Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Found And Explained"
channel.
-
26
-
16
-
14
-
13
-
@seraphm6573 I’m blinded by 5 decades of experience in this specific field of aerospace and defense, where we primarily worked on A2A programs. Missile kinematics and separation aircraft performance has been bread and butter for my family for generations.
“Cruising along at Mach .8 and Mach 1.8 don’t make a difference in overall IR signature intensity.” Uh, yes it does. It makes a dramatic difference. You just happen to be conversing with someone who has done extensive analyses on IRST detection ranges on various types of airborne targets in different weather conditions.
90km detection range is for supersonic bombers in optimum atmospheric conditions using 1990s optics. If they’re subsonic, it drops considerably from there by almost half.
For small fighters, it drops even more into much closer ranges.
For Stealth aircraft like the F-22A and F-35s, you aren’t going to detect them with IRST until on the edge of visual range due to the extensive IR concealment systems they incorporate. Supersonic speed blooms them more, but they are still quite stealthy in IR spectrum. There are some interesting photos of the Rafale’s OSF showing F-22 in burner and not in burner. It’s extremely low contrast relative to the background.
Another thing people who never did this kind of work for a living overlook is PID. You don’t just shoot at Unidentified IR contacts. You have to cue other sensors onto them to try to establish PID.
Who do you think has worked on IR concealment longer and incorporated those lessons-learned into the F-35 vs J-20?
Lockheed has been working on RF Stealth and IR concealment since the late 1950s. China just barely got into the game in the 1990s.
That means F-35s will have first-look, first PID, first-shoot. J-20 will be defensive the entire time it spends within WEZ.
AIM-120D has far greater range than you listed. It has demonstrated longer intercept range on a live target drone than the AIM-54C ever did. PL-15 is a paper capability until proven otherwise, and its seeker won’t have tracking capability until within maybe 6nm, assuming F-35s choose to not allow the automated EW system to do its job.
The short story is China is way behind the power curve in all of these spaces, no matter how many people they bribe and steal from.
12
-
@heatblast876 F-35s since Lot 4 have had smaller frontal, oblique, and side RCS values than combat-coded F-22As, according to Lockheed’s own leadership and the materials science analysis if you know what you’re looking at.
If you look at the frontal aspect of the Raptor and F-35s, you will see cavity resonance areas between the intakes of the F-22 and its fuselage/nose root area. That’s bad for stealth. F-35s have no such features, because they use Diverterless Supersonic Inlets. F-35s also have newer generations of RAM, coatings, and layerings of the RAM that are far superior to the Raptors’s (both for performance and maintenance).
From oblique and side aspects, F-35s have RF transparent materials in the tailplane area, including the booms, h-stabs, v-stabs, keel web, their spars, and cores. F-22 has metallic flat surfaces around the TVC engine nozzles, mostly composite structures for the tailplanes, but with some aluminum spars and cores. Lot 4 and later F-35s (basically the entire production lot minus the initial 6 As, Bs, and Cs) dropped the aluminum spars and structures from the tailplane area to reduce weight and increase strength in order to meet the Key Performance Parameters set by the JPO.
F-22 has a lot of titanium construction for Mach 2+ performance and structural integrity for its heavy weight airframe to be able to sustain 9gs. That Titanium construction adds to RF reflectivity. F-35s use a lot less Titanium than the F-22, and a lot more % of carbon fiber/carbon resin epoxy laminates, and carbon Bismaleimide composites. This plus the carbon nanotube RAM contribute to a smaller RCS value set from all aspects. If someone tells you any differently, you can write that source off as incompetent when it comes to this subject.
For the Su-57, they are relying on taping off seams and coating after that, which is a nightmare for maintenance. They also failed miserably with their design from the first bulkhead if you look at it. It’s basic VLO techniques that were somehow ignored on a structure than contributes around 33% of your frontal RCS. They decided to make that a reflector instead of a deflector for some reason. China did not make that gross error with the J-20, and they are even incorporating it on the J-10B/C. They also have incorporate this basic stealth design approach on the J-11D.
We simply don’t know what the production Su-57 RCS values are, nor do we know the J-20, J-11B/C, or J-11D. For the 4.7 Gen designs, they will still be large due to external stores and other bad shaping and materials.
They are not as up-to-speed with this technology set and materials science as Lockheed, and never will be. Lockheed has a head-start dating back to the 1940s, from where they did technical exploration of Nazi Germany’s early stealth systems.
12
-
9
-
9
-
@romankovalev7894 F-35s are the safest, most reliable fighter series ever produced, with the lowest MMHPFH and highest availability rates of any designs to-date. Even the F-35B has lower MMHPFH than the F-16. F-35A has astonishingly-low MMHPFH at 3.5-4.4hrs currently.
For sensors, look at the building blocks available to China's industry, then work up from there. China can only produce low-quality, low performance semiconductors. You need high performance, high quality SCs to populate the AESA, EW antenna suite, and central processors. These are very real constraints, not imaginary things based on patriotic blindness.
If your SC materials are lower capability, it forces you to have to make a bigger antenna array for your AESA.
It also handicaps your ability to stabilize and process IR spectrum imagery, so the copycat DAS and EOTS on the J-20 will never be near the performance of those on JSF. Meanwhile, they're already onto the next generation EOTS and DAS that will populate Block 4 JSF, with 2x the resolution and lighter weight, less cost.
China are imitators with a very handicapped industrial sector when it comes to high quality electronics.
Now apply that to missiles as well. If China is building the electronics for their missiles, what's the pk? How robust is their weapons test community? How often do they live-fire on maneuvering, supersonic target drones with instrumented test range complexes?
8
-
7
-
7
-
@seraphm6573 Open Source updates for F-22A are listed in the Raptor Incremental Upgrade Program and kept very vague, but they have replaced the CIPs at least once with newer generation processors, used the open architecture that was available for 3x CIPs, gone to a newer APG-77(V)1 with unspecified improvements, replaced unspecified sensors with newer ones. No US fighter program has stayed static, so this is normal. You just can’t see from the outside what has changed due to the nature of the design.
Supersonic JDAM delivery and separation tests, followed by SDB separation tests were pretty big for the F-22A combat-coded Raptors. It’s a more capable VLO penetration strike platform than anything else except JSF and B-2A currently. That was done with Increment 3.1.
They programmed RF digital geolocation for surface target emitters to support its A2G capabilities, along with AESA SAR ground-mapping modes, and made it more interoperable with Link-16 protocols.
There was 3.2A with unspecified software-based improvements related to electronic protection, Link-16 receive, and PID enhancements.
Increment 3.2B brought in AIM-120D and AIM-9X interoperability, new IFDL, improved geolocation emitter detection/tracking/sharing, and some type of improved Weapon Employment Zone commonality.
It’s a much different weapons system than when it was first fielded. The major differences are in A2A capabilities, A2G weapons employment, networking, sensors, PID enhancements, EW, and processing power to support these capabilities.
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
5
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
In order to be mass produced, it needed to only have 2 engines. As long as 2 engines could lift it and its payload and take them on a global strike mission profile unrefueled, that was plenty of capability and lots of return on investment for well over 100 airframes. The Pratt & Whitney F135 engines used in the F-35 produce 28,000lb of thrust without afterburner. The new core module of the Enhanced P&W F135 allows it to produce 30,800lb of thrust 5 years ago, with likely improvements since then. That would be 56,000 - 61,600lb of thrust. If the B-21A has 86% of the take off gross weight of the B-2A, it would be 289,820lb. B-21A wingspan appears to be 147ft. This is a rough estimation extrapolating wing span and TOGW, but it’s a fun exercise to see if the math makes any sense for basic take-off performance:
B-21A estimate is 61,600 (2 x F135 variant motors in mil power) to 289,820lb or 0.21 Thrust-to-Weight Ratio
The current B-2A has 4x GE F118-GE-100 motors that produce 17,300lb each, or 69,200lb of thrust for a 337,000 - 376,000lb Take Off Weight.
B-2A is 69,200 to 337,000lb or 0.2 Thrust-to-Weight Ratio
69,200 to 376,000 is 0.18 T/W ratio at Maximum TOGW.
3
-
3
-
3
-
@franksun4017 AESA Radars antennae arrays are made from hundreds of Semiconductors. That’s what TRMs are. The lower quality SCs you have, the bigger you have to make the antenna arrays and still won’t have comparable performance due to lack of electron mobility. China sucks in this space.
When the antenna array is that large, you then have to make the first bulkhead very large, and you have to carry a certain weight in the nose with all the inefficient garbage electronics behind the Radar antennae. There are 2 power amplifiers that are critical to Radar operation. The first generates the waveform, which is sent to the antennae and resonated out in the airspace. Any reflections that come back to the Radar need to be converted from analog to digital, then amplified with the back end amp and run through a signals processor to make sense of the contact vs clutter.
If your industry sucks at these types of technologies, the overall Radar components will be heavy while still having bad thermal management. This results in a 70ft long albatross of a fighter that now needs lots of thrust to get it into the air, with a reasonable climb rate to optimum intercept altitudes, with optimum cruise speeds and range.
They have already stated that the Russian AL-31 motors are not enough to reach these desired areas of performance.
You might be tempted to critique the F-22 for being heavy, but its weight is largely driven by Mach 2+ performance requirements, along with the weapons bay cavities and actuators, as well as 1980s-1990s era RAM (heavy). F-22s are definitely not underpowered, because the US makes world-class fighter engines.
One thing I have noticed is that China has gone complete lockdown on reporting any mishaps with the J-20, which means they are very sensitive about exposing its weaknesses. In contrast, we have many reports on J-10 and J-11 crashes (happen quite frequently).
3
-
@chrisdoulou8149 There is a lot more to AESAs than configuring them as AESAs. TRM materials and semiconductors need to be of high quality, with high density elements that deal with heat really well.
These are spaces in the Semiconductor industry where China is grossly lacking, and these chips are tightly controlled in the US.
In practice, it means a US-built AESA can have a smaller antenna array, with much higher TRM density, with better-performing TRM elements, that can radiate longer due to their thermal management properties.
This is likely the biggest factor in why the J-20 has such a huge Radome and 70ft long airframe.
Just to be able to achieve whatever capability it was they wanted for detection range on specific RCS values, with their limited TRM and SC technology, they had to make a giant nose.
The F-22's APG-77, while smaller, has higher TRM density, better SC materials, better processing power, better thermal management, and always will since the US produces cutting edge SC technology that is closed to everyone else, except Canada, Australia, UK, and JSF partners.
APG-81 in the F-35 is smaller than the APG-77 in the Raptor, but more capable.
Raptor incremental upgrade program is bringing the combat-coded F-22As from later blocks up to speed with newer chip sets, new CIPs, and new unspecified sensors.
China has been cut off from US and European SC manufacturing technology, so they will have to resort to black and grey market sources for less-capable SC materials.
This is why they pay so much money to the Bushes, the Clintons, Obama, and Bidens.
3
-
@chrisdoulou8149 If you look at the J-10 and J-11 mishap incidents, they have very high rates of catastrophic engine failures, spontaneous engine fires that ignite fuel cells, with predictable airframe losses and fatalities.
China has thrown billions at their domestic engine program, which meant placing high-level spy engineers in Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce, and GE, who were all caught.
It took the US from the 1940s to 1990s to perfect the reliable, high performance fighter engine technology, with a vast workforce of engineers, technicians, and maintainers spread throughout the world at US bases.
Since the IPE, the US pushed fighter engine technology into stealth fighter engines that are integrated into the thermal management, low observability, and improved performance.
China will never reach that level of capability since China is cut off from certain critical technologies, and has relied on Russian excrement motors from 1950s-present as a crutch, rather than innovating.
The necessary innovation to create the industrial infrastructure for fighter engines needed to have been built in the 1960s-1970s. 2010s is 40 years too late, even with bribing US Presidents.
3
-
3
-
@jetli740 The J-20 is very much its own overall airframe design, using common VLO shaping techniques found on F-22 and F-35. I’m talking about specific things like the DSI inlet, which the US pioneered on the F-16 DSI testbed, then used for the F-35’s intake design. Then look at the EOTS from the F-35 and then look at the J-20 EOTS copy.
Then look at the engine nozzles for the new WS-15, or the HUD copied from the F-22 HUD, or the DAS-like apertures on J-20, etc. Copy, copy, copy, lack of innovation. This mimics the Chinese lack of neuroplasticity to be able to create new ideas and solutions, due to the character copying with Kanji. It’s very bad for innovation and is now showing how the society will collapse after One-Child policy of infanticide. 35 years of murdering babies has cut the future out from underneath China, all done by themselves.
3
-
@extraacct478 Lockheed senior management said that since Lot 4, the F-35 has lower RCS values than the F-22. I was designing RAM in the mid-1980s just for fun, or how I would approach that engineering challenge. Unbeknownst to me, I duplicated the early German RAM shaping used on their U-Boat masts before they went to the epoxy resin lead sphere matrix on their 2nd iteration of RAM, so I was 42 years behind the power curve on that one.
I basically used what I knew about anechoic chambers at the time, and applied that. I didn’t learn about the German RAM shaping until a few years ago, when an Australian MoD engineer revealed it in a presentation.
RF propagation physics 101: There are all types of frequencies of course from different types and widths of emitters. Attenuating a design to minimize reflection/resonance back to the emitter has been a cat and mouse game for generations. The A-12 was the first operational US aircraft to incorporate these techniques, largely relying on a lot of composites and shaping along the leading and trailing edges, as well as use of composites for the variable shock inlet spikes and vertical stabs.
Just from what I have seen from photos of the F-35 layered RAM, I can tell you they have taken into consideration far more than one specific bandwidth in the RF spectrum, as well as the IR spectrum. The comments about F-35 stealth not working or not being viable in the long-run are coming from people who don’t even know what the RF spectrum is.
"Group of allies purchasing either one of these.” Allies are not able to purchase F-15S because F-15S was a Bondo/wood mock-up, nothing more. This is coming from former McDonnell Douglas-turned Boeing employee at the St. Louis Plant who said it was a stupid publicity stunt that didn’t even do static testing.
I have not mentioned any specific RCS values, nor would I acknowledge such values had I ever seen them. Instead, you might want to read the open source details discussed by the JSF program leads and test pilots in a book called, "F-35: from Concept to Cockpit” 871 pages, meant for AeroEs. I think you have to be a member of a specific association that published it to have access though. It’s OSINT.
3
-
3
-
3
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
@extraacct478 Considering how many generations we've been working on VLO technologies, I wouldn't be surprised if they've tackled multi-bandwidth RF better than most can imagine on JSF.
When we were on B-1B CTF, they kept the LO features very hush, even from people working on it. Turns out the frontal RCS is smaller than a Viper, which is impressive. I'm not aware of any effort to employ LO on the B-1A, and the podded nacelle configuration changed when they dropped the Mach 2+ requirement, favoring non LoS intake ductwork arrangement to protect the low pressure stage from direct cavity resonance.
There's a retired career F-16 FWS Instructor who interviewed dozens of F-35A pilots. They said they can't see each other outside of WVR, but are tracking Low Earth Orbit satellites when they look up.
Both F-35 and F-22 pilots report that F-35s are defeating Raptors in Large Force Exercises because of their sensors since 2017.
I think the Chinese are farther ahead in LO after the Clintons, Bushes, and Obama/Biden/Hillary gave them access to stuff they had no business even knowing about.
One of our friends on B-2 CTF said he was ordered to give access to the cockpit to a female Chinese intelligence officer at ED in the 1990s.
She went up in there like a Japanese tourist with her camera. He asked her, "Why is this so interesting to you?"
Her: "To use against you, of course!"
Bushes are surprisingly-sinophile as well. Neil merged his US Defense Aerospace Holdings firm with his Chinese real estate front in 2019.
People at those levels sell access to technology we developed over decades for our defense, and they're selling it to our enemies.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
@georgedang449 F135 was pushed to 52,000lb in the test apparatus. They currently operate de-rated for longevity at 40,000lb, with max at 43,000lb in burner. Mil power is 25,000-28,000lb.
Pratt just won the contract to upgrade with their improved performance core, which turns it into a 47,300lb thrust class in burner, and 30,800lb thrust in mil power. Thrust Specific Fuel Consumption is improved by at least 7%, which adds another 50nm to the combat radius.
F-35A and C have extremely long combat radii and persistence. F-35B has performance similar to the baby Hornet in Radius/Range.
1