 M). The difference is that the EF cannot carry anything while supercrusing…

As for the over-all performance, as someone here already said, the F 16 was the yardstick the JSF was measured, and both versions (LM & Boeing) had to perform better by at least 25 %. ACtually the range increase on internal fuel is almost 100 %! Considering that the EF/Rafale/Grippen are not too much over the F 16 in speed acceleration maneuvrability, I can’t see any major advantage of these over the F 35. If we are talking about what’s inside the plane (in the end this is what really matters those days) no European product can claim the performances of the APG 80 (already in trials!) the EW suite (based on the operational F 16 blk. 60) or EOS (technology already employed in Sniper targeting pod).