Eurofighter Typhoon for India and Japan?

[LOAgent]

Whatever happened to CAESAR?

Whilst Captor is definitely not 80s technology and is a bloody decent radar I firmly believe that not having an ESA (I'd go as far as to say AESA) is a large achilles heel for a modern fighter when pitted against modern threats. No just to secure FMS but, far more importantly, to ensure that the operators have the right kit for the job.

I suspect the answer is the same as usual. Money, money, money. Not that it is an invalid reason, just an infuriating one.

[AlienfromPaul]

@LOAgent,

CAESAR is the Captor-E that is being proposed to India and Japan too I'm certain. It's radar antenna will be mounted on a Repositioner giving it 220~degree total field of regard. 110~degree left & 110~degree right. Considerably more degrees than the current Captor and the AESAs' of the F-35 and F/A-18 Super Hornet - many experts believe that the Captor is better than the Super Hornet's AESA.

Also, Japan aren't going to get the F-22, the US has made it clear. The Silent Eagle is out of the question because it ain't in the F-X bid.

@Gravelbelly,

if you really were a part of the design team of the Captor, you'd be pleased to know that the IAF pilots were "very impressed" with it's performance. They like your work.

@Mr_breaker,

2015 is the planned introduction year for the Captor-E, not 2014.

With regards to India. An interesting article was article was released a few days ago mentioning the L1 bid, heres what it stated in one paragraph;

"However it is understood that the procurement policy has a provision that allows MoD to discard L1 lowest cost bidder for 'strategic benefit' that the next highest bidder offers . The policy document is deliberately vague on what qualifies as strategic benefit, an exceptional ToT offer or partnership may be considered strategically beneficial."

MACHINIST - MoD approves offset proposals for India's 126 MMRCA deal

Could this place the Typhoon at an advantage? I think it might.

-Paul

[jwcook]

Whatever happened to CAESAR?

Caesar was a success, and from that Captor-e was developed, thats a lot of the back end of Captor-m but with a AESA front end.

Its being offered to India and any of the partners who want it as a retrofit.

Cheers

[ion_berkley]

Rubbish, it was the 1990s (I was there designing it, I can assure you that we were pushing the boundaries of what the ASIC foundries could offer us in 1995) and that was just Tranche 1. The Tranche 2 radar included early 2000s technology, and involved a pretty comprehensive redesign of the processor path.

Not to be argumentative, but I can remember us doing the backend on those particular ASICs in the 1991/92 timeframe, so you might be a bit confused on that one....CLA7000 was the technology I think.

[Gravelbelly]

Originally Posted by ion_berkley

Not to be argumentative, but I can remember us doing the backend on those particular ASICs in the 1991/92 timeframe

There were a fair few ASICs across the design - and some got completed earlier than others. While the design started around then, some of the processors didn't get completed for another couple of years. There was one where the foundry apparently sucked air in through its teeth at the size and speed requirements, and asked for another six months; another that had to be respun very late on because the foundry had decided that they knew best, and had substituted their own design of multiplier block in place of the specified one (it took the affected team months to track down the root cause of that bug...).

Certainly, we still had HDL designers working hard through the mid-90s.

Before anyone suggests "off-the-shelf", they should remember that in those two-decade-ago days that if you wanted high-performance electronic kit, you had to design it all in-house. Clock speeds were in the low double figures of MHz; a single megabit of memory was utter luxury. From a software point of view, there were no commercially available, and robust, real-time operating systems; optimising compilers for C were still in their youth; there were no standard libraries; there were only one or two ADA design environments for our data processor team. There were no NATO-standard avionics platforms; commercial backplanes in processor chassis couldn't cut it from a mechanical or bandwidth basis; there were no COTS boards capable of handling the data volumes concerned, at the reliability required, with the specified levels of built-in test.

Of course, most of this had changed by the late 90s, by which time we'd been flying ECR-90 in DA5 for a year or two? I moved to a technical demonstrator that was using COTS boards and a proper OS in the flight kit, while the team writing the data processor software for AMSAR was a quarter of the size of the ECR-90 team, (because they were using more advanced tools to do it).

[Mr_breaker]

MACHINIST - MoD approves offset proposals for India's 126 MMRCA deal

Could this place the Typhoon at an advantage? I think it might.

@ Paul..

what i found intresting from that artical was this comment.

foreign vendors bagging deals will have to invest back 50 per cent of the worth of the deal in Indian defence industry

This will help Eurofighter consortium as they plan to build a factory in indian to help build the 700 typhoons ordered by UK, Germany, Spain, Italy etc..

[t43562]

Continual upgrades

Gravelbelly, I am a programmer so I find what you are saying fascinating. There are huge changes in tools and hardware happening all the time and it's hard to keep up with the full spectrum of it. I wonder how it's all going to affect defence - if there could be a situation where there is a big advantage for the country which spends it's money last rather than first.

I make tools, of a kind, hence the interest. :-)

[Boogeyboard]

Reportedly Typhoon comes with AESA in Japan.

[Boogeyboard]

Safe with the US? Tell that to Taiwan. Read the newspapers. China blocks US F16 sales.

[backseatjock]

Re timescales, Indian MoD says it will reach a decision during November (we'll see) but it is an EADS/Cassidian lead and not BAE there.

Bids have gone into Japan (BAE lead) and the general view is Japan will take the F35 and possibly a number of Typhoon. Considering the fact that Japan was never actually seen as a potential customer, any number would be a bonus.

Ongoing Typhoon campaigns in Malaysia, Qatar and Oman too with Saudi rumoured to be considering an additional purchase. All of these markets are BAE leads.

Interest in Typhoon, from potential export customers, seems to be higher than ever at the moment although budget is obviously an issue for a number or potential customers.

[AlienfromPaul]

Even though EADS/Cassidian are leading the Indian bid BAE have seemed to have quite an influence also.

From going through various peoples comments and articles to get something of an Idea of what is thought about Japan's requirements for their F-X fighter. Obviously theres the odd Yank boasting that theres nothing better than the "proven" F-35 and the "carrier capable" F/A-18 Super Hornet and have narrow minded views of the Eurofighter Typhoon. However there is a lot of decent folk that look at things at different angles to get more of a perspective view & quite a few seem to reckon the F-35 is too much of a risk to order now when so much is still uncertain of the programme.

Indeed the price of the Typhoon may be a concern, however I find it slightly odd that the likes of Oman, Malaysia, Japan, Turkey the UAE to some extent etc have seemed to put orders back slightly, just after when India are due to announce the winner of the MMRCA competition. Of course if India selects the Typhoon of 126+ aircraft production costs would come down making it more of an attractive offer.

With India being the 5th member of the Eurofighter Consortium and involved in production and manufacturing of the Typhoon, they would have their fair share from sales to other counrtries such as Japan, Malaysia and other countries in the Middle East.

With such an attactive offer for India would it be arrogant to think that EADS/Cassidian have this deal bagged?

[LowObservable]

Or to put it another way - if India selects the Typhoon, the price of the Rafale will come down.

Countries with smaller fleet requirements might do well to see which way the cat (tiger?) jumps.