And the B2 pic shows an IR image from an IR camera pointed at the B2 using the Mk.I eyeball. My point was that this image shows nothing. If it shows anything the lack of obvious hotspots is quite interesting.

the problem is the distance , weather , smoke , cloud ..etc at short range it may be easy , at long range not so easy ..etc , not to mention you not always look at the aircraft against a cold sky back ground

The point is that I don’t have to.. LM have not included any groundbreaking IR suppression measures into the F-35, nor are they marketing these actively (in contrary to AESA, EODAS, (V)LO…).. It shows that we are likely not that far off in our opinion regarding their usefulness..

i think they did say something about Topcoat on both F-22 , F-35 recently http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2000/news_release_000323n.htm

Practicing WVR fight has nothing to do with fun, because that kind of fight was in extreme % reality in real war conditions through history compared to BVR fight and I tend to believe that things are not going to change much.
The thing that pilots you worked with have fear of dog fight has nothing to do with what is going to happen in real A-A combat. To me they sound like MMA fighters that have fear to go to cage. From experience in Kosovo war I can tell you that our pilots wanted nothing but to fight “fur ball”. There are two reasons for that.
They know that they are strong in WVR fight and it is absolutely normal they want to put the fight in their advantage, it is nothing insane about that. And the second thing is something called courage!
When you have equally strong opponents there are great chances you will get in to a dog fight and that is the reason why pilots all over the world practice BFM.

WVR can help you kill the enemy but also help them to kill you , and it need not only skill but luck and number , that the reason why all fighter have standoff AA , AG missiles and most try to avoid WVR

That is correct but if you look at Iraqi Mig-25`s, these planes were able to shot down F-18 and were also able to evade many missiles fired at them and were also able to outrun F-15 using higher speed. And they are generation behind and were operating under unfavorable conditions ( worse situational awareness) 😉
F-35 is going to face planes such as J-20, Su-35S and PAK FA that are kinetically superior, as a matter of fact they are on totally another level compared to F-35 in supersonic arena and for things to get worse, they will probably have comparable electronic suite and superior WVR characteristic.

mig-25 have much greater speed than F-16 , F-15 but it was shot down by both due to limited situational awareness . That an example to show you how important situational awareness compared to kinematic ability of the aircraft :p
and you are assuming that T-50 and J-20 will have equal RCS to F-35 while India official website states 0.5m2 RCS for T-50/Pak-Fa:rolleyes: if that was true then T-50 will have alot of disadvantages in BVR ,not to mention until F-35 use all of it’s 3 Meteor , 2 Aim-132 and 4 CUDA and only after that T-50 superior agility can be useful ( when both of aircraft still have HOBS missiles left which one more agile doesnot really matter ) , about J-20 it doesn’t seem to be more agile than F-35 and still have problem with the engine so iam not going to talk about it here :p

OK, that’s the theory and it is undoubtedly correct.. Just like that Russian plasma stealth invention. Now you need to put the effectiveness of that solution into an equation with cost, added complexity, weight, failure rate.. Don’t be surprised if you find out it does not pay off.

Nice Photoshops. And the paint jobs are just phenomenal for the given conditions..
Oh wait, they still paint all new aircraft dull grey, why is that?

because up until know radar still the most common method of detecting aircraft , grey color help reduce visual detection range ( if the sky is the back ground ) , and also reduce the temperature of the airframe because it reflex sun light quite good and not all aircraft paint grey

Invalid argument. There is nothing like “those who design this must know much more than we do, that means whatever they do must be right”. Misconceptions, failures and troubles are common considering the people working in aerospace sector do pioneering work in many areas. The failure rate is quite high even with the most brilliant minds involved. There are concepts which don’t work, IR suppresion is one of them. Not because the basic idea is wrong but because IR sensors have gone through tremendous development in last three decades. Do you really want to hide a 1000C hot exhaust nozzle against a -40C cold sky using a drain system that pumps a 20C “cold” fuel through the leading edge? That can’t be done.. It might help reduce the head-on detection range by few miles at higher speeds but the trade-offs in terms of added complexity/cost/weight of such system are too big, especially for a fighter.

in head on the nozzle will simply be block by the aircraft air frame :p , and hotter air frame emit IR signature with different wave length , even if they can’t make the aircraft to have equal temperature with the environment they can make the air frame colder thus emit IR with shorter wave length => easier to be absorb by the air , cloud , smoke , rain …etc

It is not, at least not in the way you are presenting it. There are concepts which were deployed, from the most common techniques like application of ceramic layers to some more exotic stuff like spraying freons to the exhaust gases on the B-2A but these contribute roughly as much to the IR stealth level like camouflage pattern does to the visual stealth.

the point is not to be invisible but to get harder for enemy to detected it
BTW i saw some example of camouflage pattern 😀 if IR reduction can go this far then it quite useful actually :confused: