AMCA's design is restricted to the capabilities of our industry. When it comes out, its stealth will be outdated.
So if stealth is still necessary beyond Ghatak and FUFA, then we need a 6th gen jet. The F-35 and Su-57 are not it.
You don't seem to get why AMCA is necessary. In short, MRFA cannot deliver what it can. Otherwise we'd have just gone straight to 6G like the French are doing.
The AMCA represents a significant enough leap in survivability over what any MRFA can offer. That's why the program exists.
We just seem to be running around in circles over this.
Neither are made for deep penetration.
Neither is Rafale if the opponent is China. It won't survive. Even if it can survive by flying low, which is doubtful, it won't be able to penetrate very deep in that flight profile, and even then the weapons it can launch seem to have a high probability of being intercepted.
Ideally we need a 6G with broadband stealth (ULO) to deal with China. But that's not on the anvil for us right now.
So the next closest thing is AMCA which is LO (and will develop into VLO once it gets NG engines), but that's far away. Even the stealthy CCAs & other drones are quite a ways off.
Till then, all we can really do is fly within Indian airspace and fire standoff weapons. At worst, the MKI can do that just as well as Rafale. At best, it can do an even better job as it can carry & launch things that might be too big for Rafale like BrahMos or Rudram-3.
Additional MKIs are not such a bad idea at all if they come with Super upgrades from factory.
Even that's nonsense. All export Rafales have Meteor. What makes our version so special that it can't carry Meteors? It's such a dumb rumor.
All other Rafale/Meteor export customers use either NATO or NATO-compliant datalinks & AEW platforms (Hawkeye, Sentry, Wedgetail, Erieye). We're the only ones who don't*.
It's not inconceivable that there might be hiccups with integration.
*Not counting those that don't have AEWs at all so are anyway dependent on Rafale' own FCR.
You are assuming that Meteor wasn't operational. We received Meteors back in 2020, supplied from French stocks.
I didn't say we don't have possession of the missiles. I said they might not yet be fully operational.
What that means is that the Meteor's engagement envelope could currently be limited to what the Rafale's own FCR is able to see & guide the missile onto, because the Rafale might not yet be able to take inputs from Netra & feed them to Meteor via the datalink that connects the missile to the Rafale.
In this situation, because of the fact that we would be operating under a heavy EW environment, it's likely that there might not have been much of a difference in effective range (with good Ph/Pk) between Meteor and MICA-EM, cuz they would both only be relying on what the Rafale itself can see, within that range MICA itself is capable of prosecuting all targets.
So no point in using the much more expensive Meteor.
That's another assumption. How do you know only MICAs were carried?
Cuz we've seen MICA wreckage at the Bathinda site. But no Meteor wreckage.
Yes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But I can only comment on what I see, until & unless IAF says otherwise.
If Meteors were carried & were fully functional with AEW-provided target cues, we would have fired them. Some debris or remnants of Meteor would've been found in Pakistan and they would have paraded it. There's no evidence of any Meteor (or MICA for that matter) in Pak, even though several debris of BrahMos, SCALP & S400 rounds were seen.
You are not extrapolating anything. Just wild guesses.
It's all anyone can do right now.
As far as the air engagement is concerned, there are no facts to go on other than that we didn't lose any pilots.
