sigh.  a bit more blah blah.  I'd like to see a comparative thermal shot of this early dorsal Rafale against a ventral later model.

the hot spots are still going to converge in either loc anyway.....  the only way that it wouldn't would be if the vents were pre-chilled, the tunnels were chilled, the materials were changed etc.....

dorsal or ventral you still have a heat exchange problem.

but then again, what would I know ..... 

"What kind of lunatic ever thought something like this was going to be "discrete" to radar?"

 

That refueling probe alone probably has a bigger RCS than an F-35... and that says nothing about the rest of the plane and its weapons.

 

that the Dassault engineers made when they designed the Squall in the 1970s was to design it as a low level penetration aircraft. They reasoned that the most important aspect to mask against Russian look down radars was the TOP/FRONT and this was how and where they designed their RCS masking strategies; including the chines covering the jet engine intakes, considering that curvature of the Earth and high speed was sufficient defense against low altitude Russian IADS systems otherwise. WRONG solution. The Russian look down radars turned out to be far better than the 1%ers ever dreamed. Also it turned out that Russian point defense and local defense SAMs (and GUNS) with their IRSTS and optical trackers were far better than the French engineers ever envisioned, too.

Hence the USAF tactical exploit of the altitude coverage gap between guns and missiles and the ALL ASPECT, ALL SPECTRUM  emphasis on aeroshell signal management.

 

Herald

It 's getting tiring Herald .

 

""This liaison aircraft missile is carried by small antennas in the rear of the missile. Extremely protected against electronic jamming , it is almost undetectable .""

h*tp://frenchnavy.free.fr/weapons/mica/mica_fr.htm

 

""The missile receives its information through a small antenna on the rear of the missile.""

h*tp://jepenseakoi.skyrock.com/

Then , if the link was bad or the antennas badly placed , how would the VL Mica be so good ? And the Aster ?

The VL (Vertical Launched) Mica really shows that the hardware is working as expected , because it can be fired anywhere on a 360deg bubble . The receiver has to be well placed to receive the mid-link updates every 500 milliseconds , don 't you think ?

 

h*tp://www.army-technology.com/projects/vlmica/

 

Stop bashing the Mica , it is an excellent design .

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