not stating internal A2A means there may also be external missiles, it says nothing about external tanks,
stating internal fuel OTOH rules out external fuel

Do you think the combat radius for Gripen Ng clearly include 20 times mid air refueling? 😉 Since it clearly didn’t specifically exclude mid-air refuel either

Eighter way Sukhoi’s range stats would work just fine as a metric.And when we talk about optimized cruise altitude. Its very similar. Its perhaps Special jets like Mig-31 and F-22 that cruise above. All other its the same ballpark. The take-off and climb should also be the same or are you telling me the range are only from a air refuel??

No, iam telling you that the profiles that manufacturers publicised is up to the buyer’s decision. Some buyers will want to know the low altitude strike mission range, some may want to know the high altitude interception mission range. Some may want to know medium altitude SEAD mission range ..etc. They do not want the same thing. So manufacturers donot use the same mission profiles.It is important to remember that they do not really need to convince general public but rather the people in procurement process

Anyone with half a brain understand that Fuel consumption goes through the roof when AB being used.

Yes but not at the same rate for all aircraft.

I have looked them up, it’s all in the original message. The combat radius of the F-16C is 675 nmi in the A-G config

F-16I with Conformal fuel tank, 600 gallons tank (unlike 370 gallons tanks, those one are not jestionable ), 4 AAM and 2 GBU-10 can reach 630 nm

It looks like this

above all it depends on if there is external fuel tanks included in the estimate, like the above pic does

F-35 has no external fuel tank

And in which altitude flight profile is this done?

To be fair, no idea.Public combat radius rarely include altitude if ever unless you get it from flight manual. But i would assume it is at around 35-40k feet since those seem to be the most optimum for turbofan engine.

Not what Halloweene was talking about. He was talking about different modes operating simultaneously,. The APG-81 can’t do that (according to open source material), neither can the RBE2. They use interleaving which is pretty much the same thing to the user- generating a SAR map and track while scan for example, the switch is measured in nanoseconds so I’m not convinced it’s that imperative

Fair enough. But since we know AESA can form multiple beams, i think this is a software problem rather than hardware problem.

I see your point. But if the interleaving mode has such short time delay then what is the point of dividing the array into sub arrays for different tasks ?. You will lose out on accuracy and detection range

Interleaving mode leads to high duty cycle.

I am inclined to believe that the better computing power to design stealth airframes has made it so that the jet design has to be less compromising to the shape/aerodynamics of the aircraft but is not necessarily better absolute stealth.

So if they were to make something as stealth as possible, at the expense of aerodynamics and performance, that the aircraft that they come up with, would look more like the F 1117 than the Raptor.

It would be super cool to see someone design the most stealth airframe possible, with all the coating tech applied too. I am a coatings skeptic. Which is why I think the F 1117 might actually be a more practical stealth jet. Because it relies less on coatings and more on the brute force of angles.

KGB is right on this.. A curved shape will never be as predictable as a straight angled edge and will always have reflections to all possible directions which, then have to be handled by RAM.. there is no way around it..

No, F-117 is not the absolute shape for stealth, unless you only care about specular reflection. In reality radar reflection consist of various different kind of reflection. In optical region then specular reflection is more important than traveling wave return, surface scattering but as wavelength get longer relative to aircraft ( Mie or Rayleigh region ) then surface scattering become more and more important.

A curve often has wider specular reflection cone than a full facet, but the benefit is that it can have less surface scattering. One can look at various modern VLO platforms and noiticed that eventhough many of them don’t need agility at all , yet none of them uses full facet design like F-117. Notable examples are B-2 , X-47 their center bodies are actually quite curvy ( even from front aspect ) while there is not a single curve on F-117 design.

On the other hand, a full circular/tube body or nose is very bad for stealth eventhough they have less scattering than a full facet design. The reason is that surface wave will travel the whole circle around in that case . Thus, reflection will be much higher. At the same time they still have wider specular reflection cone

Ours are 1.1 meter in length

Probably for very low frequency then

Thing is, detection range is often cited as 2x tracking range. If you cite APG-81 tracking as 160 km, you get 320 km detection range

Not really that simple.
It depend on what sort of tracking you talking about, like tracking by conical scan or monopulse ?
We should also consider that tracking range of legacy radar often be much shorter than detection range due to PRF limit, higher PRF lead to more radar power on target but also shorter unambiguous range because reflection may come back before new pulse is transmitted. But on newer radar due to pulse compression, they can distingush reflection pulse much easier because the radar would know the compression codes/sequences, so it likely that there are less difference between detection and tracking range

Check the images out

I can’t read Chinese so i don’t understand anything in your photo. Can you translate those words in 2 table to English ?
If iam not wrong the last photo is elements counts ? the 800 T/R modules is quite low for Su-27 size aperture, unless it uses lower frequency than APG-81/77

About the RAM, your posts show around a peak -35 dBsm in the 8 gHz X-band range, so we could be looking at -60 dBsm F-35s and F-22s. Sort of scary stuff, and moreover, the stuff that’s released is unclassified, implying that actual classified RAM could boost F-35 to -70 dBsm in the X-band

I don’t think F-35 can reach -70 dBsm level ( i could be wrong though but still ), the reason being that there are several place that you can’t really put normal RAM on such as antenna ( there are frequency selective surface but we dont know their effectiveness ), RAM on transparent surface like canopy and EOTS window will likely be less efficient than normal RAM. Aspect is important too.

sounds like you know more than you let on, and at the same time, you won’t say anything that’d get you in jail, right?

No.