J-20 5th Gen Fighter Thread V
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Planned EODAS linking to helmet display?
Interesting question. What about F-22? It does not have them and never will? It does not have EODAS.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
The F22 don't have mirrors and never will because the one-piece canopy leaves nowhere to mount them, same as F16.
While mirrors are not deemed massively important by fighter pilots, especially on planes with good 360 fields on view, but nor are they deemed to be useless either.
Before with the one-piece on the J20, it was natural to not have mirrors as there was nowhere to mount them, but now, it seems a very simple thing to do to give the pilot that little bit more situational awareness at practically zero cost.
Sure, advances like HMD will help a lot, but if a set of mirrors might warn a pilot about a threat he might not have seen otherwise, even if that only happened one time out of a hundred, a thousand even, isn't that more than enough to justify the frankly non-existent cost to fitting mirrors?
Its interesting that the F35 seems to lack them as well.
While mirrors are not deemed massively important by fighter pilots, especially on planes with good 360 fields on view, but nor are they deemed to be useless either.
Before with the one-piece on the J20, it was natural to not have mirrors as there was nowhere to mount them, but now, it seems a very simple thing to do to give the pilot that little bit more situational awareness at practically zero cost.
Sure, advances like HMD will help a lot, but if a set of mirrors might warn a pilot about a threat he might not have seen otherwise, even if that only happened one time out of a hundred, a thousand even, isn't that more than enough to justify the frankly non-existent cost to fitting mirrors?
Its interesting that the F35 seems to lack them as well.
I think that is because it can project the back view (like the mirror) directly to the sides of helmet HMD? J-20 for now can do similar (but not as good) by projecting the back view on the edges of the big display. The pilot would have to roll his eye sight downward though. In the end, PLAF will also adopt something like the helmet HMD same way as F-35, we have seen prototypes before.
So, mirror not in J-20 is just a short time gap I think.
What seems incredible to me is that the air intake of this design has a very similar shape to that of the J-10B with two years in advance on first known photos of the latter and both are or are presumed to be from the same design bureau. This makes me think that the photo from the 2006 magazine could be referred to a real preliminary proposal of the J-20, probably already rejected at the time of publication, and that part of the design work on it was transferred on the J-10.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Well, I am actually quite sceptical about the whole HMD projection thing.
The human brain can deal with fixed constants. Fixed mirrors showing fixed areas around the plane, that people can easily deal with, having the rear view projected constantly st the edge of your vision? Seems like a surefire way to overload the pilot and risk disorientation and confusion.
Rather than projecting raw footage from the cameras, a far better set up would be for the computer to recognise friendlies and hostiles and project coloured arrows at the edge of your vision pointing to their direction.
As for the mirrors, well, again, it's not meant to be a replacement for anything else. It's literally just something in addition to everything else available or planned, that could be added for no cost as far as I can see.
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