… on paper..

Validated during FCS testing at Edwards AFB, White Sands Missile Range, and the Pacific Missile Range. The only part of that statement up for debate is the snap-up capability to 100,000 feet, as this was not tested to my knowledge. Very low-altitude intercepts were conducted though, with the YF-12 detecting and firing on targets at around 1,000 feet or lower when it was up around 70,000 feet or higher.

YF-12 was a reavolutionary design by itself, its legacy, however, is not very widespread in today’s designs.

Really? First coherent pulse-doppler LD/SD radar set? Pretty good legacy there. But the question was about being ground-breaking, not having some massive legacy anyway.

Any reason why the YF-23 was any more advanced than f-22??

It was a far more “complicated” aircraft. In hindsight, had the F-23A been chosen as the ATF, it probably would’ve been cancelled during EMD due to the cost increases which are affecting the F-22 program. They just would’ve hit the F-23 harder, I’d assume. But that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, it was apparently stealthier than the F-22, and significantly faster. Rumor has it that supercruise speed of the GE F120-powered example was right about Mach 2, with maximum theoretical speed being significantly higher than the airframe’s redline speed. The F-23 could’ve been the world’s first Mach 2 fighter to not have afterburners! I’ve said before that the GE-powered YF-23 is probably the single most advanced fighter aircraft ever flown.

YF-12A

Further proof that there is a right answer to nearly every question 😀

And it was designed in the late 50’s/early 60’s! Look around at military aviation in 1963 when 60-6934 made its first flight at Groom Lake. The gap between interceptor aircraft worldwide and the YF-12A was obscenely large.

The problem with YF-12 is it took 3 days to arrange tanker support from the specialized C-135s that could carry JP-7. Not very practical for an interceptor.

I imagine you’re getting at quick-turn capability and alert perfomance. In testing they showed the ability to fly three sorties per jet per day, and they had the alert force stuff worked out before the F-12B was approved by Congress for production (SecDef McNamara refused to allocate the money to the jet and effectively vetoed it himself). Besides, at the time, with regard to Lockheed and YF-12A operations, trouble getting tanker support for flight testing was primarily due to two factors:

1. There weren’t all that many KC-135Qs yet, as the USAF’s SR-71A fleet was just coming around.

2. Those tankers that were available, well, weren’t available a lot of the time, thanks to A-12 flight testing and preparation for operational deployment. But the YF-12 people in the USAF probably wouldn’t have known that, as the A-12 was a seriously classified program.

Bhagira…disruptive behavior…GTFO (get thyself fully offline 😀 ) Sorry for the delay, my internet connection has been sporadic thanks to some local construction.

And this will be the last thing I say to you guys about one particular issue: responding to an idiot in like form is NOT ACCEPTABLE. It never has been. Why you can’t figure that out or grasp that very simple concept is beyond me. Anyway I’ll delete the lunacy from Bhagira a bit later (I still have to clean the IAF thread now that I think about it).

Yes yes but cue on the fanboys talking about how one F-22 can take out 57 regiments of Backfires and their cousins. . . or what not. . .

It’s not like BACKFIREs aren’t large radar targets or anything…

They might as well put up a Gorgon/Gazelle ABM site up on Cuba, and a few Topol-M launchers . . .

Both of those are absurdly stupid ideas. No ICBM is going to be anywhere near close enough to Cuba to be shot down by a GAZELLE site (GORGON is no longer operational). Topol-M? To do what, fire at Hawaii? Topol-M TELs are large, identifiable vehicles that won’t be that hard to locate. A better idea would be low-altitude, high-speed cruise missiles (Meteorit derivative, maybe), or an IRBM. Smaller package, more survivable, harder to locate.

Right, and TLAMs and CALCMs are invisible, and can’t be shot down right?

If they really did want to make a statement they’d just put two S-400 batteries in Cuba, one at each end of the island. The portion of the airspace they’d effectively be able to close down would be huge.

The USAF isn’t going to get anything while their fleet of F-15s and F-16s is still around. . .

Except for the F-22s being currently procured…and the F-35…and a new bomber around 2018…and more C-17s…

Sean it is nothing new or revolutionary to detect a target at sea using a tropbounce. People have been developing systems to exploit various aspects of anamalous atmospheric propagation of radar signals as long as the concepts have been known. The simple fact is that, at the frequencies employed, you CANNOT get sufficient resolution off an OTH radar to target from. Please understand this – it goes for the big fixed arrays just as much as the smaller more mobile ones and it goes for western OTH radar as much as Chinese or Russian. Your guys use OTH radar….ask them.

Funny, that smaller array I posted was certainly talking about targeting systems either actively or passively. But you say it cannot be done, so…

OTH-B is old news anway. OTH-SW is the way to go, and there have been civillian efforts to give them “super-resolution”:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel4/48/15634/00725227.pdf?temp=x

How to detect naval vessels at sea with surface waves:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/2198/17798/00822088.pdf?arnumber=822088

This was interesting:

http://ceta.mit.edu/PIER/pier50/03.0405052.Fabbro.CG.pdf

Yes its not a new term either. In the Royal Navy Merlin HM1 is considered an OTH-T asset because it can target over-the-horizon from its parent vessel. OTH-T is the descriptor for the generic practice of Over The Horizon-Targetting. Its a concept – not a system.

Range and resolving power can be increased by using a more powerful array. Think about it. Maybe the Chinese OTH can be used to find things at like 3000 kilometers. Who cares. The AShBM isn’t flying that far. With a 3000 km range, resolving power at a third of that distance would be far greater than at max range. Same principle applies to airborne radar, it’s called the resolution cell.

I used MPA just as its the most commonly employed platform. Now it could be a HALE UAV, a radar sat, SURTASS essentially a platform that has the systems and surviveability to derive a target ID from the OTH cue-in. I sleep just fine thanks….as I would expect to aboard any CV/CVN at theatre-entry range off the Chinese coast AShBM’s or not!.

All they have to do is find the CVBG using an OTH system coupled with ELINT gear. They start popping off missiles and see what they hit. Maybe they don’t hit the CVN right off, so what? They’re still hitting important components of the CVBG. Hell, they take out the destroyers/cruisers first and that makes it way more interesting because now you can get a lot closer to the CVN with conventional systems.

Getting a bit hysterical Sean?. You dont have to believe in ‘the infallibility of western naval power’. All thats required is believing in the difficulty of targetting naval vessels at very long ranges. Look at the amount your nation is spending on its BAMS programme and its space-based surveillance capability. Ask yourself, honestly, if anyone else is spending that much?.

By nature we have to care about nearly the entire ocean. China only needs to worry about a swath near and around Formosa. Far cheaper to monitor a piece than to monitor the whole pie.

Offboard and passive surveillance Sean. Basic information warfare – collection of data on your opposition whilst restricting that which he can collect on you. Navies have been practising it for a very long time. Let me put this in terms you might understand – you get excited about the Russian SA-10 systems yes – what value does that system have if it needed the target to emit on a recognisable military radar set or be behaving in the fashion of a hostile before it could be employed?.

If the CVBG is going to not be emitting, then it has been mission-killed already.

SA-10 can engage a stealth aircraft if the plane is close enough to the SA-10 guidance radar to get enough of a skin-paint to allow the missile to guide yes?. If that range is inside of the release range of the stealth aircrafts standoff ordnance how likely is the battery to survive?. OTH radar and its analogies not only have to be able to detect and cue a descriminator-asset in to get the targetting solution for the AShBM but they have to do it before the carrier and its supporting arms can destroy those targetting assets.

That’s the whole point. An AsHBM gives you the range to deal with the CVBG well before they’re going to be launching aircraft to harrass you directly.

When the AShBM is bussing out intelligent autonomous, high endurance, hunting antiship missiles then its a threat. Until then its a US fantasy to try and secure funding for CG(X) that Chinese internet warriors have cottoned on to!.

So the US is making up the entire story, eh?

“up to 450 km” your site says Sean…and it doesnt say its discriminating anything at that range. It doesnt say that because it isnt. This is simply because the frequencies used, in the operating technique employed, do not provide sufficient resolution. No OTH set does at anything above about 300km.

Oh, that’s just an example of an OTH system that can pick out targets well beyond 300 km, that’s all. That thing is pretty small anyway, a lot of China’s OTH systems are enourmous systems coming close to the USSR’s Duga BMEW systems in size.

What OTH does is cue in the other assets you listed…MPA and the such like.

Never heard of OTH-T, I take it.

Then again they only cue in based on course and signal so any vessel, providing a sufficient return signal, on a suspect course track would have to be tasked out to the MPA’s. Going to need lots and lots of MPA’s….or lots and lots of AShBM’s and a very cavalier attitude to sinking cruise liners and VLCC’s!. Have a look at a supertanker with its nice long, wide flat maindeck and then look at the nice wide flat maindeck of an aircraft carrier. Without a seriously high radar resolution – i.e SAR at about 20m res those two are VERY easy to confuse on the scope. As the RAF Nimrod force proved!

Again, the assumption that it has to be an MPA providing target identification. Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.

The ELINT thing is a joke and you surely know it. If you must rely on the target being complicit in its own destruction then you have a pretty useless weapons system. There is also nothing new in the passive/active targetting system you are theorizing for your fantasy-AshBM…it was the system employed by TASM with some downright hilarious results at times when long-range shots were attempted.

Yes of course, because something didn’t work at one point means it will never work at all. How silly of me, I should be smited for not believing in the infallibility of Western naval power.

Or not.

ELINT systems are far more advanced now than they were in the Cold War, for starters. Secondly do consider when such a weapon is likely to be used. This is a sort of naval “first strike” weapon, useful in an opening volley to try and take out USN CVNs before, say, conducting military exercises on Formosa. At the outbreak of hostilities is is not likely that your average CVN will be travelling about with every electronic emitter turned off; that obliterates any hope of having a worthwhile amount of SA when hostilities kick off.

impractical without a shudder-inducing amount spent on radarsats

Only in a world where OTH radar systems do not exist…

It’s high definition DVD. Blu-ray players that are any good will also upconvert normal DVDs to HD quality.