Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning and F-22 'Raptor' : News & Discussion

Er... If DDM-NG can cue DIRCM, then it can target missiles. This is elementary. *smh*



You are confused between zooming/magnification and resolution. Zooming is civvie speak for "variable magnification".

You are confusing that with just making the font bigger on your smartphone screen, which is a completely different thing. *smh*



UV is all-weather. It can see through clouds (water) the same way as fog (water). This is also elementary. *smh*



Yes, it can, with a belly drop tank. Never mind the fact that it has enough range to not need it anyway.

From Dassault:
Last paragraph.
View attachment 20088

More significantly, it can supercruise in dry power, even with four missiles and a belly drop tank.

In short it also means it can supercruise while carrying small PGMs.
Nope, DIRCM only requires direction, missiles require direction, range, velocity and acceleration ideally.

You don't get magnification with a staring array alone, so DDM-NG has no magnification and the magnification of FSO is way smaller than that of a TGP.

Some of it can, some of it can't, same with IR wavelengths. TGPs can see through clouds and flight profiles tend to be above them. Aside from that, I'm not sure we even know all the wavelengths the EODAS operates on but I doubt it was designed with any significant weaknesses.

Yeah... it can maybe just exceed M1.0 with 1 tank, but you can't fly in the high wave drag regime efficiently, note that it doesn't specify speed, probably very low. The claims are also spurious, in one place it say 4 missiles, elsewhere 6 and M1.4. I call BS.

Yeah, small PGMs and no tanks, LOL. And even with 1 1250L tank it will still has less range than an F-35 .
 
The current order is for the Hornets, duh. But a modernised F-35C was offered to replace the SH, which the navy rejected.
Boeing offered a modernised F-18SH to replace the SH too - the Silent Hornet. Doesn't mean it was ever meant to replace it though.
 
I remember Rafale won technically the F15 in south Korea. Suddenly a special relation ship clause emerged....
I remember a powerpoint F35 (ie with supercruise, with the F16 agility, nearly ready FOC...) won by 0,02 / 10 margin on Rafale in Netherlands. Real life F35 is not war ready (block 4 is now for 2027 at best), not agile, not able to supercruise.

About Swiss : we just have some days to wait young Jedi.

LM marketing....
Looks who's talking about marketing. You go on as if the Rafale was a bloody stealth X-Wing, when in reality they didn't even have the manufacturing prowess to fold the IFR probe away in between use. I mean what happens if bird crap is accidentally swallowed by that probe and it blacks out both the engines?
 
Agreed, they dint have alternative for later variants of f16, but their f16 alternative is much superior.
Both f16 & Mirage 2k are come in to picture at the same time.
Mirage 2000 was 6 years after the F-16 and if we're comparing flight envelopes the Mirage has slightly better ITR but the F-16 STR and energy conservation is far superior.
 
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bird crap
😍

For a machine flying at 25k feet above sea level at M 1.0 , for some John to imagine a probe could intake crap , it takes a special kind of imagination.

He's totally in love with scat.

The man deserves all the help he can get & more.
 
Mirage 2000 was 6 years after the F-16 and if we're comparing flight envelopes the Mirage has slightly better ITR but the F-16 STR and energy conservation is far superior.
That's probably why during a hard dog fight between a Greek M2000 and a Turkish F16, it was the Mirage that was in the situation to shoot the other.
 
I remember Rafale won technically the F15 in south Korea. Suddenly a special relation ship clause emerged....
I remember a powerpoint F35 (ie with supercruise, with the F16 agility, nearly ready FOC...) won by 0,02 / 10 margin on Rafale in Netherlands. Real life F35 is not war ready (block 4 is now for 2027 at best), not agile, not able to supercruise.

About Swiss : we just have some days to wait young Jedi.

LM marketing....
The hubris of rafale fanboys pointing out block 4 delay when Rafale first flew in 1986 and still lacks capabilities 4th gen fighters already have. F4 when is it coming out? Lol. F-35 in 3F will kill any Rafale and can survive modern IADS like S-400s unlike Rafale whos contribution to Libya war was destroying vehicles because it had no SEAD capabilities. F-35 has been in combat all you gotta do is research but that would contradict your opinion that F-35 is not war ready when it actually is.

The Swiss will finally slap some sense into you about Rafales lack of capabilities compared to F-35 and you won't have any excuse to why Rafale lost but I'm sure you'll try really hard to make some up.
some years ago an israeli air force general said exactly the same.... Stealth will vanished.
And yet Europe, China, Russia and US are spending a large amount of money on stealth. Go figure.
 
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Nope, DIRCM only requires direction, missiles require direction, range, velocity and acceleration ideally.

Since when did IR calculate range, speed and velocity? You gotta go back to school.

IR is only good for direction and bearing. You need a laser for rangefinding. How could you miss out on something this elementary?

You don't get magnification with a staring array alone, so DDM-NG has no magnification and the magnification of FSO is way smaller than that of a TGP.

Er... The F-35 also uses staring array.

Some of it can, some of it can't, same with IR wavelengths. TGPs can see through clouds and flight profiles tend to be above them. Aside from that, I'm not sure we even know all the wavelengths the EODAS operates on but I doubt it was designed with any significant weaknesses.

Oh, yeah, dude, break physics all the way. Maybe in Britain people can see through clouds, but in the real world, we cannot. IR has the same problem, which is why the weather is cooler when there are rain clouds around, even when the sun is high up in the middle of summer. But UV goes through without a problem.

Don't you know you are exposed to pretty much the same concentration of UV from the sun even during rainy days? Stuff like this is elementary. Even teenage girls know this.

Yeah... it can maybe just exceed M1.0 with 1 tank, but you can't fly in the high wave drag regime efficiently, note that it doesn't specify speed, probably very low. The claims are also spurious, in one place it say 4 missiles, elsewhere 6 and M1.4. I call BS.

Yeah, small PGMs and no tanks, LOL.

You don't need to believe it, only the actual users have to, like Air Marshal Nambiar. Regardless, the Rafale slaughters the F-35 in performance, by a huge margin. Come back to this when the F-35 does 11G.

And even with 1 1250L tank it will still has less range than an F-35 .

A Rafale with 1 tank equals the F-35's range comfortably. The fuel fractions are pretty much the same. And if the mission requires going supersonic at mach 1.3+, then the F-35 enters the fight with even less fuel and even lesser range.

You are practically trolling.
 
No it will not. It will adapt and improve over time.

Generally speaking, yes. But specifically speaking, like for the F-35, its stealth will never improve by many magnitudes. It's stuck.

Also, aircraft like the F-22, F-35, J-20, AMCA etc are not true stealth because they all have vertical fins. For actual stealth you need to remove the fins, which is why you have designs like the B-2, B-21, H-20, Neuron and Ghatak.
 
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Generally speaking, yes. But specifically speaking, like for the F-35, its stealth will never improve by many magnitudes. It's stuck.

Also, aircraft like the F-22, F-35, J-20, AMCA etc are not true stealth because they all have vertical fins. For actual stealth you need to remove the fins, which is why you have designs like the B-2, B-21, H-20, Neuron and Ghatak.
By the time rest of the world catch up to F22 design, USAF will be flying NGAD rectifying all the shortcomings F35 has.
And F35 is not just about LO Airframe.
There is a shitload of work has been done to make it a unit of fully networked battle system. As an isolated unit, it may have lot of shortcomings compared to their European counterparts but that irrelevant as far as USAF and NATO is concerned.
For countries like India, it’s dud IMO
 
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That's probably why during a hard dog fight between a Greek M2000 and a Turkish F16, it was the Mirage that was in the situation to shoot the other.
T-38s shoot down F-22s during pilot training all the time, does that mean T-38s are better? European vs Muslim was the likely reason the F-16 lost.
 
By the time rest of the world catch up to F22 design, USAF will be flying NGAD rectifying all the shortcomings F35 has.

Catching up to the F-22 is no problem, the Su-57 Mk2 and the upcoming J-20C will easily surpass it. All other upcoming designs are better than the F-22 by a significant margin.

NGAD isn't meant to do what the F-35 does.

And F35 is not just about LO Airframe.
There is a shitload of work has been done to make it a unit of fully networked battle system. As an isolated unit, it may have lot of shortcomings compared to their European counterparts but that irrelevant as far as USAF and NATO is concerned.
For countries like India, it’s dud IMO

That's not a problem. In fact our networking is currently much more modern than what the US uses. They need to upgrade.

Also, in case we buy the F-35, it's going to have to be integrated with our own network, and the US can allow that the way they did with Israel.

Look, there's a lot of marketing fluff here. The F-35 can do stuff the F-16 and F-15 cannot, so the Americans are advertising the F-35's capabilities from their perspective, which ends up sounding impressive. But the Europeans had introduced a lot of technologies that the F-35 has back in the 90s and 2000s itself. For example, the French came in with IMA (sensor fusion) back in the mid 90s, whereas Saab released Gripen with a high speed directional datalink back in the mid 90s as well. EADS came up with an advanced HMDS solution before the F-35 did, which gave them a 360 deg visual around the aircraft displayed on their helmet. All these are major game changers, but were introduced or entered flight testing in Europe long before the F-35 even began first flight. Even when it came to weapons, the Americans have nothing like the Meteor, Hammer, MICA, ASRAAM, IRIS-T, SPEAR, Brimstone etc.

Since the Europeans cannot compete with the Americans given their smaller budgets, the Europeans try and stay ahead when it comes to avionics and weapons systems. Right now, the upcoming Rafale F4 and Gripen E are a generation ahead in terms of avionics compared to the F-35. So even the networking solutions they use are ahead in comparison.

Otoh, we depend on the Israelis who co-develop a lot of systems with American funding and technologies, which allows them to upgrade at a faster pace than the Americans, and then sell it to us as well. For example, the Americans are still working with networking solutions they developed in the 80s, like the Link 16, whereas we are now working with the most modern cutting-edge networking solutions available, like the B-NET, which is also backward compatible with older systems. So, in case we buy F-35s, we will go back for an Israeli solution and it can be better networked than what even the Americans have. Right now, the best networked F-35 is the Israeli version. They can connect to any military asset they have with very high speed datalinks, so we will be able to do the same. On the American version, high speed datalinks are restricted to only the F-35, and they are still working on their solution.
 
Since when did IR calculate range, speed and velocity? You gotta go back to school.

IR is only good for direction and bearing. You need a laser for rangefinding. How could you miss out on something this elementary?



Er... The F-35 also uses staring array.



Oh, yeah, dude, break physics all the way. Maybe in Britain people can see through clouds, but in the real world, we cannot. IR has the same problem, which is why the weather is cooler when there are rain clouds around, even when the sun is high up in the middle of summer. But UV goes through without a problem.

Don't you know you are exposed to pretty much the same concentration of UV from the sun even during rainy days? Stuff like this is elementary. Even teenage girls know this.



You don't need to believe it, only the actual users have to, like Air Marshal Nambiar. Regardless, the Rafale slaughters the F-35 in performance, by a huge margin. Come back to this when the F-35 does 11G.



A Rafale with 1 tank equals the F-35's range comfortably. The fuel fractions are pretty much the same. And if the mission requires going supersonic at mach 1.3+, then the F-35 enters the fight with even less fuel and even lesser range.

You are practically trolling.
When combined with sophisticated processing and sensor fusion plus overlapping FoVs of different IR/EO sensors.

Talking about EOTS in frontal hemisphere and underneath. TGP magnification >> IRST magnification.

It's cooler but the weather is still warmer on a cloudy day in summer than winter because some gets through. Not all UV gets through, check your facts. EODAS is EO/IR, so we don't know all the wavelengths anyway, it may be UV as well.

And yet your skin doesn't burn as easily on a cloudy day, or at all really, even if you're freckled and have ginger hair.

A Red Bull stunt plane kills either of them and a 911 out-turns a tank, but air combat exceeded such comparisons some time ago.

Nope.

10,300 + (1250 x 1.76) = 12,500lb

12,500/[33,000 + (1.76 x 1250)] = .355 Rafale

18,250/47,250 = .386 F-35

Plus external fuel causes way more drag and impacts manoeuvrability and once you add weapons, weapon weights will affect the lighter fighter more too. Oh, and I didn't add the weight of the actual tank and pylon to the weight of the fuel for the Rafale.
 
When combined with sophisticated processing and sensor fusion plus overlapping FoVs of different IR/EO sensors.

So much BS in just one sentence. All the staring arrays look only in their separate directions. There is no overlap.

Sophisticated processing and sensor fusion doesn't beat basic physics.

It's cooler but the weather is still warmer on a cloudy day in summer than winter because some gets through. Not all UV gets through, check your facts. EODAS is EO/IR, so we don't know all the wavelengths anyway, it may be UV as well.

EODAS is IR only.

And yet your skin doesn't burn as easily on a cloudy day, or at all really, even if you're freckled and have ginger hair.

A Red Bull stunt plane kills either of them and a 911 out-turns a tank, but air combat exceeded such comparisons some time ago.

Nope.

10,300 + (1250 x 1.76) = 12,500lb

12,500/[33,000 + (1.76 x 1250)] = .355 Rafale

18,250/47,250 = .386 F-35

Plus external fuel causes way more drag and impacts manoeuvrability and once you add weapons, weapon weights will affect the lighter fighter more too. Oh, and I didn't add the weight of the actual tank and pylon to the weight of the fuel for the Rafale.

Fuel fraction is more or less the same, especially so in favour of the Rafale since the F-35 has to use AB. And an F-35 with a fuel tank is a pregnant duck, it is so even without one.

The deficit of the F-35 in the air police: A rapid intervention (technical jargon "QRA") fulfills the F35 far less well than the European competitors Eurofighter and Rafale. The time required by the F-35 to intercept an aircraft at 11,000 meters with a climb to 11 kilometers (typical flight altitude of commercial aircraft) and subsequent tracking (supersonic) is at least 50 percent higher than that of a high-performance standard fighter. This takes over 1 minute longer compared to the competition. In aerial warfare, these are ages. The F-35 could not be procured based on this criterion alone: the competition literally flies away from it. The stealth capability of the F-35 plays only a minor role in defensive air defense.

No contest. The F-35 can't even show up to the fight.

It's a serious problem when even the American leadership calls the F-35 a "piece of shit".
 
Catching up to the F-22 is no problem, the Su-57 Mk2 and the upcoming J-20C will easily surpass it. All other upcoming designs are better than the F-22 by a significant margin.

NGAD isn't meant to do what the F-35 does.



That's not a problem. In fact our networking is currently much more modern than what the US uses. They need to upgrade.

Also, in case we buy the F-35, it's going to have to be integrated with our own network, and the US can allow that the way they did with Israel.

Look, there's a lot of marketing fluff here. The F-35 can do stuff the F-16 and F-15 cannot, so the Americans are advertising the F-35's capabilities from their perspective, which ends up sounding impressive. But the Europeans had introduced a lot of technologies that the F-35 has back in the 90s and 2000s itself. For example, the French came in with IMA (sensor fusion) back in the mid 90s, whereas Saab released Gripen with a high speed directional datalink back in the mid 90s as well. EADS came up with an advanced HMDS solution before the F-35 did, which gave them a 360 deg visual around the aircraft displayed on their helmet. All these are major game changers, but were introduced or entered flight testing in Europe long before the F-35 even began first flight. Even when it came to weapons, the Americans have nothing like the Meteor, Hammer, MICA, ASRAAM, IRIS-T, SPEAR, Brimstone etc.

Since the Europeans cannot compete with the Americans given their smaller budgets, the Europeans try and stay ahead when it comes to avionics and weapons systems. Right now, the upcoming Rafale F4 and Gripen E are a generation ahead in terms of avionics compared to the F-35. So even the networking solutions they use are ahead in comparison.

Otoh, we depend on the Israelis who co-develop a lot of systems with American funding and technologies, which allows them to upgrade at a faster pace than the Americans, and then sell it to us as well. For example, the Americans are still working with networking solutions they developed in the 80s, like the Link 16, whereas we are now working with the most modern cutting-edge networking solutions available, like the B-NET, which is also backward compatible with older systems. So, in case we buy F-35s, we will go back for an Israeli solution and it can be better networked than what even the Americans have. Right now, the best networked F-35 is the Israeli version. They can connect to any military asset they have with very high speed datalinks, so we will be able to do the same. On the American version, high speed datalinks are restricted to only the F-35, and they are still working on their solution.
B-NET are ordered only recently and it will take few years to fully integrate it the assets we have.
Truth is we are still using unencrypted coms in many of our legacy fighters and our jets don’t talk to each other seamlessly the way they should by audio and video feed directly into the mission computer like say Gripen has. Even F16 have very good data links and sensor fusion in latest blocks. Apparently Migs and Sukhois have problems with Isreali jammers and can’t communicate seamlessly with the AWACS we have. I’m not sure though if it’s entirely correct or just rumors.
Apart from that we don’t have enough sensors and whatever we have are still not integrated fully that resulted in 27 Feb incident related to downing of Chopper.
I’m not sure how you have concluded that our coms are better than USAF and USN.

Anyway having something is different than implementing it and employing it in the battlefield in its entirety. It’s like IIT-Kanpur saying we have better 5G network than China which is dishonest thing to say
 
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B-NET are ordered only recently and it will take few years to fully integrate it the assets we have.
Truth is we are still using unencrypted coms in many of our legacy fighters and our jets don’t talk to each other seamlessly the way they should by audio and video feed directly into the mission computer like say Gripen has. Even F16 have very good data links and sensor fusion in latest blocks. Apparently Migs and Sukhois have problems with Isreali jammers and can’t communicate seamlessly with the AWACS we have. I’m not sure though if it’s entirely correct or just rumors.
Apart from that we don’t have enough sensors and whatever we have are still not integrated fully that resulted in 27 Feb incident related to downing of Chopper.
I’m not sure how you have concluded that our coms are better than USAF and USN.

I am referring to post-upgrade. And I don't think it will take years either. Hundreds of BNETs are already operational.

And it's not just BNET. I am also referring to AFNET and IACCS, both are indigenous.



Our overall network now uses the latest technologies.

Anyway having something is different than implementing it and employing it in the battlefield in its entirety. It’s like IIT-Kanpur saying we have better 5G network than China which is dishonest thing to say

The implementation process started long ago and is actually nearing completion.


Read more about it here, this is the latest status...
A snippet:
As of September 2015, five years after the deployment of AFNET, the IAF has established five nodes of the IACCS in the western sector facing Pakistan at Barnala (Punjab), Wadsar (Gujarat), Aya Nagar (Delhi), Jodhpur (Rajasthan) and Ambala (Haryana). The system has since then been connected with vital AD nodes and has provided network-centric capability to the air defence forces in the Northern and Western sector along Pakistan and China border and steadily extending it to other vital areas for pan India coverage.

The loss of the chopper is due to failure of SOPs. The helicopter crew had deliberately disconnected from even the existing network, never mind the complete failure of SOPs by both SAM and helicopter crews. But this is 2021, not 2019. So things are different now.