And that is the reason they are doing it. They are going to use those F-35s as sensor assets to provide better situation awareness. right ?

That would be one of many reasons. The advantage a stealth platform has in that role is that it doesn’t have to run and hide at the first sign of the enemy. It can get 6 times closer to the enemy than non-vlo airframes without being seen, giving it the ability to track the enemy for longer and allowing for more effective deployment of fleet defenses, over the horizon missile shots from the fleet…etc.

Plenty of other reasons though. If I had to face off against….

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/35225228.jpg

…with 19 Harriers, I’d be more than a little concerned. If I had 19 F-35’s on board, I’d make sure to ask the pilots for some good photos of the wreckage when they got back.

so it doesn’t have to make any course adjustment.

The same is true for intercepting a supersonic missile. A big, fast, heavy missile is not going to make quick direction changes due to inertia and due to the relatively small size of its control surface actuators, at high speed and dynamic pressure, its not going to be pulling large control surface deflections. Its basically a fast flying truck.

The ship know’s the point where the missile is heading to (the ship, duh), so it can compute the parameters the inbound missile will need to fly within to hit. With that, the knowledge of its speed and it turn capabilities, performing an intercept is easier than hitting a target that is constantly dodging for computers with nanosecond reaction times and vector computational ability.

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– This diagram shows a scenario (roughly to scale) of a maneuvering inbound missile A at M2.2 with 15G turn capability. If my calculator’s are right this gives it roughly a 17km turn radius.
– The ship has an option of firing 3 interceptors B in quick succession in 3 different directions to cover all of missile A’s possible trajectories at that stage.
– Well before point C the ship’s systems know that the missile needs to pull a maximum G turn all the way to the ship to make a hit, so it can fire interceptors directly at the appropriate intercept points to meet missile A, no turning required.
– If head to head interception is required, then the ship can fire its interceptor in an appropriate direction so they intercept missile A head on. The missiles have no problem in turning inside the incoming missile A to line up a perfect head to head intercept as shown with D (Mach 3.5, 40G SM-2) and E (Mach 2, 60G RIM) showing the relative turn circles.

Personally I think a swarm attack comprising of dozens of $30,000 MALDs interspersed with 0.00001m^2, low IR emitting NSM, JSM or LRASM’s would be infinitely more scary. Consider the MR-800 radar. According to Janes, it has a detection range for sea skimming targets of 0.01m^2 of just 6nm. A stealth missile of 0.00001m^2 would be detected at around 1.1 miles. This gives the crew roughly 7 seconds warning of the threat. The top sail radars need to be pointed in the right direction in the first place (50/50 chance there’ll be a 3 second delay in detection) … so odds are high they’ll have just 4 seconds left to react. The defensive launchers wouldn’t even have time to move before the ship was hit.

Saw someone mention the advantage of AESA target detection speed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkpFsXz9yk

The tiny (comparitively) APG-81 array, from the moment it is started is picking up 50% of the targets in its FOR within 1 second, 73% in 2 seconds, 87% in 5 and 100% in 9. How much quicker would a SPY-1 do it with lower frequency, less targets to track in the FOR allowing more time for volume search, a 25% smaller area to cover (90 degrees vs 120 for the APG-81) and an array roughly 30 times the size with 200 times the power output? Fractions of a second sound about right. With a 45nm range against sea skimming targets and the ability to classify a mach 2.2 sea-skimming object as an ASM within a few nanosecond pulse trains, pretty sure reaction time is not going to be a big issue.

BTW that video has some clues in it as to the range of the APG-81. Very similar/slightly better than the Irbis-E it seems.

A real stealth aircraft (from its stealthy aspects) will have an RCS roughly 2000-20000 times smaller than the legacy aircraft the ALQ-99 was designed to protect. Using the burn-through range equation, the required power to protect a stealthy aircraft could be roughly 2000 times less for the same result, give or take for atmospheric attenuation. So the 28kw of high band and 7kw of low band jamming power being toted by the growler to protect legacy jets needs to just be a minuscule fraction of that to protect the F-35, in the order of just a few hundred watts worth of broadband TRMs configured as a thinned array on the apg-81 and that would cover wide area jamming from 100’s of km behind the lead aircraft. The broadband TRMs could perform both radar functions and broadband jamming.

Cree are currently producing transmitter components for TRMs capable of 0-18GHz at 90+ watts and they are just a few square mm in size.

Not sure if it was this thread but the guy saying that the growler needs to be within 80km to jam an emitter is drunk and completely off his **** if he’s referring to growlers protecting stealth aircraft. Nobody’s flying their mach 0.8 limited, $95m jamming platform to within 80km of enemy aircraft it cannot hope to escape.

At that time, the Soviets operated large numbers of VHF radars, so the potential capability of these against the new US aircraft would have been investigated.

The 60 foot wide, high power, low frequency, MOBATS antenna – a permanent fixture at Helendale RCS test facility in California. Helendale facility advertises the ability to test between 120MHz and 35GHz.

Those who think stealth aircraft designers somehow overlooked low frequency radar are most seriously deluding themselves.

*snort* so they train using fully loaded, live weapons systems against manned aircraft. Wow… the caliber of some of the people on this site ><

ultimate responsibility is with US & EU and israel that started this whole thing and f’d up…

Wow, when did I get to the RT site?

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Absolutely not AB at that frame, look at the source video again. F-22 is a disaster signature wise on AB, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58N6Plr17GU#t=60

I showed the F-22 at afterburner and cruising…

AB
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…which is very much like the Su-35
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Head-on at a moderate throttle setting
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..and as mentioned, discussion of IR signature while using afterburner is pointless. EVERY fighter – without exception – is going to be seen from very long range while using AB. What IS important (for VLO aircraft, no as much for legacy fighters) is the IR signature for the last 20-30 miles while approaching enemy aircraft to take a shot (if still undetected by radar) and ideally those last miles will be done at Mil power or lower, where the F-35 with its unique configuration has at least one massive advantage in signature reduction over everything else.

I’m curious as to whether the F-35 can tell how far away it can be detected by typical IR sensors like it can for radars:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmDYCjRSMqI

So what you are saying, those Typhoons did BFM with the F-22 at RF, and the F-22 did not use speed or AB under engagements?

Who knows what they did at red flag, the German typhoons were “slicked off” (podless) and didn’t have Pirate so for all we know the F-22’s were flying around under AB with impunity at BVR just for grins.

We do know that the typhoons weren’t able to engage the “Overwhelming at Modern BVR Combat” F-22s from range and were being shot at from 20 miles out with no confirmation that the Typhoons were even able to track the F-22s at that range.

From an engagement perspective, how much difference is M1.4 at AB going to make to a Meteor shot from 20 miles compared to M1.1 at mil power? Is the tiny bit of extra speed worth letting your target spot you early, giving them time to evade/counter attack?

Something interesting I just noticed about the Su-35, even when its engines are almost completely idle, it still glows brightly in IR. Picture below during a tail slide.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3zX4QI-BT4