Thread: F-22 vs. Su-37 who would win

What is it with Russians? I mean really. I have no grudge against them from the cold war, we did what we did, and they did what they had to. But come on guys! Certain realities exist. Why does EVERY American weapon system suck, and every Russian system is superior? Is there any question that Russian stuff generally sucks? Their nuke subs were more of a threat to Soviet sailors, their aircraft, while good, were not state of the art. Their tanks, after the M-1, were just targets. Their training sucked then and still sucks now. Their nuclear weapons are comparable, but certainly not superior.

I suspect it is like after Stalin died, and the Soviet Navy took a severe budget cut. Most all major surface combatants, and that 1000 sub fleet were subject to the scrap cutting torch. Pride runs deep. Self delusion prevails. I am not slamming, and I know as an American I can have bias, but what has been revealed from history and now interpolating from budgets and most reputable publications, it seems Russian military technology struggles conceptionally to keep up with the west.
The fact is that the Russian navy is about 100 major surface combatants and nuclear subs and a few additional conventional subs. The rest are not functioning for one reason or another. The Russian air force is a quarter what it was, and while now the average Russian pilot is flying 150 hours a year, it still doesn't compare to the west. Western equipment seems a full generation ahead on most fronts. Not that I forsee any possible situation of attacking Russia, because I don't, but why do they keep denying reality? The facts seem obvious to this biased American.

Sadly, Sandman, it's even worse than you describe. The fleet is pretty much one big rusting hulk. The Kuznetsov went on excersizes this summer, and managed to limp back into port under 1/3 power. Thay smacked two SU-33's into the deck in practice ops, doing a lot of damage in the process. It's not really what you would call force projection....I hate to say it, but Russia is down to missiles only, which leaves quite a large gap in the balance...

Originally Posted by Northax

Do we believe all the bull from Lockheed? lol

You could say the same for ANY aircraft company (including Sukhoi), when they're trying to market their jet for sale. However, Lockheed has had an awesome track record for making great aircraft: SR-71 Blackbird, YF-12, F-117, F-16, etc.:

I'm going to put YF-12 and SR-71 together, and the F-16 was General Dynamics. Lockheed just does a better job of lieing than the rest of us contractors.

Originally Posted by Northax

Oh, super-maneuverability alone won't mean squat when an AIM-9X pulling 40-50 G's at higher speeds than your Su-3X is flying, is coming at you. You'll never outmaneuver this baby, so you can spout all the garbage you want about super-maneuverability, cobra maneuver, kulbit, etc. all you want. It's a waste of time, stress on your airframe; AND going slow is the ONLY way you're going to perform these maneuvers! Guess what? Going slow is NOT the place you want to be in a REAL WORLD combat situation.

I'll agree with that.

Originally Posted by Northax

And, don't act as if U.S. aircraft couldn't match such maneuverability. Go check on Google for the F-16 MATV, F-15 ACTIVE, F-18 HARV, X-36 super-maneuverable stealth UAV flown in the mid-90's by NASA (which I believe will be the basis for our new jet fighter stealth UAV), HiMAT UAV flown in the early 1980's, X-31 flown by NASA, etc.

Now, am I discounting 'super-maneuverability' altogether? Certainly not! But if that's your MAIN reason to fly such a jet into REAL combat against the stealth jet fighter such as the F-22 Raptor, then you've got big problems on your hands; especially when you're showing up on the opposing forces (F-22's) radar almost as big as a Boeing 747, and the AIM-9X flying in on you. In BVR, you're dogmeat against the F-22 Raptor. And that's where we want to take out the enemy: BVR.

F-22 does not really take advantage of the most useful benefits of thrust vectoring,, i.e. it does not increase it's flight envelope, but rather gives it a much larger pitch rate. So while it can get to it's limiting alpha faster, it cannot pull greater alpha without losing control than without it's thrust vectoring. This is the inherent limitation of using a 2D thrust vectoring nozzle. An aircraft with 3D thrust vectoring, however, has a drastically increased flight envelope as it allows an aircraft to obtain much greater alpha under control as it has an additional control direction.

For instance, with a 2D nozzle, you can get to the airframe's limiting alpha quicker,, say 40 degrees just for example, and then the control surfaces of the aircraft will be so washed out that they will not be able to counteract the assymetric collapse of vorticies generated by the LEX/engine inlet which pass over the wing. When this happens, the aircraft will yaw off to one side or the other departing from it's controlled path. Now if this same aircraft had 3D thrust vectoring,, i.e. pitch AND yaw control,, it could surpass 40 degrees alpha and MAINTAIN controlled flight because the yaw direction thrust vectoring can counteract assymetric airflow which the washed out control surfaces cannot. With 3D thrust vectoring, you increase your flight envelope, your pitch rate, your yaw rate, and assuming the nozzles can move in opposite directions, your roll rate as well. With 2D, you're only increasing your rate in the direction of vectoring,, For the F-22 it's pitch.

Originally Posted by Northax

About the YF-23 being more stealthy? Sure, it was, but by HOW MUCH is what's important. I don't think it was drastically THAT much more stealthier than the F-22; not that much to matter, that is. So when the F-22 came out with it's TVC for good maneuverability as well, ON TOP of that stealth, that made it much more attractive to the USAF; for good reason: TVC will give better maneuverability, the jet'll bleed less energy in supersonic flight while turning, can take off and land in shorter distances, etc.

YF-23 had a considerably lower RCS than the YF-22. What was exceptionally better on YF-23 was it's ALL ASPECT stealth. There were two reasons YF-23 didn't include thrust vectoring initially. First the trough design, which gave it MUCH greater IR stealthing than YF-22, couldn't be used with a pivoting nozzle. Second, it increased weight in the aft fuse of the aircraft. In addition, keeping the nozzles centered close to the pivot point of the massive 'rudder-vators' of the YF-23 shielded the hot engine exhaust from all viewpoints excepting aft. YF-23 had lower wingloading than YF-22 and was capable of considerably higher speeds because of it's extremely low profile, which additionally contributed to it's visual stealthing. YF-23 though not as maneuverable at low speeds as the F-22 was a highly maneuverable non-thrust vectored aircraft. The F-22 is evolutionary whereas the YF-23 truely was a revolutionary design,, way ahead of it's time.

Don't let anyone fool you, performance took a back seat to politics (another area where LockMart excels) in the ATF competition.

jgetti and highsea.

I talked to engineers at company involved in MKI program few month ago after I read the points of highsea. They confirmed that MKI radar is inferior to specs stated to Raptor, because of inferiour computing power. However they argued vigoursly that MKI's radar is anyhow worse than AESA. All I understood is that there different ways how to solve the same problem and that MKI radar is at least as good as AESA and that while designing they left vast room for further modernizations of computing equipement working with radar. Another way of modenization is that emitting power of N011M may be increased many times making it a short range weapon by itself while it somehow can't be enhanced with AESA.

Anyway I am not trying to undermine your very interesting and educative points highsea. I am simply have little understanding of this issue and heard some different oppinions on it.

Hi Garry,

The N011 looks to be a pretty good radar, I am not saying otherwise. But the differences go beyond computing power and raw power. There are fundamental differences in potential that are related directly to the design diferences between PESA and AESA that will always exist.

As far as beam agilty (steering), they are fairly similar, since both types are electronically steered. PESA radars use TWT tubes, which means that the frequencies are fixed. AESA elements are frequency agile, which makes jamming a lot more difficult, because each element can Tx/Rx indepedently. In a jamming environment, only a small percentage of the AESA elements are affected, and they can just switch to a clear frequency. Saturate a TWT tube, and the display goes white until the range gets close enough for the radar to burn through the jamming signal.

LPI- each element of an AESA radar can be adjusted wrt when and how and it is transmitting. So you have 1500+ elements that can transmit at different frequencies and power levels, pulse forms, PRF, each element individually operating below the threshold of the opponent's RWR set and jumping around in an unpredictable fashion. The computer then combines these returns for the overall target picture. So the opponents RWR may only see 3 or 4 watts of power, and only for a very brief instant, compared to the kilowatts that the passive array is cranking out on a fixed frequency. The AESA is not putting out enough energy for passive detection. The oponent may think there's something out there, but he will not know what or where, if it's a false alarm, etc. In the meantime, the Raptor already has him targeted.

Graceful degradation- A TWT tube gets weaker with age. This affects the performance of the entire system. AESA elements have their own T/R built in- individual elements can fail without significantly affecting the peformance of the system. This directly affects reliability- a single TWT failure on a PESA radar renders it inoperable until it s replaced, and TWT tubes have low MTBF rates. You will have something like 150-200 hours for the TWT tube vs. 1500-2000 hours for the AESA. The AESA antennas are so reliable that they are built as completely sealed LRU's. A couple power connectors and coolant lines, you can literally swap out the antenna in minutes. Disadvantage is that the MMIC's generate heat, and like all electronics, they work better when cool. So the AESA set requires active cooling.

Versatility- The PESA radar can operate only on as many frequencies as it has TWT tubes, and as you add tubes, weight and complexity goes up, and reliability goes down. So you can have L-band search and X-band tracking/targeting at the same time by using part of the antenna for each function, but that's about as far as it goes. The AESA can do these functions, plus SAR imaging, communications, IFF, passive scanning, jamming, RWR, etc.- all simultaneously. It can train multiple beams at different targets, each one doing something different, to a much greater extent than any PESA set wil ever be capable of doing.

There's no question that the future lies with AESA. Every radar house in the world is working frantically to catch up. AMSAR, RBE-2 Active, NIIR, etc. The French and Israelis have sets, either in testing or on the market, using US MMIC's. Russia doesn't have the capability for mass-producing the modules as yet, but given the money, they could build it. Anyone can build a laboratory set, but consider that the JSF program alone will require over 2,000,000 modules, and you can see that mass-production is necessary for any practical application.

The US has already moved beyond the first-generation "brick" architecture, and uses "tiles", which are a fraction of the size, and allow a much greater degree of versatility. We are also moving away from Gallium Arsenide MMIC's to Gallium Nitride, which will allow more power efficiency in an even smaller package.

So whoever else manages to build the next AESA, be it Russia or Europe or whoever, they will still have to go through the same learning curves as we have, gaining capabilities with experience. We are pretty confident that this is one area where we will mantain an advantage in the foreseeable future.