Canada's F-35 selection

[R011]

1 hour ago, DB said:

I don't believe that is even necessary with modern equipment. Would have been for deconfliction when the AA weapons involved were nuclear, but now?

Why wouldn't it be necessary for modern weapons?  It isn't as if a cointinent wide defene can be accomplished by some erks pushing around counters on a map while an officer dispatches indivisdual squadrons.  They recognized the battlespace wasn a bit larger and more complex trhan a tiny bit of southern England way bacjk in the fifties.  Hence SAGE and its sucessors telling planes where to fly without human controllers.

[DB]

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

Everything that you might have wanted to do with a state-of-the-art customised system in the 1950s/60s is available to every aircraft with even a basic but modern air navigation system, provided you can datalink in a handful of waypoints. Which is why I said originally that the only important stumbling block is the comms crypto.

It's not as if you need to find space for 400lb of valve-driven "computer" any more - it's all going to fit in a milspec box that weighs maybe 40lb, and that's more about the enclosure and environmental specification than the necessary weight of the functional bits.

The really funny thing about this is the thought that defending against nuclear weapon armed Bears really matters. All of the important action will have happened up to several hours earlier...

[Dawes]

Don't worry. They'll never get through our Nike Hercules defenses.

[Josh]

Does anyone have any source indicating NORAD even uses any kind of specific com equipment that isn't a normal NATO standard? I would have thought in the days of link16 for all no separate format would be necessary.

[R011]

2 hours ago, Josh said:

Does anyone have any source indicating NORAD even uses any kind of specific com equipment that isn't a normal NATO standard? I would have thought in the days of link16 for all no separate format would be necessary.

They certainly used to.  Given remarks by contenders in this competition, they still do.  What it is and whether it is hardware or software or both, I don't know.

[Peter Venkman]

On 3/31/2022 at 5:52 PM, DB said:

 

MBDA claims that the no escape zone for Meteor is far larger than for any other (Western) AAM, even after the last publicity from the AMRAAM team who rather carefully described their long range trial shoot down.

The key is continuing thrust at far longer ranges than any pure rocket means far better chances against manoeuvring targets. Subject to the missiles being broadly speaking the same size, of course, the ramjet is just more mass efficient.

The US is testing the next gen of long range missles. Multiple programs currently underway. Perigrine is a project to make a longer range missle with dimensions that will effectively double the number that can be carried stealthily.

[Josh]

It is true that as far as is known, all US projects are still solid rocket. It's also true that a ramjet is always going to be more mass efficient than a rocket. For whatever reason, the US has decided to stick with solid rockets and offset the mass efficiency concerns with other mechanism - hit to kill with no warhead, separating booster stages, dual pulse motors, etc.

It will be interesting to see if the HACM program is ultimately developed to have an A2A capability against large aircraft (tankers, AWAVs). The ASALM project was to have that ability and todays electronics would probably make that easy to accomplish - most any terminal radar or IIR seeker would do, and at a mile per second, mid course updates would probably be largely unnecessary for non transonic targets.