An older video but never-the-less fascinating.
Wow, never saw that. F-35 the iPhone of jet cockpits? I’ve never been into the details of avionics I’ve always been interested in the performance engineering. Beyond the typical fighter cockpit displays and target acquisition capabilities, how big of a move forward is this?
(I know admitting this I should find another forum (is there one for the old Afterburner game?)
That is impressive, isn’t it.
I’m no expert, but things have certainly moved forward a lot in the last decades.
The radars (pseudo) modelled in DCS are pulse doppler radars, which are a lot more limited in their ability to acquire and track targets and are more vulnerable to jamming than the AESA (active electronically scanned array) radars modern jets carry. As I understand it, the AESA radars can track a lot more targets and old-style radar warning receivers may not even recognise an AESA lock as one - so your enemy in an older jet won’t even know you have him locked.
Stealth technology, sensor fusion and datalink mean that you could for example have a pair of F-22’s or F-35’s flying towards enemy fighters with one aircraft a decent distance behind the other: the front fighter has no active sensors on but receives and can utilise the radar feed from the rear fighter, which is outside weapons engagement range but can track the enemy on active sensors.
The enemy RWR will see the radar painting of the rear fighter but is out of range to engage: the front fighter is effectively invisible, so it can get to within ‘pitbull’ (autonomous self-guidance) range of an AMRAAM without ever being seen by the enemy or turning on its own active sensors.
The enemy RWR will pick up the AMRAAM pitbull lock but at that point he will only have minimal time to defend as the missile will be less than 10NM away, approaching at Mach 4…
I think the topic is debated somewhat but at least on paper it seems that stealth fighters with datalink should be able to pretty much decimate their previous generation counterparts by dictating the terms of the engagement such that no visual range merge (where actual ‘dogfight’ fighter manoeuvring capability / skill starts to matter) will actually take place.
Until someone figures out how to jam the datalink?
Absolutely - the countermeasures / counter-countermeasures / electronic countermeasures tech race will play a huge part.
An engagement between two equal-tech fighter forces with full fledged ECM would be where it really gets interesting! (hope to never see that IRL, of course)
It’ll be gunzo lufberries again. War. War never changes.
FTFY. You need have to live long enough to maneuver for a luftberry to happen. In a head on WVR engagement, the future’s going to be dice rolls and death.
And automatic blinding lasers sniping the AIM-9X’s and R-74M’s. Mark my words, guns. lufberries. the old arts might just be applicable again as all the gizmo’s cancel eachother out. It’s happened before.