Forum: Modern Military Aircraft

hcobb wrote:

But fortunately the USAF has declared that dogfighting is once again dead for good so they don't need that capability.

Oh, really? I fail to see how the F-35's conceptually impressive BVR weapons and the Raptor's extreme agility show any kind of low faith in BVR fights. If the F-35A had no gun and wasn't designed to ever take one (F-4C/D), I'd agree with you, but the provision for close in gun- and heater-fights is very much still there.

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hcobb wrote:

But fortunately the USAF has declared that dogfighting is once again dead for good so they don't need that capability.

Where did the USAF say that? Dogfighting isn't the preferred tactic due to the lethality of modern weapons, but..........the F-22 and F-35 are very agile, should they need to maneuver aggressively.

Q: What sort of targets is the F-35's gun optimized against?

Hint: Examine the differences between the guns on the F-22 and F-35.

hcobb wrote:

Q: What sort of targets is the F-35's gun optimized against?

Hint: Examine the differences between the guns on the F-22 and F-35.

The only difference between the F-22 and F-35A's gun is caliber. What's the difference between the Su-30's gun, and the F-35 for that matter?

And RoF.

The F-35 carries an anti-surface target gun and the F-22 carries an A2A gun.

What gives you that idea, just because it's 25mm instead of 20mm?

There are two reasons why you would want 25mm:
1. More "lead on target" per second
2. They are developing laser guided rounds and a 25mm shell would be easier to adapt than a 20mm one.

Eurofighter uses a 27 mm Revolver cannon, so does that make its gun strictly A2G? Rafale uses a 30 mm gun, and yet it can use it in A2A.

F-22 uses a 3rd gen high ROF a2a spray and pray gun... new gun is needed.

Obviously, a true ground-target gun would be 30mm, like the on in an A-10, so therefor the 25mm F-35 gun is a specialized air-to-air gun. Very Happy

It is a dual purpose gun

sprstdlyscottsmn wrote:

It is a dual purpose gun

This. Using hcobb's reasoning, the F-4 shouldn't have performed any strafing runs in Viet Nam because it uses a lower-caliber gun-- and yet, it did.

Damn! I was hoping for something on bombers.

hcobb wrote:

Arming a bomber with medium range missiles simply means that the fighters it is up against can launch from further out than it can.

If the bomber returns fire at the same extreme range then all the missiles will have burned out and be in their final glide approach. The fighters can pull 9 G turns to evade and the bomber can not. So this is a useless capability to tack onto any of America's bomber platforms.

If the target is moving toward the launch vehicle, the distance is decreasing; if it's moving away, the distance is increasing. If an air-to-air armed bomber sees enemy fighters approaching, it can fire a bunch of missiles and immediately turn away so any missiles launched toward it have a long distance to try to catch up. The enemy fighters then have the choice to either pursue and thus run right into the bomber's missiles at shortened range, or turn away to put the bomber's missiles in a long-range stern chase and thus not go after the bomber.

From the POV of the side that sent the bomber, volley-and-flee isn't a good way to hunt down enemy fighters and clear the sky, but it does defend the bomber. To pull this trick off, though, the bomber needs to be fast, like B-1R (a proposed B-1B upgrade which hasn't actually been done, including not just the air-to-air stuff but also new engines). Giving a B-2 or B-52 air-to-air radar & weapons wouldn't have the same effect. The fact that the B-1R idea hasn't been done and we still have just B-1Bs is a result of not having recently deployed our forces in a place where our bombers would be threatened by enemy fighters beyond the range that our own fighters could defend.

hcobb wrote:

The answer is to send our fighters out to engage their fighters before they get within missile range of our bombers.

That only works within fighter range. Bombers need to either have some other means of keeping themselves safe beyond that range, or just not operate outside that range at all. Notice that the designs of both of the last two new kinds of bombers we've made have been dictated entirely by concepts of how to stay safe when you're alone in enemy territory (extreme speed in B-1, stealth in B-2), and that the subsequent real or proposed modifications of one of them were also driven by shifting from one such self-protection concept to another (speed in B-1A, reduced radar signature in B-1B, speed and air-to-air weapon systems in B-1R).

southernphantom wrote:

sprstdlyscottsmn wrote:

It is a dual purpose gun

This. Using hcobb's reasoning, the F-4 shouldn't have performed any strafing runs in Viet Nam because it uses a lower-caliber gun-- and yet, it did.

Against the massive tank battalions of the Vietcong? Very Happy

The NVA tanks in Vietnam included PT-76, T-54/55/59/63

The NVA tanks in Vietnam included PT-76, T-54/55/59/63

Forum: Modern Military Aircraft

What will USAF really end up doing about bombers?