Forum: F-35 Lightning II

Everything is defeatable. Stealth (EM/IR) are defeatable. Since day one of wood and fabric airplanes, tactics have been hit and run. There is no such thing as an invisble plane. Wonder Woman's jet isn't real. Anything sighted can be shot to put it simply. The future is faster, higher, further (yeah the doctrine from the 50's). The future is not slow and low and 10 coats of RAM and some ceramics/metals coatings on nozzels.

Maybe we should relish in the fact that DoD has opted to throw 350 billion dollars out the window on a subsonic 2 bomb carrying airplane with some LO and better sensor integration than the F-117 (a subsonic 2 bomb carrying airplane from 30 years ago).

Here is the problem with your argument... Faster, higher, further is ALREADY defeated. Stealth isn't defeated yet.

Here is the problem with your argument... Faster, higher, further is ALREADY defeated. Stealth isn't defeated yet.

Who says stealth aint defeated? Pop Mech? An digested and heavily mod'd briefing? If you want to be stealthy and effective as a bomber then go you go low and fast with a low RCS/IR platform. Keep fighters out of the scene with your own cap drivers and thats as good as it gets.

If you know what to look for, its there to see expecially if your bumbing around downtown Tehren at 2,000 feet and mach 1+/-.

Look, EVERYTHING, is defeatable. So why get out of bed in the morning? For ever thesis there is an antithesis. So why bother?

You can't defeat every wavelength bouncing off your airframe (actually you can but its expensive and maye not proper for this forum and it doesnt hinder supercruise) and computers are getting quite nifty at picking out targets from random noise. I haven't looked into the cell phone styles of picking up low rcs airplanes, but there's another way of developing an air defence grid with burried fiber optic cables for jam proof information distribution. Everything is defeatible... In nature everything eats everything else (for the most part) and warfare aint no different.

Everything you can think of is defeatable. We've seen stealth in what? Irag? Ooooh.... look out. Better spend 300 billion dollars because of success in Iraq or against the Migs that our guys get to fly in Europe. To my knowledge there are more ways to defeat stealth than I can remember this early. Have they been fielded? Hm? Now, then there is going to be so much ecm soup in the air rcs considerations for any airplane are going to be greatly reduced.... When everyones equally good at not seeing the other guy electronically what do you want? An underpperformer or an over achiever? The answer should be obvious.

What aircraft is that?

(1) Supercruise is WAY LESS important than stealth. So choosing marginal supercruise (plus perhaps a small dose of extra agility) over stealth is basically building a Rafale -- something that is not survivable in the coming decades. Choosing Mach 2 supercruise over stealth is building the Concorde. Lets put it this way, speed has been a defeated mode of defense. The SR-71 is no longer survivable at Mach 3.2+ cruise which is why it is retired. Basically, if the SAM batteries can find you they can shoot you down regardless of how high you fly or how fast you can go.

Not so sure this is accurate. I don't think there are too many SAM's out there that can exceed 60k ft.

So why US purchased the raptor and not the black widow. If stealth was the issue then Northrop should have won.

So someone's trying to tell me that the real reason the SR-71 was retired was because SAM's can now bring it down??!!

Unless I'm not recalling the details from Ben Rich's Skunkworks correctly, the SR-71 was never actually used to overfly or "penetrate" Soviet air defense systems. SR-71s would either take photos and/or other sensor recordings/scans from its onboard recon sesnors while flying along a portion of the Soviet Union's coastline. In fact, one of its major roles was to collect sensor data on the various radars that would lock on to it as it approached the coastline. Again, if I remember right, the SR-71 would begin a turn ahead of time so that it never actually passed over Russian territory. Not only that, but when its mission was to collect data on SAM and even airborne interceptor radar, it WANTED to get as much of a hostile reaction as possible. It needed the actual missiles to be fired at times so it could record as much as possible about the launch events using its electronic survielance gear. This would include all the various frequencies used by the radars themselves as well as missile uplink guidance frequencies. Depending on the missile system, you can have various frequency modes for tracking a target and guiding a missile on it. In order for ECM gear to be programmed to defeat new systems, aircraft like the SR-71 had to run the gauntlet at times so slower aircraft could simply jam these radars in the future to keep from getting shot down during an engagement, bombing run, etc.

The SR-71 could probably still outrun most if not all SAM missile systems today as long as it didn't approach them foolishly, but in a planned, methodical, probing fahsion. I think you may be giving missiles in and of themselves a little too much credit. There are some deadly systems out there, but they're only deadly if fired at targets within a no-escape zone. Don't be fooled by the max range and altitude quoted for SAMs or AAMs. For these same systems to shoot down an SR-71, the SR-71 would have to make itself a target (i.e. no change in course, altitude, speed, etc.). Trust me, these SAMs are going to have serious solution issues on a Mach 3.3 aircraft at angels 80. Assming the SAM system's radar can lock it up early enough to predict where the target will be in X seceonds (assuming it maintains course, altitude, and speed) such that the actual missile can physically fly a lead pursuit course to that point in or under X seconds, it's still not going to be a very high probability shot. Now if the SR-71 gradually changes speed, heading, and altitude after the missile is fired, it will probably end up outside the missile's kinematic range. When you're flying so high and fast, even gradual course, altitude, and airspeed changes turn into huge initial prediction errors for the missile guidance system. The radar can see the changes in the target flight profile and send course updates to the missile, but if the missile was fired under a low percentage situation to begin with, no amount of course changes in the world will help it find the SR-71.

Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to missiles is that their average speed over the course of their flight when intercepting a very fast, high-flying target is NOT Mach 6-8. In fact, it's probably closer to the speed the SR-71 can maintain for significant periods of time. The fact of the matter is that these missiles still need to be going quite fast as they're nearing the SR-71's position or they won't be able to pull enough G forces to keep up lead pursuit. Once a missile no longer has significant lead pursuit on an SR-71, the game is all but over. And that's what happened time after time after time. Missiles were shot with maybe a PK of 5-10%, the SR-71 reacted by flying a little higher, faster, and onto a slightly different heading, and the same missiles fired with a 5-10% PK quickly attain 0% PK under the new flight condtitions of the SR-71. Same deal with interceptors. They couldn't scramble fast enough to get into a position where their missiles could be fired under optimum conditions. Ohhh... and the SR-71 probably had the ability jam many of the radars that locked onto it after encountering them (it probably collected the necessary data in a previous mission), so only systems not yet encountered (or fully profiled) would pose any significant threat.

The exact reasons for the selection were never made public.

Plausible explanations vary. There is the saying that YF-22 team presented a program with less developmental risks and presented more robust stealth techniques which were more maintainable in the field (no taping and no tiling for instance; both of which were used on the YF-23 but not on the YF-22) Because the B-2 was a maintenance hog, the USAF may have wanted to avoid that. There is also the saying that the YF-22 team was selected because the USAF has a higher confidence level with regard to industrial performance, particularly in cost control and timeliness. After the A-12 and other expensive still borns the USAF may have went with what they perceived as the safer industrial bet.

What we know is that BOTH platforms exceeded the maneuverability requirements of the USAF. The YF-23 was actually faster (by ~ Mach 0.05) during the fly offs. According to people who worked on the YF-23 program, the YF-23 also supposedly had better RCS numbers. There is no mention whatsoever on the part of the USAF, or any of the participating companies, that the YF-22 was selected because it was more agile -- this is completely a popular conjecture. Lastly, we also know that the YF-23 team was fully debriefed on the selection reasons, they were satisfied and decided not to file a protest.