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

gizmodo.com

71–80 of 87 posts

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

#71

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…

> That being said Yahoo! Answers also rarely has good content

I would go even further and say it is the spiritual successor to YouTube comments before they were G-plussed.

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

#72
Interesting(I didn't read the whole article because I'm not logging into Quora). I wonder what the state of the art is? Certainly we have tech now to get all the info on all the aircrafts? I would think that software could be employed to fill in the gaps and extrapolate the info at the least. What with 3d video tracking and the like at the levels they are at today.

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

#73
post #33

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…

This one got reposted to Gizmodo, with a saner interface. http://gizmodo.com/how-fighter-jets-lock-on-and-how-the-targ...

Thanks. We changed to that from http://www.quora.com/How-does-a-fighter-jet-lock-onto-and-ke... since there were so many complaints about the latter.

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

#74
post #30

Related anecdote - I worked with a coder a while back who was a naval aviator before he went back to school, flying carrier-based transports. I asked him once about whether he would have wanted to fly fighters instead, and he said that just flying transports was already a huge amount of work, as far as flight plans, training, practice, and such. Flying fighters apparently involved doing all of that same work, plus a…

believe me, flying fighters really is as much fun as it sounds. It is more work than the transport guys, but you get out what you put in. its all worth it coming in for a 450 knot overhead at 600', pulling six g's in the break, then catching the three-wire aboard the carrier.

Indeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEe3xfWfkG8

I am curious to know how such footage is shot.

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

#75
post #62

Upon reading of RWR and its delights, at least one part of me, the techno-dweeb, goes "weeeh!" .. 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.

You might be interested in the UAV Challenge:

http://www.uavoutbackchallenge.com.au/

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

#76
post #30

Related anecdote - I worked with a coder a while back who was a naval aviator before he went back to school, flying carrier-based transports. I asked him once about whether he would have wanted to fly fighters instead, and he said that just flying transports was already a huge amount of work, as far as flight plans, training, practice, and such. Flying fighters apparently involved doing all of that same work, plus a…

On the other hand, when you're the engineer maintaining the flight sims for the pilots, boy oh boy can you have fun in those machines :) I've logged over 100 hours on the F-18, and 20 for the F-111. Never got to experience those long high G turns though...

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

#77
post #73
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one got reposted to Gizmodo, with a saner interface. http://gizmodo.com/how-fighter-jets-lock-on-and-how-the-targ...

Thanks. We changed to that from http://www.quora.com/How-does-a-fighter-jet-lock-onto-and-ke... since there were so many complaints about the latter.

So the average bastard who reads Hacker News still gets to read the content? Your hypocrisy is just amazing.

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

#78
post #30

Related anecdote - I worked with a coder a while back who was a naval aviator before he went back to school, flying carrier-based transports. I asked him once about whether he would have wanted to fly fighters instead, and he said that just flying transports was already a huge amount of work, as far as flight plans, training, practice, and such. Flying fighters apparently involved doing all of that same work, plus a…

believe me, flying fighters really is as much fun as it sounds. It is more work than the transport guys, but you get out what you put in. its all worth it coming in for a 450 knot overhead at 600', pulling six g's in the break, then catching the three-wire aboard the carrier.

To remember that there are people that can and do pilot those jets regularly, before coming home to their family, gives me a kind of feeling of vertigo and envy, that my life (and the other peasants around me) is flat, onedimensional, boring and meaningless.

But soon I forget and resume watching Netflix.

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

#79
post #57

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…

The radar and weapon control systems are "locked on" to from the aircraft's perspective - I don't really understand what you're talking about...

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.

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

#80

Meta Note 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.

Since quora has problems in the money department, how is their competitor Stack Exchange maintaining profit?

Stack Exchange made the brilliant move of having disparate communities with a defined (and passionate) audience for each. This makes selling targeted advertising much easier. Ex. Stack Overflow is probably one of the best places to reach developers with job ads—hence they can charge a lot more for that than generic display ads.

This is all pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if Stack Exchange's RPU would be 10x Quora's.

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