I think doctors should prescribe a small dose of Lukos™ after a stressful days – laughing at your post makes me feeling better ! Thanks.

Remove your blinkers, lukos.
You consider Rafale development as deadpan. This far from reality. Roadmap is very clear and evokes Rafale being in production well past 2025 – and expected to be in service in 2050.

By 2050 it will be hilariously outdated and by 2030 it will be roughly where Tornado is now, as will the Typhoon in all honesty. You can keep it in service as long as you want but in 20 years time it’ll be a live target drone wrt air combat capacity.

Past the F3R update, you are forgetting all further developments already on study at the present day – nEUROn, MLUs, and so on.

Stuff like Taranis and nEUROn have their uses for deep strike interdiction (and maybe recon in opponent-free airspace), but they’re no fighters and none will be ready for anything until at least 2030. In the mean time between 2020 and 2030, the RAF and many other European airforces will have a Typhoon with a highly capable large AESA with a broad range RF attack and comms potential mounted on a swashplate, along with F-35 stealth fighters with a level of avionics sophistication that is unparalled. During the same period the FAF will have a less capable Rafale and some Mirages begging for their pension.

You are right about one thing. Typhoon life will be probably much shorter than Rafale’s. You can thank Eurofighter GmbH for Typhoon’s initial hasty development, lacking some fundamental elements present on the Rafale, such as highly modular avionics, allowing room for vast and relatively easy improvements, RCS discretion thought from the start, among other. Typhoon was developped as a dragster on which they thought they could add ESP and ABS later. They probably can, and are achieving this on various updates (P1E, P2E..), but they have to make a lot of compromises.

I’m just realistic about the pace of evolution, you seem to think the Rafale will be capable of addressing the threat of PAK-FAs, J-20s and J-31s for 10 years with nothing other than Mirages for support. I’d rather rely on a Typhoon with a more capable, larger AESA and a whole bunch of F-35s to do the same.

Hilarious when you take a closer look at Typhoon RCS reduction measures.. close to none.

Rubbish. A quick Google on your part would put pay to that assumption. For a start it can carry 4 BVRAAMs semi-recessed without pylons and has more highly swept wings and canards and a smaller canard span and a retractable IFR probe. It also has RAM on the leading edges of the canards and wings.

http://eurofighter.airpower.at/faq.htm

If you talk about Mirage III.. then yes. 😉

Irrelevant against modern fighters.

@TooCool> Thanks, that makes sense. I never realized the T/W ratio of the Gripen C was that low, or I might have wrongly used F414 values last time I checked. A quick calculation with 100% fuel gives me ~0.85 vs ~1.05 for Rafale.

1.15 for Typhoon. 1.2 clean according to BAE.

considering the relation, one may conclude that Gripen and Rafale, both similar in aerodynamic choices (close coupled delta canard) generate lift and drag relatively similarily. The Typhoon maybe a little bit draggier as with almost 10% higher t/w than the Rafale, it manages barely 3% higher climb rate..

Or the quoted climb rates are approximate, but hell there’s also a lot of other factors besides drag and T/W that affect climb rate. If I remember correctly the only basis for the Typhoon climb rate was a statement somewhere saying “over 25% better than an F-16C.” So really that just works out as >318m/s.

I repeat, show me that specific quote of mine.. Right, you can’t bcos there is none..

So why were you arguing with someone who only said just that? Next time, if don’t disagree with something, don’t argue with it and we can all save a lot of time.

It’s vice versa. You’re unhappy with the outcome so you’re trying to spoil it with any self-invented crap that fits your theory.

So everyone’s investing tons of cash in a useless technology again? Just like with stealth? And missiles, because Pierre Sprey says they’ll all miss and we should stick to guns. I know the advantages of AESA, that’s why when someone says it doesn’t offer significant mission advantages, I immediately question what the details of those missions were, and so far you have come up blank.

Sure they have. But that is for Radar 2 (call it Captor-E Mk2), not for current Captor-E. That’s exactly what me and others were claiming from the very beginning.

Scheduled for 2019, with Mk1 in 2017.
http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?134713-Switzerland-to-re-launch-fighter-competition-in-2017-so-who-will-win&p=2223316#post2223316

Read above.

Just read.

That was PESA, not AESA.

PESA is still better than mechanically scanned, why continue a failed point?

A solid AESA radar can be fixed. If your radar needs a swashplate in order to get the same performance, then it likely has a problem with the sidelobes. There is a good reason why all radar developers have abandoned swashplates years ago – it’s not like they haven’t crossed their minds as they must have developed dozens of these before with slotted arrays.

What a load of cobblers. Is that why the Su-27s and Su-35s use one, and why the PAK-FA has cheek radars? Without the swashplate, FoV is limited to about 60deg, so you can maintain lock whilst going evasive at 90deg to an opponent.

Another wet dream of yours..
First, the report doesn’t say “by 2020” but “from the early 2020s” which is ~2021-2023 in my books.
Second, the report has no authority, it’s only an estimate.
Third, you can expect delays. While even the vanilla Captor-E is still far from being introduced, the Mk2 will have significantly longer development time.

Cheaper and easier to do it in one upgrade rather than 2, think about it. It’s the delay that permitted the development time in the interim. The phasing should be obvious. GR4 going bye bye in 2018, so there’s a major Typhoon upgrade happening then anyway.

Long story short, estimated 2022 can actually be ~2024, plus ~2 years delay with the back-end, then add few years for software patches and increments in order to get the final desired capabilities.. Welcome to ~2030 when the Mk2 can reliably do the things you have described..

Pffft, rubbish. The things I’ve described are nowhere near as complicated as conformal radar, don’t make me laugh. They have already been demonstrating this technology for some time, the remaining task is primarily integration. That’s hardly the same as the beginning of a study phase.

http://ukarmedforcescommentary.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Bright%20Adder

The AESA radar will enable the Typhoon to fully exploit the capabilities of the Meteor long range air to air missile, included the 2-way datalink which makes the weapon a fully networked effector, capable of in-flight retargeting. The AESA will be more powerful and reliable, will track a higher number of targets simultaneously and it is also expected to be able to act as a high-speed communication system (radar to radar) and an Electronic Warfare weapon, with Jamming capability.
The british AESA technology demonstrator, the Bright Adder, is said to be particularly focused on the EW function.

The AESA situation is complex, as there are, effectively, two different evolution paths which will be harmonized into the final product: in addition to the british Bright Adder demonstrator, the Euroradar consortium, led by SELEX Galileo and comprising Cassidian and Indra, is working on the Captor-E, development of which was announced at the Farnborough International Air Show on 20 July 2010.
Both programs were preceded by numerous demonstrators such as AMSAR (Airborne Multirole Solid State Active Array Radar), CECAR (Captor E-Scan Risk Reduction) and the CAESAR (Captor Active Electronically Scanning Array Radar), the latter having already flown on a Typhoon in May 2007.

The AESA radar that comes out of the development will be mounted on a repositioner, unlike current AESA plates which are fixed. The repositioner will expand the field of view of the radar well past the frontal 100°, enabling surveillance to the sides and allowing the pilot to manouvre aggressively in an air battle, without breaking radar contact.

It has been clearly stated that it won’t be possible to have a fully-capable AESA radar in 2015: capabilities will be expanded and implemented over time, with the two successive releases of 2017 and 2019.

So you can see that this is a far more evolved radar and development and demonstration has been ongoing for some time in order to nail the perfect final product, much as with Meteor.

you forget the rafale has its “cheeks” allowing to increase the surface facing forward, which the Typhoon doesn’t have.. if we’re to push further that kind of speculation, it can go quite far.. however, you consider that, if the Rafale gets it, the Typhon automatically will as well.. what you (on purpose obviously) forget to take into account is that the french have started these studies and are financing them.. Typhoon partners no, and there will be quite some time before they come to agree upon a financing for such stuff.

The same cheeks that increase RCS. I still don’t see it making up for the 500 module deficit.

Anyway, by the time those studies finish, i.e. 2030, the Rafale will be defunct and most other countries will have a fleet of stealth fighters, possibly with a conformal arrays, since US have done studies too. The French just shout about their studies more, lot’s of people are studying them and you won’t hear much about them until they start actually developing one for an aircraft. By 2030 I imagine a Typhoon replacement will be well under way. This is the thing, the article says 10 years of development, that’s before you even get to integration. Do the studies even count as actual development? By the time this thing is done, no one will care because the Rafale will be about as relevant as a Tornado or Mirage is today.

blah blah blah… The photo was NOT taken during the shot. you would have seen the missiles but nvm no use talking to deaf.

No missile was fired. It was a theoretical lock obtained and a theoretical missile shot. There is zero proof the shot would have worked even on a target drone flying straight and constant speed. Your stated ‘capabilities’ always come up short when probed. As such the range isn’t even relevant because nothing actually happened. That’s right, you’ve presented a nothing and called it a capability.:highly_amused:

well the photo probably taken before the shot in lock on phase, unless you can prove otherwise

This is the problem, there was no shot. If a live shot actually happened >20nm, the target wouldn’t be there at 7.8nm. But since no real shot actually took place, he can claim 1 million nm. And in a tail-chase scenario an enemy could easily pick him and his hot tailpipes out with IRST, an IR targeting pod, or even an IIR missile seeker from quite some range without any emissions. So this is a theoretical execution of an improbable scenario. Basically what happens in real life is an Su-27 picks his aircraft out on IRST, closes and kills him with an R-27ET from well over 7.8nm away, no emission occurs and Spectra is dead weight.

the fact is that unless you’re fired upon with an AIM-54 at max range, your time is counted in seconds.

There is significant time in BVR combat even with shorter range BVRAAMs. Yes, it’s measured in seconds, but 30s or more is a long time.