@Gambit
Could you please expand on the topic of an aircraft firing its BVRAAM and letting the AWAC guide the BVRAAM into the enemy aircraft. A lot of members over here are at disbelief with this information, i remember you gave your input on this topic but that was long long time ago. So its highly appreciated if you could expand on this topic.
Thanks in Advance
Here is the initial understanding of how radar guidance works for air-air missiles...
There are two distinct units inside a radar set: transmitter and receiver. Each can be physically distinct as well instead of cohabitation inside a single container, or line-replaceable-unit (LRU). For sem-active guidance, the missile is the receiver part of radar detection. The parent aircraft is the transmitter part.
For active guidance, the missile is fed initial general target information: direction and distance. The missile will prepare its own complete radar system to search for a target in that sector. Keep in mind that a missile's nosecone is space limited so the missile's radar antenna does not have a lot of room, or physical scan limit, to perform its search.
Plus...Target information is highly dependent upon antenna physical dimension. The larger the antenna, the tighter its beam and the better the target resolution. On the other hand, to compensate for small antennas, higher freqs can be used to produce pencil beams but at the expense of maximum effective detection range. This means even for active radar guided missiles, air-air or ground-air, it is best for a larger radar system to provide the missile with target information for as long as possible. Even for 'fire-and-forget' type. The joke is that you can forget about the missile hitting the target if you do not provide target information for up to %30 of the missile's flight time. Of course, the closer you are to the target, the less need of you, the parent aircraft, to provide that illumination.
So the next logical evolution of active radar guided missiles is on how to provide that
EXTERNAL guidance until the missile's own radar is capable of taking over within that 'no escape' zone for the target. That external guidance could be the parent aircraft or an AWACS. The form of guidance could be radar, as in target illumination, or the AWACS tracks both target and missile and sends course correction information to the missile. The AWACS does not -- does not -- have control of the missile. The AWACS simply performs the standard triangulation calculations between itself, the missile and the target and if there are any heading deviation between missile and target, the AWACS will sort of 'advise' the missile to alter its course. The missile, being robotic, will of course obey. All the while still searching for the target with its own radar.
A more sophisticated missile will have its radar off until its distance to target is less than %50 from the original calculation. The AWACS will provide that distance figure. Then when it turn its own radar to illuminate the target, it will have the target within that 'no escape' zone. That is why today pilots can no longer ignore AWACS transmissions whereas in the past they can go on with their mission. Even more sophisticated missiles will be able to accept 'hand-off' signals, meaning it is 'advised' to accept guidance information from another airborne platform such as another fighter or another AWACS from a different direction or even ground controllers. More sophisticated missiles will be able to tell everyone in the vicinity that it is tracking the target based upon their distinct radar illuminations of the target, thereby requiring no guidance at all. The more the target is illuminated from different directions, the sooner the target will be in that 'no escape' zone.
This is not science fiction. The problem have always been miniaturization of the radar components. So the smaller the components, the greater the capabilities and performance levels of those capabilities. The move from semi-active to active guidance testified to that fact.
