yes Will F-35A be equipped with AESA radar?

[NytHawk]

18 minutes ago, Muchocracker said:

 

(makes the notch window extremely tight)

Even if a target could completely defeat the F35s FCR (Notching/EW etc), the F35 still has at least another 4 sources filtered and processed through its information fusion architecture to maintain a stable track independently from the radar alone.

[Muchocracker]

14 minutes ago, NytHawk said:

Even if a target could completely defeat the F35s FCR (Notching/EW etc), the F35 still has at least another 4 sources filtered and processed through its information fusion architecture to maintain a stable track independently from the radar alone.

And that's what makes it so powerful.

[TotenDead]

В 20.01.2025 в 14:14, Muchocracker сказал:

And that's what makes it so powerful.

Does it? It's like a Flanker in TPRL mode, huh

Edited January 21 by TotenDead

[Muchocracker]

10 minutes ago, TotenDead said:

Does it? It's like a Flanker in TPRL mode, huh

EOTS, DAS, RWR, and MADL donations all contribute weapons quality track data to its closed loop sensor fusion

Edited January 21 by Muchocracker

[TotenDead]

В 20.01.2025 в 13:29, Muchocracker сказал:

 

It's still very much an issue with AESA's, no radar is immune to main lobe clutter. But being a phased array it's afforded some advanced processing algorithms that you can't get with mechnical types. 
 

Processing algorithms have nothing to do with type of the array, you can make a Cassegrain radar on modern electronics with cutting-edge software and achieve similar results in that regard
 

[TotenDead]

1 минуту назад, Muchocracker сказал:

EOTS, DAS, RWR, and MADL donations all contribute weapons quality track data to its closed loop sensor fusion

Well, Su-27 irst is also called EOTS and for a reason, i suppose.
The fact that F-35 has extra sources of detection and tracking compared to the Su-27 is... Nothing special? I mean, it would be strange if technology stayed at the same level since the 80s, many post 2010 jets have similar capabilities

[Muchocracker]

1 hour ago, TotenDead said:

Processing algorithms have nothing to do with type of the array, you can make a Cassegrain radar on modern electronics with cutting-edge software and achieve similar results in that regard

It absolutely does. For DPCA and thus STAP to work. It requires many different receiver channels (commonly done at every single antenna element) and digital beam forming to process and filter the main lobe clutter by weighting normalized dopper and look angle. Thus requiring a phased array antenna. 

1 hour ago, TotenDead said:

Well, Su-27 irst is also called EOTS and for a reason, i suppose.
The fact that F-35 has extra sources of detection and tracking compared to the Su-27 is... Nothing special? I mean, it would be strange if technology stayed at the same level since the 80s, many post 2010 jets have similar capabilities

The difference is the SU-27's IRST is not a fully integrated sensor into a unified trackfile processing architecture. It can't use it in the same way the F-35 can. 

Edited January 21 by Muchocracker

[NytHawk]

5 hours ago, TotenDead said:

Does it? It's like a Flanker in TPRL mode, huh

5 hours ago, Muchocracker said:

EOTS, DAS, RWR, and MADL donations all contribute weapons quality track data to its closed loop sensor fusion

Many people don't understand that MADL isn't like link16 (Or any other A2A datalink) which only supplies target positions/vectors. Each MADL node shares every individual piece of sensor information they have on threats, can be considered a near perfect hivemind.

For example, imagine a flight of 6 F35s in an A2A engagement. One aircraft decides it's necessary to prosecute a target, which means it needs a trackfile on it with quality sufficient for weapons guidance. That F35 has the combined sensor information of 6 EOTS, 6 DAS, 6 RWR, 6 ESM suites and 6 AESAs, in which its onboard computers can fuse together.

Not a single other fighter platform allows for such advanced information transfer between aircraft, and the sheer amount of onboard processing of data from both onboard, and external sources.

Edited January 21 by NytHawk

[TotenDead]

3 часа назад, NytHawk сказал:

For example, imagine a flight of 6 F35s in an A2A engagement. One aircraft decides it's necessary to prosecute a target, which means it needs a trackfile on it with quality sufficient for weapons guidance. That F35 has the combined sensor information of 6 EOTS, 6 DAS, 6 RWR, 6 ESM suites and 6 AESAs, in which its onboard computers can fuse together.

Sounds cool, but one should keep in mind that each of those sensors sees its target/targets with some degree of error. Data transfer between planes adds more errors. And then even more errors are added because the receiving fighter needs to compute the real parameters of the target in relation to itself. Not only what you wrote is just excessive, if you fuze such an amount of information about a single target INSTEAD of using your own sensors you'll turn the jet into an informational junk bucket. And if those are used together with sensors of the plane which will launch its weapons - there's simply no point in receiving info from other 5 of the buddy planes

That doesn't mean that data transfer is useless in other scenarios, for example it's good for providing overall picture of the battlefield. But that's nothing beyond average

3 часа назад, NytHawk сказал:

Not a single other fighter platform allows for such advanced information transfer between aircraft, and the sheer amount of onboard processing of data from both onboard, and external sources.

Hard to argue with a religious belief when there's no info on other 5th gens and most of modern 4th gens

[TotenDead]

В 21.01.2025 в 15:21, Muchocracker сказал:

It absolutely does. For DPCA and thus STAP to work. It requires many different receiver channels (commonly done at every single antenna element) and digital beam forming to process and filter the main lobe clutter by weighting normalized dopper and look angle.

The Cassegrain antenna wouldn't even need those because it consists of a single powerful emitter and receiver, not thousands of those. What you wrote is used to counter specific limitations and problems encountered when working with AESAs. Each type of array has its own challenges, but other than that they are similar in their basis

В 21.01.2025 в 15:21, Muchocracker сказал:

Thus requiring a phased array antenna. 

It's the other way around. AESA might need a displaced phase center antenna и space-time adaptive processing to improve its capabilities because it's an AESA, a radar that consists of hundreds and even thousands tr modules

В 21.01.2025 в 15:21, Muchocracker сказал:

The difference is the SU-27's IRST is not a fully integrated sensor into a unified trackfile processing architecture. It can't use it in the same way the F-35 can. 

No wonder, the planes were created 30 years apart from each other. But basics are still the same

Edited January 24 by TotenDead

[NytHawk]

7 hours ago, TotenDead said:

And if those are used together with sensors of the plane which will launch its weapons - there's simply no point in receiving info from other 5 of the buddy planes

There are reasons to be receiving information from wingman via MADL despite having some of your own sensor suite tracking it. You simply get additional information you can work with that you simply can't obtain by yourself. An example of this is getting passive ranging from multiple DAS or ESM sensors working together. This is especially useful when trying to track LO targets which may not be within radar range yet, or if you want to engage a target without emitting from your own FCR.
 

[Temetre]

Am 18.1.2025 um 18:25 schrieb mikey69420:

I agree, but as a small detour, a simple AESA radar with full array beam steering isn't actually that hard to implement, the mathematical model is pretty straight forward to figure out (you simply consider a phase offset in each antenna of the array and calculate the field equations from there). If you want something more accurate, I'd say simply look up a picture of the AN/APG-81 radar on the internet, try to copy it's topology into a finite element solver like ansys hfss and simulate the shape of the beam. 

However we both know that the real radar is much much more complex than that. Consider now that individual antennas are steered, well, you've now got infinite combinations of how the beams may look like (not all of them may be interesting however). Not only that but no one outside the industry knows exactly how the AN/APG-81 controls it's individual antennas but even if we knew, it would be crazy hard to simulate this in real time in DCS but still, given enough time, they could simulate different beam combinations in finite element solvers and then do some careful approximations to have a believable model of AESA beams in DCS under different configurations.
But it doesn't stop there, now that the beam is sent, reflected and received (which seems to be simulated believably in DCS as the razbam F15E seems to have sidelobe tracking, clutter and interference effects to name a few), the signal processing for an AESA with individual beam steering would still be the most difficult task in my opinion. Of course, it would be crazy to assume that the whole signal processing flow would need to be implemented in DCS but you'd at least need an idea of what the AN/APG-81 engineers did with the sent beams, the modulation and processing algorithms for different radar modes, else you may break the whole radar implementation. It seems like an insurmountable task almost.

Though this is just my two cents after pondering on it for a couple of minutes, I am sure that some people at ED know far more about the intricacies of simulating radars than I do given their previous work, however, without any actual publicly available data of the behavior of that radar, I suspect they will try to make up the radar data by reading various sources and trying to imagine "believable" behavior and then fit it on a "simple" AESA radar model. How will they implement the intricacies such as individual antenna steering and all the radar modes that use different modulation schemes and signal processing without any real data? I've got no idea.

Sorry for the long message but as an electrical engineer in ic design, after I saw you and other people brought up the point of the f35 having an AESA radar, it made me wonder of how such a complex system could be simulated. At first I thought it would be straightforward, but after thinking about it some more, you fall down a rabbit hole that seems impossible to get out of. I'm not a radar engineer nor do I do a whole lot of complex signal processing so the only thing I could do is wish ED good luck and move on (while remaining suspicious).

Thanks for expanded on the topic, thats also my impression. Its "easy" to describe the basics, but any specifics as to how it actually performs in practice is just... near impossible to tell.

And its not like the mechanical radars are easy to simulate in the first place.

Am 21.1.2025 um 21:03 schrieb TotenDead:

Sounds cool, but one should keep in mind that each of those sensors sees its target/targets with some degree of error. Data transfer between planes adds more errors. And then even more errors are added because the receiving fighter needs to compute the real parameters of the target in relation to itself. Not only what you wrote is just excessive, if you fuze such an amount of information about a single target INSTEAD of using your own sensors you'll turn the jet into an informational junk bucket. And if those are used together with sensors of the plane which will launch its weapons - there's simply no point in receiving info from other 5 of the buddy planes

Thats where the F-35s data processing and sensor fusion might come in play. When you combine lots of poor quality data, you might be able to extrapolate better information. Same principle eg how F-16s can network their HTS-pods.

Its also where its hard to tell how or if anything works without some documentation thats almost certainly classified.

Edited January 25 by Temetre

[British_Dragon_14]

The simulated F-35 Radar we are going to get isn't going to be simulated as it is in real life. Not even close.

The DCS Simulated World we already fly around in knows exactly where everything is, the information is already stored in the CPU RAM.

The F-35 MFD Touch Screen is just going to give you the information that you already have or what the Server already has that is stored on the CPU RAM. Such as unit type, position & heading, speed & attitude and possibly IFF.

I imagine it will be similar to having a cheat menu open on the Cockpit MFD screen as this AESA Radar is so powerful. Giving us huge amounts of data in real time.

But Eagle Dynamics needs to model and simulate the speed at which we obtain this information and the limits of the Radar such as angles, blind spots and Ground Radar and some other highly technical things.

[Kraken_ZA]

22 hours ago, British_Dragon_14 said:

The simulated F-35 Radar we are going to get isn't going to be simulated as it is in real life. Not even close.

The DCS Simulated World we already fly around in knows exactly where everything is, the information is already stored in the CPU RAM.

The F-35 MFD Touch Screen is just going to give you the information that you already have or what the Server already has that is stored on the CPU RAM. Such as unit type, position & heading, speed & attitude and possibly IFF.

 

Were you realistically hoping for something else Re-F-35 Radar. Honestly anyone that thinks that they have a true to life accurate simulated radar in anything code based is fooling themselves. Even the F-35 FMS cannot simulate the actual radar perfectly, as there are an insane amount of variables that can constantly change at any given time. You would hope that all the program data for the simulation is being processed by the hardware otherwise we would have true stealth aircraft invisible even to the naked eye.