Is it the size of the nose dome or something else? For example mirage f1 has a small nose and it can guided medium range missile, even F-20. Why didn’t F16A used medium range missile. Making it more confusing, some stated that F16’s radar has even longer range than Rafale. Anybody?

While there are many factors that effect the range of a radar, for a given frequency, one can can understand the range of radar in terms of three basic parameters

(a) Transmitted power
(b) Gain of the Tx/RX antenna
(c) Dynamic Range of the receiver

Real life channels, however, suffer from a phenomena called “multi-path”; i.e. signal arrives at the receiver via multiple path, where each path delays and attenuates the signal in its “own” way. These signals from various paths then get added, and the resultant signal seen by the receiver is very different from what was transmitted by the transmitter.
Increasing the tx power and/or improving antenna/receiver gain is of no use then, what is needed then is processing power to “undo” the effects of the channel, thus the processing power then may be considered as the fourth parameter that defines the range of a radar.

I understand that for commercial airliners higher bypass ratio is used. The point was that, will the thrust from 4 WS-10As be enough and how much more time, may be, needed to modify WS-10A for civilian purposes.

I remember reading somewhere that French company Alactel is working on a radar that will operate in UHF band, though the primary purpose of this radar is detection of tactical ballistic missile, it may work against extremely stealthy fighters like F-22.

Lower frequencies radar can detect todays stealthy fighters, however the error in estimated location of the target is so high, so as to practically render these radars useless.

Is any body aware of any such research/studies that have been done to reduce this error to an acceptable degree.

how many FC-1 have been crashed or flight tests postponed due to RD-93. it has been 3 years of extensive flight testing. and it is definitely smokey because smokless version hasnt been ordered.

RD-93 has been used in Mig-29 for the last two decades, and is probably more trouble prone than AL-31. It is not confirmed, if a better version of this engine (smokeless) exists, as Mig-29 itself has’nt been much of an export success.

While some information is available about WS-10A (the replacement for AL-31), what would be the chinese alternative to RD-33.

Perhaps a more relevant question to ask is, that how relevant is the maneuverability of Flanker in actual modern combat vis-à-vis current generation aircrafts and the F-22. .

Probably very helpful against current generation fighters as far as bringing the aircraft in “optimum-launch” conditions is concerned, slightly less in evading a missile.

However against raptor, the primary concern should be good detection capability, and probably it would help Russians if they spend the money on some kind of low wavelength radar rather than TVC and the associated hardware.

Radars trying to detect far away or stealthy airplanes are trying to analyze very low power reflected signals. To do so, they use very sensitive hardware in an attempt to discriminate signal from noise. When you suddenly zap that sensitive hardware with huge radiated power, something is going to burn out. Once burned out, it has to be repaired before it is usable again. A mission kill has been scored.

The analogy is your doctor listening for a heartbeat using a stethoscope, but you suddenly switch on your megablaster stereo system at highest volume. You’ll blow the doc’s eardrums out of his skull.

Pre-amplifiers with extremely high-dynamic range (i.e. capability to deal with input voltages over a wide range) in the receiver portion may solve this problem.

If it works… Just bought a Russian Night Vision Gear!

How much it costs and is it available to civilians. I have read somewhere that NVDs can harm eyes.