Yeah, besides, most SU57 contrarians will bring the same debunked stuff over and over. For instance, the – IMO not suspicious at all – T50 public patent that explicitly says 0.1-1.0m^2 as a goal for the average RCS, yet people act like it’s frontal, written in stone, and also as if the T50 was the same as a production SU57. For the sake of it, I just opened the translated patent, it reads:
“The technical result, to which the invention is directed, is in reducing the value of the radar visibility of the aircraft to an average value of the order of 0.1-1 m2.”
People, differences between production and prototype isn’t something unique to the SU57, the YF22 and F22 are also quite different aircraft.
We’re on a thread on radars, and the feeling I get is that some people here are trying to implicitly argue that the radars on the SU57 must be bad simply by extension of already debunked stuff, such as exposed screws on a very early prototype (RAMless), the IRST ball (as if they didn’t have faceted IRST designs, and as if RAM, RAS and RTM didn’t exist), exposed engines (while both Sukhoi and MiG studied S-ducts, YF23, radar blockers), round exhausts (flat nozzles were also studied by them, Sukhoi S-22, Su-27 T10U-5), canopy bow (YF23), all-metal skin/canopy simulations (5th gens have composite skins) and the list goes on.
Finally, many of the more general YF23 drawings are unclassified, have been for some years now, anyone can grab a copy of Paul Metz’s book on the YF23 and see for themselves. If the Russians didn’t think their shapes were decent for their RCS goals, they very well could use the YF23/F23 drawings as a base, tweak it via anechoic chamber studies and EM-analysis software, and call it a day, but reality is different: they don’t need to copy it, many principles of RCS reduction are now available even for the general public. We know about continuous curvature, faceting, parallel edging, serrated edges, edge treatment, creeping waves, edge diffraction, corner diffraction, tip diffraction, keller cone’s, tin oxide canopies and what not. To think engineers – especially Russians, who have studied stealth for decades – in other countries don’t know about that is just foolish.
