I made a suggestion for customisable MAWS slaving, as the Typhoon has this I thought people here might want to check it out and leave feedback?
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Great suggestion, definetly needed and defiently LONG overdue
Exactly, before you had to drive all the way to the asylum. Now its just one click away.
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So I finally got around to it (actually I just fixed the camera and was able to run opentrack) and try out Typhoon in AirSB. And oh my god, how ridiculous this ridiculousness is.
It feels like I came to a shootout blindfolded. Tracking empty space, tracking missiles, losing contact in strait flight in clear sky, the inability to pick up a contact with the cursor if at least 2 seconds have passed since the beam passed (as far as I know, selecting a target with the cursor is a normal way to control a real radar), etc.
The way it feels in an airplane, one of whose features is sensor fusion, is just ridiculous. In AirRB you can at least navigate by markers, and in AirSB you are your only sensor - the radar (no, well of course you can look for contacts through the PIRATE thermal imager… Good luck throwing an amraam through it. And good luck with the friend-foe indicator too.) And my god, it’s physically painful.
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Yeah, definetly the greatest weakness of it so far. The general tactic i’ve been employing is ultra defensive play, put myself into positions where I can give the radar time and then engage when optimal to do so. But yeah, its not just Blue Vixen, something is definetly fundementally wrong with the radar
Right, but use of active seekers on missiles as well as multiple seekers, multi-mode seekers, datalinks have all vastly improved.
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Typhoon feels like everyone else is using TRDs and ECM
I just use the irst to find targets now, its actually quite good at that, i then switch to radar if i want to use my araams or stick with irst if i want to remain hidden. Do you know if i m missing something, because i cant think of a reason why the eft wasn’t given data link along with the Rafael other than it doesn’t get hmd DL perhaps? But even then having it give use radar targets like on tws soft locks would go so far in giving us some situational awareness, would help the tornado as well.
Yes, but wouldn’t you rather your jet shout at you in King’s English. The silky smooth voice of Joanna Lumley -
‘Now be a dear and don’t be silly. You really ought to pull up out of this dive. There’s a good boy…’
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They aren’t even a thing yet on air to air or even surface to air missiles.
They are just about at the point of miniaturizing the technology to equip it on anti ship missiles and cruise missiles.
The shape of the nosecone of these types of dual mode seekers is still also very round and very unoptimised for supersonic flight.
they put a 4 mode seeker on the GBU-53 its already been minaturized to fit on a SMALL diameter bomb
Yeah and they have to have a dome clamshell covering that’s the same diameter as the missile which makes it impractical to fly at supersonic speeds.
An IR seeker can be 1/10th the diameter of the missile body alone, and a radar seeker can have a fully aerodynamic nosecone that won’t interfere with the radar.
but with modern tech surely they can do both? at the very least, IRST is capable of guiding in AMRAAM, with two way DL on AIM-120D it could overcome the EFT TRD
Pray tell - what happens if the DL freq is jammed…
what happens if the aircraft uses AESA radar (aka nearly every US fighter) and can transmit information, ie datalink, and it is immune to the deception jamming used by spectra and praetorian dass
Adding two different seekers on the same missile would add weight to the missile compared to just one, unnecessarily reducing the range of the missile when you wouldn’t want that compared to adversaries. Plus, the Russians and Chinese already are using PL-15 and R-37s which currently outrange western missiles besides perhaps the Meteor.
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good point, that is why i mentioned combined IRST, ARH, AESA fire control radar, and 2 way DL to ensure a hit even through jamming and decoys
AESA isn’t immune to jamming. Resistant - certainly. However not immune.
You also run into the issue that the further away you get the emitter (e.g. the attacking aircraft) - the greater the effect of defensive jamming on the relatively low-powered missile seeker radar. If you want to maintain your 2-way communication with your AMRAAM you have to bump up the power - which means you become far easier to detect.
In this scenario you might well find a Meteor hurtling back down your bearing - which will probably reach you before your AMRAAM connects. Possibly two - the first to make you break off and go defensive - the other to catch you out while you duck the first one. =)
Either way - we could be here all day. Lots of what-ifs, maybes…
ECM and EW is one of those dark and arcane arts where the people who know it certainly wouldn’t be loitering around on the WT forum.
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but how easy is it to jam a narrow DL directly from missile to aircraft? or to intercept that signal with enough accuracy to do any defensive jamming against the DL frequency.
again, if you only use an IRST to guide in that amraam, which has been done on F-15, itll ignore the TRD and defensive jamming attempts because it has 2 way DL. there is also the matter of burn through range for the missiles own seeker
even if you used the radar and irst, its LPI, itll be pretty hard to pinpoint
assuming F-15 vs EFT, both will detect each other, but the F-15 can bring that giant AN/APG-82v1 to bear to jam the CAPTOR-E into ingame CAPTOR-M state, so the typhoon couldnt pull a meteor launch off sucessfully
Even Russia can do that… its not hard at all.
The only guaranteed way to be immune to jamming/ecm is to use fibre optic cables.