fftPerhaps but ANY nation today, whether capitalistic or not, that attempts to match the US one for one in an arms race would bankrupt itself.
The point was not whether China’s economy is growing but its current consumption. China’s current comsumption is huge. Much greater than the USSR but it still does not have the same equivalent numbers of weapons as the old USSR. So it is not engaged in an arms races. If it were you’d see far more ships, planes and tanks.
How many people live in India and how many live in America? India buys nowhere near as many refrigerators and televisions as the US. The old USSR which had the same population size as the US consumed much, much, much less than the US.
All third world countries, even those with large populations, buy less refrigerators and other appliances than the US or even small western states. Third world nations simply buy less, no matter how many people live in them. China is the one exception of a third world country that buys more than western states.
But the question isn’t really about the number of refrigerators or televisions but about a nation that could buy many times more of these items than the USSR and yet doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of weapons as the USSR.
China simply isn’t engaging in an arms race in the level that its total economic strength would allow it too. It doesn’t because it is a lost cause to challenge the US in procuring weapons.
Another reason why you won’t want to engage in an arms race with the West. So why would you want to engage in an arms race with the US and the West if they take a large chunk of your exports?
BTW, China actually runs a deficit with the world but a surplus with the US and the West so it is not really like Japan and Taiwan that depends on an overall surplus to survive. China’s internal market is what allows so many televisions and refrigerators to be bought.
If the US decides to block every port in China, there is nothing China can do anyways so why bother trying to match the US submarine for submarine. You are proving exactly my point.
The bottom line is this: China is not engaged in an arms race in spite of its total economic and industrial capabilities (evidenced most strikingly by its consumption of steel) because it’s pointless – and economically suicidal – to match the US one for one in arms.
China may not match US in arms-race from the quality perspective, but from quantity perspective, it should be able.
fftHow can a TV channel have access to the actual cockpit displays.
fftWhile COTs can be used for many circuits, circuitry for the F-22 and many other weapon system is far in advance of what you will be able to obtain anytime soon. The computers for the F-22 have a clock speed of 10.5 GigaHtz and a 128 byte architecture. Most main frame computers do not have that capability.
Adrian
A clock speed of 10.5 GHz seems to very difficult to believe. Intel with 0.09 micron has found it difficult to cross 3.4 GHz barrier, and that for a cpu which has extremely long pipeline (P4 sacrifices IPC for frequency) and was designed from scratch for high frequencies. F-22’s computers are way old, and are probably built using 0.18 micron process.
Theoretically, Such high frequency may make sense for DSP chips, if the input signals to them have extremely high frequency, but even then the standard fashion is to down convert the frequency before feeding the DSP.
Also designing A/D converters for such frequencies will be extremely hard.
128-bit architecture also does not make sense (unless you are referring to length of some internal registers).
fftIf the quality of the british-made cars is any indication, then good luck to Canada for buying these subs.
fftFor the euro-fighter, which country has the most technological contribution.
fftThe range resolution depends on operating mode, but not really on operating frequency or antenna structure. Some range imprecision is an inherent property of High PRF and affects US radars as well (e.g. in HPRF Velocity Search mode, which has the longest detection range, there is no range data provided at all). Fully automated digital radars are better able to mix their PRFs and operating regimes to overcome the weaknesses of individual operating modes – e.g. “Raid Assessment” and HDTWS modes which alternate “search” and “spotlight” operation to reduce the range uncertainty of “search” alone. The Russian radars are switched manually between High, Low, and Interleave, the latter of which can’t be used with TWS.
Amplitude monopulse antennas create two (or more) beams pointing in slightly different directions, and compare the signal strength from each beam to determine which way the target is moving. A “locked” target centered between the beams is not at the position of maximum sensitivity of either, so the target needs to be a little closer to be locked than it does to be detected. Phase monopulse antennas have the beams pointing in the same direction, so a target can be locked at practically the same distance it can be detected.
This is an awkward way to express the question because the Russian forces stopped receiving any new fighter radar technology at the end of the Cold War. What is the estimated arrival time of something that is stationary?
But for discussion’s sake I would say design bureaus – “5 years”, air force – “30 years”.
Switching from large numbers of analog filters to digital sampling would replace all of the radar circuits. It would be more cost-effective to build something completely new.
My opinions,
-SK
Thanks for the answers. Theoratically, choice of frequency does tend to effect the range accuracy. In general higher frequencies give better accuracy, whilst lower frequencies have poor accuracy. For instance stealth a/c can be detected by WW2 era type radars (which have lower frequencies comapred to modern ones) but the error in target location so high that a SAM cannot be launched.
fftI wish I had enough rank to add to somebody’s reputation because this is IMHO among the best written answers I ever saw online about Western vs. Russian fighter radars, and it didn’t receive nearly enough praise in this thread.
About the only part I would disagree with is the part about Russian radar azimuth search. In general the scan azimuth is fixed at +-25 degrees and can’t be widened, only the scan center can be shifted left and right. This corresponds with the Soviet GCI design principle that the fighter radar is not intended for target detection, but rather for missile fire control.
Back to the original question though, some specific weaknesses of the Cassegrain antenna-based N-019 and N-001 compared to US-built radars with mechanically scanned slotted arrays:
– Heavier radar
– Heavier antenna
– amplitude monopulse instead of phase monopulse
– lock range is shorter than detection range
– lock is not instantaneous
– no ground mapping modes
– based on large number of analog Doppler filters instead of digital sampling
– larger Doppler “notch” range of blind speeds against beaming targets
– sidelobe compensation guard channel horn doesn’t rotate with reflector
– sidelobe compensation needs to be manually switched on
– sidelobe noise reduces detection range at low altitude
– sidelobe noise creates additional pursuit “notch”
– poor resolution in range (up to 8 km) and azimuth (up to 10 degrees)
– reduced downward-scanning antenna gimbal limit prevents missile lofting
– reduced downward-scanning antenna gimbal limit complicates F-pole tactic
– no NCTR mode
– display doesn’t provide sufficient data about target altitude/speed/direction
– no pulse mode for look-up targetsThe Russian jets are also generally disadvantaged in BVR for depending on limited-range SARH radar missiles which can’t be fired from TWS mode, lacking active jamming equipment, and some other issues, although these depend on the exact aircraft under discussion and are separate from the radar itself.
Despite the long list of disadvantages however, the coherent LD/SD radar closed the “back door” in the Soviet air defence network that was previously open to low-altitude NATO strike aircraft, and thus smashed the enemy’s spear in a way perhaps no Soviet invention had done since the atomic bomb – the NATO armadas of A-6, F-111, B-1B and Tornado IDS all became instantly obsolete. This is an accomplishment not fully appreciated by the question “who would win in BVR”.
-SK
An excellent post, SK. May I ask a few questions,
That poor resolution in range (up to 8 km) is due to the frequency of the radar or antena design. How much reduction in estimation error for range can be achieved by going to PAR type antennas.
Aren’t lock-on ranges always, some what less, than detection ranges (probably due to the initial poor S/N ratio of the signal, when the target is much farther from radar).
Compared to “west”, how far are “russians” behind in radar technology.
How much improvement can be extracted from these poor radars by subjecting them to a heavy dose of “digitalisation” (e.g. using better CPUs and DSPs)
fftHave you read the article that came with those pics?
Makes me want to do the same… 🙂
Do you have the link to the article.
fftI have seen the figures of 13,800 kg of thrust for a single AL-31F, here it is shown as 12,500 kg.
fftYou don’t use P4s or Athlons. You use embedded low powered microcontrollers generally between 33MHz to 100MHz in speed, usually i486 or Motorola 68XXX architectures, or RISC like ARM, MIPS, AMD 29000, and PowerPC. These usually don’t produce too much heat. Used to be, the chips are encased in ceramic DIPs with gold plating on top to conduct heat but that was back at a time when chips are built with big micron sizes. With small micron sizes, power use is extremely small and so is heat generation. Mission computers in the F-16 MLU for example, use R3000 chips. R3000 has a better known application—the CPU in the original Playstation.
COTS (using 486 chips) is applied on the MKK’s radar since the 486 can directly execute the 8080 assembly use to write the N001 software. But for the N001VEP used on the MK2, the fire control software was rewritten into C, which in the future, can be portable to more powerful non Intel 86X architectures to execute.
The delay of the migration of the BARS software into COTS may have to do with the original software being in assembly. The software has to be rewritten into high level language like C and then recompiled to the executable binary of the processor in question. That rewriting may have been the cause of the delay, especially if the original programmers are no longer around and there is no proper documentation. That’s going to take a lot of work after you decompile the binaries, determine how the whole thing works, then rewrite them into high level.
It might be faster if you just write the code from scratch.
Thanks for the reply. Heat is definitely a big issue these days, (especially with P4). But then elaborate cooling mechanisms are also available (including the ones that can literally freeze the cpu), after all even desktop CPUs (which generate an awful amount of heat) have been used in laptops and notebooks. I wonder how much performance improvement can be achieved, by simply replacing the 486 class CPU with one of the newest CPUs.
The algorithm that allows radar to track multiple targets, I suppose, is fairly computation intensive.
fftWhat are you talking about? The Russians have pretty much access to the same COTS (stupid acronym for Commercial Off The Shelf) technologies like anyone else. The micron sizes for any current COTS is generations ahead of the most advanced military electronics technologies because Moore’s cycle occurs so much faster than military certification cycles.
It can be said though that there maybe a Russian regulation that allows only domestically made components are allowed for RuAF consumption, permitting only the use of COTS for export products (which can make the export version actually superior over the domestic variant.) For example, a DSP inside a certain active radar missile seeker may be forced to use only Russian made and branded DSPs, but the same version of the seeker for export may be using COTS DSPs from Texas Instruments.
I can see how that would affect the performance of Russian domestic radars and fire control systems, which have been besieged by the lack of processing power. But it has not stopped export variants of such equipment from performing.
That’s nonsense. The Luftwaffe planes are degraded from the beginning. Even their engines are detuned. The planes in the airshows are export specs, which often include the ability to use the R-77 ARH and TV guided weapons. Furthermore, they’re upgraded versions using more advanced versions of the N019M or the Zhuk series N010 slotted array radars, which is roughly comparable to the APG-68.
It’s like judging the entire F-16 family just because you have a Block 10 F-16A as an example.
How easy is implemetation of the COTS concept . While it is fairly easy to buy a generic CPU (say P4 or athlon) but does’nt these CPU’s have to be “ruggidized” (by enclosing them in special enclosing perhaps) simply because these were not designed for harsh military environment.
One great advanatge of COTS should be the availabilty of mature and advanced development tools (e.g. compilers) and skilled programmers.
Why COTS have not been applied to BARS radar yet.
fftYou mean supersonic AShMs? China had developed supersonic anti-ship missiles way back in the 1970s. The C-101 Sawhorse family. Not entirely successful, there were land, sea and air launched versions.
The current known version is the HY-3 offered for export. Specs are max speed Mach 2.5 and over 100 km range.
To be frank, my knowledge of naval weaponry is rather poor. The point was that Brahmos/Yakhont/Sunburn have been called “Aegis-killers” due to their high speed, manuvering in terminal phase etc.
China’s C-80x class is subsonic, a strange thing, considering that famous Taiwan election and American carrier issue.
fftIn what aspects this missile difers from brahmos.
fftWhy China despite all the development in other areas of naval assests, did not develop a missile like Sunburn/Brahmos.
fftYou should read the article. I need your opinion as the content is quite radical. Radical as in saying “On December 6, 2003, the new J-11 model type made its first flight, featuring new technical material (composite?), a new radar and fire control system, which can use domestic product.” The text goes on to the reasons why China may have rejected the Russian proposed Su-27SM upgrade plan.
Su-XX series have supposedly poor visibilty from cockpit compared to F-16. Has China attempted to do anything about this, or is it too much of a surgery to be performed.
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