lukosYou fly within your corner speed plateau during combat, not at maximum cruise. The F-16 loaded with fuel tanks is flying Cat II limits at best. (Cat I mode with limits on manuevers.) So once again it’s around 400 knots plus or minus a couple dozen for the plateau. Survival depends on best turning performance, not cruise speed.
For merge yes but BVR is different. However an altitude advantage at merge isn’t going to hurt. Before merge speed can be key to escape also.
You’ll have to explain how you arrive at that conclusion. CAT limits are for turn rate not speed???
lukosthe missile can pull 50g when it is still under power, and at low alt, due to speed,
without propulsion and at higher alt it will drop agility more rapidly than a fighter
The component of thrust in the lift direction only provides a smallish portion of the lift. If the speed is still high the missile will turn well. Because a rocket motor doesn’t suffer degraded thrust at high altitude due to the lower density (oxygen content) the missile will gain far more speed at high altitude than a fighter, hence why range increases considerable. As speed increases, lift increases by that amount squared, which balances out the affect of reduced air density on lift. And a perk of the low density is that speed doesn’t fall as fast after propulsion stops.
So actually a fighter suffers more than a missile.
lukosif you picked up the phone and asked someone a quickfire question*, you’d expect them to write you up a memo?
*questions of work scope are obviously not included.
If it regarded an important engineering aspect I’d send an e-mail and save the response, otherwise 6 months down the road people claim they didn’t say what they did say. Of course they still do that, but having saved said e-mail you can very quickly shut them up.
lukosLukos, who is this mysterious “we” that you keep citing? (As in “Make sure we get a valid source as a response” and “we need some kind of formal write-up”). You no more speak on behalf of other forum members than I do.
All I’m planning to do is to say is something like that – “When asked to clarify the frequencies at which the individual elements of an array operate, a major company actively involved in AESA development and manufacture stated that….”
There is the new potential complication that the MH17 preliminary report is to be published next Tuesday, so I rather suspect that I’m going to have to prepare and deliver at least one briefing on the subject, and probably several. So unless the journalist who made the enquiry is prepared to ‘blow’ his ID on this forum by directly posting the company response, the AESA frequency question will have to go onto back burner until MH17-related business is over.
You can view it as a Royal ‘we’ if you like.
No need to rush, learning can be a slow process.
lukosit obvious that missiles not follow the same path as aircraft but you can see from page 2 that even at mach 2.2 the turn radius is 34 km ( likely same for dive and bank )so high speed mean you will go much closer to target =enemy missiles have much more energy left to lead and track , and at very high speed like mach 2.5 it really unlikely that aircraft can make rapid changing in direction caused that likely break their wing
Where am I looking sorry?
I find it difficult to explain. Whilst it’s just a game, I recommend you buy Flaming Cliffs 3 and set up a simulation. It’s as realistic as you’ll get in a PC flight simulator and it’s played by real pilots who constantly notify the designers of small inaccuracies. You’ll see that in a head on intercept a plane with either a faster/longer range missile and/or ARH missile has plenty of time to make the enemy missile’s intercept very perpendicular by the time it gets there and drain the missile of energy. You’ll also note that missiles never really fail to make a turn as such, the just lose energy in the turn. It’s more a case that a missile falls out of the sky rather than actually missing, assuming it isn’t jammed.
Turn radius in level flight is likely greater than turn radius in a dive and you’re also adding the dive distance to the deviation in the missile’s course. In a long range intercept with R-37s, tens of km could be plenty of space to turn and the lateral and vertical deviation increases the missile’s flight distance tremendously.
lukosit still dont make up for the 10 fold increase in wing load compared to a decent fighter
It clearly does, which is why missiles can pull 50+g, as opposed to 9g (or may 10-11g if pilot is superman and restrictor is removed).
lukosThen are you still working in engineering (assuming you were at least at one point)?
Yup.
lukosside lobe doesn’t seem to affect old radar That much, I mean system like Tor-m1 ( not use either pesa or AESA) evade anti radar missiles basically by spin their radar around if their side, back lobe radiate that much then that would be useless?
btw
does radar homing missile like Alarm and agm-88 work again AESA radar?
Why ESM system can be used to geolocated ground radar but not enemy fighter? (alq-213, alr-67)
AN/ASQ-239 Barracuda are said to be able to do single-ship geolocation, is that a myth?
ALARM wouldn’t have a problem against a spinning radar, because it came down from directly above.
AGM-88E theoretically doesn’t have a problem with any ground target. If you can detect the radar and give the missile a GPS/INS co-ordinate it can track both passively and actively with MWR terminal seeker, so even if the radar shuts down, it can still be homed in on.
Fighters are fast and could be at any altitude. Ground radar is usually stationary, or at least very slow and, somewhat obviously, on the ground, which makes range determination easier.
AN/ASQ-239 is very clever. Watch this space I guess.
lukosAre you still in uni?
Nope, long time ago.
lukosI will believe @madrats numbers are in the ballpark until better documentation are provided,
half that flight were armed with A2G munition, so i believe it was below 30k ft,
and M2.7 average is reasonable when i assume both were in transonic
Given that he stated that the F-16 travels 6km in the time the missile flies 24km, that would imply a Mach 0.67 cruise, which is far too low even for cruise. Given that he was about to take a missile shot and may have been tracking the MiG for a while before getting in range, he will probably have sped up from cruise anyway.
A3-6 suggests Mach 0.84 as optimum cruise with DI = 100 and optimum cruise altitude remains over 30,000ft until you get to well over 40,000lbs even at DI = 200. Optimum cruise also remains over Mach 0.8. And looking at C1-9 it’s surprising what you need to get it up to a DI of 200. E.g. 2 x GBU-10 has a DI of 30-34. 2 x triple Mk-82 multi-store (C1-12) has a DI of 64.
https://info.publicintelligence.net/HAF-F16-Supplement.pdf
There were also a significant SAM threat, so low altitude wasn’t recommended.
lukosThis is getting a bit silly. Do you envisage that when Aviation Week finishes an interview with a company official, their reporter dismisses what she has been told because it was not in verifiable printed form so was just “say so”, or perhaps because the interviewee “may have managed a brewery prior to that position”?
If the company in question does reply, their response will not be addressed to “Mr Lukos, Keys Forum, UK”. It will be addressed to the magazine that the enquirer works for. They made the enquiry, and the information will be for them to use.
If the company cites a published document available on the web, that would be great. But I suspect that the response is more likely to be “I have passed your question to our AESA engineering team, and they say that….”. Given sight of that reply, all I can do is to post a summary of the response here.
Such is the nature of most enquiries I deal with. If I have a client who wants to know whether the Force Arianne de Haute Volta operates the HQ-9 SAM, they are unlikely to envisage paying my expenses for a trip there. They will expect that I will rely on a local source that I considered reliable, and would in turn report to them what that source reports having been told.
We will have to leave this topic until a reply finally emerges. This could take more than a few working days.
In the long run, it does not matter which of us is right, or if the truth turns out to be more complex than we both envisage. What matters is that another bit of useful knowledge of how AESA works will enter the public domain, and any misconception is cleared up.
Well we need some kind of formal write-up. We can’t have a case of, “yes, Bill says so,” otherwise it ends up like one of halloweene’s pilot stories.
lukosI understand that higher speed mean missiles have to aim farther ahead, but to be fair it also mean very big turn radius for aircraft thus easier to predict
People get hung up on turn radius too much. An intercepting missile does not follow the same path as your aircraft or anything like it. As a Mach 2.5 aircraft dives and banks, it picks up a huge lateral and downwards speed component forcing the missile to turn sharply and rapidly increases the distance the missile has to travel. It’s also difficult for the missile to lead and track as it’s speed slows down. If the aircraft then adjusts the turn and dives steeper, the missile needs to make a fairly big correction again. At the extremes, the aircraft may end up going faster than the missile, after which an intercept is unlikely.
If the aircraft speed is low relative to that of the missile (e.g. subsonic), the lead and adjustment is minimal by comparison.
lukosmissiles fin are pretty tiny compared to fighter wing ( proportion to their body size ) , missiles also have alot higher wing loading
But they go a lot faster and lift is proportional to V^2.
lukosIt would only be easy if the receiver that is listening of the signal was in the main beam of the radar. The relatively large sidelobes present in the polar diagram of a conventional reflector type antenna radiate enough energy to make detection (and ARM attack) relatively easy, but this is not the case with an electronically scanned array. PESA and AESA sidelobes are minimal.
Our exchanges regarding whether an AESA radar is a single-frequency-per-pulse device has apparently stirred one of the defence journalists who lurk on this forum to pose the question to an established AESA manufacturer. So as in the case with the non-existent second rocket motor in the Alarm missile, we should eventually get a definitive answer.
Make sure we get a valid source as a response, rather than just a say so.
If you get a pulse all at one frequency, then there is a huge jump in power at that frequency, however briefly. Hardly LPI.
lukosMissile launch at 30km, impact when target is 18km away. So the gap closed 12km between the shot and impact. If each were closing at the same speed they each went 6km before impact and the missile went 24km in the same span of time. The fighters were subsonic. The missile was Mach 4 and traveled four times the distance.
Pretty cut & dry. The fighters were not flying supersonic.
That’s actually just you making stuff up. Hardly cut and dry. 24km in 30s is only Mach 2.7 average. Flying at typical intercept altitude (30,000-40,000ft) that is slow for a missile. The article itself says it can travel 33km in that time. Add your 6km, that’s ~39km. Is the time it disappeared from radar necessarily the exact moment it was hit?
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