On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:26:04 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:

Unless there's some exteme qualifiers, you have to assume it's a fairly
general average. With even moderately ambitious stealth, you can get a
good reduction in cross section across the board (even a 10% reduction
gives you several extra miles of "shoot first" at long ranges).

To be precise, 1 mile at 40 miles range.

Consider the old-tech F-117. They fly it through some of the most
heavily-defended airspaces, *ever*,

Oh? Did Serbia and Iraq have modern AA systems? I think not.

and manage to not get shot down
(except for one case when they got nailed in a low-level raid by
visually-sighted AAA). And it's practically obsolete, in most "stealth"
respects. The F-22 may have a couple of weaknesses (the aforementioned
intake and exhaust), but even those are relative.

How detectable is the F-117 (and F-22) using visual or IR sensors?

A quick BOTE calculation suggests that with clear air conditions, a
F-22 would in principle be detectable at 100 km with the sort of
digital equipment you can buy in a high street shop (a 10 m wide
object would produce an image 10 pixels across, assuming a 1000 mm
lens and a focal plane with 100 pixels/mm) though I'm sure in real
life conditions wouldn't be good enough to spot it in daylight.
Spotting the exhaust at night might be easier, especially for IR
sensors.

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