Serious F35 question

Alright, so I get the idea of the F35 is as a strike-aircraft come multi-role fighter.

- Air defence is becoming very sophisticated
- Getting the drop on someone has ALWAYS been the best way of winning air to air fighting
- Behold, F35 penentrates the airspace, precision strike the area defence weapons, or sneaks up on aircraft that IT detects with FLIR or RF-DF or from surveillance assets talking them in.

Okay, good so far, makes a lot of sense.

So what in the fuck stops it being detected by FLIR itself? What stops e.g. China, just putting 100 ching-chongs around each vital area that needs air defense with thermal camera and then giving each man a decent radio? I think 100 chings with these is probably still about 1-100th the cost of a single F35, right?

>Go high
Even easier to spot you with this stuff. Fighter vectored to you. Dead
>Go low
Harder to spot, but now you can also be picked up with acoustic sensors. Fighters vectored to you, / low level air defence re-arranged to anticipate your arrival. Dead.

Or does the stealth aspect of the aircraft protect it reasonably well from anticipated missile threats even THOUGH its detected? I get how narrow beam seakers on radar guided missiles will have a hard time locking it up but what stops laser beam riding missiles fucking it up? Or just electro-optically ranged fucking GUNS?

Before anybody "BUTT MAD VATNIk/BRITFUCK THREAD SAGE x3,0000000000000"'s me, bear in mind I think america has, overall, the finest military equipment in the world....

But is putting all your money on "your modern radar can't see me ergo I'm fucking invincible - just ignore this enormous IR footprint". really a good idea?

Or am I being a fucking idiot? Is there something I'm missing? Is there a reason why you can't put ONE dickhead with a thermal camera at the head of your possible threat direction (a valley, say) and a telephone line to possible targets.

Attached: f35.jpg (265x190, 5K)

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_An-12_family
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Look up the detection range of modern IRST and modern radar. You're cutting detection range to about 1/4, assuming zero IR signature reduction.

Infrared is distorted by water in the air much more than radar. So, yes, you can "see" it, but the picture is much "fuzzier". It also means it is much more vulnerable to flares at said distance. Most thermal tracking weapons (which do exist) aren't as long ranged as their radar-guided bretheren for that exact reason. If you are up close, nothing is stopping you from trying to pop an F-35 with a thermal/infrared tracking weapon. HOWEVER, by that point, the F-35 would have long since pinged you on its radar suite.

The best mk. 1 eyeball can do is vector planes to it's general location, wherupon the F35s advanced sensors and networking will be able to pick it apart with very little risk.

Stealth isn't meant to make it 'invisible' to radar, it's meant to give the F35/22 team the advantage to the point where they're able to track and shoot at 2-3x the range that their adversaries can, thus winning the fight BVR and with relatively little risk.

You're not entirely off. IRST systems can be used to track aircraft without the use of a radar. However, their detection range is quite limited compared to radars, due in part to the nature of Earth's atmosphere. There's a hard limit to how far you can detect something with a camera that simply can't be engineered around.

The Infrared signature was taken into account when the F-35 was designed.
>Is there a reason why you can't put ONE dickhead with a thermal camera at the head of your possible threat direction
What could said dickhead do? Even if he could see the fighters with a thermal imager (A very big if) the only thing he can do is call for interceptors, which can be shot down by the F-35 flight, or call for mobile AA, which probably won't get there in time and would have little hope of shooting down stealth fighters at altitude anyway.

The range of a modern IRST system like EuroFIRST Pirate against a subsonic target head on is basically BVR weapon range.

Only on the very low end of BVR. Pirate’s advertised frontal detection range is 50km in perfect conditions, which is an incredibly short distance in aerial terms. And even then, getting an actual target lock for a weapon isn’t possible until at around 30km.

>he doesn't know what a luneberg lens is

Attached: 1541977833441.gif (512x807, 434K)

Pirate isn't 50km.

50km would be what the Russian OLS-35 is capable.