Forum: F-35 Variants and Missions

count_to_10 wrote:

Well, if you really want to look down the road, they are looking to instal an offensive laser in the F-35 where the B's lift fan sits.

How many billions of dollars for that "promise" ultimately?

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castlebravo wrote:

firstimpulse wrote:

It always seems that as soon as some engineer declare's his shiny new plane/weapon has made the dogfight obsolete, some loophole comes along... Wink

To think that the turning dogfight will always be the dominate form of air to air combat is to me just as bad an assumption as when people thought early BVR missiles would make the dogfight a thing of the past.

@Castlebravo, I think the assemement that missiles will make the turning dog fight obselete is a correct one, it was just premature because the technology had not been perfected yet. Now it's pretty close.

velocityvector wrote:

count_to_10 wrote:

Well, if you really want to look down the road, they are looking to instal an offensive laser in the F-35 where the B's lift fan sits.

How many billions of dollars for that "promise" ultimately?

Absolutely no clue. It isn't exactly part of the standard package.

alloycowboy - the DIRCM movement can lead to a very simple jammer against the EODAS. Essentially, just paint the aircraft with an IR laser to blind any sensors.

Its too soon to say that any one technology will work, especially as we haven't seen the same level of sophisticated IR jammers and countermeasures that we have seen in the Radar realm. At least publicly / that I know of.

Personally, I think that the EODAS will provide an excellent counter to most air threats, but the F-35 will be at a disadvantage to a high powered fighters, especially in the 2020 - 2030+ range when everyone has advanced IR countermeasures.

Finally, dogfights may come back into vogue, at least medium range dogfights, when neither side can achieve a decisive BVR engagement due to stealth aircraft on both sides.

alloycowboy wrote:

I think the assemement that missiles will make the turning dog fight obselete is a correct one, it was just premature because the technology had not been perfected yet. Now it's pretty close.

If the time truly comes (and the fact that it's come is accepted by air forces), then future air combat will be between things that are now fighters' targets: bombers & transports (just with combat sensors & missiles aboard).

alloycowboy wrote:

castlebravo wrote:

firstimpulse wrote:

It always seems that as soon as some engineer declare's his shiny new plane/weapon has made the dogfight obsolete, some loophole comes along... Wink

To think that the turning dogfight will always be the dominate form of air to air combat is to me just as bad an assumption as when people thought early BVR missiles would make the dogfight a thing of the past.

@Castlebravo, I think the assemement that missiles will make the turning dog fight obselete is a correct one, it was just premature because the technology had not been perfected yet. Now it's pretty close.

That's a pretty brave call. I'm sure someone said something similar when they started updating missiles to not be as easily distracted by flares.

Thing is, they're never really perfect. They're just either ahead or behind the current batch of counter-measures by a certain amount. Newer counter measures or weapons upgrades will appear which shift the balance again.

Depending on how far ahead or behind your weapons/countermeasures are compared to the other guy you could easily find yourself back in a turning fight trying to bring a gun to bear. Hell, it may be your only option.

alloycowboy wrote:

@Castlebravo, I think the assemement that missiles will make the turning dog fight obselete is a correct one, it was just premature because the technology had not been perfected yet. Now it's pretty close.

Ahem, Taiwan and their Sparrows might have something to say about that.

jeffb wrote:

alloycowboy wrote:

castlebravo wrote:

firstimpulse wrote:

It always seems that as soon as some engineer declare's his shiny new plane/weapon has made the dogfight obsolete, some loophole comes along... Wink

To think that the turning dogfight will always be the dominate form of air to air combat is to me just as bad an assumption as when people thought early BVR missiles would make the dogfight a thing of the past.

@Castlebravo, I think the assemement that missiles will make the turning dog fight obselete is a correct one, it was just premature because the technology had not been perfected yet. Now it's pretty close.

That's a pretty brave call. I'm sure someone said something similar when they started updating missiles to not be as easily distracted by flares.

Thing is, they're never really perfect. They're just either ahead or behind the current batch of counter-measures by a certain amount. Newer counter measures or weapons upgrades will appear which shift the balance again.

Depending on how far ahead or behind your weapons/countermeasures are compared to the other guy you could easily find yourself back in a turning fight trying to bring a gun to bear. Hell, it may be your only option.

@JeffB ...... Here is an interesting article called "Expanding The No Escape Zone". Here is a quoe from the aritlce.

http://www.airforce-technology.com/features/featureair-to-air-missiles-expanding-the-no-escape-zone/

Quote:

Fifth-generation AAMs are every bit as high-tech as their fifth-generation launch platforms. Like the fourth-generation before them, this latest crop of missiles has largely arisen out of a range of developments and improvements in seeker technology.

Resistance to infrared countermeasures, increased off-bore sighting capabilities and high in-flight agility features from the previous generation remain, but they are now further enhanced by electro-optical imaging technologies and advanced digital processing.

The combination allows fifth-generation missiles to discern more detailed images, improving their ability to distinguish between enemy aircraft and any flare countermeasures they may deploy, enabling vulnerable points to be specifically targeted, rather than just locking on to the brightest heat source, as well as allowing much smaller targets, such as drones, to be engaged.

alloycowboy wrote:

@JeffB ...... Here is an interesting article called "Expanding The No Escape Zone". Here is a quoe from the aritlce.

http://www.airforce-technology.com/features/featureair-to-air-missiles-expanding-the-no-escape-zone/

Quote:

Fifth-generation AAMs are every bit as high-tech as their fifth-generation launch platforms. Like the fourth-generation before them, this latest crop of missiles has largely arisen out of a range of developments and improvements in seeker technology.

Resistance to infrared countermeasures, increased off-bore sighting capabilities and high in-flight agility features from the previous generation remain, but they are now further enhanced by electro-optical imaging technologies and advanced digital processing.

The combination allows fifth-generation missiles to discern more detailed images, improving their ability to distinguish between enemy aircraft and any flare countermeasures they may deploy, enabling vulnerable points to be specifically targeted, rather than just locking on to the brightest heat source, as well as allowing much smaller targets, such as drones, to be engaged.

I guess he was writing the article from the AAM point of view as he doesn't seem to spend much time talking about the newer counter-measures like DIRCM or the Israeli MUSIC active laser counter measures system.

He also doesn't mention the rise of multi-mode active/data-linked/IR seekers which are (I think) the new big deal in this technology.

arkadyrenko wrote:

alloycowboy - the DIRCM movement can lead to a very simple jammer against the EODAS. Essentially, just paint the aircraft with an IR laser to blind any sensors.

Not feasible unless they're going to develop free-electron lasers small enough to fit on fighters and reliable enough to use. All other lasers require a metastable quantum orbital state where an excited electron can sit without automatically falling into a lower orbital. Then the electrons can be excited just slightly more, and 50% of them will fall to a lower orbital, emitting a photon. That sets up a resonance where many electrons are tripped into falling by the passage of the photons of those that already tripped, thus ensuring they trip in time with the earlier photons.

The problem is there are a very limited number of substances with that property. Iodine that has freshly interacted with oxygen, certain quantum states in doped silicon that has been etched to provide the right spacing between adjacent electrical paths, certain gasses excited to plasma, certain solids serving as capacitative dielectrics. All of those emit photons of known wavelength. Bandgap filters to block all of those wavelengths exist and aren't even expensive. They're not really feasible on an expendable missile, but an $80M plane, no question. Blocking all possible IR lasers, you'd lose a small amount of sensitivity by losing small portions of the IR spectrum, but not enough to matter against incandescent targets like combustion-driven motors and items warmed by the sun. Free-electron lasers run electrons through a linear particle accelerator and force them to emit photons by wiggling them between sets of timed magnets. They're infinitely tunable and can emit laser light in any color. They're also the size of buildings, and sensitive to environmental conditions. There are a limited number of wavelength tuning options for single wavelength lasers, like sonic crystals and hollow photonic crystal fibers, but they're limited in the power they can handle. You're not going to blind military IR sensors with them.

And then there's the simple fact that you can't blind a stealth fighter you don't even see, using a laser. Lasers can blind things at a distance because they're coherent. In other words, the beam doesn't spread (except by the diffraction caused by the interaction of the beam with the edges of its aperture, but that's tiny). You have to detect and track the F-35 before you can point a laser at it, and you have to be accurate enough with that track to keep your laser spot on the sensors of a maneuvering aircraft. If you have the ability to track it that accurately, why not just put a missile into it in the first place? (And what do you do when the F-35, which can surely track you better than you can track it, puts its own jamming laser back onto your tracker?) Furthermore, unlike a Sidewinder, EODAS has multiple sensors distributed over a large airplane. A laser has a tight focus. You can't illuminate all of EODAS with one laser, like you can illuminate the tip of a Sidewinder. Even moreso, you can't illuminate all F-35s near you with a laser, like you can with a single Sidewinder. F-35s are networked. If you do manage to jam one F-35 with a laser, the networking ensures even that one still knows exactly where you are. And you're emitting a huge IR laser beacon its friends can put their own missiles onto, as well.

By the time you have enough building-sized lasers and unjammably redundant tracking sensors on your plane that you can jam a whole wing of F-35s, your countermeasure to EODAS isn't exactly a simple countermeasure to EODAS any more. Nor do you have something that the F-35 will have any difficulty dogfighting. You probably don't have something a B-2 would have difficulty dogfighting.

river_otter wrote:

arkadyrenko wrote:

alloycowboy - the DIRCM movement can lead to a very simple jammer against the EODAS. Essentially, just paint the aircraft with an IR laser to blind any sensors.

Not feasible...(for numerous reasons)

I think I can dispute this one Otter. I can buy a five or ten watt laser off the internet right now that will blind commercial pilots just fine from, what, ten miles away? Add a dual spinning mirror array with gyroscopic stabilization to that and a computer to control it and I could blind twenty or thirty commercial pilots a second (or at the least severely distract them). Beam spread can be controlled on the fly as well so that individual sensors could be covered at the rate of at least five or ten a second which would be a pretty good start against the two closest guys. You'd need your own DAS system to see, range,identify and localize specific target points but that honestly doesn't sound like too big an ask to me.

Edit: Sorry, I don't think the ones on the internet are 5 or 10 watts. They're probably 1/100 of that output nevertheless they'll blind pilots just dandy anyway.

I don't see that as an easy task at all. Even assuming that such a laser would really mess with senors you are firing at you have to have precise enough controls to aim the thing at a very small, specific part of an aircraft that is moving at high speed while you are also moving at high speed. It has to compensate for the buffeting of operating at that speed. Before that it has to identify the sensor system it is aiming at the other aircraft moving at high speed to aim at it. Even if you can do all those things (and none of them are easy) you still have to deal with the problem of the F-35's networked nature.

This is very different from aiming a laser at an incoming airliner on a predictable inbound path from a fixed point on the ground. This of course ignores his larger point which is that you could pretty easily filter out the types of lasers one could take airborne.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you could whack one together over the weekend with a couple of bits of wood and your old cd player but I still think it's doable. In fact it doesn't have to be stabilized as such if the rotating mirror system covers the whole section of the sky above the unit then mounting a high speed camera would allow you to analyse and fire on aircraft (and targets on said aircraft) any time they come into alignment through the mirrors. They are already developing systems like this to defeat IR guided missiles, is it that much of stretch to see them targeting the launching aircraft as well?

By the way, if your DAS system works in the infra red region of the spectrum, it's going to be tricky filtering out an infra red laser.

You could put a rotating or strip filter in the EODAS and use it to filter out the laser's frequency. Remember that the IR spectrum is large and varied while a laser is only a single frequency.

castlebravo wrote:

firstimpulse wrote:

It always seems that as soon as some engineer declare's his shiny new plane/weapon has made the dogfight obsolete, some loophole comes along... Wink

To think that the turning dogfight will always be the dominate form of air to air combat is to me just as bad an assumption as when people thought early BVR missiles would make the dogfight a thing of the past.

You know the definition of "loophole?" It's something which doesn't happen very often. Just like WVR turning fights with 4/4.5 generation aircraft. Not something which happens very often. But still happens.
This might change when 5th gens fight each other though- the kills that aren't practically instant (when one guy sees and targets another without being seen) will almost certainly be won in dogfights. Although, just like in the century of air combat before the 5th generation, most kills will probably still be made when the victim never even saw his doom streaking up behind him.

Forum: F-35 Variants and Missions

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