a true all purpose competitor thats much worse in essentially every way would be some of the older russian irsts, pirate was never envisioned to provide guidance for air to ground stuff like eots or other irsts.
pirate air to ground wise is even worse than some of the irsts on the 80s/90s mig 29s
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Yeah, the EOTS a2g stuff at least is a development of the SNIPER XR so it’s like the plane is always flying with a dedicated TGP built in
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i would assume that means f-35 doesnt have an option for a targetting pod
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Yeah
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I have no idea
resolution of pirate is actually pretty good look at this, you can see how the nose of the typhoon blocks it out
Theyve got a load of experience at doing it. So not surprised.
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for example here’s an image from ols-35 intercepting an f-22 over syria
not an exact 1:1 comparison because it’s imaging a fighter instead of just the ground but you could tell pirate is at least of similar quality
There are some yt videos with side by side comparison. Idk what size is what but they’re pretty clear
that image quality is insane, certainly better than pirate, rafales or ols 35, lemme find a pic of rafale imaging
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Reading through the article, left is legacy EOTS (current) and right is Advanced EOTS (block 4)
You could probably film an IMAX movie from a couple dozen miles away with whatever the F-47 is going to get at this rate
rafale imaging
Spoiler
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so EOTS will probably be as good as it gets until they add a block 4 F-35. at least the F-35 has one thing going for it now
In fairness.
It looks more like a Targeting pod that doubles as the aircrafts IRST rather than the other way round for most other aircraft.
So it would strictly speaking be more fair to compare the EOTS to Sniper, Litening 5, etc etc
pirate actually might be higher resolution than the rafale irst, at least the old one. 4.1 has newer irst
Assuming it was never upgraded. I have no idea either way, but would be wierd to never upgrade the sensors in PIRATE since its development. The video from Thales is from 13 years ago and the footage within it might be older than that.
still, i think the level of integration and functionality the EOTS has plus not adding more wieght and causing more drag, and in the future if its modeled increasing the RCS, will make it better than those
rcs of either euro/rafale will be useless, they weren’t designed to be super low observable like 5th gens. rafale definitely incorporates more stealth than eurofighter but neither are at all stealthy
Yes, being intergrated is very good, but Id still describe it as an intergrated targeting pod that can do the job of an IRST rather than as an intergrated IRST that can do the job of a targeting pod