Forum: Modern Military Aircraft

river_otter wrote:

So I'm still left wondering, what exactly makes this design sixth generation? Nothing about its appearance says anything new, just stealth and probably sensor fusion, which is fifth gen. The only possible thing I've seen mentioned is that if it's designed from the outset to be not a fighter but a two-seat battlespace coordinator for a wing of air dominance drones, that's a new design paradigm. But where are its drones if that's the case? They'd have to be an integral part of the combat system. Spherical coverage by directed energy weapons might be another new design paradigm that expands on spherical sensor fusion, but nothing in this design particularly suggests that. "It doesn't have a vertical tail" isn't a generation.

6th Generation might mean ELO signature reduction against multispectral sensors, as well as against visual/audio detection means. Directed energy weapons. Increased situational awareness/sensor fusion over 5th Generation designs. Improved sensor suites/electronic attack/ISR. Combat radius- 1000-1500nm. M2 Supercruise for extended periods. These are all speculation, but would represent improvements over 5th Generation designs.

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Wait a minute. 40,000lbs? On another strike fighter (I assume that's what "F/A" means)? I'd love to see how the Navy intends to build a twin-engine 6th generation (which I assume means internal weapons/fuel) fighter that weighs less than the F-35. It sounded plausible back when A2A was the priority, but now?

I keep reading that extreme efficiency in all flight regimes will be the new norm for this sixth generation so that could mean that a lot of aspects of the fighter will be variable geometry such as the use of smart materials that respond to electronic signal inputs to change the airfoil shape, aspect ratio, length, sweep, dihedral, etc. to match varying conditions.

With enough variable geometry within the engine inlet it should be possible to get the intake to swallow a normal shock by increasing the throat area accordingly at the appropriate mach number and then decreasing the throat area again after the inlet has started to create a converging-diverging supersonic to subsonic diffuser with a weak normal shock held in the subsonic section. That way flow can be slowed down mostly isentropically from supersonic to subsonic speeds with minimal stagnation pressure losses. Such an inlet is far too complex and heavy to make now but in the future who knows what they'll make with all of these piezo-electric actuators and microscopic shape-memory alloys they're working on.

I want this thing to incorporate the aforementioned Pulse-detonation engines River_otter mentioned. However, I prefer they be used as an augmentor or as a part of a multi-cycle engine system as opposed to being the only propulsion system. Such a propulsion system is still quite unproven even today and I don't know how well it will be developed even in the next 20 years.

What about stoichiometric turbine engines? What's interesting is they have no afterburner.

Pulse-detonation doesn't really work well. Continuous detonation has some promise, though.

Technological advances in sixth generation fighters? Oh, I'll have a field day with this! Remember, the worlds best fighter at present is using technology twenty years old.

Forget conventional engines. SABRE perhaps? Adding a precooler to a jet is like adding an intercooler to a turbocharged car engine- doubles power at all altitudes, or something close to that. Add to that a scramjet mode for highspeed cruise (scrams are terrible at low altitudes and speeds), and a hybrid rocket mode, and you'd have a sub-orbital aerospace fighter. And, of course, the engines would use fluidic thrust vectoring, which would give the craft some manuverability even at the edge of space. I would say electroaerodynamic drive (think an electric jet with no moving parts), but that's too far out at the moment.
Either way, the F/A-XX might be to the F-35 what the F-86 was to the P-51, in terms of engine technology.

Armarment-wise, DEWs are a must, although one must wonder what types of countermeasures would be used against these. Missiles were terrible at first, so I'd assume Lasers (and DEWs in general) wouldn't be terribly effective for the first decade of their deployment. Missiles and bombs are getting smaller, so internal bays might be able to hold more than the eight that the Raptor can.

Aerodynamically, there should be a noticeable advance. Control surfaces would be completely different- the wings and tail would morph instead of swing or deflect. Most of the agility of the craft would probably be from the TVC though. Oh yeah, and I'm pretty sure that model in the pic is about as close to what it will look like as the Firefox does to the PAK-FA. This probably sounds kinda far out to some, but what would you have said if a guy told you in 1982 that 5th gen fighters would be invisible to radar and be able to do backflips?
Beer

These days, you can pretty much assume that any new fighter is using 20 year-old technology by the time it reaches IOC.

Simply given the length of the development cycle, yeah. Firstimpulses last statement about what 5th gen does compared to state of the art 30 years ago rings very true though. Flying nearly twice the speed of sound on dry thrust, stealth to the point where people can't target you even if they see you, limitless nosepointing, radars that can't be detected, spherical BVR sensors. Maybe the next gen will have sperical multi spectral LPI AESA?

I agree with scottsman's statement on spherical AESAs. Several of the contractors have mentioned that as a possibility with the skin being the sensor that operates in a MASSIVE multitude of EM radiation bands.

I'm going to stick with "the plane does the flying, while the pilot just picks destinations and targets", with the addition that unmanned drones will be doing most of the turning and burning.

count_to_10 wrote:

I'm going to stick with "the plane does the flying, while the pilot just picks destinations and targets", with the addition that unmanned drones will be doing most of the turning and burning.

accent on the burning, if the accident rate of the MQ-1 is anything to go by...

southernphantom wrote:

count_to_10 wrote:

I'm going to stick with "the plane does the flying, while the pilot just picks destinations and targets", with the addition that unmanned drones will be doing most of the turning and burning.

accent on the burning, if the accident rate of the MQ-1 is anything to go by...

Isn't the MQ-1 still remotely piloted?

X-47 is the one to use as a comparison.

count_to_10 wrote:

southernphantom wrote:

count_to_10 wrote:

I'm going to stick with "the plane does the flying, while the pilot just picks destinations and targets", with the addition that unmanned drones will be doing most of the turning and burning.

accent on the burning, if the accident rate of the MQ-1 is anything to go by...

Isn't the MQ-1 still remotely piloted?

Yes. My confidence in land-based UCAVs is extremely low, to the point that I would actually be in favor of smaller aircraft flown off of bombers or tankers. (Anyone who's read Dale Brown will know what I'm talking about. Think Flighthawks Wink

)

I'm thinking that 6th gen fighters will end up being defined by using fully automated flight. The F-35 already does the tracking of targets for the pilot, so autopilots that can engage targets without constant inputs are probably not that far off.
In the end, the best airframe may simply be something that is capable of upgrading it's computing power to the latest hardware on a regular basis.

Forum: Modern Military Aircraft

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