Case

Didn't you say that of the last release? :D Thanks for the details on the engine! Seem like you confirmed that good programs are never written from scratch, but need to converge a bit...

Can I borrow that axe? I got some code to chop too :)

Eight hundred lines shorter!?! WTH have you been doing? :music_whistling:

Why can't it be used as an example? Why would there be any difference between technology developed in the Soviet Union or outside the Soviet Union? If your point is that the technology is more likely to developed and developed faster under a communist regime compared to a commercial regime, you may be very mistaken. I would argue quite the opposite.

I wonder when the time comes where two aircraft sharing information via datalink will be able to simply triangulate an aircraft that is jamming their radars with the best jammer available. In the end, even the most sophisticated jammer is still nothing more than a big I AM HERE sign when triangulated. Perhaps that time has already passed :D

I beg to differ. I think it is better to stay above SHORAD and AAA and be able to spot launches and dive accordingly than to stay low and give you no room to manouver without losing speed and getting in an even bigger mess... This is more a bug than a realistic feature, especially since it is set at 10m exactly... It is even more unrealistic to engage a S300 site in an A-10. I'd say killing Osa's and Tor's with A-10's is already pushing the limits of reality. The challenge in flying A2G is not knowing what you are up against. Take a nice column of vehicles with one or two SHORADs... When you find the column you don't know which are the guys that'll shoot you. So you have to ID these first before you can use the gun on the soft targets. Killing trucks with Mavericks is just a waste. So either use the TV to ID the unit or, if you really like a challenge, spiral in slowly and ID the SHORAD the moment it fires at you.

That is indeed weird... can you post a screenshot of the HUD in this situation?

Yes you will, but Rmax will not be 12 km, it will be a lot smaller because the closure rate is small (or negative, see my previous post).

Maybe you are not aware that Rmax is not a fixed number for a given missile. Rmax is computed from the distance between target and attacker and the closure rate between them. In a head on engagement the closure rate is large (say 500+500km/h), but in a tail chase the closure rate is small, and possibly even negative if the bandit is flying faster than the attacker. This means the missile has to cover much more distance than in a head on engagement.

Yes it should and it would if and only if the target would have a large enough signature for the seeker to pick up. Clearly the Mirage 2000 you are engaging does not fit those descriptions, and I doubt there is any aircraft in LockOn which would fit those descriptions.

Is it me, or does it seem that the time on the forum is running some 4 minutes ahead of schedule?

As was said before, the reason you get LA so late is because the seeker of the missile has nothing to lock onto... only when you get close enough will it be able to pick up the target... so even though the missile has enough energy to reach the target at 12 km in a head on engagement, it will only be able to guide towards it when you get within 5.

Yes, but what is Rmax in those situations? It will be much less than 12 km, so fractionally you get the LA earlier.

But if the enemy is smart enough he will see your launch and you have just wasted a missile...

Until you get the launch authorization, you are tracking the bandit by either your radar or the EOS. It is only until the seeker of the R-73 itself can see the bandit when you get the launch authorization and allowing the missile to track the bandit. Especially in a head-on engagement the heat signature will be smaller because you won't directly see his engines. Edit: Try to approach the bandit from the side, you should get the launch authorization earlier.

Can someone explain the difference between a patch and an add-on... cause half of the people replying in this thread don't seem to think there is any...

Let me assure you then that there is nothing dubious with the quality of this paper. Edit: It is always advisable to check arXiv papers and see if they actually got published. If they were, then there's most likely nothing dubious about them.

Maybe for fields other than astrophysics... however, this paper was accepted and published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) in March 2008; http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/abs/2008MNRAS.384.1207H I hope you're not saying that MNRAS is of dubious quality :music_whistling:

The quality isn't dubious at all. These guys are explaining how to use an off the shelf parabolic dish as the primary reflector and a specifically designed secondary reflector to increase the efficiency and simplicity of a radio telescope. It's just not applicable to this thread... You may want to brush up on it, cause beam-forming is at the heart of phased arrays, the technology behind actively or passively electronically scanned arrays, of which you talk so highly so often. As far as I can see the feed horn for the N001 radar is specifically not placed in the center for exactly the reason you quote above (though interference/diffraction is probably less of a problem compared to reflections). This is what you meant by saying the mainlobe is not at the center. Placing it off the center means you minimize central obstruction while minimizing possible shape changes to the main beam.

arXiv, eh? If by beam-splitting you mean to say beam-forming then that's completely out of the context. The idea behind a Cassegrain or any focusing instrument is to focus the radiation, and not to use interference to get directional information. I'm failing to see why this paper would answer the question about the maximum lockable range. The angular sensitivity graphs they show are typical in the sense that they show the mainlobe and the progressively weaker side lobes. The point you made earlier about diverging beams would probably make sense if the radar was working on different frequencies, where each frequency has a different beamsize, and sidelobes could be overlapping with the mainlobe. Still, you'd have to be talking about pretty different frequencies... Yes there is, it's just that your target moves in an extremely predictable manner... all you're doing is correcting for the rotation of the Earth :smilewink:

Exactly, but in (optical) telescopes the obstruction will always be orders of magnitude larger than the wavelength you're talking about (centimeters versus fractions of a micron), while I guess that the central obstruction for a radar is at least the same order of magnitude in size (both centimeters). That's why I said I don't see a problem with a 1m radar dish and tens of kilometers in range. But since we're both not experts on this I don't think we'll figure it out unless we find a good paper or outside help.

Unfortunately I don't. I'm just trying to apply the laws of physics on this. There may be some truth in the divergence of multiple beams, but they are still coming from the same transmitter, so I have a hard time seeing how a 1 meter dish could run into problems at ranges of tens of kilometers. More likely the divergence means loss of sensitivity, but still, a large enough target should and would make up for those losses. Hence I'm not surprised by Vekkinho's post above. Edit: with SK you mean SwingKid, right?

Those numbers seem reasonable, as at the diffraction limit a 1 m radar dish at an X-band frequency of 10 Ghz has a beamwidth (lambda/diameter) of 2 degrees. Still, this only sets the beamsize and possible the shape of the beam, but says nothing about a limit to the range to which the radar can keep a lock.

Thanks for these links. Google already led me to them, but didn't answer questions other than clearing up what GG meant by the mainlobe being offset from the center.

What kind of issues? I can imagine that the lobes are not symmetric or that there might be a loss of contrast in certain lines-of-sight that are obstructed by the receiver, but I don't see how this could and would affect a maximum lock range. Especially not one as fixed a range like you said before... in the end it all depends on the flux that the radar receives...