The fighter design for modern air-combat

[Scrooge]

As I know, the tasks below are common parts of modern air-combat:

1.BVR

2.Stealthy

3.Situation awareness

4.ECM

As a KSP player, these are all relative designs I can come up with:

1.Supersonic cruise -> small section area derivative & ramjet engine & high specific impulse

2.Low RCS and IR characteristic -> Polygonal surface and thermal control (cuz the algorithm used by BDA do not consider the influence of IR shelter for IR missile)

But for 3rd (Lighter vessel for more weight of radars and electrical supplies?) and 4th points, I haven't figured out any useful designs...

Anyone have good ideas about vessel designs for these tasks?

Edited December 25, 2019 by Scrooge

[Guest]

3 and 4 just mean cramming the thing full of electronics. All-round IRST, maybe also tail radar would all help SA, and the primary radar has to be powerful enough to detect enemy stealth aircraft. For a BVR platform, you also want a decent fuel load.

Also, what you're describing is more of an interceptor. For a proper fighter, you want to have a gun. No matter how many missiles you cram in, there's always that one bandit who goes in too close and keeps at it until you're too low and two slow to go for Fox 2. Thrust vectoring and a low-speed wing are both very nice to have, too. BVR is great against bombers or inferior aircraft that can't shoot back at that range, but not so much against other fighters. If you fire an AMRAAM at 100km at a maneuvering target (that is, one that can just turn and run), you'll miss. You need to get in closer, and if the opponents have a comparable missile (say, an R-77), you're also improving their chance of hitting. A BVR duel typically plays out much like a high speed game of chicken. Granted, high speed helps extend the effective range of your missiles and reduce that of your opponent's, but if you sacrifice too much maneuverability, you won't be able to turn back fast enough to defeat the enemy missile.

[Scotius]

3.

What else you might want? No reasonably light fighter can match E-3 Sentry's sensor suite capabilities. Just make sure you have constant radio connection and you are ready to go.

[Scrooge]

15 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

3 and 4 just mean cramming the thing full of electronics. All-round IRST, maybe also tail radar would all help SA, and the primary radar has to be powerful enough to detect enemy stealth aircraft. For a BVR platform, you also want a decent fuel load.

Also, what you're describing is more of an interceptor. For a proper fighter, you want to have a gun. No matter how many missiles you cram in, there's always that one bandit who goes in too close and keeps at it until you're too low and two slow to go for Fox 2. Thrust vectoring and a low-speed wing are both very nice to have, too. BVR is great against bombers or inferior aircraft that can't shoot back at that range, but not so much against other fighters. If you fire an AMRAAM at 100km at a maneuvering target (that is, one that can just turn and run), you'll miss. You need to get in closer, and if the opponents have a comparable missile (say, an R-77), you're also improving their chance of hitting. A BVR duel typically plays out much like a high speed game of chicken. Granted, high speed helps extend the effective range of your missiles and reduce that of your opponent's, but if you sacrifice too much maneuverability, you won't be able to turn back fast enough to defeat the enemy missile.

Your reply is informative and helpful! Thank you!

Now I know the difference between F-35/22 and MiG-31/25...

12 minutes ago, Scotius said:

3.

What else you might want? No reasonably light fighter can match E-3 Sentry's sensor suite capabilities. Just make sure you have constant radio connection and you are ready to go.

Err...maybe I was not clear about the question, AWACS is good but I want a F-35 acutally...

Edited December 25, 2019 by Scrooge

[kerbiloid]

29 minutes ago, Scrooge said:

I want a F-35

Then buy Yak-141 designs in early 1990s.

Oops... Done...

Edited December 25, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Scrooge]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Then buy Yak-141 designs in early 1990s.

Oops... Done...

"(º Д º*) LOL

VTOL is good, but it is optional for those 4 tasks as well...I think?

The major shape of Yak-141 resemble MiG-31/25 which is a well-known manned rocket...I dont think it will have a good aerodynamic maneuverability...

Edited December 25, 2019 by Scrooge

[DDE]

5 hours ago, Scrooge said:

But for 3rd (Lighter vessel for more weight of radars

You may be doing it wrong. One, somewhat controversial like of advocacy, calls to reduce the use of active sensors.

5 hours ago, Scrooge said:

1.Supersonic cruise -> small section area derivative & ramjet engine & high specific impulse

Or bigger missiles.

Supercruise increases costs and clashes with stealth, especially infrared stealth.

[kerbiloid]

No meatbags onboard.

Only airbots.

Manned planes only as flying analytic centers to recognize non-standard situations and call for missiles&drones redirection.

[Scrooge]

22 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

No meatbags onboard.

Only airbots.

Manned planes only as flying analytic centers to recognize non-standard situations and call for missiles&drones redirection.

As you said, the role of fighter maybe replaced by drones, since they can do maneuvers with very high Gs.

But AWACS is centralized, once splashed by BVR missiles, the node of radar and datalink fall apart, compare to this, a squardron made of 4 F-35 seems more robust than a single AWACS...?

33 minutes ago, DDE said:

You may be doing it wrong. One, somewhat controversial like of advocacy, calls to reduce the use of active sensors.

Or bigger missiles.

Supercruise increases costs and clashes with stealth, especially infrared stealth.

I forgot the heat caused by high speed air-flux, thx for your mention! :-)

[kerbiloid]

11 minutes ago, Scrooge said:

But AWACS is centralized, once splashed by BVR missiles, the node of radar and datalink fall apart, compare to this, a squardron made of 4 F-35 seems more robust than a single AWACS...?

I don't mean exactly AWACS.
AWACS as a supernode,  fighter-like planes as minor nodes. Why dogfight when you can call for a pack of AA missiles from ground/sea instead and help guiding them.
And a drone assault squadron in front, as BVR eyes of the crewed leader plane, at 100 km behind.

Missile/drone assault cruisers instead of WWII-style aircraft carriers, and 1-2 classic for marines in local conflicts.

That's my imho, of course.

Edited December 25, 2019 by kerbiloid

[mikegarrison]

I wonder how long it will be before fighters become so expensive that any country can only afford one.

[Scrooge]

30 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

I don't mean exactly AWACS.
AWACS as a supernode,  fighter-like planes as minor nodes. Why dogfight when you can call for a pack of AA missiles from ground/sea instead and help guiding them.
And a drone assault squadron in front, as BVR eyes of the crewed leader plane, at 100 km behind.

Missile/drone assault cruisers instead of WWII-style aircraft carriers, and 1-2 classic for marines in local conflicts.

That's my imho, of course.

That strategy is impressive!

Guiding by other vessel seems to have been implemented, but I am not sure.

I also focus more on fire & run instead of close range combat, but I was reminded by a reply that fighter do need to be considered with a dogfight situation:

5 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

 For a proper fighter, you want to have a gun. No matter how many missiles you cram in, there's always that one bandit who goes in too close and keeps at it until you're too low and two slow to go for Fox 2. 

Otherwise I even think of some kind of design with no carried missile but crammed full of radars and sensors...just for guiding missiles fired from base afar.

16 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

I wonder how long it will be before fighters become so expensive that any country can only afford one.

And maybe only one is still enough...?

Edited December 25, 2019 by Scrooge

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Scrooge said:

Otherwise I even think of some kind of design with no carried missile but crammed full of radars and sensors...just for guiding missiles fired from base afar.

If so, why even use an aircraft? Just place the radar on the ground, with a huge phased array antenna. In fact, you can have several radars working in concert, tracking both missiles and targets, vectoring the former to the latter with deadly accuracy. If you thought of that, congratulations: you just invented the S-300 SAM system. It is, indeed, quite a monster, and the later versions can be effective even against the likes of F-22, but the primary limitation remains: effective range.

Remember that any ground-based system will, ultimately, be limited by the range of its missiles. Even the mighty S-400 does not have the range of 400km against anything except a strategic bomber flying straight at it. Theoretical maximum ranges of missiles are, more or less, marketing hogwash. There's a lot more going into a missile's actual range, and it doesn't matter if you can target a plane 600km into the enemy territory if you don't have any missiles actually in effective range of the target (and if you do, that still doesn't guarantee a hit). Generally, targeting range will be much longer than that, and detection range will be longer still. This also means a modern RWR will see a SAM site way beyond its engagement range. 

Having a missile-armed fighter in front, especially one that's going fast, gives you a huge increase in missile range. You add the fighter's combat radius, and then add the boost it gives the missile by lifting it to high altitude and launching it at high speed. All this adds energy to the missile and places it closer to the enemy, which is what makes it more likely to kill things. The AWACS network, all those means to improve detection are secondary to the fact that even the most modern missiles can be defeated kinematically (that is, outflown). A fighter will always have more fuel, more power and, most importantly, the ability to optimize its thrust. Missiles generally don't throttle, so what you do in a fighter is to force the missile to follow you into dense air when it's going very fast (thus hitting it with a huge drag penalty), and once it has lost its energy to drag and doing tight turns in dense air, you climb out into thinner air, which causes it to slow down to its stall speed. Networked sensors can help avoid missiles, by detecting the incoming missile and notifying the pilot, and they can also aid the planning of an attack, but for actually guiding the missile, modern radars are more than adequate.

[Scrooge]

4 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Having a missile-armed fighter in front, especially one that's going fast, gives you a huge increase in missile range. You add the fighter's combat radius, and then add the boost it gives the missile by lifting it to high altitude and launching it at high speed. All this adds energy to the missile and places it closer to the enemy, which is what makes it more likely to kill things.

Missiles generally don't throttle, so what you do in a fighter is to force the missile to follow you into dense air when it's going very fast (thus hitting it with a huge drag penalty), and once it has lost its energy to drag and doing tight turns in dense air, you climb out into thinner air, which causes it to slow down to its stall speed.

Networked sensors can help avoid missiles, by detecting the incoming missile and notifying the pilot, and they can also aid the planning of an attack, but for actually guiding the missile, modern radars are more than adequate.

It's a good article from which I can learn the development of air-combat strategy, Thanks!

My comprehension is: A missile platform enhancing range and accuracy of missiles is the role fighters should play, is that it?

Edited December 25, 2019 by Scrooge

[Guest]

It's the one they do play, right now, on a modern battlefield. BVR combat is more about missiles than it is about fighters themselves, though radar, stealth and ECM can't be disregarded. Networked sensors can help overcome them, but then, jammers can also be networked, and try to jam datalinks that enable networking, so the situation is fluid on that front. Electronic warfare is a complex topic and nobody really knows how it'd play out between two opponents with a similar tech level (which is the very point of classifying them so deeply). Indeed, some latest updates to F-16 and F-15 propose outfitting them with an absurd number of missiles, up to 24 in the latter case, and with new sensor systems. This is mostly because the older designs can't hold a candle to 5th generation jets in a dogfight, so they have to compensate in BVR. 

One interesting idea would be a fighter with a tail radar fully capable of guiding BVR missiles. This would enable it to go evasive immediately after launch, while still supporting their own missiles. Russians have a few designs with a rear-facing radar, though I don't know how capable that is (might be just for SA).

[DDE]

5 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Having a missile-armed fighter in front, especially one that's going fast, gives you a huge increase in missile range. You add the fighter's combat radius, and then add the boost it gives the missile by lifting it to high altitude and launching it at high speed. All this adds energy to the missile and places it closer to the enemy, which is what makes it more likely to kill things.

Taken to extreme length, it looks like this:

Spoiler

And also like this:

Spoiler

47 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Russians have a few designs with a rear-facing radar, though I don't know how capable that is (might be just for SA).

Likely AS. You need extreme off-bore targeting/lock-on-after-launch capability, and to my knowledge on the short-range R-73 has that for the moment.

Edited December 25, 2019 by DDE

[Guest]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

 

Likely AS. You need extreme off-bore targeting/lock-on-after-launch capability, and to my knowledge on the short-range R-73 has that for the moment.

Note, we're talking BVR. This is not off-boresight launch. It's a normal launch, then turning tail and updating the R-77 from the rear radar until it goes active. Naturally, R-77 does have LOAL, because all active radar missiles do. The only question is, can the rear radar encode datalink updates to R-77, and can it be switched over from one to the other, neither of which is a trivial problem. This would be a very powerful BVR tactic, because it would allow guiding your own missile while denying the enemy the launch window. Range at which you can hit a target that flies directly away at high speed is disappointingly short when compared to "rated" range.

And yeah, MiG-31 can be configured either as a flying Iskander TEL, or a flying S-300 battery. A very poweful weapon system if used right.

[Scrooge]

17 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Note, we're talking BVR. This is not off-boresight launch. It's a normal launch, then turning tail and updating the R-77 from the rear radar until it goes active. Naturally, R-77 does have LOAL, because all active radar missiles do. The only question is, can the rear radar encode datalink updates to R-77, and can it be switched over from one to the other, neither of which is a trivial problem. This would be a very powerful BVR tactic, because it would allow guiding your own missile while denying the enemy the launch window. Range at which you can hit a target that flies directly away at high speed is disappointingly short when compared to "rated" range.

And yeah, MiG-31 can be configured either as a flying Iskander TEL, or a flying S-300 battery. A very poweful weapon system if used right.

Aiming enemy from tail can lengthen the time for guiding missiles and increase accuracy of them while evacuating from the danger zone.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Scrooge said:

Aiming enemy from tail can lengthen the time for guiding missiles and increase accuracy of them while evacuating from the danger zone.

No, it can't. Quite the opposite, in fact. Extending guidance time is a bad thing. The missile won't become more accurate by guiding longer, and in fact, the longer it flies, the easier it is to evade. Also, if you turn and run early enough, the missile will run out of energy and fall to the ground. Turning tail is, in fact, the best way to evade modern missiles. You just have to do it early enough. Every BVR missile evasion maneuver begins by showing the missile your tail (because at least with the AMRAAM, if you're inside the "range turn and run", then you're not in BVR anymore).

[Scrooge]

1 minute ago, Dragon01 said:

No, it can't. Quite the opposite, in fact. Extending guidance time is a bad thing. The missile won't become more accurate by guiding longer, and in fact, the longer it flies, the easier it is to evade. Also, if you turn and run early enough, the missile will run out of energy and fall to the ground. Turning tail is, in fact, the best way to evade modern missiles. You just have to do it early enough. Every BVR missile evasion maneuver begins by showing the missile your tail (because at least with the AMRAAM, if you're inside the "range turn and run", then you're not in BVR anymore).

So, what's the major advantage of tail radar?

[Guest]

If you can use your tail radar to guide your missiles, then you can turn and run from outside the enemy's Rtr and keep guiding your missile. If you opponent doesn't have it, he can only turn away without firing a shot, because doing anything else pretty much guarantees he'll run into your missile before his own one goes active. On the other hand, if your opponent does have one, then it's the standard game of chicken again, only with the launch range being around Rtr, in other words very close to being able to engage with an IR-guided missile.

In a standard BVR engagement, you launch at a much longer range (Rpi, that is "range probability of intercept", which is range at which you've got a good chance of hitting) and crank, that is, turn to the side in order to keep your enemy in your radar limits while keeping him from closing in too much. Also, you usually won't get information when the enemy has launched a missile, only when it goes active, at which point it requires some heavy maneuvering to evade. The trick is to have your missile go active before your enemy's does, but not to fire it from so far away that he can evade it. With a tail radar, you no longer have to choose between guiding the missile and evading your enemy's, so you can just launch at an optimum range and turn away immediately, ruining any shots your enemy could have fired at you. If you have it and the enemy doesn't, the fight becomes ridiculously lopsided.

[Scrooge]

1 minute ago, Dragon01 said:

If you can use your tail radar to guide your missiles, then you can turn and run from outside the enemy's Rtr and keep guiding your missile. If you opponent doesn't have it, he can only turn away without firing a shot, because doing anything else pretty much guarantees he'll run into your missile before his own one goes active. On the other hand, if your opponent does have one, then it's the standard game of chicken again, only with the launch range being around Rtr, in other words very close to being able to engage with an IR-guided missile.

 

22 minutes ago, Scrooge said:

while evacuating from the danger zone

Maybe I wasn't clear about my expression, but the main idea I want to convey is common with yours.

Turning backward while keeping radar toward hostile area is kind of guarantee for evacuation.

[Guest]

Well, you phrased it oddly. It's also not about extending the time you have to guide your own missile. Rather, you'd be able shorten it (that is, launch from a shorter distance), and still be able to run away. 

[Guest]

interesting stuffs

 

[magnemoe]

On 12/25/2019 at 10:40 AM, Scrooge said:

"(º Д º*) LOL

VTOL is good, but it is optional for those 4 tasks as well...I think?

The major shape of Yak-141 resemble MiG-31/25 which is a well-known manned rocket...I dont think it will have a good aerodynamic maneuverability...

True, it would probably been better to have the vtol version of F-35 been another body say f-36 while keeping as much common parts as you could. 
You only need vtol then flying from pocket carriers, yes you can do some tricks with them but doubts its worth it outside the pocket carrier rolle.