How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
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How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
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Re: How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
#2Call it a hunch, but if the flares spew dirty and irregular, maybe there's an awareness that this sloppy spread of IR readings has benefits.
Re: How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
#3Overfitting to the training data. Sounds vaguely familiar.
Re: How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
#4[deleted]
Re: How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
#5If you enjoy reading about electronic warfare, it is worth reading Steve Blank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley".
Here's the bit about moths [1]:
> John said, “Listen, you can hear the jammer.” The what? “The jammer,” he said, “Watch the moths.” It turns out the moths, through evolution, had developed their own electronic countermeasures to jam the bat radar. They had developed ultrasonic receivers and ultrasonic jammers and physical countermeasures. When they picked up the bat radar illuminating them by sensitive hairs on their antennas, they would send out their own little squirt of ultrasonics by rubbing their legs together, jam the bat radar, and then they would immediately take evasive action and dive to the left and right.
> Through Darwinian selection over millions of years, these moths had developed an entire electronic warfare, electronic countermeasures, electronic countercounter-measures suite, and here was a guy in 1973 in Thailand who was figuring this stuff out. To be honest, it was my first insight that there was really a bigger picture.
> So, John’s point was, “I keep trying to tell officers way above me that there’s probably a ton we could learn from watching these natural systems. What we’re doing in the air war over the North is just nothing more than something that’s been going on in nature for millions of years, but I can’t seem to get anybody’s attention.” (Thirty years later MIT would develop the Insect Lab and work on swarm behaviors for UAV’s and robotics.)
[1] https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-va...
Re: How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
#6I've often wondered if a WW1 stringbag could fly right past modern air defenses without being detected or tracked.
Re: How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
#7I find it interesting the US jet was an FA-18, which entered service November 1983 (USN) is actually more than 30 years old as well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Hor...
Re: How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
#8It's a 14-year old missile.[1] It's a variant of the Sidewinder missile from the 1950s. The Sidewinder has a good track record partly because it's so dumb. Classic versions are tail-chasers; the pilot must get on the opponent's tail before firing. Newer versions are supposed to be "all-aspect", but they still work better if they can see the hot end of a jet engine.[2]
[1] http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/aim-9x/ [2] http://www.donhollway.com/foxtwo/
Re: How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
#9I find it interesting the US jet was an FA-18, which entered service November 1983 (USN) is actually more than 30 years old as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Hor...
This is equivalent to say a couple years old Ford F-150 is a truck from 1975. The branding is the same, the shape is similar, but it ain't the same plane.
Super Hornets are still being produced, upgraded and improved and will probably still be in the assembly line in 20 years. A 30 second Google didn't show the year of the F/A-18 in question, but I assume it is from the mid 2000 or something like it.
This was even more true for Soviet tech. The American B-52 are ancient, but the Soviet Bears were produced, upgraded, replaced and improved until the very end. Cost-plus programs like the F-35 with enormous upfront R&D are good for the manufacturer, suppliers and lobbied politicians, but iterative designs, like evolution, also just works.
Re: How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
#10I find it interesting the US jet was an FA-18, which entered service November 1983 (USN) is actually more than 30 years old as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Hor...
Actually it was super hornet. It has so few common parts with the original, that many people consider it completely different airplane. The program costs we're also big enough to hint new design if I recall correctly.
The reason it is called "hornet" and why it shares so much external similarity is some kind of domestic propaganda reasons. To make people think that US Navy doesn't have modern equipment when they actually do.