D-Scythe

Think you forgot about the underwater thing...unless you honestly believe travelling in water is not really any different from travelling in air. From which I would then counter why not build an submarine in the shape of an Flanker if air and underwater travel is in fact the same? Are we still talking about unguided Shkval's as opposed to the unknown and possibly not in service guided Shkval? Cause as far as I know, any modern attack sub can wade through salvos of unguided Shkval's at silent speed easily. If you only need to alter your depth a few hundred feet to evade a Shkval, it's not gonna be changing the tempo on ANYTHING. Sure, the attack is going to change - to an EASIER one. If you ever tried to attack a Seawolf or Virginia class sub with a Shkval at range, the captain is gonna laugh at you and send two ADCAPs your way. Then someone needs to get out the blonde dispensor because the Seawolf crew are going to be heroes.

What? I think you misread him - I clearly got the impression that by slowing down the Shkval becomes vulnerable just as an ordinary torpedo would to evasive manuevers (which American submariners are well-versed), and would thus give up its speed advantage. "Russia is developing a version of a supercavitating torpedo that does have some artificial intelligence and homing sensors including sonar. The problem is that for the sonar to work, the Shkval has to slow down drastically, in spurts, so it won't be blinded by its own noise and has a chance at acquiring and reacquiring its prey to make the needed terminal course corrections. This seeming enhancement to the Shkval introduces a substantial Achilles' heel: When moving slowly, and relying on conventional sensors to home on its target, the Shkval becomes vulnerable to all the standard evasive tactics and countermeasures with which American submariners are exceedingly well versed. The Shkval, during such an attack, also repeatedly forfeits its one apparent advantage, its speed, before having to accelerate again. Rumor has it that Moscow is trying to make a wire-guided Shkval, but trailing a wire that doesn't snap at 300 knots, or melt in the searing heat of the rocket exhaust, or cause the vacuum bubble to collapse enough for the whole weapon to suddenly tear itself apart, seem daunting problems indeed." Please at least re-read that one paragraph, if you're gonna pretend to have read the whole article ;)

GGTharos, I'm gonna have to disagree with you and just come out and say the Shkval is basically useless in every scenario save a last ditch, point blank defense weapon. If you disagree with me, just read this article and disagree with the author. http://www.military.com/soldiertech/0,14632,Soldiertech_060420_shkval,,00.html This guy puts my views on the Shkval in words far better than I ever could, and apparently he has some credentials as well. If you're still unconvinced, well, let's just agree to disagree.

The snapshot is only effective because the torpedoes can actively GUIDE themselves to target. It's like mad-dogging an AMRAAM - point and shoot, and hope your weapon finds the target itself. The Shkval with a conventional warhead is USELESS for this. You can't hit a moving target when all the information you have prior to launch is bearing information alone - it's like trying to HOJ an AMRAAM, but the AMRAAM doesn't guide. I'm not overestimating anything. You know sea combat happens in 3 dimensions right? Bearing information itself is useless - you need an accurate POSITION fix, especially if you're using a non-guided weapon. You might as well try to hit enemy fighters with unguided rockets with RWR data alone - unless they're tipped with nuclear warheads, Shkval's are probably equally useless to engage anything. You're kidding right? Let's do some math. Assuming a speed of 230 mph, it takes the Shkval 78 seconds to cross 10 000 yards or 10 miles. Even if the target submarine moves at 10 kts/18.2 kmph (considering modern subs have silent speeds twice that), it would've drifted ~400 m/1300 ft away in 78 seconds (the 5 mile/10120 yard engagement range). So, even if you had the EXACT position (bearing in horizontal and vertical) of the target, and launched the Shkval at the target with ZERO dispersion, The Shkval warhead needs to have a blast radius of almost half a kilometer to have any chance of killing the target evading at 10 kts. The target probably won't even have to worry about staying overly silent - chances are the Shkval will make so much noise as to make any subsequent targetting difficult. No, I know. I agree that as a quick reaction weapon at point blank range it's good to have. I just don't understand why some people regard the weapon so highly.

Yeah, the similarities are subtle. I can see why you might be confused.

Snap shot at what? It's not like submarines advertise their position whenever they launch a torpedo - what, you think all torpedoes go hot instantly when they get launched? Like the Shkval? Usually, normal torpedoes wait until the launching submarine is some distance away before cranking up the engine. Sure, you're gonna get some idea where the enemy sub is (enough to know you're under attack), but you're not going to get an exact location - certainly no data with enough precision to give your Shkval with anything more than an infinitisimal PK. There is NO pressure on the enemy submarine - do you know how exact the bearing measurement has to be in order to hit something 5, 10, 15 miles away? Worse yet, now the enemy has the EXACT fix on your location and can more accurately guide his torpedoes to you. Way to go, you're a dead man.

Um, the Shkval isn't THAT fast - only about 230 mph. Considering that modern torpedoes have an effective range well over 5 miles, it's still gonna take over a minute for the Shkval to cover that distance - plenty of time for evasive manuevers. The Shkval is nothing but a gimmick, and when fitted with a conventional warhead is absolutely useless at all ranges except point blank range. It's non-guiding and it's loud - hardly the ideal combination for any submarine. Say what you want about it, but give me a MK 48 ADCAP anyday.

Which incidentally is a rip off of the Eurofighter and F-22. All the designs posted here seem to be like "Eastern-ized" Raptors.

The J-13 models look almost exactly like the YF-22/23 prototypes with canards.

And generally bigger fighters have a larger RCS. Does that mean all large fighters have large RCS signatures? Get the idea?

Agreed. No idea where the idea that nuclear subs are loud comes from, but some of the quietest submarines (Ohio, Seawolf, Akula, etc.) are nuclear powered.

The Russians were probably more interested in the AIM-54A if anything. Saying the development of the MiG-31 was based on IRIAF F-14s is like saying the Su-27IB was developed from captured F-15E/I/S airframes - you have to be smoking some real good stuff to believe that.

Please, enlighten me. I didn't even know we had money to spend on spies :lol:

How many times does this have to be repeated? Those things *don't* guide. What *makes* them fast also *makes* them unguidable. You might as well be shooting unguided Phoenixes from an airplane - unless it has a nuclear warhead on it, it's not gonna hit anything.

One hundred and ten percent correct (JASSM excluded, but that's not even in service yet).

What's the difference between "regular" counter-measures and "irregular" counter-measures? There is no reason for stealth aircraft not to be equipped with chaffs, flares and ECM. They don't give away *anything* unless they're deployed, so they're *not* deployed until the aircraft is detected. Once the enemy knows you're there, the pilot can go wild with his defensive toys.

There's plenty of noise to filter out - you don't think all RF wavelengths just zip through the sky without generating any sorta clutter do you? Temperature, clouds, mainlobe, sidelobe, etc. Besides, how would the radar know when to turn on the notch and when to turn off the notch? Chances are there will always be some type of ground clutter in the any case, from the mainlobe or the side lobes (which is a SECOND notch). And then you factor in such things as multiple bandits, chaff, missiles, scintillation of radar - all things that would affect a radar tracking by RCS, but not by doppler.

No - the notch NEVER disappears. I don't know where you're getting your info, but it's not right. You still need doppler look up - else your target can blanket everything in chaff and you're screwed.

Nope. For Western radars, because of their design, lock on range is the same as detection range (LOMAC has got this wrong). Swingkid would be able to explain this in more detail if you wanna dig deeper into it. No, it would be true in a look up or look down situation. Look down is only different because naturally the radar has to deal with more clutter.

Never said anything about F-15s owning Raptors - it never will. The other new fighters, like Eurofighter, Rafale, etc. are NOT stealth - they have a smaller RCS for sure, but that just means the F-15's AESA radar will pick them out at 120 miles rather than 140. Detection 101 - doppler signature is usually a much more important factor in detection than RCS *except* from max radar range. You could have the RCS of a B-52 but if you have no doppler, you're invisible. Likewise, you can have the RCS of an F-117, but provided that the radar is within maximum detection range for your RCS, you're gonna be picked up. And some of you need to think more BVR. Sure, dogfights happen, and will always happen, but it never happens by choice. The victor of the engagement has long been decided BVR by the time the first SRAAM is fired. You win BVR, you win WVR, pure and simple. And unless it's stealthed or a MiG-31, nothing can consistenly out-BVR a good pilot in an Eagle, especially an updated one with -229A engines.

Hmm, I figure it can probably detect long-range missiles who's rocket motors have already burned out. Obviously, the missile body itself can be detected due to air friction, and by observing the position of the missile relative to the aircraft (e.g. incoming PN missiles look like a fixed dot from your canopy), the computers can deem it to be an incoming missile. False alarms will probably sky rocket though.

Basically you have IR sensors built into the airplane (like RWR antennaes) that are triggered whenever it detects a heat signature that the computers deem likely to be a missile.

If you ever have to get that slow in a dogfight, you've done something seriously wrong. Furballs are the great equalizer in combat; a MiG-21 with Python 4/R-73 is just as lethal a threat as a F-22. Anyway, if you put new Pratt and Whitney engines in the F-15, chances are it'll do stuff no other aircraft can do too. Well, quick and low-cost are relative terms - such upgrades would be quick/low-cost in comparison to developing a new fighter (a lot cheaper than Eurofighter), but obviously it's gonna be a pretty substantial upgrade. You're basically taking out the old stuff and putting in new computers, engines, radar and TEWS into the jet. It might be better to describe it as "low risk" - everything required is already in service. And yes, the F-15's RCS will still be large in comparison to it's (newer) competitors, but if the F/A-18E's ECM/towed decoys are as good as they say...

The -229 is powerful - indeed, CFT-less F-15Es can supercruise clean - but dated. Although it can be retrofitted into the F-15C, the Eagle can easily be modified to accommodate the newer F100-PW-229A engines instead, developed for Block 60+ F-16s. I think it can be scaled to produce something like 36 000lb of thrust, and can TVC if so desired by the customer. That pushes the thrust-to-weight ratio out of the 1.5-to-1 ballpark for a fully loaded Eagle, btw. Defensively the F-15 would need an overhaul as well although again, it would probably be a low-cost, quick process using existing equipment. Boeing could easily rip flight computers, ECM/towed decoys/chaff and some cheap-as$ RAM stuff from the F/A-18E/F (or even the F-16C+'s). The whole program could literally be a cut and paste job involving elements of other weapons systems already in service. Take the F-16's engines, the Super Hornet's avionics, and presto, the gap between the F-15 and it's competitors widens again. And then...Eurofighter? What's that?

Pretty sure the Gripen gets it's engines from Volvo, not the U.S. The RM12 is a development of the GE F404 (confirm?), but the Swedes have done a lot of things with it that should set the RM12 as something like the cousin of the wife of the uncle of the brother of the mother-in-law of the GE F400 family. Anyway, this stuff/crap about beating the F-15C is pointless - if the Eurofighter can't beat a 20 year-old Eagle air-to-air, something is seriously wrong with the European aerospace industry. Also consider if anyone even bothered to give the Eagle another MSIP-like upgrade, chances are it'll easily rip apart anything in the sky with a good pilot on board (cept an F-22). Hell, just add stuff that aren't even new - the APG-63V2/3 AESA, some cheap RAM/ECM/RWR upgrades, and the 15E's 229 engines from 15 years ago - it already has datalink, GPS, AIM-120C/D, JHMCS and AIM-9X - and you'll have super-cruising fighter that comes second only to the Raptor. Consider the *one* time they put -229 engines in a F-15C over Edwards, the thing went Mach 2.8 before the canopy started to melt. And there are *much* better engines available nowadays. The only reason why anything comes close to the F-15C right now is because no more money is being put into it, allowing its competitors to catch up. The fact that its 40 year old design has the potential to stay at the top of the A/A food chain speaks sh!tloads about the folks at McDonnell Douglas who built them back in the day.