Thats not how IFF works… IFF sends out an interrogation and the queried target either replies to said interrogation with the relevant required information based on the IFF mode, or does not reply/reply properly and “fails” the interrogation. The interrogation itself does not provide any info itself, as thats be incredibly idiotic to send out your aircrafts information to a potential threat. You’re just grasping at straws on that one.
Yes, thats the aforementioned datalink that is the reason as to why the Rafale has permanent all range 360 IFF ingame, same as the A-10C, same as the F-16C is supposed to have. Most top aircrafts in-game use datalink to communicate their positions and all info they’ve acquired to the general pool of friendly aircrafts. Thats the whole point of datalink.
Obviously it is, a correct IFF response can provide info on the aircraft type, number, mission, etc… itd be silly not to use said information.
Link-16 operates in the IEEE L-band (NATO/in-game D-band)
MIDS seems to operate in similar wavelengths as well. You’re quoting the datalink frequencies.
Its an interrogator transponder. It can send IFF interrogations and respond to them if interrogated. It does not have an IFF system only to respond to interrogations, nor do interrogations provide any real info on the interrogating aircraft. As stated above, itd be silly to just beam over info to an unknown target.
The whole point of an IFF system is to try to figure out if a contact is a friendly or a threat, you dont provide your info to something you do not know the nature of yet.
Because then it wouldnt need to have a transponder to respond to interrogations, and if it was connected to the aircraft via datalink, it wouldn’t need to be interrogated in the first place.
It wouldn’t need to respond back to the interrogations that is correct, without having to give away unnecessary emissions.
A source explicitly states that the Rafale’s external cooperation mechanism has it so that it receives locations of other targets(friendlies, hostile, neutrals) but solely uses internal cooperation (MIDS/Link 16) to communicate its own position within a patrol.
It would still need to interrogate the target for the IFF to provide any info. At this point you’re literally just saying the IFF serves no function at all in the Rafale.
To receive information via IFF, it needs to emit an IFF interrogation which the bogey will reply to if in fact a friendly, so for your bug report to make sense, it HAS to emit IFF interrogations anyways.
You’re now also strictly arguing against your own bug report, stating that the friendly location sharing solely done over datalink, which doesn’t “separate the bug report from datalink” like you initially said you wanted to do.
Also, of course it strictly uses MIDS/Link-16 while performing an operation with other known friendly assets, itd be idiotic to be bouncing around IFF interrogations and responses all the time between assets already supposed to be supporting each other and sharing much more info than simply their own positions. As I’ve already stated, the entire point of IFF is to interrogate a target you do not yet know is friendly, hostile or neutral for whatever reason.
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”
