At last …
When one know the duty of the French Tigers in A-Stan , it is a very good news for the troops on the ground , being French or not .
I welcome the move 🙂

Cheers .

The Brimstone is a excellent, very usefull weapon indeed.

To me there are two European weapons that have emerged during this conflict: the Brimestone and the AASM.

Very complementary. The AASM is not adapted for moving targets and it’s a bit an overkill to shoot a Toyota.
On another hand it allow a threat bubble of 50 km around the carrier where any AA site, artillery site, convoy or heavy stuff can be destroy.

Brimstone is excellent for target of oppotunity. Which is more and more the case once the foe has understood that he can’t go out heavy.
Very, very complementary.

Maybe a swap AASM for Brimestone between France and UK?

I’d like our forces to have Brimstone anyway.

Originally Posted by obligatory View Post
I beg to differ:
Swashplate technology allows the radar…

If we talk about the Swashplate for the Gripen, we can talk about the GaN AESA and the lateral conformal antenas developments for the Rafale then.

In both cases, they’re not fully funded and developped yet – but planed – and the indians will be invited to participate in the funding and the R&D probably.

Yes, from what i have seen, Gripen AESA is ahead of Typhoon AESA,
and Meteor integration is also ahead on Gripen vs the others, in fact the only fighter ever fired a Meteor.

I got info on Gripen Raven AESA from @signatory, and i have yet to see him being misinformed on Gripen related stuff.

That’s about half a year ahead.
Actually @Tay is on the right track when he bring up GaN, France has a clear lead here that won’t go away anytime soon.

If the first “pre-production” RAVEN AESA was out Q3-2011, they would have a very advanced prototype to show by now.
I don’t think it’s the case and they don’t show it much like the French did with their AESA prototype (in Switzerland for instance… well, they even shown a prototype in Singapore in 2003)

Now it depend in what you understand with “pre-production”. Is it like “pre-funding” compared with “funding”? 🙂

It’s hard to believe the 2013 schedulle and some actually don’t in Brazil and India.

Pierre-Yves Chaltiel, head of Thales’ electronic Combat Systems, said Tuesday the delivery of the production units follows more than 10 years of work and more than $1.3 billion of government and industry investment in the system, DefenseNews said in a report from Paris.

I do know that the Swedish and the Anglo-saxons are superior persons (j/k) but I fear that any customer who’d buy the Gripen NG on brochures will have to fund that one way or another for a delivery… by 2015 maybe (fist true-production samples)
But once the finger in the gear…. could work.

As the question has been asked by Loke IIRC. The RBE2AA is in LRIP since late 2008. 4 of such pre-production examples are being built (or have been built by now). These have been used to validate the final production configuration and will be used for further operational test and evaluation, probably to exploit the full potential of the system and define tactics for operational use. These radars are retrofitted to existing Rafales for this purpose. Full rate production of the RBE2AA with start in accordance with the production of the batch 4 examples which are due for delivery from 2013. All batch 4 Rafales (F3+ standard) will be fitted with this radar among other enhancements including the M88-4E, DDM-NG and OSF-IT.

What interests me more than the exact TRM count is what changes has been conducted on the back end. It’s stated that there will be four new processors, but are these really new processors or additional processors? Any other hardware changes?

The next question interesting for me is what additional modes and capabilities are offered by the RBE2AA in comparison to the current RBE2?
What I’ve gathered so far is:
– 40 to 50 % increase in detection range
– improved ECCM
– sub-metric SAR mapping
– NCTR
– extended waveforms
– increased azimuth coverage (+/-70°)

Anything else?

^^^ good questions. Thanks to higher the level: it was getting boring.

I can’t answer the questions, the only things I understood is that the use of the AESA for communications and jamming hasn’t been developped yet (because not in the schedulle of condition of the F3+ roadmap) though Thales said they made reservation for them and **ahem** “pre-funded” the development to a certain extense. Maybe the UAE want them.

I have 3 questions concerning the SELEX / RAVEN AESA:
– how much are the “pre-fundS” yet? Is the pre-funding cleared and all? And of course how much in $$$ or €€€ whatever?
– what is the schedulle of condition for this first step? Is there a contract? voted funds with archievement targets?
– as you pointed out: the first samples of the production RBE2-AA are out since late 2008.
To me, all the modes were written then but the elapsed time up to now (and 2012) was used to open each of them, test each of them, debug the softwares, optimize, make the procedures, the manuals, on so on.
I am not surprise that the time from a prototype to a really operational equipment takes so long.
It’s always like that.

Does that mean that the SELEX / RAVEN will be at the stage the RBE2-AA was late 2008 in 2013? Is it possible to prove otherwise?
When the “pre-production” sample from the other Eurocanards?

That exactly was my question in an earlier post, if we can consider RBE 2 as a the worst radar like Too Cool said, only because of the small diameter and the number of modules, or if there are other features (besides Swashplate) to compare the capabilities of a radar?

I Think the TooCool was sarcastic :rolleyes:

Concerning the UEA, they actually have a benchmark with the APG-80, and not any benchmark: the US invented the stuff, make if fly for several years and are (were?) at least 10 years ahead in the development.

No doubt the UAE upgraded their stuff every time they had the oportunity too.

So if there is only few “regressions” that really mean we’re not far to catch up with the RBE2-AA
EF and Gripen don’t have such issues anyway since the have no operational radar to show…

Yeah, they can still benchmark with “future capabilities” and catch up with brochures.

.. could you rephrase that

Yes. The frigate story is truely a facinating story and one should be more sensitive of its poetry 😀

It’s BIG corruption (too big obviously), sex, crime, politic, several people killed in Taïwan, some unfortunate accidents with folks falling through the window in Paris (4th floor minimum), a judge called “Juge Jean-Pierre” who had political ambitions and who revealed everything from Taïwan leaks… (the “talk too much” bite)… which judge Jean-Pierre commited suicide after…
…a mistress of French former foreign minister who was involved and who wrote a book: “The Prostitute of the République”….

…Well: not something boring like obligatory posts 😉

It was truely a pathetic gang war between well educated corrupted politicians both side.

So any public news coming from Taïwan on that story really doesn’t mean anything, seriously.

But clearly now, it a decade ago and we’d better laugh about it and turn the page. However, you know how Chinese generals who lost face are: they haven’t a lot of sens of humour 😀

…from both sides, c-sevens nonsense for example from the French side,…

There is no nonsens at all, merely an opinion be it a minority opinion here.

In this minority opinion, one has the right to be skeptical about anything concerning the Eurofighter since:

– advertising and pictures from 2003 concerning cruise missiles (Storm Shadows and Taurus) never materialized,
– heavy advertized A to G capabilities which never materialized either in Afghanistan,
– we learn that the strong point of the plane which is A to A isn’t that a strong point after all since Corsica and UAE (be it in dogfight or BVR),
– info comming from Switzerland show that the maintenance needs of the plane in Austria and Germany is heavy and not satisfying
– they gave up the testing of the meteor for some odd reason in spite it was due to make them (too busy in the Fakland too?)
– and of course the whole T3 which is very disapointing beginning with lack of funding for AESA but the same worth for anything else

Lastly we come to realize that the more some “spin doctors” pointed out some points in the Rafale: user interface, radar, “under-powered”, the more we can corelate it with actual – and real – weak point of the Eurofighter:
data fusion way behind Rafale’s, radar of RDY2 generation, a engine not better than M88 finally in spite Snecma was late at the starting point.

My (minority) opinion after all this is that the Eurofighter is not good – a badly born plane – but it’s supported by a good comunication bubble which is not that surprising finally when you think about it…

It’s whenever they want to show us the contrary.

Edit: I tought I was in the MRCA thread…