You need to put out enough power, coherent enough, to be detectable at
distance. I'm sure even the F-22 puts out an interesting collection of
low-level EM radiation, but by the time you could detect it you could
*see* it.



Makes sense. I suppose if it was detectible from very far you'd have
millions of eletrical motors and millions of lots of other electronic
devices all raising hell with each other.





Where's the Raptor getting *its* targeting data from?

From it's LPI radar. In that scenario though it really comes down to
can the Meteor or AMRAAM track an F-22.

Good question, and not one with an unclassified answer


What's got me scratching my head is why they don't put an IR seeker
for the terminal guidance. While the F-22 is a stealth aircraft I
don't think I'd want to put it to the test with say a Eurofighter and
ASRAAM.






From the theory, the answer is "yes, eventually, but how close does it
have to be?"

The Typhoon can stare at the
sucker all day long but if it can't guide a weapon to it without firng
up the radar. . .

No need to light up the radar, PIRATE's good enough to let you heave a
missile at the target. But is it good enough for the missile to be able
to acquire, track and home? Good question.

The speed gives you a lot more options though. There were many times
in Desert Storm when they saw aircraft running for Iran but couldn't
get fighters there fast enough because either A) The couldn't get the
speed with their external tanks or B) the didn't have the range if
they punched off the tanks.

That's a pretty narrow set of circumstances, and it's worth noting that
the aircraft were running away and not coming back. Even if none had
been intercepted, they were still all losses to Iraq.

Yeah but they weren't suppose to be LOL!





wanting to get to the Bad Guys ASAP.

Yeah top speed is important but unless you have the tankers flying
around to refuel you you aren't going to get very far without external
tanks which drags your speed down. I doubt the numbers are public but
it would be interesting to see the numbers for a simulated 400 mile
intercept flown by an F-22, Eurofighter, F-15, and Mig-31.

What's cuing the intercept at that range?

Could be AWACs, OTHB, forward-based sensors, or even satellites. That
last brings up another question though. The US wants to get space
based radar but can *existing* elint satellites detect things like
fire control radars? It would seem feasible to have a couple (three
or more I guess) elint satellites listening for nothing but fire
control and search radars and forwarding the locations on to the
shooters.




They have
to fly out, deal with the target, and fly back to base with no
tankers. Who gets there first and who makes it back to base? The
enemy could have stand off weapons so the further out you intercept
the better. It would be interesting to see the results. My money
would be on the Mig.

Don't know the numbers, but it's a Soviet sort of question (honking big
GCI nets backed by large interceptors) and the MiG-31 is a good answer
to it.

Or the YF-12 back the sixties sigh





I'm sure there *is* a current tactical advantage to supercruise, but
it's not immediately obvious against the current threat. (As opposed to
the original problem)

Last time I checked there are still Su-27s and Mig-31s flying. Come
to think of it there are probably more countries flying Flankers these
days then those generals back in the 80's might have imagined in their
worst nightmares.

True, but how many of those are serviceable and how many hours a year of
realistic training do the pilots get?


Will it always stay that way? And yeah if Gabon has TWO or some other
rinky-dink country has three or four that's no biggie but when you've
got China with hundreds and counting and working on an F-22 counter
(yeah working on isn't *getting* but a like the saying goes, "a
thousand monkeys with typewriters given enough time. . ." ) and
India's growing numbers of Flankers and their pilots getting MORE
training than the US pilots get. . .well then it's not so cut and dry.
And who's to say what the world stage will be like in twenty or thirty
years? Hell less time then that ago we were selling Tomcats with
Phoenix missiles to Iran. And who knows where Russia will fall?
Right now they seem to be neutral and while China is trying to cozy up
to them I think if it came down to it they'd choose the devil they
know (the US) over the one they don't (China). My point being that
right now in history there are too many unknowns and in some scenarios
you'd DEFINITELY want to have the best you can build. If the next
thirty or forty years were for sure going to be like the last ten then
sure, you could scrap the F-22 and life would be fine. It's those
unknowns that are the flys in the ointment.



Or are you saying that since Russia never built the
1.42 or Berkut that we should stick with the thirty year old F-15?

No, you're stuck with the F-22 (whose main drawbacks are its cost and
the reverence in which it's held, hardly catastrophic) as your
next-generation fighter.



Stuck is right. As of a few weeks ago there were 74 F-22s built or
under contract. The R&D is spent and there's no getting it back. The
tooling, facilities etc. are in place. Despite what some would have
the world believe the USAF doesn't pay X amount + an R&D percentage
for each new Raptor. So say Kerry gets voted in and cancels the F-22
to prove he can win a ****ing contest, what then? The USAF adopts the
F-35 as it's premier fighter? A single-engine jet that can't even
break Mach 2? Does anybody really see the USAF accepting this? And
if they funded a NEW aircraft where would they cut corners to make it
cheaper? Get rid of stealth? Not likely. Supercruise? Maybe. So
you'd end up with a big twin-engined fighter with maybe just frontal
aspect stealth and "reduced RCS" everywhere else like the F-35 and
maybe F135s instead of F119s (they're cheaper supposedly). How much
would IT cost to develope and how many years? In the end would the
cost of that scenario really be any cheaper than just continuing to
buy F-22s? Even if you stopped F-22 production at 74 you still need
to keep the system in place to support what there is so you're not
going to save money there. If the USAF was *forced* to accept the
F-35 as it's premier fighter history suggests that in the end they'll
end up with what they *really* want even if they have to wait for a
new administration to get it. What would really be a laugher though
is if they really are dragging that F-23 out of the museum and at some
point someone says "well we don't need them BOTH and that F-22 is up
to $260 million a piece- I'm sure we could bring that F-23 in cheaper.
.. ." Funny not because I think they could do it but funny that
inevitably there will be somebody who thinks they CAN.



The idea is to be *better* than the other guy not wait until he can
kick your ass before you try to achieve parity.

True - it's just that the end of the Cold War means that the threat the
F-22 was intended to address, has not materialised. (Hence, among other
things, its reinvention as the 'F/A-22' - is that still being pushed?)

I don't know. ISTR seeing a photo of an F-22 with SDB in one of it's
bays. The latest I've heard is the various incarnations of a strike
F-22. Everything from a basic stetched F-22 with longer main bays to
the full cranked-arrow, tailless job powered by F135s.




It does have serious potential for tactical recce, mind you. Fast, long
range, low observable, highly survivable: stick an imagery package in
the weapons bay and you've got the RF-22 PhotoRaptor.

That would be one expensive tactical recon aircraft :-)




The F-22 is a fantastic aircraft and without a doubt the best air-to-air
platform that anyone's likely to see for some while. It's even better
than the Eurofighter Typhoon (yes, I admit it), though there's a valid
argument about the cost-versus-capability tradeoff if the two faced off
(shades of P-51 Mustangs versus Me-262s... the jet was clearly
individually superior, but was outnumbered too badly by a 'good enough'
opponent to prevail).

I don't know. It's pretty tough to over rate stealth. If those were
stealthy Me-262s. . .well back in those days I suppose "invisible"
would have been more appropriate. . . how well would P-51s have
faired?

Depends "how invisible". The tactic of simply mobbing their airfields
and ambushing them in the pattern would still be effective even if they
were hard to see.

Yeah. I have a tough time imagining F-22 bases getting mobbed by
enemy aircraft though. If in a Taiwan scenario they deployed F-22s to
Taiwan though it could be raining tactical missiles. Dead is dead I
guess.






The trouble is, it's perhaps *too* fantastic: it dates back to when the
assorted fUSSR fantasy-uberfighters were considered real threats.

Actually the ATF came about because the Flankers and Fulcrums were
seen as such a threat.

True, but the Eurofighter, Rafale and Gripen were designed against the
same threat and manage to overmatch it at lower cost.


One on one is a Gripen REALLY a match for a well flown Su-37?






There's much less of a credible air threat now, than there was when both
Raptor and Typhoon started life.

I would say different not less. How many countries have S-300s?

That's a nasty beast, but not a driver on your fighter procurement
program


If the enemy is defending it's airbases with S-300s it does. Without
all-aspect stealth pretty much any area they set up S-300s becomes a
sanctuary for enemy air.





Will the
enemy AD crews resemble Iraqis, or Serbs?)

Hell for all we know they could be Israelis. A lot can happen in 30
years.





How
many have Flankers? And just because it may *appear* to be less now
doesn't mean it will remain that way. The F-22 is intended to be
viable for the next thirty or more years.

As are its contemporaries.

It keeps coming back to the problem
that, unless you expect them to fight each other, they both thoroughly
overmatch the likely enemy, and one's about twice the cost of the other.

I don't know. How well would a Typhoon do against Su-37s armed with
KS-172s?

Pretty well, would be the short answer .

I don't know, that KS-172 outranges even Meteor by a significant
amount.