You haven’t looked very closely at the Gripen if you did not see the bottle shaping. … The Tejas just doesn’t have classic aerodynamic shaping like its contempary counterparts.

Likewise. As a matter of fact, the area-ruling on the Tejas is VERY pronounced.

Eaxctly what “classic aerodynamic shaping” do you see missing??

i have recently submitted a 3 view picture of tejas to a developer so that tejas can be added in flight simulator ,does any one have 4 view pictures of tejas ??

Could you post a link to the 3-view here? The only one that I know about is horribly inaccurate …

Hi!

I found in the web this beautiful image. Is this the PAK-FA?

What do you think?

…

It is a fictional aircraft made by a modder for the game “Lock On: Modern Air Combat”. I think it was called WF-23 or something of that sort.

BTW wing twist and wing sweep DO NOT affect turn rate. In a turn, the wing provides no or very little lift.

Shalav,

That is a misleading statement. It is true that in a tight circle only a small component of the wing’s lift will be countering gravity, but the wing is most definitely generating a lot of lift. Instantaneous turn rate is effectively determined by maximum lift co-efficient, and sustained turn rate by both wing loading and L/D ratio, both of which have a *lot* to do with the lift generation capability of the wing.

However, having said that, there is nothing to say that the Gripen’s design makes it a better design than the LCA through a mere inspection of aircraft configuration. Robban has raised several points, but none of them have any authoritative credibility:
– It is a fallacy that canards are automatically more unstable than their canardless counterparts. A canard can be designed to have any desired static margin.
– Wing twist is not unique to Gripen — in fact every aircraft worth its name has some amount of wing twist to a) prevent the entire wing from stalling all at once, and b) to control spanwise lift distribution to reduce induced drag. The LCA also has this. In any case, how does twist help turn rate? I would think that it actually reduces turn rate.
– The LCA also has slats and its double delta wing creates vortices at high AOA.

It is essentially impossible to do any kind of comparative analysis without a bunch of detailed aerdoynamic data, which is not available to us. So we will have to do with approximations … and hand/flag waving!

A random distribution is just that, random.
A bell curve implies a pattern to the overall distribution, with a majority of incidences clustered near the designated center, and discrepancies tapering off toward the limits

Matt,

There is nothing called a “random distribution” as opposed to a bell (i.e., normal or z-) distribution. The events that comprise the distribution (i.e, the
random variable) cannot be predicted so you don’t know what the next event will be. However, the events as a whole do have a distribution. (If it weren’t so, most of statistics would not be possible.)

For example, throwing dice is random, with a uniform distribution (which is probably what you’re thinking of as a “random distribution”). Things like test scores, height, etc. are also random, but with a z-distribution. Samples from data that are z-distributed have a t-distribution. There are other distributions for other purposes (e.g., f-, Chi-squared, etc. etc.)

Obviously, you don’t expect a mathmatically perfect curve in a real sample, at least not on this planet, but the overall shape will have such a pattern.

Actually samples *will* be t-distributed (i.e., lower hump and thicker tails) if the underlying population is z-distributed. Also, the t-distribution is parameterized by sample size, so for small samples, the tails are very thick (so the distribution is very wide, implying larger uncertainty). However, as the sample size gets larger, the t-distribution approaches the z-distribution, and for sample sizes near 40 or so, there is almost no difference .

Most of this material is from an elementary probability and satistics course, but as I previously said, you can Google this.

Actually I think that you are both right. 🙂

Unless your guns are truly horrendous the rounds won’t be randomly distributed and should follow the standard bell curve with the rounds being concentrated along the barrel axis.

There is no contradiction between the two. In fact, the shells are likely randomly distributed in a bell curve.

Even in the overlap areas you’re not going to have nearly as many rounds as around the centerpoint of a single barrel. Unless you’ve got more evidence than just your opinion I’m inclined to think such a setup has very little chance against a target as small as a mortar round.

True. However, the distance between the barrels is going to be negligible when compared to the engagement range. As a result, the two “cones” are effectively going to be a single cone.

I guess so, that would be like what – 10% of mission time?

I guess that it could vary by quite a bit. A mission would involve taxi, take-off, cruise to station, loiter, and then the reverse sequence of steps. Cruise and Loiter are optimised at different angles of attack (i.e., corresponding to different L/D ratios), so the duration that the operators have to be seated at an angle would depend on how much time is spent in the cruise phase (assuming that taxi and take-off/landing is relatively insignificant).