Originally Posted by
orca
Hi Jacko,
Pirate is (I believe) fabulous...but the basis of my opinion is that the fundamental here is the ability to send enough information with a small enough latency for a weapon to acquire and guide.
A mech scan can do it for host platform weapons and has been shown to be able to do it in some circumstances for wingmen via link.
What AESA gives you is ultra low latency - because you dont wait for the next sweep to update a track. It also gives a higher quality track at range (and therefore higher range) due to the shape of the beam. The update rate allows each player to scan a huge volume of airspace - siro +/- 60 degrees in azimuth and elevation and all tracks are high quality. Mech scans can’t do this. This combined with a better MIDS fit allows you to off board more messages. In other words - it becomes ‘to everybody, every day’. MIDS JTRS keeps on giving because you can get your own radar to do its own mini scan around MIDS tracks - whilst doing its thing at not far off the speed of light!
In slack handfuls MIDS JTRS takes data rates up above 1Mbps in comparison with about 100kbps for other terminals.
I am a big supporter of the AESA radar upgrades planned for Typhoon but have lost track on how they are progressing.
Meteor’s latent kinematic capability will be unlocked by a AESA and conversely not maximised with mech scan. No point having a long stick and not being able to see far enough! (My opinion only.).
Thank you for that info orca. For years they [we] tried to achieve paired firings on the F4k it never was successful analogue systems, as you state just didn't have the capacity to communicate.
With the digital era, things have changed.