Armored Fiber Optic Cables: These cables, which include metal armoring for enhanced protection against physical damage, can weigh significantly more, often exceeding 200 kg per kilometer (132 pounds per 1000 feet). How much does fiber optic cable weight?).
(quick search, nothing relevant to rafale, just wanted to get an idea of what could be the mass)
that will be massive change, depending on the lenght of cable there is on-board Rafale.
I doubt later variants of rafale would be lighter. Unless you’re Chinese, most of the time later variants of the same air craft will be heavier even if more composites or similar weight reducing savings are used due to usually being reinforced for more weapon capability
Yes, most likely it will be heavier if anything although offset by that 20% increase in thrust. Even Chinese aircraft get heavier too, J-10C weighs heavier than J-10A for instance.
What’s interesting is that the Mirage 4000 has two engines with more thrust than the Eurofighter’s.
Mirage-4000:
2x M53-P2 = 9770kgf x2 = 19,540kgf
Eurofighter:
2x EJ-200 = 8180kgf x2 = 16,360kgf
20% greater thrust for the Mirage 4000 in-game. Imagine if we had a whole team of people working on the Mirage 4000 the way we do currently for the Rafale :))).
Mirage 4000 really had a lot of potential and was just cobbled together by Dassault out of their funding with no government funding as a private venture.
I take your point but just comparing the thrust I don’t think showcases why the EJ200 is regarded by virtually everyone as such a good engine (and also why the M-88 would be regarded similarly).
The specific fuel consumption differences and the thrust to weight and the volume differences are the real advantages of the EJ200, also consider EJ200 is designed with a WAR power rating of 95kn that was removed later on as thrust was sufficient.
Definitely, but I think ultimately it would’ve killed the Rafale as we now know it, and equally so, there would’ve been absolutely no competition between whatever Mirage 4000 evolution Dassault cooked up and literally any seriously proposed design variant of the Eurofighter, ultimately leading to a loss of French relevance in the combat aerospace industry.
I think at best you could propose it as a Mirage 2000 replacement in limited numbers which would lead the French air and space force to a potentially better situation in the last few decades, with a more relevant aircraft than the Mirage 2000 (M4K being closer to the F-15 than F-16) as the backbone as the Rafale started to come online.
Of course what makes a good engine isn’t simply the thrust output but also the many different factors you pointed out, but the question is what determines if an aircraft is the “thrust king”, wouldn’t that solely come down purely to the thrust of the engines on the aircraft?
F-15E and SR-71 are often regarded as a thrust monsters but the pecularities or downsides of its other attributes of the engines aren’t really looked at there.
It depends. The Mirage 4000 offered greater nose size (bigger and better radar potential) and greater payload than the Rafale and could have adopted some of the sensors like IRST/TV while also utilizing ESA radars which the Eurofighter did not equip for a long time. It could have competed against the Eurofighter similar to the F-15E and F-15EX if the Mirage 4000 was upgraded over time, but it would have been inferior to the Rafale in terms of signature reduction (and also sensor fusion) since it did not have that feature from the outset like the Rafale did nor was it planned to.
