Wouldnt matter in the second interpretation as I mentioned, as it would be a single blip from an interrogation when a sensor designates or scans over the target, which, even if the RWR picks it up, the pilot may not have the time to notice it unless the RWR keeps the info on screen, but the second interpretation implies the bug report as written by DirectSupport is false and the IFF system does not provide perfect 24/7 friendly location.
RWR picking up and displaying the IFF system would only matter if it was always transmitting interrogations and receiving replies, as you’d have a constant source of emissions.
There are no free lunches, you cant magically know where everyone is at all times without electromagnetic emissions of some kind to provide that information to you. There was actually a Gripen pilot (or instructor? cant remember atm) that was discussing some things regarding a similar concept irl in which electromagnetic emissions are becoming such a threat to the survivability of aircrafts due to the sophistication of other sensors that can pick them up and analyze them that in multi-ship operations, its relatively common to have only 1 aircraft operating any sort of long range emitters (like radar and the likes) and using datalink to provide the relevant info to the other aircrafts in the formation.
The concept DirectSupport wants, of always being able to know friendly location despite being outside of the radar scan volume does exist, but it is not enabled by the IFF interrogator transceiver, its enabled by tactical datalinks, which gaijin have stated (though like I said, erroneously) are not in-game yet and which DirectSupport has himself said he wanted to keep the bug report away from to prevent it from being denied.
It would be if IFF interrogation/response signals only happened once on first pass from a sensor, its not unreasonable if the IFF is being modelled as its own always on passive radar that is constantly beaming interrogations to all aircrafts within its scan volume to ascertain the status of all withing its potential scan area.
Thats why I said I lean on the likelihood of the second option. I doubt France would make an IFF system that was constantly making IFF interrogations as that would definitely be picked up on as a constant emission source of emissions that could be exploited, compromising the aircrafts “stealth”, but it would need to constantly be emitting interrogations to constantly get responses in return. The 2 situations are mutually exclusive.
You either have a sensor that pings once that gives you a snapshot of important information, or you ping constantly to have constant knowledge of everything within the scan volume of the IFF’s antenna.
Except this is what I have been implying. That the IFF interrogation would initially happen (external cooperation) and then pass into datalink/MIDS (internal cooperation) once it has been confirmed that the aircraft is a friendly and the Rafale’s position would constantly be shared. The IFF information could be relayed through datalink.
@quartas121 I should note that these antenna are not the electronic scanning antenna. They are too small, too thin, they would not have the sufficient T/R modules to do proper electronic scanning imo. These also predate the APX-111 and later systems as they belonged originally to the APX-109 which is not known to have that kind of ability. I think that is mostly referring to an IFF interrogator built into the radar or something else for those systems.
@DirectSupport The F3R standard in particular has enhanced Link16 capabilities and better connectivity;
In fact, let me post the entirety of the section I referenced before in the last post so people can see just how relevant the multifunction antenna are on the Rafale.
The Radar, ESM, ECM, and IFF share many antenna or sensors as they also share functions. This is crucial towards the sensor fusion that the Rafale enjoys and takes advantage of over other aircraft. The document states quite clearly;
the use of common radioelectric scanning axes (in surveillance areas will, operationally, lead to a better association of the tracks provided by these different sensors
Also, in the case of the radar function, the fact of distributing several (conformal) antennas over a greater aircraft surface than in current practice, will provide for lowering the working frequency (> = L band) and thus, improve the detection of stealthy targets and enhance anti-jammer protection, both currently inexistant in such frequency domains.
Really interesting, these are more sources I’ll have to sift through and make use of. I believe they can be additional sources to one or two existing reports.
Thanks, really interesting. Was smart of Rafale to use same antenna for multiple jobs, though I do wonder how effective it is when it has to do 2 or more of those jobs at once
has anybody the problem that you dont get any launch warnings in the rafale in sim?
i got the rafale and played like 3 sim games and in two of them i didnt got any launch warnings from missiles.
ontop of that I neither get sounds or a smoke trail when firing my own missiles
has anybody else that problem or is it just me?
Update:
I think i found the problem, it is that when you have WT downloaded though steam
it still uses EAC instead of battleeye which causes problems in gamemodes that need you to have
anticheat turned on to play them
the fix is to rename the Battle Eye executable (“aces_BE.exe”) to the EAC one (“eac_wt_mlauncher.exe”) and delete the EAC one
Edit 2:
made a bug reort on the Anticheat problem mentioned above would be nice if you could press
“i have the same issue”
It’s probably not just one antenna and when it is using an antenna for more than one purpose does it really need to sit there for more than a split second to send an interrogation signal and then go back to whatever else it was doing?
Thank you for your response and thank you for all the time spent improving the game content for French planes. In fact, the speed indicated on the Dassault Aviation website is that to preserve the Ram coating of the plane. Furthermore knowing that the Rafale is capable of carrying 1.5 its weight in payload and that it can carry 5 heavy loads and in particular 4 under its wings. Even if I understand that aerodynamic friction and load transport are not correlated, it is not normal that it has a lower tear speed than planes which are not capable of the same transport load.
I would not expect much on the AESA until everyone else gets them. As for signature reduction, I would not expect anything anytime soon as they have to make sense of the reports for both the Rafale/Eurofighter, see how they can implement it especially with different stores, and etc. And even when they understand how to implement it, they may want to delay it until everyone else has their Gen 4.5 with AESA/PESA that can counter the reduced RCS features.
If the initial IFF interrogation is being made to the Rafale, and then everything afterwards is being done via MIDS/Link-16;
IFF is not constantly providing ally location since its the ally making the interrogation, so you arent receiving any info regarding ally location in that way.
You’re just asking for datalink info and pretending its the IFF system thats providing it since you know the bug report will otherwise be denied.
@Gunjob can this bug report be looked over again? The bug report itself is clearly stating the system being requested is completely unrelated to datalink, but the creator is arguing that the IFF system would not be used for constant ally position sharing and it would actually be datalink, suggesting the creator knows his bug report is faulty in reasoning but is fishing for an advantage the aircraft should not have in-game due to gaijins specification of tactical datalinks not being in-game yet.
First off, you can’t expect Gunjob to do something about the discussions we’re having on how things would be in reality, and expect it to translate into the game. We’ve talked about and gone over how things are in reality.
What Gaijin could simply do is say that because tactical datalink is not in-game yet, the Rafale aircraft would be forced to constantly use its standalone IFF. Then you might argue that the emissions of the IFF should constantly be emitted, but I would argue that’s pointless as the Rafale F3R had revised antennas which combined them into one L-band antenna on the spine. And no top-tier RWR to my understanding in-game would even detect L-band.
Feel free to make a counter bug-report anytime but I’ll insist on having my sources included as well out of fairness.
Why not fixate on the A-10C and its datalink instead of being fixated on solely the Rafale? Point to devs that unlike the Rafale, the A-10C does not have its own standalone IFF and must rely on tactical datalink only.
