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1 Capability AvailabilityOperational capability is only relevant if it is available when required. At our recent EuroDASS Future Capability Conference (October 2019) this was effectively articulated as ‘Little C’ and ‘Big C’. ‘Little C’ being the underpinning availability, serviceability and maintainability that makes the ‘Big C’ available and deployable when needed.
Praetorian Evolution will have a
maximal digital architecture, exploiting high-rel manufacturing techniques to improve equipment reliability. The digital architecture also supports enhanced health monitoring,
offering improved fault diagnosis and reduced no-fault-found scenarios, both contributing to reduced repair turn-around-times.
The Evo architecture will comprise of
common hardware modules, configured by software, thus reducing through life cost of ownership by reducing the requirement for spares holdings.
2 Weapon System IntegrationA
multi-channel digital receiver architecture will provide high quality, high fidelity parametric data. This capability will allow Typhoon to act as a
forward combat ISR-node, providing forward intelligence gathering opportunities and contributing to the wider digital battlespace picture and shared situational awareness via data off-boarding.
The
enhanced processing will also allow the DASS to contribute to sensor correlation and confirmation.
Clearly, interoperability across the weapon system, own-ship and multi-ship will increase in complexity as the number of on-board emitters increase and exhibit increased bandwidth and/or power. The Evo architecture will provide
additional interfaces (ethernet and discrete) to interface to other subsystems to facilitate improved interoperability.
3 High Frequency Agile ChangeAgility and adaptability will be a key discriminator in the future dynamic battlespace. Legacy threats are Evolving, and exhibiting agile update cycles; modern threats are quickly and easily reprogrammed. In response the future DASS must support
agile update and migrate from traditional mission data constructs to a more intelligent algorithmic based mission data construct. The traditional approach of parametric-based mission data fields is becoming insufficient to cover all modes of threat variants and unable to resolve threat system ambiguities. Furthermore, we must strive to reduce the complexity and burden placed upon National Air Warfare centres for the creation of mission data.
The Evo architecture will provide a
segregated software architecture that supports the safe introduction of applications and algorithmic mission data. This will support threat-specific ECM applications, and ESM analytical algorithms providing threat identification, situational awareness and optimised countermeasures. The segregated architecture will also support the longer term aspiration to move certain elements of operational functionality from the operational software to algorithmic mission data, meaning functional update can be achieved in a far more agile and cost effective manner.
4 Operational CapabilityIn terms of the future capability requirements for the DASS, in generic terms these address themes such as extension to the operational frequency ranges; effective operation in the future congested and contested EM environment; networked multi-platform co-operative techniques; enhanced ECM in terms of field of view, power and technique complexity; geolocation and unambiguous emitter identification; low false alarm rate missile warning. These have shaped the Praetorian Evolution architecture, alongside the future growth potential to support incremental capability growth by software update through to the Typhoon’s OSD.
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Some examples of technology exploitation within the proposed Praetorian Evolution architecture include:
· Advances in ultra-fast sampling and digitisation will enable wide bandwidth digitisation, effectively behind the receive antenna.
· System-on-Chip (SoC) technology combines hardware (analog, digital, mixed-signal, Radio Frequency (RF) functions) and software processing into a single integrated chip. This high level of integration uses less power, and offers significant SWaP (size weight and power) benefits.
· Novel antenna design techniques will mean traditionally large physical antenna designs can be realised in smaller, more integration friendly adaptations formats.
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