Sukhoi and her stunts

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

You are assuming a fighter or bomber without reduced IR signature. Your effective range of IRST against this thing is most like about the same time a slammer lights up your aircraft as it just turns on its radar on its final terminal guidance envelope.

I have added in the attempts at thermal suppression. You can suppress the engine some, but your frictional heating, work heating of the atmosphere as you plow into it at Mach 1.5, all that cannot be readily suppressed and IR can see quite far against those things even at subsonic.

Also, remember that the F-22 engine is actually runs hotter than most in an attempt to get better performance. To make it worse, normally a turbofan has some unheated air that's made into useful thrust in the fan portion and incidentally helps cool the plume coming out the rear somewhat. Because the F-22 is a low-bypass turbofan, that airflow is reduced, so you have more to compensate with your heat suppression system.

IRST is pointless and almost useless at 40 km too on something that travels about a mile every 2.5 seconds in Supercruise.

The supercruise speed is only about Mach 1.5. Even at sea level a Mach is only 330m/s, so we are talking 475m/s, more like 400-450 at the altitude the plane will actually be able to supercruise. That's more like a mile every 3.5 to 4 seconds.

If you have it on IRST, and it has you as its next victim, and you are probably traveling directly at it to be in the IRST cone

Not quite. The scan arc is 60 degrees out of a total possible of 120. Plus if you have a wingman, you can tell him to cover -60 to 0 and you can cover 0-60, so you can have 120 degree coverage, as good as a radar, though shorter range.

and probably at about Mach .9 in your SU, that would give you about 30 to 40 seconds warning before this thing flies right by you, and probably only about 15 seconds warning before a slammer lights you up by turning on its internal radar for its final terminal guidance.

I see you also bought into the American story that no one will actually hear the APG-77 because of its "LPI", despite the fact the darn radar is supposed to emit 20kW at peak.

LPI is only a game. In very crude terms, it turns a narrowband signal into a broadband one. The enemy's RWR is a broadband receiver. The problem is at worst one of processing, since radar vs RWR tends to have the radar at a disadvantage.

More cynically, I won't be shocked if I hear that the F-22s were detected by old SPO-15 systems, ambushed, and destroyed in thier first mission. A modern American system attempts to classify a radar by type (F-15, F-16, SA-8...etc), and the SPO-15 lacks this sophistication (there are 6 little lamps on the bottom for six broad types of radar, like "fighter" and so on), but that may also mean it'd look at the whole spectrum for a radar source instead of splitting it up. Once they do that, they'd catch on that there is really a darn bright, non-coherent, broadband source out there.

Hope you're not sleeping in that 15 seconds because you have little time to think of a game plan to live for an extra second or two, or die instantly.

Actually, the F-22 is in real trouble now. He's basking in his "stealth", but I got him. I can snapshot a mix of active radar homing and IR missiles back at him and send his position to my entire air defense network via datalink.

In air combat, 15 seconds is eternity. Not to mention if you think that's not enough time for me to do much, as I counterfire there won't be much time for the American to do much as well.

I'm probably dead (unless I evade your AMRAAM, which is still possible), but when one considers the massive cost of your F-22, it is probably worth it.

PS. The five F-15's couldn't even begin to fight only one of these things and the F-15 pilot that lived longer than 2 minutes, didn't live longer than that by much.

I'd skip "What was the setup?" and get right to it.

The problem is that they fought like Americans and "died" as predicted by American predictions formulated on American theories of air combat.

F-22 advances in high-alt BVR fight. Many American F-15s, stunningly, have no datalink, a fact that's changing only recently, and the one they do get may or may not support air-to-air work. Using American RWR, they can't hear the enemy's radar emissions. Even if they could hear it, their RWR is not designed to make any fire control solutions and they have no weapons to exploit this. If they have no datalink, even if one guy gets lucky with his radar, he can't really help anyone set up shots. F-22 fires AMRAAM, very high hit rate is assumed. All F-15s killed by second wave at most. How could it not have ended within three minutes?

Suppose we go to a low-altitude BVR fight. Sometimes that happens too. Lower alt = less range. So, effective missile range will fall <40km. If they have a IRST, they might (I'd grant you it is only a might) actually detect before missiles are launched. But no, they lack this function. Radar and visual only. F-22 gets into missile range. Fires. Kills.

Even if they assumed a WVR engagement, here's where I'd have to disagree with Riccioni - techniques for optimizing the use of the wing for creating lift have improved greatly over 30 years, so the same wing loading does not mean no edge to the F-22. So it is not too shocking it won. Especially if the F-22 was armed with a JHMCS. Even a MiG-29 with AA-11 Archers and a helmet sight can kill F-15s armed with AIM-9Ms easily, at least according to an American simulation.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world does not necessarily follow the same rules. This is something Riccioni noticed, but is not often mentioned.

We already mentioned IR. Now, unlike American RWRs, modern Russian RWRs like the SPO-32 Pastel can process an attack. And we've also mentioned how LPI is really a game. So it has either already been defeated (perhaps even by accident as the result of a different design philosophy) or will be defeated. So, if the APG-77 gets detected, a valid attack can be made on the American fighter using a mix of IR and Passive Radar Homers, perhaps with some actives as a 2nd echelon. The worst part for the American is that any fighter hunting for a F-22 knows it might get ambushed in turn. The American thinks that he's definitely the ambusher.

The enemy has IR for medium-low alts so he is not a total sitting duck. He also has datalink - so for example two can act as sacrifices but link data back for shots from a 2nd echelon flying 30km back. For close he also has thrust vectoring and he has not been forced to make any aerodynamic compromises for stealth.

It doesn't mean, of course, that Su-37 is a match for a F-22. But things are not necessary as lopsided, and to that one factors in the massive cost and rarity of the F-22.