Volumetric flares, like BOL, that create a giant wall of IR signature between the plane and the missile, so it cant recognize it. But that is if a missile is behind a plane. Other than that, DIRCM or death.
Matching a whole IR signature is impossible using things like flares.
How effective is BOL the other way, with the aircraft perfectly silhouetted by a cloud of BOL (I.e direct front aspect) Is the seeker still able to handle that?
That is something i do not know. It might be unable to recognize a plane, but any evansive maneuver will move the plane away from the IR cloud, showing distinctive features like wings or tail. If you dont maneuver, the missile will just fly into the middle of a IR signature, and find you there.
DIRCM doesn’t work against IIR as they would just switch to home on jam, so instead of distracting it you would advertise where you are. An exception would be a DIRCM system with enough power to destroy the seeker of the missile (directed energy weapon). And the IRIS-T specifically would just remove the scanned lines which are blinded from the image processing.
Theoretically, damaging the seeker of the IRIS-T should be much more difficult as the time it looks directly into the DIRCM is around 195,3125 µs (12,5 ms per picture scan, 80 times per second, 64 lines scanned → 1000 ms / 80 pictures / 64 lines = 195,3125 µs per line), so the received energy is limited. I hope I got my calculation right. Additionally the small array of the IRIS-T can be much better cooled because of its small size. A focal-plane-array like the AIM-9X and ASRAAM continously looks into the DIRCM so it’s much easier to damage as all transmitted energy always hits the sensor for the full duration of the pulse.
I wrote something about that in the BOL thread so I will just quote that here.
The time between overhauls is dependent on so many variables. Like the load on each compressor- and turbineblade, temperatures, etc. so you could build a much more inefficient engine which has less compression ratio, less RPM, less combustion temperature but a much higher time between overhauls as the load on all components is less.
The power rating of the EJ200 is, compared to other engines (weight and size), at the upper end of so it doesn’t really suprise me that they have shorter timespans between overhauls. The load on all components is just that high.
Comparison:
F100-200:
Compression ratio of 24:1 with a 88 cm inlet with 3 + 10 compressor stages and 2 + 2 turbine stages with a turbine inlet temperature of less than 1620 K (the 229 has 1620 K so I assume the 200 has less).
EJ200:
Compression ratio of 26:1 with a 74 cm inlet with 3 + 5 compressor stages and 1 + 1 turbine stages with a turbine inlet temperature of ~1800 K.