to add to Cola’s post, the first page of the “rafale vs typhoon” pdf states its hypothesis about their caracteristics quich, as the author himself says “isn’t realistic”..

from there on, his own calculations are necessarily inaccurate

@ Obligatory:

Yes, but that is also a weakness, if you have high speed, you can with a simple turn make that missile aiming for the moon, earth, or mars, after which it can never recover.

that was feasible relatively easily with old missiles who had difficulties looking off-boresight and that’s what beaming is all about (put the missile at your 3-9 o’clock line and go fast, it will have to aim way ahead of you and may loose track). with most recent missiles, the detector can look much further sidewards and these techniques are more difficult to put in practice.

another technique was to make hard turns, forcing the missile to manouver and bleed speed and reduce its manouverability. Still, it’s not so simple and I don’t know of any fighter pilot that would not consider a missile fired at him as a real danger

@ obligatory

as I said, the missile evasion tactics you talk about are what I said to jackjack about a missile being forced into manouvers it can’t do, like Shaw explains in his book.

However, if you read the book (the whole book, not just ont page) you have also some nice explanations about cutting corners in a turn…

A missile coming from your six won’t have tu pull the same turn (same radius) than you.. it will turn inside and will need much less G’s to follow what you do. The sooner you turn, the less G’s the missile will need to pull. You can see on this schematic relative paths:

as you can see, the turn the missile has to pull is much wider in that case, and that’s if it just does direct pursuit (continuously pointing its nose on target). The modern missiles work in lead pursuit, which means that they adapt to the target’s trajectory and aim ahead of it, reducing even more the necessary G’s.

So, can a missile be avoided? yes. but the window allowing it becomes increasingly small and doesn’t restrict itself to a simple “turn radius comparison”

one thing that is important is how much lift (G’s) you can generate ata given speed.

For example, in the video posted by wrightwing, the SH flies slow, 110kts, generating 1.0G at 29.9° AoA which is beyond what rafales limiter will allow. the rafale does a 100kts slow flight in a straight line in its demo (1.0G too). it can manage the same load factor at a slower speed while, obviously, flying with a lesser AoA.

while some point the “high AoA” as a killer capability, the fact is that the Sh has to be a higher AoA than the rafale to manage to simply generate the same acceleration (G), which most certainly comes with a superior drag as well…

what’s even more interesting is that, while going about 360kts, the SH pulls its highest load (5.5G’s) that is visible in that demo (from parts where the HUD is displayed).. it is at an AoA of 7.8° at that point… so much for the need to go to some insane AoAs… unless youre going realy slow, you don’t go anywhere near 30° or more; and, in any case, you don’t turn all that much while doing so anyway

the highest AoA reached in the video that we can witness is 38.3°, instant (not sustained) as the pilots pulls hard on the stick while the aircraft is slowing down at that moment, the recorded G’s are diminishing as AoA goes above 30°, the aircraft acting more as an airbrake (speed ~210kts and slowing down) than producing lift

nice show, but what are you looking after specifically?

the M has one hard point less (something to do with the placement of hook, I think) but the gun was always part of the requirements

a couple of things:

– when you compare aircraft powel level in dogfight, it’s not only the weight that counts, but the drag it generates… much more energy and need higher thrust to generate the same amount of G’s as teh rafale (those canarde canalise airflow over the wing, allowing higher lift (higher G and, therefore, higher turn rate) for a given AoA

– when you dogfight, you can manouver in a single plane. that’s what beginners do and the aircraft with higher STR wins if the pilot manages to remain at his corner speed, basically. If the fight goes to another speed range (say, the oponent’s corner speed, the aircraft with higher STR overall can still find himself turning less than its oponent and loosing. What’s more, when pilots know their stuff (and today’s fighter pilots are pretty much well trained both in USAF and AdlA), they manouver out of plane (don’t floow each other in flat circles waiting for things to happen), use their aircraft’s capabilities to the maximum extent and it’s the combination of pilot’s skill and all various aircraft capabilities that will decide of the issue of a dogfight. If rafale managed to play more or less even with the raptor in one exercise means simply the pilots did well. how well on each side? we’ll have a more precise idea after more encounters happen. One is not enough.

– as for IR detection, we had videos here of missile IR tracking of aircraft.. and the whole aircraft was clearly visible in IR, not only the engine. and that was just with a small sensor of the sidewinder. The OSF on the rafale has a capability to track targets way further than any sidewinder. beliveing that an aircraft won’t be seen by it simply because it’s nozzles (which are on the opposite side of any waircraft anyway, when you come head on) are treated against heat is naive to say the least. What the OSF will see are the nose and leading edges heated by air friction (especially if the aircraft goes above Mach1 in which case it will litterally “glow” for any todays decent IR detector. Supercruise may mean “suicide” in that situation since your manouvering capability at M1.5 is, more or less, nonexistent (if you manage to pull 5G (which may prove difficult to do while maintaining speed), your turn radius is several miles wide) and a medium range IR missile coming at you head on will have very short flight time to meet you)

Yes but the Harriers engine had a Hot spot at the vector nozzles. With this design you get about 18k pounds of thrust from the cool air fan. That should make a big difference in heat signature.

actually, the thrust of that fan is there only for vertical operations… it does nothing in normal flight, when you usually want your heat signature to be low…