Of course, a heavy fighter of sufficient power with a full load is off in 3,000ft, or less, assuming a powerplant of sufficient thrust!
J-20 5th Gen Fighter Thread V
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Of course, a heavy fighter of sufficient power with a full load is off in 3,000ft, or less, assuming a powerplant of sufficient thrust!
There ya go now Jeff Head! woo-hoo!, now show me that bird with a nice white based paint in Air Show colors??
pylons are jettisonable as well, she would be as slik as a "baby's butt", if you blow the tanks and pylons, the pylons are not cheap, but they are expendable?? LOL
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Exactly, to use drop tanks for combat missions, you need to loose the pylons as well as the tanks, which costs a fair bit of coin.
The other reservation I have with stealth fighters using drop tanks, especially in peace time and within sensor range of potential hostile forces, is that it makes the stealth visible to enemy sensors.
That allows your opponents and enemies to be able to take a very close look at the signals returns from your stealth, and potentially be able to spot some pattern or signature characteristic that they could program into their radars and missiles to allow them to find and lock-on to your stealth specifically, even if the radar return from it is well below normal detection thresholds if their radar was just scanning normally. Just the same as how knowing the signature and characteristics of a sub's noise profile will allow you to be able to find it even if the sub's noise level is below background levels.
I guess you could always mix them in with conventional fighters at close distances behind. Then after you've dropped the tanks peel-off from the other jets.
No, not really. It makes the tanks and pylons visible to sensors...but the steal remains what it is.
If you are going to fly your stealth aircraft with or without tanks within range of OPFOR sensors, you open it up to that type of analysis.
But drop tanks do not improve that analysis of the stealth.
Drop tanks and their pylons allow the opposition to see those things themselves...and this is why in any actual exercise or real mission, they would be dropped well before they anticipated them being seen.
But they would be used for that entire time getting there...thus adding additional fuel to the aircraft for the mission and particularly for remaining on station.
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
Well, if you were on a training mission in a stealth aircraft flying with drop tanks and did not drop them prior to entering rival radar range, the radar of a rival nation would see your drop tanks and pylons, but not your stealth fighter (if it works) BUT they would be able to assume that those drop tanks and pylons are attached to a fighter, no? Then, they could analyze the return pattern and see if they can pick up any minute traces of signal (normally considered background at that level because it's so minute) around the drop tanks/pylons and see if they could detect a pattern. Then, they could program their radars to call a positive on that pattern whenever it detected it, even if it was way below the normal threshold for a call. I'm assuming, of course, that stealth fighters do not return no signal at all, but rather return a signal (in a unique signatory pattern depending on stealth model) too small for the radar (under normal circumstances) to determine from background noise.
I don't really know if they can do this; this is just what I suppose may be possible so do correct me if I'm wrong.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Very well put sir! That is exactly my concern.
As far as I am aware, other than the fabled Russian plasma stealth, no stealth technology, certainly nothing operational or remotely close to it (that we know of anyways) can eliminate all returns from hostile radar scans.
All current 5th gen stealth technology relies on minimising returns to the emitter such that the returns become lost in all the background signals noise.
However, if you had the exact signature characteristics of a target stealth, you will be able to fielder your radar signals fitters to specifically look for such a signature, no matter how weak, and flag that as a contact.
Its the same principle as how we humans could pick out a single, familiar voice in a crowded room buzzing with background chatter and loud music even if the voice in question is less loud than the music and other background noise.
Only computers would be able to do that a great deal better.
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