Herald , your lovely link doesn 't provide anything against what I say and far from it . The last part is interesting but the main talk is about "semi-active" guidance . Old stuff ...

(I keep the link , mind)

 

Cheers .

on the attenuation effect of signal, and look again at HOW guidance works (what antenna arrays you need and where you should expect them on a missile body and then stop lying about this stuff, 

 

Do you understand me? Stop lying. I've given you more than enough resources. You no longer have any excuse to lie.

 

Herald

 

Herald , for the last time , the Mid-link antennas are on the rear of the Mica .

Case closed .

 

One more time , I would like to come back on some of the Rafale 's stealth features (maybe I should start a new thread) .

In this regard , most engineers agree that Dassault from France is ahead in Europe and Saab from Sweden being a close second . Both Countries are more or less running the "stealth" business in Europe .

It shows . 

Dassault said a long time ago that the Rafale RCS was 10 times lower than the M2000 , Sweden said that the Gripen RCS was "very low" . The Eurofighter Team also said that the Typhoon had some RCS management .

Few pictures will help the reader to understand and look by himself .

The Rafale ' s nose RCS is very low :

 

 

 

The "cross" shape is telling as well as the curved spaces in between the airframe and the air intakes . Look also at the link in between the fuselage and the wings .

 

The air intakes are always the main RCS problem especialy from the front and Dassault went further than Saab and Typhoon into the stealth design :

 

 

Notice the real "S" shape and the RAM coating .  The fan blades are not visible from the front , the air intakes are also hidden from any look-down position .

 

Typhoon from the front :

 

 

 

3 Rafales with 2 Typhoons . Look how the Typhoon air intakes looks like the F-16 Viper 's intakes :

 

 

 

The Gripen : 

 

Of course , this is MUCH better : the F-35 :

 

 

But I hope that everybody understood what I mean .

 

Cheers .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some readers will be happy to know how the "sensor fusion" really works onboard the Rafale .

Here is a drawing showing the complete system ramifications . Study it :

 

 

This is 5th Generation regarding the data-fusion and the computing power (Spectra also has its own 3 processors on top to compute data on the fly without help from the mainframe computers (MTU and EMTI)) .

 

Link that to a 200km bubble EM detection range , a very efficient Autopilot and you get something who will evade most threats without being detected in the first place .

The last RedFlag proved that the Rafale could penetrate unnoticed deep into heavily EM territory and fire its AASMs with total inpunity and come back to base (while recording every EM emissions around for later purposes) .

 

Did the  Gripen , Typhoon , SH , Strike-Eagle , SU-30 , etc , archived it ? As far as we know , NO .

 

Cheers .

 

 

 

 

"But I hope that everybody understood what I mean ."

 

Yes, that you are a clueless dolt that knows about as much about stealth as you do about playing a banjo.

 

The Rafale was not designed with stealth in mind.  It was simply not a consideration at the time it was first developed.  Late in the process once France had an oppotunity to see where the US was going with stealth designs a few features were retro-fitted to the Rafale, leaving it with a moderately reduced RCS by 4th generation standards.

 

Far better than an Su-27 perhaps, but not nearly as good as a Super Hornet. 

 

In no case is it fair to call a Rafale a stealthy aircraft.  Canards, a fixed refueling probe, a vertical tail, the heat shield just above the engine at the rear of the aircraft... generally poor fit and finish... nothing about that design is intended to be stealthy.

 

 

Naturally since you have been lying about this for years now you aren't going to stop today.

 

 

"The last RedFlag proved that the Rafale could penetrate unnoticed deep into heavily EM territory and fire its AASMs with total inpunity and come back to base (while recording every EM emissions around for later purposes) ."

 

More lies I see...

 

It is stupidity like the above that removes any doubt that you are a troll.

 

Red Flag has been explained to you probably dozens of times.  Red Flag is not some idiot fanboy's idea of an aerial competition with a big shiny trophy at the end.  Red Flag is a simulated air-war with some very specific rules, intended to educate its participants.

 

At no point were Rafale's flying alone doing anything with "impunity."  To even suggest they might have been demonstrates an utter and complete ignorance of what Red Flag is, or a willingness to shamelessly lie.  In your case I think it is a mixture of both. 

 

All aircraft at Red Flag work as part of a team. If Rafales were in the air practicing a low level attack, there would have been a heck of a lot of other aircraft in the air doing other missions, including providing top cover for the Rafales.  Why? Because that is the WHOLE POINT of Red Flag.  If all you were going to do was fly Rafale's low all by themselves you wouldn't bring them all the way to Red Flag to do it. 

 

There are simulated badguys at Red Flag, and they will simulate killing you... but Red Flag is not a contest, and is not designed to test or prove specific platforms.   Red Flag is about learning to fight as a team against a realistic, but decidedly inferior, simulated opponent.

 

Even an idiot fanboy should know this by now.

 

 

Rufus :

Pfff ..."

Rufus , you know jack sh*t about DACT excercises . The only thing you did get right is this : "Red Flag is a simulated air-war with some very specific rules, intended to educate its participants." 

The rest is utter bollocks . You should try to meet some pilots and educate yourself like I did .

 

Listen to me : within the decided rules , do your best to fulfill the mission . This is the motto .

I have talked to pilots , other frenchmen friends of mine also talked to pilots and maintenance team and I can assure you that within the rules , every shot is allowed , even under the belt . believe me . If it wasn 't the case , nobody would learn anything , you stupid man !

 

Cheers .

See the bad seam fits of the tinnel segments? See the manufacture defects at the inlet cowl?

 

 









Still trying to BS us, liar

 

Radar Cross Section Fundamentals

There are two basic approaches to passive radar cross section reduction: shaping to minimize backscatter, and coating for energy absorption and cancellation. Both of these approaches have to be used coherently in aircraft design to achieve the required low observable levels over the appropriate frequency range in the electromagnetic spectrum.


Shaping

There is a tremendous advantage to positioning surfaces so that the radar wave strikes them at close to tangential angles and far from right angles to edges, as will now be illustrated. To a first approximation, when the diameter of a sphere is significantly larger than the radar wavelength, its radar cross section is equal to its geometric frontal area. The return of a one-square-meter sphere is compared to that from a one-meter-square plate at different look angles. One case to consider is a rotation of the plate from normal incidence to a shallow angle, with the radar beam at right angles to a pair of edges. The other is with the radar beam at 45 degrees to the edges. The frequency is selected so that the wavelength is about 1/10 of the length of the plate, in this case very typical of acquisition radars on surface to air missile systems. At normal incidence, the flat plate acts like a mirror, and its return is 30 decibels (dB) above (or 1,000 times) the return from the sphere. If we now rotate the plate about one edge so that the edge is always normal to the incoming wave, we find that the cross section drops by a factor of 1,000, equal to that of the sphere, when the look angle reaches 30 degrees off normal to the plate. As the angle is increased, the locus of maxima falls by about another factor Of 50, for a total change of 50,000 from the normal look angle. Now if you go back to the normal incidence case and rotate the plate about a diagonal relative to the incoming wave, there is a remarkable difference. In this case, the cross section drops by 30 dB when the plate is only eight degrees off normal, and drops another 40 dB by the time the plate is at a shallow angle to the incoming radar beam. This is a total change in radar cross section of 10,000,000!

From this, it would seem that it is fairly easy to decrease the radar cross section substantially by merely avoiding obviously high-return shapes and attitude angles. However, multiple-reflection cases have not yet been looked at, which change the situation considerably. It is fairly obvious that energy aimed into a long, narrow, closed cavity, which is a perfect reflector internally, will bounce back in the general direction of its source. Furthermore, the shape of the cavity downstream of the entrance clearly does not influence this conclusion. However, the energy reflected from a straight duct will be reflected in one or two bounces, while that from a curved duct will require four or five bounces. It can be imagined that with a little skill, the number of bounces can be increased significantly without sacrificing aerodynamic performance. For example, a cavity might be designed with a high-cross-sectional aspect ratio to maximize the length-to-height ratio. If we can attenuate the signal to some extent with each bounce, then clearly there is a significant advantage to a multi-bounce design. The SR-71 inlet follows these design practices.

However, there is a little more to the story than just the so called ray tracing approach. When energy strikes a plate that is smooth compared to wavelength, it does not reflect totally in the optical approximation sense, i.e., the energy is not confined to a reflected wave at a complementary angle to the incoming wave. The radiated energy, in fact, takes a pattern like a typical reflected wave structure. The width of the main forward scattered spike is proportional to the ratio of the wavelength to the dimension of the radiating surface, as are the magnitudes of the secondary and tertiary spikes. The classical optical approximation applies when this ratio approaches zero. Thus, the backscatter - the energy radiated directly back to the transmitter increases as the wavelength goes up, or the frequency decreases. When designing a cavity for minimum return, it is important to balance the forward scatter associated with ray tracing with the backscatter from interactions with the first surfaces. Clearly, an accurate calculation of the total energy returned to the transmitter is very complicated, and generally has to be done on a supercomputer.


Coatings and Absorbers

It is fairly clear that although surface alignment is very important for external surfaces and inlet and exhaust edges, the return from the inside of a cavity is heavily dependent on attenuating materials. It is noted that the radar-frequency range of interest covers between two and three orders of magnitude. Permeability and dielectric constant are two properties that are closely associated with the effectivity of an attenuating material. They both vary considerably with frequency in different ways for different materials. Also, for a coating to be effective, it should have a thickness that is close to a quarter wavelength at the frequency of interest.


High Temperature Coatings

Reduction of radar cross section of engine nozzles is also very important, and is complicated by high material temperatures. The electromagnetic design requirements for coatings are not different from those for low temperatures, but structural integrity is a much bigger issue.


Jet Wakes

The driver determining radar return from a jet wake is the ionization present. Return from resistive particles, such as carbon, is seldom a significant factor. It Is important in calculating the return from an ionized wake to use nonequilibrium mathematics, particularly for medium and high altitude cases. The very strong ion density dependency on maximum gas temperature quickly leads to the conclusion that the radar return from the jet wake of an engine running in dry power is insignificant, while that from an afterburning wake could be dominant.


Component Design

When the basic aircraft signature is reduced to a very low level, detail design becomes very important. Access panel and door edges, for example, have the potential to be major contributors to radar cross section unless measures are taken to suppress them. Based on the discussion of simple flat plates, it is clear that it is generally unsatisfactory to have a door edge at right angles to the direction of flight. This would result in a noticeable signal in a nose on aspect. Thus, conventional rectangular doors and access panels are unacceptable. The solution is not only to sweep the panel edges, but to align those edges with other major edges on the aircraft. The pilot's head, complete with helmet, is a major source of radar return. It is augmented by the bounce path returns associated with internal bulkheads and frame members. The solution is to design the cockpit so that its external shape conforms to good low radar cross section design rules, and then plate the glass with a film similar to that used for temperature control in commercial buildings. Here, the requirements are more stringent: it should pass at least 85% of the visible energy and reflect essentially all of the radar energy. At the same time, a pilot would prefer not to have noticeable instrument-panel reflection during night flying. On an unstable, fly by wire aircraft, it is extremely important to have redundant sources of aerodynamic data. These must be very accurate with respect to flow direction, and they must operate ice free at all times. Static and total pressure probes have been used, but they clearly represent compromises with stealth requirements. Several quite different techniques are in various stages of development. On board antennas and radar systems are a major potential source of high radar visibility for two reasons. One is that it is obviously difficult to hide something that is designed to transmit with very high efficiency, so the so called in band radar cross section is liable to be significant. The other is that even if this problem is solved satisfactorily, the energy emitted by these systems can normally be readily detected. The work being done to reduce these signatures cannot be described here.


Infrared Radiation

There are two significant sources of infrared radiation from air breathing propulsion systems: hot parts and jet wakes. The fundamental variables available for reducing radiation are temperature and emissivity, and the basic tool available is line of sight masking. Recently some interesting progress has been made in directed energy, particularly for multiple bounce situations, but that subject will not be discussed further here. Emissivity can be a double edged sword, particularly inside a duct. While a low emissivity surface will reduce the emitted energy, it will also enhance reflected energy that may be coming from a hotter internal region. Thus, a careful optimization must be made to determine the preferred emissivity pattern inside a jet engine exhaust pipe. This pattern must be played against the frequency range available to detectors, which typically covers a band from one to 12 microns. The short wavelengths are particularly effective at high temperatures, while the long wavelengths are most effective at typical ambient atmospheric temperatures. The required emissivity pattern as a function of both frequency and spatial dispersion having been determined, the next issue is how to make materials that fit the bill. The first inclination of the infrared coating designer is to throw some metal flakes into a transparent binder. Coming up with a transparent binder over the frequency range of interest is not easy, and the radar coating man probably won't like the effects of the metal particles on his favorite observable. The next move is usually to come up with a multi layer material, where the same cancellation approach that was discussed earlier regarding radar suppressant coatings is used. The dimensions now are in angstroms rather than millimeters.

The big push at present is in moving from metal layers in the films to metal oxides for radar cross section compatibility. Getting the required performance as a function of frequency is not easy, and it is a significant feat to get down to an emissivity of 0.1, particularly over a sustained frequency range. Thus, the biggest practical ratio of emissivities is liable to be one order of magnitude. Everyone can recognize that all of this discussion is meaningless if engines continue to deposit carbon (one of the highest emissivity materials known) on duct walls. For the infrared coating to be effective, it is not sufficient to have a very low particulate ratio in the engine exhaust, but to have one that is essentially zero. Carbon buildup on hot engine parts is a cumulative situation, and there are very few bright, shiny parts inside exhaust nozzles after a number of hours of operation. For this reason alone, it is likely that emissivity control will predominantly be employed on surfaces other than those exposed to engine exhaust gases, i.e., inlets and aircraft external parts. The other available variable is temperature. This, in principle, gives a great deal more opportunity for radiation reduction than emissivity, because of the large exponential dependence. The general equation for emitted radiation is that it varies with the product of emissivity and temperature to the fourth power. However, this is a great simplification, because it does not account for the frequency shift of radiation with temperature. In the frequency range at which most simple detectors work (one to five microns), and at typical hot-metal temperatures, the exponential dependency will be typically near eight rather than four, and so at a particular frequency corresponding to a specific detector, the radiation will be proportional to the product of the emissivity and temperature to the eighth power. It is fairly clear that a small reduction in temperature can have a much greater effect than any reasonably anticipated reduction in emissivity.

The third approach is masking. This is clearly much easier to do when the majority of the power is taken off by the turbine, as in a propjet or helicopter application, than when the jet provides the basic propulsive force. The former community has been using this approach to infrared suppression for many years, but it is only recently that the jet-propulsion crowd has tackled this problem. The Lockheed F 117A and the Northrop B 2 both use a similar approach of masking to prevent any hot parts being visible in the lower hemisphere. In summary, infrared radiation should be tackled by a combination of temperature reduction and masking, although there is no point in doing these past the point where the hot parts are no longer the dominant terms in the radiation equation. The main body of the airplane has its own radiation, heavily dependent on speed and altitude, and the jet plume can be a most significant factor, particularly in afterburning operation. Strong cooperation between engine and airframe manufacturers in the early stages of design is extremely important. The choice of engine bypass ratio, for example, should not be made solely on the basis of performance, but on a combination of that and survivability for maximum system effectiveness. The jet-wake radiation follows the same laws as the engine hot parts, a very strong dependency on temperature and a multiplicative factor of emissivity. Air has a very low emissivity, carbon particles have a high broadband emissivity, and water vapour emits in very specific bands. Infrared seekers have mixed feelings about water vapour wavelengths, because, while they help in locating jet plumes, they hinder in terms of the general attenuation due to moisture content in the atmosphere. There is no reason, however, why smart seekers shouldn't be able to make an instant decision about whether conditions are favourable for using water-vapour bands for detection.
 

 From this it can be seen that while the Squall was designed to be a lot of things (mainly a pedestrian low altitude intruding bomb truck).all aspect all spectrum  low observable was NOT one of the qualities that was even considered. . 

I am not going to respond anymore to you Rufus . Your ignorance is staggering ...

 

Cheers .

Herald , for God sake stop your never ending bashing . You go nowhere .

Like many French haters , you don 't like anything French and when it comes to military things , the USA must be the benchmark . Could you please put your flag down and talk like an adult and think a bit in front of your keyboard before jumping on it and typing BS ?

 

Every stuff I post , you jump on like a mad monkey with all sorts of irrelevant links and verbal abuse . You are a troll and your intelligence is less than average . In fact , SP doesn 't need you , we could do better without you .

Your last post is only a disgusting saliver spit and nothing else .

 

I mean , calling the Rafale a "pedestrian low altitude intruding bomb truck" clearly show your bias .

SYSOPS , how do you want me to respond to such vile and venomous attack ?  This is a clear violation of the board rules if you ask me . You are very clear about the definition of "trolling" and what Herald is doing should be dealt with and promptly .

 

Cheers .

 

 

 

 

 

Oh?  Was that between deliveries?  lol

 

You can get as indignant as you want, but you are a fake, and we both know it.  You waste your time and ours posting your poorly thought out lies to this message board, and when someone calls you on it... you lie some more and try to pretend you have "educated" yourself. (which you follow up shortly by posting more ignorant garbage that even the teenagers on this board can instantly recognize as such)

 

Let me spell it out for you one more time fanboy.  Red Flag is not a competition.  Red Flag didn't "prove" anything about the Rafale, certainly not in comparison to other similar aircraft.  Red Flag is not about different forces getting together to prove how great they are... 

 

How many times do we need to pound that into your teeny brain before it stays there?

 

 

 

Listen to me fanboy, Red Flag is not about "winning."  It is about learning.

 

On one iteration Rafale's might be tasked with destroying a certain target.  The next day they will likely fullfil a different role as a different group does a similar mission.(different missions are intentionally spread around)   Nobody is sitting there scheming out the best way to use the available aircraft to best "win."  It is about training.  All participants are there to get a good learning experience, including those with less capable equipment or less proficient crews.  What do you think this is?  Some kind of a football game where you put your best team on the field and leave the slow kids to sit on the sidelines?

 

In the real world, you may very well be fighting with forces that include older equipment and/or less proficient crews.

 

That is one of the things that is so amazingly stupid about the little scenarios you dream up.  You honestly seem to think the Rafale was flying alone out there against a horde of enemies, evading all of them, smashing the targets, and returning home to triumphant cheers, sprays of champagne and of course a great big Red Flag Championship Trophy. 

 

The reality is that dozens of aircraft from several different forces were in the air, all doing different missions, including SEAD, EW, AWAC, aerial refueling, and yes, providing fighter cover for the Rafales so they can do their low level strike... how do I know this?  Because this is how professionals fight, and thus how professionals train. 

 

Neither the blue force nor the red force is trying to invent new tactics during the exercise or taking uncessary risks. 

 

And you KNOW it at last. Because even you can read the plain English that exposes you and your pet plane for both of what they are.

 

Not what you claim to be.

 

Herald

You 're both wrong , on all accounts .

Since there is nothing I can do or post to show you the light , I will do without you . 

Simple .

 

Cheers .