How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
There's growing number of ways, both active and passive, that targets can be tracked or future positions predicted. One of the answers on that page hints at this, the other answer is misleading and often not how it's done in many modern systems.
Source: engineered parts of these systems before.
A particular target has been identified, it is being tracked (maybe at the expense of scanning for other targets if its an older system, probably with track-while-scan otherwise), and based on this updates are being sent to the missile in order to control its initial trajectory when it gets launched to point it in the correct direction.
But soon I forget and resume watching Netflix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wEURyjB3Lc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH7TiA58UzQ
;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEe3xfWfkG8
I am curious to know how such footage is shot.
Hm. I figure the glory you get from being a fighter pilot is one of the perks, so they might as well milk that for all it's worth.
My point is that it's interesting to note the professions that seem more glorious than they actually are, and beware those who sell themselves or the job based on that glory: it's an illusion.
Note how the radar's processing units and dish take up the entirety of the aircraft's nose and how large the system is compared to the technician working on it. There simply isn't enough space to add another radar.
Nor would it make sense to split that into two smaller radars, as the size of the dish and processing units is strongly linked to its power and range. That's one reason larger aircraft like the F-15, F-14 and Su-27 have longer-ranged and more powerful radars than smaller fighter aircraft.
This track vs scan limitation is removed by Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars such as this AN/APG-63(V)2 retrofitted to a USAF F-15C: http://www.pacaf.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/070720-F...
Rather than having a mechanically-slaved reflective dish, an AESA radar has hundreds of Transmit/Receive Modules (TRMs) each capable of acting like a tiny radar dish by transmitting or receiving on its own frequency and being steered its own direction.
So now, rather than having the radar dish jump between track and scan at rapid intervals, the system can just dedicate a few hundred of the AESA TRMs to tracking one or more targets while letting the remainder continue sweeping the skies. There's no limitation on azimuth because each TRM can be individually steered.
So in short, the answer is that the latest fighter aircraft don't have two radars, they have hundreds or thousands of tiny radars that can work together in a whole bunch of useful combinations.
Edit: Replaced initial image with a Wiki Commons link that doesn't have linking issues.
The steering uses amplitude and phase shifting to create beams through constructive or destructive interference. All very fascinating stuff, and it allows for additional uses like jamming and directional communications links.
Can anyone describe the solution to this?
Example idea: Once selected for "lock," the antenna scans in small circles and migrates its central point toward the point on the scanned circle that provides the strongest return, allowing for variation due to noise sources.
[1] "Multiple Target Tracking with Radar Applications" - Sam Blackman (http://books.google.com/books?id=Ag9TAAAAMAAJ&q=tracking+mul...)
http://www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/MESA/Documents/a...
Yeah phased arrays have probably been the rule for decades at that price-no-object level.
Even at the consumer level, there have been phased-array marine -sonars- (e.g. Interphase brand product line) for at least ten years for "only" 4-digit prices. Spatial resolution is of course tied to the number of elements but they do present more information that your typical 1-d "fish finder."
It acutally makes the sim quite fun to play, although you do have to get past that learning curve. I think for me it was the learning part that was kind of fun too
Another part, more of a hippy tree-hugger, goes "wish we were using this to figure out where to drop the water/medicine/books instead of BOOMB devices" ..
I mean, seriously. Tell us where to drop the books, and BOOM there it is: how it should be.
As an aside: I hate quora' site design so much I have blacklisted it using Google Personal Blocklist. Somehow I dislike it more than Experts Exchange (which is also blacklisted), it is just super cluttered with nonsense, rolls into the comments section without warning and rarely offers good content (see Experts Exchange again).
That being said Yahoo! Answers also rarely has good content but at least with Yahoo! Answers you can determine that with a glance. You visit the page and you can see the answer (or lack of answer). So Yahoo! Answers remains in my search results, Quora and Expert Exchange have been vanished indefinitely.
PS - Quora also likes to spawn pop ups whenever you click anywhere on the page for no real reason (just asks for your Quora login details). For someone who randomly highlights blocks of text while reading this is pure hell...
We don't mind the change of link - we just want knowledge shared on Quora to get to as many people as possible and we don't mind if it happens on other sites. But I wanted to let you guys know that this was a bug and the behavior is back to normal (nothing with share=1 will ever require viewers to sign in / trigger this level of complaints). There can be so much negativity here that it can be hard to tell the difference between general hate (as radmuzom suspected) and a real problem, but in this case it was a real problem.
Apologies for the abusive word used.
I wonder why they removed that option from search results?
Although www.w3fools.com has softened its stance.
Someone needs to make a Stack Overflow to Quora's Experts Exchange (preferably by just using the Stack Overflow codebase/framework).
This one would fit into http://aviation.stackexchange.com/.
I think the content is often pretty good! YMMV I guess.
The content is usually good but it's still annoying that Quora impedes you from sharing it with others that aren't also on Quora.
I would go even further and say it is the spiritual successor to YouTube comments before they were G-plussed.
God I hate Quora. There's the `share=1` flag but still, the end of the article is truncated and you're asked to login.
Quora wouldn't piss me off so much if they were not so annoying about me logging in and linking a social account, if they didn't post crap from my friend's facebook account who do have an account, send me spam about whatever people I know might have done (or not done) on their platform.
This is trying to gather users by pissing them off. Likely I'd have created an account since if it weren't for their aggressive behavior.
Games to keep an eye on (if you like combat) http://www.polygon.com/2014/6/9/5791924/e3-2014-marks-the-re...
Been out of games for a while, but looking forward to Oculus and whatever today's Thrustmaster equivalent is :)
The hardcore side of combat flightsim gaming for me was Su-27 Flanker (http://www.mobygames.com/game/su-27-flanker), published by SSI. So hardcore I never actually managed to complete a full mission! It was a bit dry, without any campaigns or any kind of career tracking, but man was it detailed! It made me fall in love with the real-life Flanker.
And of course, Falcon 3.0 by Spectrum Holobyte. Another awesome flightsim I spent a lot of time with but never managed to complete a single mission with. It was obvious this sim was a work of love.
1) DCS World (https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/world/) is the "framework" and comes with some free aircraft. There are paid aircraft options both 1st and 3rd party; DCS A-10C being the most popular.
2) Falcon BMS (http://www.benchmarksims.org/forum/content.php) which is the successor to Falcon 4.0
Time to buy shares in joystick manufacturers.
First, there's the resolution issue. I've only used DK2, but its resolution was so low that I was unable to read the dials/HUD without getting my face super close to them, which presents major issues when trying to maintain situational awareness.
Second, no matter how many buttons and switches you have on your HOTAS, you're going to have to manipulate something with your keyboard/mouse at some point. This causes some obvious problems when you have an Oculus strapped to your head.
It doesn't compare well to the modern commercial flight simulators in terms of graphics or realism, but it's still a good time. :-)
Falcon 4.0 is nothing short of amazing. It has been under non-stop development by the official developers and the community (thanks to a source code leak) since 1984.
Many of the community developers are former pilots and avionics techs.
I'm not sure if its the software or the OP who added the "?share=1" parameter but thank you for including it in the link.
The flag makes reading quora possible. If HN doesn't add this parameter by default I think it would be a worth while upgrade to the site.
Lots of great content is locked in quora otherwise.
quora defends the design by saying that it's their way of piping user-specific content.
I agree, it's super irritating and results in information being locked for those that don't know how to go around it.
Quora has the opportunity to do the same, but I think the specific stack exchange communities offer a better partition between topics. Quora does it's best to show you targetted questions/comments, whereas StackExchange sites just throw you wherever you showed up (which, if by search, is usually a better choice)
A good example : I once answered a fringe question about the Dalai Lama on Quora, now many of the questions i'm tasked with giving answers to are spiritual in nature, and of absolutely no interest to me. It's the same search bubble problem that YouTube/Google runs into occasionally. Things like that make me prefer more 'basic' sites like StackExchange networks.
This is all pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if Stack Exchange's RPU would be 10x Quora's.