The latest MiG though, the MiG-31, still has a turquoise cockpit!

Ken

Ken, the MiG-31 is the latest numerically but it entered service several years before the MiG-29, so its not really the “latest MiG”.

Well, some immediate observations.

Red Hebe was actually the 1300lb weapon, not Red Dean. I’m looking for a reference for weight for Red Dean but it was less.

Red Dean requirement was 1951, some 6 years earlier than work started on GAR-9 (AIM-47). Doesn’t seem like that much, but it was a very fast moving time, and thats a fair gap. Red Dean was design, built, tested, and cancelled, before GAR-9 had left the drawing board.

Red Dean was never intended as a long range weapon. British airborne radars of the mid 50s struggled to exceed 18-20nm detection range even on a bomber sized target, so the idea of a long range AAM was simply fantasy then.

Red Dean was intended as an all aspect AAM, compared to Firestreak (Blue Jay) which was rear aspect only. It was required that it needed no support from the host aircraft after launch, so it had to use active radar homing. This therefore limited launch range considerably, and there was no way to use inertial guidance / midcourse updates like AMRAAM. The requirement was about 5nm I believe, though I believe Red Dean could probably exceed that. Its diameter was fixed by the active radar seeker, which couldn’t be any smaller, and was very bulky. Due to the lower precision of the radar guidance versus the IR guidance of Firestreak, miss distances were going to be higher so it had a much larger warhead. That’s why the missile was large overall.

GAR-9 is a totally different thing. It used semi-active radar homing, was later in timing and relied on a brand new radar (AN/ASG-18) of revolutionary capability and complexity that actually took the best part of 25 years to get into service.

Briefly, the base CAPTOR has some LPI features. For example, while it has a pretty high power transmitter, it is designed to output only the power needed at the time, where earlier radars tended to run at full power all the time.

The AESA antenna allows many more sophisticated LPI techniques however.

Regarding the multiple target track capability – look up Blue Vixen, which is the ancestor to CAPTOR. It could track more than 20 targets at once.

The table posted above isn’t very accurate BTW.

Regarding RCS, Typhoon uses Frequency Selective Surface materials in the radome to keep out incoming radar signals except in the frequency band of the the CAPTOR.

Wrong. One of the major reasons behind the adoption of the mechanically scanned antenna was lower sidelobes than a passive phased array. In the case of the RBE2’s RADANT antenna its definitely wrong because the way it works, it effectively has a fixed planar array with two lenses made up of pin diodes in front. This means the sidelobes cannot be lower than with a planar array as the two lenses will inevitably introduce losses. This is also why RDY initially had superior range to RBE2.

The benefits of passive phased array are about fast movement of the beam etc. For Rafale, this was thought to outweigh the small range penalty. For Typhoon, the decision was taken to maximise range.

Axisymmetric design

1986 – axisymmetric nozzle design started at Lyulka
1989 – mounted on T10-26, LL-UV(KS) on standard AL-31F
21 March 1989 – First flight

Flat design

1990 – Mounted on LL-UV(PS)

Its firmly subsonic, so it could have done with turbofans. However, with buried engines it would limit the size of engine usable.

Zare, the figures I gave were from Fedesov’s (Head of GosNIIAS) Russian book on air defence technology, and are confirmed by an ex MiG-31 pilot.