Forum: F-35 Armament, Stores and Tactics

A great deal of fun can be had by comparing America's 5th gen fighters, equipped with current day 4th gen missiles against Russian/Chinese 5th gen fighters and the missiles they may have in a decade or two.

By my calculations the F-35 can just get into AMRAAM range of the T-50 head on before getting detected, while the F-22 can make Sidewinder, if not gun, range. (Aspect is everything here, due to Russian IR systems.)

If net enabled warfare really works out then some sort of air breathing missile would seem to be called for (for supporting units to launch from great ranges), and if it used a supercruise vectored jet turbine on a stealthy airframe with an afterburner for the terminal attack it could be launched without giving away the location of the launching aircraft.

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When you say current missiles, do you mean C7 or D?

Why limit US jets to (what would be) 20 year old missiles?

There is also US jamming (cooperative and multi-aspect), not only of the enemy fighter, but of the inbound missile itself.

The true comparison, if it ever happens, will be the NGM vs whatever anyways.

SpudmanWP wrote:

Why limit US jets to (what would be) 20 year old missiles?

That's how you play this game. To do otherwise would be to conclude that the United States has the advantage of quite a long march on the Russians and Chinese and that any ally offered F-35s should feel quite comfortable with the choice.

I would still give the benefit to the F-35s with Aim-120D+ and Cooperative EW.

hcobb wrote:

... By my calculations the F-35 can just get into AMRAAM range of the T-50 head on before getting detected, while the F-22 can make Sidewinder, if not gun, range. (Aspect is everything here, due to Russian IR systems.) ...

Where did you pull those "calculations" from, and should one wear gloves and wipe them down with Charmin before anyone touches them? Rolling Eyes

You can't possibly know the actual heat signature of an operational F-22 or F-35 from any aspect (and frontal least of all), nor the exact sensitivity of Russian IRST sensors. Just like we never see the F-22 in public without some sort of radar reflector (Luneberg lens or external fuel tanks) I seriously doubt they appear with their full IR suppression systems turned on either. Plug meaninglessly incorrect numbers even into correct math and you still get a meaningless result.

Your conclusions don't make sense, either. A two-engined fighter with skin heating from its Mach 1.5+ supercruise speed is harder to detect in the IR than a subsonic cruise (as far as has been admitted) fighter with a single, higher-bypass engine and a much longer exhaust tunnel? Both have the engine(s) between the tails, which has been used to disrupt IR detection at least as far back as the A-10. The F-22 might have a more powerful skin cooling system, though you can't possibly know if that's true or not and it could very well be the opposite. About the only clear advantage to the F-22 is that it will approach at a higher speed and therefore give the T-50 less time for an inefficient IRST volume search to just happen to find it in the first place. There's a big difference between snapping an IR photograph of a B-2 in a known location less than a mile away with who knows what shutter speed, and trying use IR to find an aircraft whose location you don't even know. Long exposures, high zoom, and slow sweeps to image a faintly emitting target aren't compatible with scanning the entire sky efficiently. Rapidly sweeping the entire sky with an IR camera over and over to find something you don't even know is there is incompatible with finding stealthy targets. Aspect is hardly everything, though one thing it does say is that the frontal aspect puts a relatively cooler airplane between the IRST and any view into that airplane's exhaust, the primary source of IR and possibly the only source of IR on either the F-22 or F-35 that's visible to the little IRST on a T-50 beyond eyeball range (by my "calculations"). Even running away though, the F-22 has to have around twice the heat signature of the F-35. Only from the top or bottom, maybe, are the flat exhausts of the F-22 likely to have less heat signature than the F-35, though that matters more to SAMs than a T-50. A T-50 significantly above or below the opposing radar exposes its cylindrical engine fairings and will be detected by AESA long before detection by IRST volume search becomes a realistic threat to an F-22 or F-35. The T-50's IRST might give it a way to keep track of and maybe even target an F-22 or F-35, if the T-50 survives the merge and manages to get on the tail of the NATO aircraft by visual means, but by my "calculations" the T-50's IRST has only slightly more hope of actually finding a stealth fighter beyond an AMRAAM's NEZ than the T-50's radar does.

Actually we do know quite a bit about the F-22 IR cloaking systems.

http://www.northropgrumman.com/analysis ... tealth.pdf

Hey hcobb, thank you for posting that paper. I'm not sure that it made your point, but it was very interesting reading.

Happy New Year!

Chad

That paper talks about the active cooling and stealth paint the F-22 needs to supercruise sneak.

I've got the power of stealth, in my paint.

The part of that paper talking about active skin cooling was sourced from Bill Sweetman in his How LO Can You Go article. Of course stealth is irrelevant when you tr-3b's in operation.

http://www.sldinfo.com/re-crafting-the- ... necessity/

A new generation of weapons is needed to capitalize on the sensor and stealth advantages of 5thGen aircraft like the F-22 and F-35.

The article emphasizes the advantage of speed provided and how hypersonic tech can benefit a new generation of missiles to deal with time-critical targets while affording defensive system less time to rract to the threat.

I'd like to add to river_otter's informative post that the use of an EA-16G Growler or it's predecessor the EA-6B Prowler (or any jamming platform for that matter) will reduce whatever chances a Sukhoi T-50 will have considerably.
Neither the F-35 or the F-22 operate alone. And when (if) the Sukhoi T-50 finishes development and comes into service the F-35 might well be using a more advanced AMRAAM or a future missile such as JDRADM see http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/raytheon-gets-darpa-boost-for-amraam-harm-replacement-349306/ and http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2007/q2/070531a_nr.html
And like river_otter I would really love to see your "calculations" on how an F-35 "can just get into AMRAAM range of the T-50... before being detected..." That sounds suspiciously like the beginnings of an ausairpower.net post to me.... Crazy Pilot

Sorry if I'm being unnecessarily harsh, but let's wait until at least one of these aircraft is in service before we start making claims okay? Shrug

Aussie Air sez that the next gen Radar on the PAK-FA sees 1 m^2 at 200 n miles.

So take the Global Security number of 0.0015m^2 and apply the radar formula that the range varies as the fourth root of the RCS and we get 39 n miles. Which is out of reach for the Sidewinder, but doable for recent AMRAAMs.

And one other thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track-before-detect

Raise your hand if you think the Russians or Chinese will do TBD better than the Americans.

TBD requires larger amounts of computing power & memory than traditional ESM. So on that basis I would not be raising my hand for the Russians or Chinese.

Very interesting. And why exactly would you not expect such sufficient 'computing power' capabilities to exist in the next 5-8 yrs or so? Last time I checked, the world's most powerful computer was not American.

In the area of avionics, the Russian and Chinese designs has traditionally lagged behind their western counterparts.

Forum: F-35 Armament, Stores and Tactics

Let's compare USA 4th gen missiles vs. 5th gen jets