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How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

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Re: How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

#51

Post by toomuchtodo »

OldSchool wrote: post #40

Hmmm, I was kind of hoping for an explanation of how the control system determines how to modify the highly directional antenna's orientation to continue to maximally "illuminate" the target once it's been selected from a general scan. 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 circ…

Are you asking if the antenna gets moved to illuminate the target once acquired? I apologize if I misunderstood. If that's the case, the antenna is a solid state phased array; no movement is required. Mobile communications (cellular and satellite) spot beams work under the same principal.

http://www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/MESA/Documents/a...

Re: How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

#52

Post by rcxdude »

theoh wrote: post #42
_djo_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No space. Take a look at this image, it's the standard AN/APG-63 on an F-15C fighter aircraft: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:APG-63_radar_of_F-15_... 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…

It is important to note that the antennae in a phased array (TRMs) cannot be "steered" individually: it is the electronics that creates a beam by timing the transmit and receive signals to a number of antennae. It's similar to the way an array of atoms creates a pattern of beams in x-ray crystallography, if that makes it clearer.

This does also mean that the whole array can be pointed in multiple directions at once: The only limitation is the number of phase shifters coming off of each antenna (if the signals are directly sampled and then the beam forming is done in software you are then only limited by your processing power. I'm not sure if this is currently possible in radar but I've seen it done for sonar).

Re: How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

#53

Post by hammock »

krat0sprakhar wrote: post #6

Off Topic: Man! Reading this answer so makes me want to play those FlightSim games of the yesteryears like Apache Havoc, Commanche, Jane's F/A 18 Hornet etc etc. Does anyone have any suggestions for a modern Flight Sim game? Thanks!

Ever play EF2000? It's not a modern one but it's an older realistic one that I remember fondly. That and Echelon (not realistic)

Re: How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

#54

Post by Perseids »

platz wrote: post #47

After playing something like Falcon BMS you'll have all these radars memorized. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU3pmXvnc0k&hd=1 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

The radar discussion in the video is pretty good itself. It begins at 30min 31sec: http://youtu.be/uU3pmXvnc0k?t=30m31s .

Re: How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

#55

Post by lucb1e »

jlas wrote: post #21

Another interesting aspect is the Lock-On detection of the enemy aircraft. Aircraft are able to identify when they're being tracked by other aircraft or homing missles. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_warning_receiver

like mentioned in the answer..?

Re: How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

#56

Post by sanderjd »

Someone1234 wrote: post #2

Good response, worth the read. Heck the response alone could justify their own article. 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). Th…

Which part is the nonsense? The stuff on the sides? What do you mean by "rolls into the comments section without warning"? (Honestly curious.)

I think the content is often pretty good! YMMV I guess.

Re: How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

#57

Post by reduce »

The system has not performed "a lock on the target", at least not in the way that the language leads you to believe. The tool is making a prediction, that within a certain level of confidence, and given the present parameters, that firing the missile will result in the neutralization of the target.

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.

Re: How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

#59

Post by Agathos »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #51
OldSchool wrote: post #40

Hmmm, I was kind of hoping for an explanation of how the control system determines how to modify the highly directional antenna's orientation to continue to maximally "illuminate" the target once it's been selected from a general scan. 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 circ…

Are you asking if the antenna gets moved to illuminate the target once acquired? I apologize if I misunderstood. If that's the case, the antenna is a solid state phased array; no movement is required. Mobile communications (cellular and satellite) spot beams work under the same principal. http://www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/MESA/Documents/a...

Of course some radars did physically move their dishes to stay locked on to a target. I'm in the middle of The Invention That Changed the World (spoiler alert: it was radar) and I was stunned to learn how well this worked with analog circuits. An SCR-584, paired with an M9 analog computer, could detect that a plane was moving out of the center of its conical scan, and then convert that into a signal to the motors that drive the dish (and its associated antiaircraft guns).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conical_scanning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-584_radar

Re: How does a fighter jet lock onto and keep track of an enemy aircraft? (2013)

#60

Post by wtracy »

krat0sprakhar wrote: post #6

Off Topic: Man! Reading this answer so makes me want to play those FlightSim games of the yesteryears like Apache Havoc, Commanche, Jane's F/A 18 Hornet etc etc. Does anyone have any suggestions for a modern Flight Sim game? Thanks!

If you want something Free/Open Source to mess around with, try GL-117 (your distro probably has a package for it): http://www.heptargon.de/gl-117/gl-117.html

It doesn't compare well to the modern commercial flight simulators in terms of graphics or realism, but it's still a good time. :-)

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