Quote:
Originally Posted by Wildcat
I don't think ultra-maneuverability is that important a feature.
A reasonable amount of maneuverability is enough.
We're talking about a platform with an extremely sophisticated radar system which will also be backed up with link and contact data from AWACS radar aircraft, among other sensor info.
When you're taking your shots 20-30 miles away with an active radar missile, you can turn away to get some distance before the other guy's even in range to fire his missiles, if he even gets a lock on you in the first place (Stealth).
And ignoring all that, it only takes a split second of yanking the nose to get an IR missile shot off, and after that the bad guy's usually going to have to break off to evade, or he'll be hit.
Look at the examples of dogfighting in a sim/game like Flaming Cliffs (Lomac). Fights with missiles rarely devolve into scissors battles, it's usually finished in 1 or 2 reversals or even at the break, if it even gets that close. Probably more than 70% of all the fights are over at 20miles distance with a long range radar guided missile.
|
I get the impression you don't fly against other humans often (or maybe they are just not very good). In my experience guns only knife fights tend to happen quite a bit if the pilots involved are highly skilled/experienced. The reason is if you know what your doing it really isn't all that hard to evade modern missiles, particularly BVR shots, so long as you are paying attention. It does though take a lot of maneuverability and a lot of available energy to pull it off, however. Also you absolutely would get a maddog sent right back at you if I have you on radar or not, as I would know where you are because to get a BVR shot off you would either have to activate your own radar to find and lock on to me, or have a friend your data linked with who has their radar on as AWACs data is not accurate enough to shoot with. Either way I get a radar spike and would be ready. If your close enough to use IR missiles, your close enough to for me to probably get a radar lock, stealthy or no, if not you can be IR boresighted or via a helmet display, which means you also get an IR missile to play with too. Even stealthy modern fighter planes still have a fairly significant IR signature. Besides going to IR means we're now in a dogfight, where energy and maneuverability mean almost everything, which by the way was the real situation with that test pilot when taking the F-35 against the F-16D. The fact that an F-16D, while still carrying its drop tanks and full missile compliment, and could still out turn and out energy a clean F-35 in a dogfight, is very very bad, considering the role it is meant to play. A fighter plane that cannot dogfight is not a fighter plane.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ikalugin
Nebo-M is a currently operated, mobile (15 minutes to set up) radar.
Getting stealth against it is not possible with existing known physical principles, due to the fact that the wavelength defeats both shaping and RAM coatings/structures. Even if such signature reduction measures were to be adopted, the growing radar power would still allow detection (at cost of murdering poor birds but still).
|
My understanding of Nebo-M is that it does not entirely defeat stealth. Shaping still would work according to the various analyses I have read for the simple reason that shaping bends radar waves around the craft rather than sending them back. But the RAM coatings maybe not so much (though for all we know this gap may already be covered by reformulating the RAM). Of course since most current stealth jets rely heavily on RAM coatings with only partially shaped designs, they may be detectable at altitude. More importantly, VHF radar has a lot of issues when trying to detect and track low flying aircraft, particularly stealth aircraft when they are flying close to the ground, even with filtering it would be very easy for a stealth plane to become part of the noise.
Besides, if the Russian radar works so well as they claim against stealthy aircraft, do you not think the US would have quickly dropped the F-35. I mean why spend all those hundreds of billions of dollars if it doesn't really work? I guarantee that Lockheed Martin Skunkworks has access to comparable VHF radar systems to the Nebo-M, and would have tested the design against it. With their setup they can pretty much simulate just about any existing radar system in the world, and very accurately examine how stealthy a design is from all aspects against all the different radar types.
Quote:
|
In my opinion stealth is/was overrated. Relying on it for survivability creates a single point of failure within the desighn, plus stealth is difficult if at all possible to imporve post production.
|
I both kind of agree and kind of don't. Stealth does not make sense for the main front line aircraft. But it can for highly specialized aircraft that could be used to blind the enemy deep inside their own territory. Some aspects can be changed and improved on post production, such as changing the skin material, switching RAM coatings (this has happened before with the F-117), and other minor tweaks. About the only thing you wouldn't change would be the airframe, though in theory even that would be possible.