That photo is basically the closest you will get to see the engine, considering the angle of the S duct
A few limitations to that methodology :
The 3D model could be filled with errors, for all we know, since they only specify :
This does not take into account the materials and the coating used, which mind you are quite important details. They even mention it there :
By the way, even their own model can go below 1m² in clean configuration, depending on frequency, without taking the coating and composites into account (that’s assuming said model is accurate in the first place) :
I wouldn’t consider the Rafale as “stealthy” myself, because it lacks a bay anyway, but i seriously doubt all these little features (serration, coating, composites) would make it equal to your regular 4th gen Su or F-1X
Yes, but I don’t see any particularly low thermal radiation of the Rafale compared to the Su-30, except for the air intakes. I don’t think that the radiation of the Rafale is lower than that of the same MiG-21 or F-100, the engine of which are also not visible.
Also, unlike the Su-30, the Rafale has a radiating upper fuselage. I don’t know what’s there.
The thermal camera is of low quality that it can barely detect heat sources, so asking that it differentiates the difference in heat quality outside of the intakes is a huge ask for this camera.
According to the camera, outside of the intakes of these aircrafts the rest of the airframe is very cold, which isn’t true.
The camera can differentiate between VERY HOT and HOT but can’t differentiate between very warm and room temperature.
I’m not sure, it could just be that it is a low quality thermal camera and that equipment that properly differentiates temperature would run in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Surely there’s a way to adjust what the camera consider hot and cold (and the colors indicated) without needing some super expensive camera. Then again, it might literally just be a super expensive camera
the hot thing behind rafale’s cockpit (which @Segment was wondering about) is the air conditionner evacuation, which appears in the same color as Su’s engines
i’m not an air conditionner maniac, but i doubt it’s as hot as 1000+ °C
This is true when it comes to what they have deployed for fighter aircrafts, but that might not even be true because the Rafale stealth demonstrator also exists although only one is built.
The KAAN relies on a lot of technology from other countries, while the Rafale was very much a French design. The French have also had an RCS-measuring anechoic chamber since 1977 that allowed them to perfect and adopt stealth technology decades ahead of many other countries, it just didn’t incorporate those technologies into anything in service as the cost was too great, and not only that, there was no need for an a full-stealth aircraft, and instead data-fusion/sensor-fusion with multi-role and semi-stealth was a bigger priority. The F-22 having been benched and kept to Japan while the US had to use the F-15/F-16 more is a good case of that. Super Hornet would have been more relevant. F-22 is a unique rare case of being designed too far ahead of its time to be useful.
You can see that Dassault has had an anechoic chamber before anyone else besides the US.
Spoiler
I would also note that the biggest technology thief stealing from the US is not Russia or China, but rather France. So if anyone is going to have great stealth tech besides the US, there’s no reason to believe it wouldn’t be the French. You can hear it from a former CIA analyst yourself in this video below. Timestamp: 2:23
This is the first time I’ve heard that the Rafale stealth demonstrator exists, do you have any pictures of it? I’m looking forward to it because it looks really cool.
I wouldn’t say that, the F-22 was based on 1980’s cold war requirements and was designed to ensure air dominance in a period of time where the world climate was quite uncertain. We wanted to maintain an advantage over our enemies for quite some time and the F-22 was a great investment in that regard.
Better to have the bigger stick as they say, and it was just lucky that we got it during a time when world issues didn’t really rise up to anything super serious. No super powers got into major conflicts or threatened each other with nuclear war, etc. There is also the case of the B-2 stealth bomber. No one else in the world has a nuclear bomber fleet that can fly right through enemy airspace unimpeded and drop a nuke, even today. So yeah, I think there is a great need for fully stealth aircraft. If France couldn’t justify that but had the means… that would be a very interesting conversation indeed.