Su-35 vs F-22/F-35

Su35 has absolutely zero chance against the f35.

Sukhoi’s own patent claims Su-57 having a design RCS between 0.1 and 1 m2.

Su-35s operate within an IADS network that can detect and track F-35s from enormous distances... the Su-35 pilot might never turn his nose mounted radar on.

That’s comparable to a clean Super Hornet and it shouldn’t be a surprise when Su-57 follows many of the same RCS-reduction measures such as using radar blockers to hide the engine face instead of an actual serpentine duct.

A clean SH is useless for air combat. Western claims of similar RCS for Rafales are equally amusing... especially with that stealthy fixed inflight refuelling probe.

It’s not just Su-57 being less stealthy than F-35 (-40 dBsm) – it has a 1,000 times bigger RCS. Since detection range is proportional to the 4th root of RCS, a 1,000 times bigger RCS equates to 5.6 times greater detection range. And this is after giving Su-57 every benefit of doubt, the F-35’s RCS is very likely closer to -50 dB.

And yet Israeli F-35s refuse to fly into Syrian airspace...

The F-35 will be enjoying almost 6 times greater detection range against Su-57. The difference is so huge that Su-57 will be hopelessly outclassed. We see this time and again in Red Flags and Northern Edge with F-35 having 28–1 kill ratio against modern 4th gen. aircraft backed by AWACS and SAMs. The enormous difference in detection range from Stealth is the primary factor for such a lopsided kill ratio.

Or the fact that previously the Russians had no stealth fighters so fighting stealth aircraft was never a requirement of US or western fighter aircraft/AWACS platforms and that they are optimised for murdering people in third world countries and are not really set up for second world opponents...

It doesn’t matter how capable radar or EW suite you have, they simply can’t compensate the enormous difference in detection range from a VLO airframe. You can have amazing performance at airshows but without Stealth you’re not gonna be in a fight against 5th gen. aircraft.

So why is the US stopping buying F-35s and putting F-15s back into production which I am sure will have a RCS of 0.001 when fully armed because US stealth is just so amazing.

And this is ignoring the infancy of Su-57 program and consistent delay in the production/IOC since last 4 years or the fact Su-57’s avionics suite is not remotely comparable to that of F-35.

Su-57 has multiple radar antenna including L band for hunting enemy stealth fighters. F-35s have more problems than they have working features...

The F-35 has a bigger and much more capable radar and orders of magnitude more powerful EW suite giving vastly superior Situational Awareness.

If it is stealthy why does it need any EW equipment?

Surely EW would just give away the planes location.

Where F-35’s DAS make it the only Fighter to fully operate in the IR spectrum, Su-57 can’t even use its forward-hemisphere IRST without further ruining its RCS. The IRST is turned backwards in Su-57 because its a sphere, the worst shape in terms of RCS that uniformly reflects in all direction.

The Mistral MANPADS has a faceted pointy nose for aerodynamic purposes... not good for IR performance however. Igla-1 and later missiles have a rounded IR sensor which is optimal and uses an aerospike for aerodynamic performance...

Su-57s IRST will likely be rather superior to the F-35 and F-22 neither of which really have a proper IRST.

Despite all the problems with Su-57 program including lack of existence or international interest, the fundamental design is so far behind F-35 in terms of both Stealth and Situational Awareness – two key aspects of a 5th gen. aircraft. The Su-57’s design is closer to that of modern 4th gen. than it is to either F-22 or F-35.

Is that why the US is putting 4th gen fighters back in to production and are now talking about 6th gen fighters?

10 years since first flight and there’s no indication of K-77M or K-74M anywhere close to being operational, forcing Su-57 to fly with R-77 & R-74 externally (as they won’t fit inside).

There is no value in releasing information about their weapons... suffice to say until the Su-57 was in service there would be no benefit for having these missiles in service or shown to the public.

Imagine the kind of articles you’d see if F-35 didn’t have an operational missile that could fit internally. The Su-57 gets away with all the shortcomings using propaganda and fantasies, the likes of non-existent L band radar.

It has a full range of air to air and air to ground weapons specially developed for it.... unlike the F-22 and F-35.

The SDB was developed because they fucked up and couldn't fit air to ground weapons in their F-22s of course, but does their AIM-9X sidewinder still needs to be extended from a weapon bay to get a lock on a target before launch?

How unstealthy is that?

The Su-57 is nowhere near F-35 for similar reasons as to why F-18 Super Hornets are nowhere near F-35. The gap in Stealth and ultimately Situational Awareness is just overwhelming.

The wing mounted L band AESA arrays on Su-57s and Su-35s and now upgraded Su-30s render F-35 and F-22 stealth ineffective to all their primary interceptors...

Doubt. F22 and f35 are essentially undefeated in exercises vs f15/f16/fa18/raphael/typhoon.

Are you sure, because your own figures....

We see this time and again in Red Flags and Northern Edge with F-35 having 28–1 kill ratio against modern 4th gen. aircraft backed by AWACS and SAMs.

Made worse by US think tank simulations with F-35s against Chinese Su-35s showing the Chinese would likely win the engagement...

America nuked them because it was convenient for them and no one could stop them.

They selected the two target cities because they had no military value and had not been bombed up until that point, and they bombed them for two reasons... one to show the Japanese they were prepared to kill anyone and everyone with no mercy, and two to show Stalin the same message and now we have nukes...

Having your future enemy realise you are a soulless bastard was the message... a message they repeat often because the talk about morals and human rights is just talk.

All of those responses with hypersonic missiles and zircons and Khinzals. Those are strategic weapons. By even bringing them into discussion you are acknowledging the inferiors of the Russian airforce to the Americans and their doctrine.

They are not even nearly strategic weapons.... Zircon has a range of 1,000km or thereabouts and Kinzhal about 2,000km and both have conventional warheads as standard... they are not even nearly strategic weapons.

Also this website severely underestimates how good amraam is. It’s active radar homing and has passive homing to counter jamming.

It has a combat performance of about 40% PK against unaware targets... which is amazing compared with Vietnam war era BVR missiles with about 6%, but not something that is relevant when talking about peer enemies...

And you are turning a blind eye to the advantages of using the UV sensor.

Another advantage is that all objects give off IR radiation.... all things have a temperature, but things like IR decoy flares give off IR radiation too but they also give off UV rays and will help differentiate between a hot object and an actively burning object... a jet engine compared with a flare decoy.

The f35 does as well, and it indeed excels in stealth. That said I would be wary of falling into the usual fanboi tropes and hubris. We dont know the full capabilities of either fighter. They are both incredible.

It is the attempt to achieve high levels of stealth that make the F-35 so expensive to buy and to operate... an advantage that is hard to quantify, and is only going to degrade over time as radar and IIR sensors improve.

Not just this many dont know that even older radars can be heavily upgraded with powerful computers and software updates.

Many older radar antennas lacked performance because they generated enormous amounts of data that could not be processed. To allow it to be processed a lot of the raw data was ditched before processing to make it easier... The first Zaslon radar in the MiG-31 was notorious for having weak computer processing power despite being an amazing PESA radar with excellent performance.

Does su35 have the ability to launch a missile at f35 with data from ground based radar without its own radar having a lock? I doubt it.

Using data from other platforms it could detect the target on its IRST and launch an IR guided R-27ET at the target... It would probably be able to use its L band AESA to get a precise location and then use the power of its nose mounted PESA to find the target and launch a missile.

That would be insane sensor fusion that even Americans couldn’t dream off in their 5th gen jets.

Their AWACS planes can lock on targets for S-400s to engage over the radar horizon from the launchers... in the 1990s when testing the R-37 missile a MiG-31M with an old radar received target data from an Su-30 operating much closer to the target and launched the missile which flew 300km to hit the target it never detected on its own radar...

If su35 jammers can defeat amraam that is definitely comforting but Americans are always working on the next thing. They are sneaky.

They certainly are, but the Russians are rather clever too and at the moment with their AMRAAMs and AIM-9X sidewinders not working properly it should come down to guns and I would put my money on the Russian plane in that case because the F-35 sounds like it is pretty ordinary in that regard.

Su35 dont need radar, IRST and r74 is enough, hel run down f35 at mach 2, and kill him without him knowing

It is an F-35... R-27T or R-27ET would be plenty.

They upgrade their old missiles all the time... so does the west... I mean ESSM is just a new build Sparrow missile from the Vietnam era... with modern digital components and new seekers it is fine for most tasks.

The R-27T and R-27ET had the same seeker as the R-73 but actually had a wider field of view because it is a larger missile. It lacked the amazing agility of the R-73 because it didn't have a thrust vectoring rocket motor, but those butterfly front wings allow it to turn sharp corners without bleeding off as much speed as a triangular wing shape because it acts like a forward swept wing and the span wise flow goes in to the wing root and over the wing surface creating lift instead of off the end of the triangular wing tip where it creates a vortex and extra drag...

Europeans are not bypassing stealth. Look at the prototypes of all their 6th gen fighter aircraft. They have been designed keeping stealth in mind.

Lots of prototypes and promises but not many actual aircraft.

Su-57 is stealthy but they will rely more on its ability to guide drones than anything else. Its stealth will worl great at long distances from where it will guide its drones on tatgets.

F-22 is just stealthy. F-35 is still full of mostakes in development.

For the Russian planes stealth is a feature... like camouflaged uniforms, but it is still a well armed and equipped fighting machine.

US stealth is a sniper in a Ghillie suit who is best equipped to fight from a distance, which is fine when the enemy are the Taliban, but against a near peer enemy it is a problem because Russia has invested in equipment to see camouflaged targets...

He can’t fire r74 without radar lock. IRST is not enough to launch with thermal.

Which just shows how much of an expert you are... or your sources are.

Tell me... what is the value of a high offboresight air to air missile if you have to point your radar at the target and scan and get a lock before you can launch.

Also what sort of radar are the Houthi using when they launch R-73s from the ground?

A little bit of news for you... since it entered service the R-73 along with the radar and IRST and helmet mounted cueing system has a range of different options for attacking targets.

One is to get a radar lock and get the missile to look at the locked on target and then launching the missile... but the IRST and the helmet mounted sight can also be used to direct the missiles seeker to lock the target... the helmet mounted sight means you can turn your head and put the blinking crosshair on the target for a system lock... once locked you can range it with the radar or laser to get precise range and you also have an IRST lock and a radar lock too but you don't have to turn the radar on.

A missile lock is all you need for a launch... and you can get that by scanning with the missile seeker... which can take a while because its field of view is very large, or you can point the missiles sensor at the target using the IRST or radar or Helmet mounted sight... and once the missile has a lock the missile can be launched.

Even if the radar and IRST are off you can still get a lock and launch the missile.

Problem with that is you are gambling on amraam not hitting anything. F35 will get to fire first.

Currently that already happens 60% of the time with aircraft that don't know they are under attack... and don't have EW even if they did.

Su-35s and Su-34s and Su-30s and Su-57s and MiG-35s do.

But I was talking about r77. It can’t launch r77 without radar lock.

You are wrong about that too. R-77 is an ARH missile, not a SARH missile... but even the SARH R-27ER does not need a target lock before launch.... it flys to the target area on autopilot and then as it approaches the target the launch aircraft illuminates the target and the missile homes in on the reflection. In fact an Su-35 could probably launch the missile to a point 20km to one side of the target and turn and fly towards the opposite side of the target and then when it turns and illuminates the F-35, the F-35s design is intended to redirect radar waves away from where they came from so it would scatter the radar in other directions except back at the launch aircraft... with a SARH missile fired out to one side it could probably get enough redirected radiation to get a lock.

Yes R77 is also avoidable, but this dance would continue

And also Su-35 can carry 14 missiles if it wants to... how many on F-35 if it is to be stealthy?

This is the problem I have with Russia not having a real stealth jet operational.

Amusing... If I was American I would be super pissed off that they have more than 600 F-35s and they still have fundamental problems and are still not fully operational despite being 5 times more expensive to buy and operate than these new Russian fighters.

Even worse the Su-57 is their F-22 and it is a fraction of the price of the F-35 and yet kicks its arse in terms of speed and range and payload... and not just that but they are using the design to fast track a light 5th gen stealth fighter that is cheaper to buy and operate than most modern Lead In Fighter Trainers....

F35s can pressure flankers the same way by continuing to launch amraams and getting closer for better shots. And even though su35 is better aerodynamically it’s bleeding speed and energy dodging missiles while f35 is cruising pretty.

F-35s can't even super cruise and have the aerodynamics of a brick.

They can't out turn F-16s or F-18s which means Su-27s and MiG-29s will probably beat them as well... let alone newer models with TVC engines.

R27 is a garbage missile worst PK than the sparrow.

Actually it had better numbers that Sparrow and probably would have allowed MiG-29 pilots to shoot down F-15s fairly easily... that is one reason why AMRAAM was fast tracked... the other being how good R-73 and HMS is.

BTW upgraded digital Sparrows are still the front line defence missile for the US Navy... try looking up what ESSM stands for.

Su 35 has to know the f35 is there to be able to fire anything

Has a rather big and very powerful radar in its nose and IRST and also wing mounted AESA array radar too optimised specifically for stealth targets.

Big hint.... on the ground the Russians have a big radar family called NEBO.

It includes several very large radar with very different antenna because each radar operates in a completely different frequency range.

These radars are not used separately, they are used together and their signals are combined and processed and they create target data vastly superior than any of the three radar could generate on their own in terms of anti stealth and anti drone capacity.

With wing mounted L band AESA radar and nose mounted Ku and Ka band PESA radar do you think they use the nose radar to not find stealth and wing mounted antenna for IFF purposes?

Or do you think they have computers combining not just their information but also information from the IRST, and the radars and systems of other aircraft and ground platforms?

Russians have a bad habit of lying and over exaggerating everything. I know because I’m Russian.

The Turks have no reason to lie and they say the S-400 is better than what the Russians promised. China seems pretty happy with its Su-35s too.

Kret has been caught doing it. The Indians rejected su57 because they deemed it not good enough.

The Indians rejected it because they wanted several massive changes and were told if they wanted them they would have to pay for them themselves.

One of the things was a two seater, and the other was much higher level of stealth, which would massively blow out the cost of purchase and operational costs for no enormous improvement in performance.

It was the mistake they made with the F-35... not stealthy enough to be safe but stealthy enough to be far to expensive to operate as your main fighter.

Any time russian equipment fails it’s blamed on it being an export model when the truth is Russia just makes inferior products.

Most of the time when Russian equipment fails it is because it is being operated by morons. Even rather old gear operated well can be effective enough... ask Serbia... as long as it is maintained.

The best hope flankers have against f35 is that it only has 4 amraams internally and if it wants aimx9 it’s stealth is severely degraded.

The best hope Flankers have is that every HATO country buys hundreds of F-35s and they end up making 20,000 of them.... the west will be bankrupted.

Jamming makes stealth more effective and stealth makes jamming more effective. This is basic stuff.

The first F-22s and F-117s had no jammers... newer stealth aircraft carry jammers...

You have to ask yourself if stealth is so great why is their primary jammer aircraft an F-18?

Surely it should be an F-22 or F-35...

F22 has only a better chance marginally to f35 because it can actually fly, and maneuvers, even then rafale trashed f22

The core problem for the US is the S-400s and S-350s it will have to deal with before it gets anywhere near a Russian plane.

It's impossible to compare missiles without getting a few dozen and doing your own tests. The same applies to American and Russian designs, so the dick-waving based on "real life" operational history is a pointless endeavor.

Depends on the target too of course... R-27s are plenty for shooting down cruise missiles and drones as well as all sorts of fighters in the current models with digital electronics and parts.

Same for the Sparrow in the form of the ESSM.

That’s not the whole truth. They weren’t happy with the stealth the radar and the engine. They wanted an f22sky and were underwhelmed as well not wanting to fund the production.

They did want better stealth and two seat version and when they found out they would need to fund both they decided to not invest in development and just wait till they were in serial production and buy some off the shelf and upgrade them then. Essentially what they did with the Su-30MKI. Make it much more expensive with some token western parts and domestic parts and then complain about how expensive it is despite being less than half the price they paid for Rafales.

They payed 6 billion for the vasic design.

Pretty sure they were expecting to pay 2 billion and were asked for 6 billion and ended up paying nothing at all.

At which point lots of westerners said the Su-57 is dead because Indian money was paying for the development and with that gone it will be cancelled...

As we can tell today of course...

This is a major flaw in Russia's marketing programme. Instead of catering to third world shitholes like India, Africa, Russia should market its products in Middle East, South America and Europe. That's where the top dollars are.

Rich countries generally owe their wealth to links to the west... links the west will cut if they buy Russian products.

Rich countries get rich because they never pay full price... poor countries can develop and grow from investment and trade and become rich and respect Russia because of that...

galicije83 wrote:
Do you know that they need almost 2 hours for deployment and undeployment instead of 2.5 hours as other battery need it..so yes they reduce time but not for god sake to dozen minutes but just to 2 hours instead to 2 hour and 30min...

SEAD, more like seethe. Pathetic. So the very best of NATO wild weasels could not even take down pretty much static targets - and that's with nobody contesting the air space or attacking their airbases

Nobody tell them even the strategic SAMs have setup and tear-down times of 5 minutes, or they'd shit themselves.

bitcointrader70 wrote:
I mean they couldn’t find them because they spent majority of the time hiding. These SAMs were effectively suppressed and their inferiority showed. NATO bombed them with practically zero resistance. It showed that older Soviet SAMs were essentially useless  in this conflict. The f117s that were hit were due to poor NATO mission planning and lack of EW support.

Serbia's SAMs were shooting from day 1 until the end of the conflict - why lie?

bitcointrader70 wrote:
If s300/s400 will have to hide like this from NATO than they are failures.

As opposed to US stealth jets that wouldn't even dare come within LOS of Russian S-400?

You shot three but could produce only one. F 117s were flying through the same flight path. Zoltan Dani waited for the appropriate time and shot down just one of them.

That does not make any sense. Even if there was a rigid flight path and schedule, you still can't shoot down a plane with that information if you can't see the plane.... get a camera and sit somewhere on a bus route with a blind fold on and set your watch alarm to when the bus should be travelling down a street... when the alarm goes off take a photo... is there a bus in that image? And buses only travel in two dimensions... aircraft travel in three...

The idea that you know the schedule for the plane so you should be able to shoot it down is ridiculous.

Being a habitual importer Indians had zero knowledge about stealth. So those assholes were actually a part of the program. They entered into the Su-57 project thinking the Russians will design a F-22 for them.

The idea was that they were going to take a Russian design and make some India specific changes to it and then put it into production... much like they did with the Su-30MKI... they put Indian and western kit into it and then assembled it in India.

After having burnt their ass on the project Indians realized the Russians are not developing a fighter that is anywhere as stealthy as the F-22. Instead they were developing a far less stealthy platform with great maneuvering capabilities.

The F-22 is not very stealthy either.... certainly not enough for it to be a problem for the Russian IADS.... the only really stealthy aircraft they have is the B-2 and they train to penetrate Russian airspace at low altitude... why would they do that if Russian radars can't see them?

So they bailed out and started working on a home grown version of a stealth aircraft that will be powered by either a US or French engine.

The French don't have an engine in that thrust range do they? They would be better off with Al-41s and upgrading their Su-30MKIs to that engine too if they don't already use it.

India is most likely to just wait and in a few years buy Su-57s from Russia as a finished product.