On Sat, 25 Oct 2003 09:16:05 +0100, "Paul J. Adam"
wrote:

In message , John Keeney
writes
"John Cook" wrote in message
. ..
In short stealth is nice but lots of other factors come into play, eg
Aircraft A is 100% invisible, but aircraft B has a 100% effective
defensive decoy system.

Who wins??

The stealth plane, because he's got a cannon and you can't
decoy ballastic rounds. ;-)

Don't decoy the round, screw with the sight: that cannon is aimed by a
predictor system that needs target range and velocity data. Not hard at
all to have the gunsight generate the wrong pointing data. (And the
chance of a hit without a working sight is pretty minimal: not something
to bet an airframe and a mission on)

This also presupposes that you're able to get into parameters for a guns
shot... far from a given.


And it's assuming you don't get a dual mode seeker coming after you.
One of the Standards has both semi-active radar AND IR and they'd
kicked around the idea of putting one on Sparrow. Wouldn't be too
difficult to pull of if they felt it necessary. For example say an
F-22 identifies the enemy aircraft at position X and launches an
AMRAAM equiped with an active radar / IIR seeker that looks for a
return that has both a radar return AND an image somewhat resembling
an aircraft, it seems like it would be difficult to decoy. Granted
their isn't such a missile in service to my knowledge but it wouldn't
be particularly difficult to come up with one if they felt the need.