so do you guys think RAN’s choice for the STVOL carrier over the CTOL one was the right choice?

In the 70ies it was. Yes. It was much cheaper than a CATOBAR carrier of the size to handle the available aircrafts. The Brits ran out of money in the 70ies and 80ies. So it was the right choice.

Despite the claims that Brahmos is far superior to the likes of Tomahwak/Babur as they will be shot down easily by India, why is Nirbhay proving to be soo difficult? I would have thought it would be an easier job.

May be because Brahmos is Russian technology made usable for India (not a new development) and Nirbhay is a home grown product. India has a lot of problems in developing modern systems compared to china.

Dividing the array in many sub arrays means less power for one of the sub beams and so less range. This is the disadvantage of multiple beams. The full range can be achieved by the use of all modules only.

We should stay on aircrafts. Your point was that they could track dozens of targets. That’s not true. The track while scan in the 50ies and 60ies was by eyeball V1.0. TWS makes sense only with synthetic displays to show the comprehensive processed data. This kind of displays was available from the 70ies onwards. With the crude radar displays of the 50ies and 60ies there was no chance to display the data of multiple tracks and other targets together in one small display on aircrafts. It was the operator that had to discriminate from the picture the most dangerous target. And then it was his task to track this one target. The first aircraft with synthetic displays was IMHO the F-14. Please give some source for your claim!

Sea Sparrow was not alone. There were Standard Missile, Terrier and Tartar. Talos was gone in the 80ies. Ships operated in cooperation with other ships and Sea Sparrow was the choice for smaller ships.

There is the same thread. 😉

I suppose it is a long range anti-AWACS missile.