My original statement was that the Eurofighter consortium lags behind other countries. The fact that RBE2-AA was delivered to French forces in 2012, whilst the Eurofighter still does not possess (or only recently possessed) an AESA radar only proves my point.
Still three times as much money was invested into the Eurofighter compared to the Rafale. And still, the consortium opted for mostly already existing technology: a mechanical radar, an already existing GEC-Marconi radar MAWS, etc.
There is nothing to support this to be honest. If anything, the Eurofighter consortium has only just caught up to other countries in terms of radar technology.
Well tbf having the German and British working together is almost as much of a feat as the French and German
And yes, dassault was pushed very much to deliver quickly. That’s one of the reason the rafale took so long receiving all of its main loadout, hence why the 2008 comparaison is fairer to both jets than let’s say late 90s early 2000s
IRL I think ESA radars have inherent advantages that a mechanical just can’t achieve. You guys often mention that the speed of the mechanical CAPTOR-M allows it ti mimic ESA radar when tracking multiple targets, but it always will be blind to other targets when changing its pattern, even if for a fraction of a second, while ESA just don’t care. It also allows ESA radars to have much better terrain following algorithms. (And there’s probably a lot more advantages)
As for in game, I strongly believe thePESA would literally not have been worse than what’s in game.
Even if the CAPTOR-M is absolute garbage in the current state, the RBE2, while absolutely gold and usable, is also terribly underperforming compared to what an AESA should be able to perform
France launched and funded their own studies for unstable canard designs before engaging with the rest of EFA consortium. Even then, France undertook studies with MBB and British Aerospace for little over a year and a half before abandoning the programme. So no, there was not a “ton of development” which France was involved with.
It does and they wasted nearly 2 years with additional Radar studies to placate Germanies needs. Addding to huge increase in development costs and then going with the Radar that Britain, Italy and Spain wanted in the first place. That is the side effect of multi nation developments.
They did and at the time the decision was made for the M Scan Radar over the PESA and the burgeoning AESA technology. They did continue to work on an EASA Radar with the mindset it will be replaced with later models. If they had gone for an AESA Radar straight away they really risked delaying/derailing the programme.
It’s going to be brand new it should at least be the equal to current in service AESA Radars.
This is not necessarily true. Otherwise RBE2-AA would be considered equivalent to AN/APG-77 considering the former was brand new at the time. This is false.
My understanding is AESA will always be faster as it has no mechanical parts and can process massive ammounts of data.
Captor-M was designed to mimic PESA Radar technology by having a very high scan rate and the ability to track and priortity track will still scanning for targets air and ground.
PESA and Captor M should be similar in that regards.
RBE2-AA is also a very small radar with only ~800 T/R Modules compared to almost 2000 Modules on the Apg-77 or the ~1500 Captor-E will have. And Mk.2 also incorporates GaN Modules instead of GaaS, which is used by most ESA currently
And instead of going with a PESA radar they tried to make work an outdated technology, which is in my opinion a pretty bad idea. The jump between PESA and AESA is not as big as between mechanical and PESA, so until they got their AESA they really have been behind in technology compared to all the other countries making their own 4.5+ gen fighters (even Russia)
The advantages of GaN is that you can have more power going through a module (~10W for a regular silicon, and more than 70W for a GaN). This does however comes at the cost of a bigger overall module, which means you’ll end up with less modules per surface area. I wonder how much modules those upgraded radars will end up with.
The more powerful the module, the less you have to combine to get an effective range on a said target, meaning it’s easier to track one target. While you have less overall modules, you need fewer of them to track each target so overall the number of tracking targets remains high or even increases.
France initially decided yo keep the regular silicon modules instead of going to GaN because they found it simply too expensive. They will however also switch to GaN for the F5 variant at least, now that it has become more cost effective
On paper maybe, they evaluated Radar types and decided on the Captor-M which until the last 5 or so years wasn’t seen as a major incumberance to Typhoon.
Little fun fact I just found out by the way, both the RBE2-AA and Captor-E are based on the same joint AESA-study/prototype between France & Uk from '93 and Germany joining in '95.
The prototype is called AMSAR and the program ended in '08.
I think Germany is ditching the Captor Mk.1 and going with Mk.2 like Britain, there used to be a page on Hensoldt that literally said they were in the process of producing the needed T/R modules (something like 100000) needed to make the radars needed for Germany and maybe Italy and that page just disappeared.
The problem with PESA and EASA at the time of development that they added signficant weight and space constraints due to the need to provide substantially more cooling and even greater power generation which had not been factored into the original design. The entire nose section forward of the cockpit would have had to have been redesigned, in addition to ballast and balance weights being used in other areas of the aircraft.
In this regard, mechanical scanned radars were significantly superior at the time as the technology was much more mature, compact, reliable and cost efficient.
Also, it was established that the ECR90 and subsystems could have several generations of upgrades, whereas the available PESA/ESA radars at the time could not be easily upgraded and would need to be replaced at the same time the CAPTOR-M with a modernised AESA.
Sure an electronically scanned array would have provided slightly better performance, but it just was not viable for the project at the time of development.
The original ISD for Eurofighter was 1995 and it was judged that AESA technology would not be mature enough by then. That judgement is clearly correct as it was not until the early 2000’s that the first airborne AESA radar’s started being introduced to service on fighter aircraft. Obviously the ISD of Eurofighter slipped, but the decision to use an advanced M-Scan radar was already made by then. And before you make some snide comment about how the Eurofighter was late and therefore bad I’ll remind you that the Rafale’s original ISD was meant to be 1996, and it too was similarly delayed.
Starting in 1993, and continuing through the 1990s & early 2000s the Euro-radar companies worked collaboratively with the French on the AMSAR (Airborne Multi-role Solid-state Active-array Radar) demonstrator. Branching off from the joint programme the Euro-radar companies went on to develop the CAESAR (Captor AESA Radar) demonstrator based on CAPTOR, while the French went on to develop the DRAAMA (Demonstrator Active Antenna Radar and Advanced Modes) demonstrator based on RBE2. CAESAR was actually successfully flown on Eurofighter in 2007, while as best I can work out DRAAMA was not flown on Rafale until 2009 (so it seems technically the Eurofighter flew with an AESA radar before the Rafale).
Following on from the two demonstrator programmes the French decided to push ahead with RBE2-AA, directly based on DRAAMA, and had it enter service in 2013. Meanwhile the Eurofighter nations (likely motivated by the adequate performance of CAPTOR-M, and probably some politics as well) decided instead to work towards a more advanced AESA solution resulting in the GECAR programme and then ECRS Mk.0 which started testing in 2016, finished development in 2020, and entered service in 2021.
If the Eurofighter nations wanted they could have decided to build a CAESAR based production radar (like the French did with DRAAMA) and had it enter service sooner. However it seems they were not in a rush to replace CAPTOR, and decided they would rather wait on even more advanced radars becoming available. This approach can be seen with how an AESA radar (ECRS Mk.0) is currently in service on Eurofighter, but the main consortium members have decided to wait on Mk.1 & Mk.2 before equipping their fleets.
So it’s not really accurate to claim the Euro-radar consortium lacked the ability to develop AESA radars. They broadly kept pace with the French throughout the development of AESA radars (and actually flew their national demonstrator first). There was just a different approach taken as to how soon an AESA radar should be put into production.
