Forum: F-35 Armament, Stores and Tactics

If an F-35 jets bounced by fighters then someone else wasn't doing their job. Do you really believe in this networked, data-linked, composite force structure that ANY plane would be going in alone and subject to getting bounced??? Rolling Eyes

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First of all the gun has been built onto every fighter since the Vietnam war when it was discovered that missiles only hit their target 25% of the time they were fired beyond visiual range. Secondly it is not a question of last time it is a question of future engagements, sure it is highly unlikely that a gun would be necessary, but in a pinch at point blank range i would take a gun to being turned into floating debris or rather falling debris. Finally a gun is a back up weapon for sure, but if guns are unnecessary then why did the Air Force want one placed on the F/A-22 Raptor and one of their version of the F-35.

Secondly although highly unlikely air-to-air engagements aren't dead yet. Just because a power hasn't stepped forward with a sizeable Air Force to compete against ours that doesn't mean it won't happen. You have to look at the ifs and the buts when building an aircraft not just the right nows. Yes I seriously doubt that Osama Bin Laden had SU-37 Terminators stored somewhere, and Iraq had no Air Force really. Any soldier will tell you that simulations and actual combat are two different thing, and no technology truly works until it is tested. Will the F-35 survive without a gun and only two Air-to-Air missiles, yeah probably, but thing about this the original F-4 Phantom had no gun and was killed not by missile equipped fighters, but by old Russian Migs that carried guns only. Back then they thought a gun was useless too.

Sorry, i haven't read the whole thread... but has anyone mentioned using a kind of rotating missile/bomb selection system, like in the B-2 Spirit? It would have to be more compact though, so instead of having a launching arm for each weapon (rotating around a large central pivot), it could be on a sort of conveyor-like system, that doesn't necessicarily have to be circle shaped (could be oval shaped, or triangle shaped, etc, and would run around the perimeter of the inside of the weapons bay. The conveyor would then move the missile into position over a single launching arm, so it could eject the weapon out of the aircraft when it is upside down, move the coveyor again so that the next weapon is over the launching arm, launch that, etc.

If no one knows what im talking about or trying to illustrate, then I will try and draw a crude picture if needed (im a terrible artist)

Elite 1K Joined: Aug 19, 2004 - 09:19 AM Posts: 1092

Way too complex for a relatively small fighter.

idesof wrote:

Can you tell me when any U.S. aircraft used its gun to shoot down anything in combat?

Careful...remember GW1! Wink

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Active Member Joined: Nov 22, 2004 - 09:20 PM Posts: 134

dwightlooi wrote:

RobertCook wrote:

dwightlooi wrote:

This is how I estimated the width of the bay at the point roughly on the same plane as the tail end of the AIM-120. The bay is about 35" wide overall.

Sorry, but that's way, WAY off. Shocked

Like I said, the BLU-109 warhead on the JDAM depicted is only about 14.6" in diameter, and horizontally, it's right about where it needs to be for us to even dream of eyeballing the fit of two AMRAAMs according to a photograph.

Actually, it is quite accurate. Across horizontal plane where the end of the AMRAAM is, you CAN use the diameter of the AMRAAM as a 7" reference. It will be correct on that plane and it permits us to estimate the width of the bay as indicated at around 35" with a <10% error.

According to the measurements in the image, the BLU-109 seems closer to being 21" in diameter (three AMRAAM diameters) on that plane than 14.6", which I reckon is well outside your 10% error margin.

dwightlooi wrote:

If you take the BLU-109's diameter as 14.6" and do a measurrement across a plane closer to us, you'll still get approximately the same result. It is very apparent, if you at the bay near the plane where the BLU-109's nose oglive ends becomes cylindrical, that the bay is MORE THAN 2 times wider

The elevation at which you're making your estimate does not take into account the vertical space necessary to contain the missiles, which would be about 12.45". Besides, you're not even using a single elevation--the outer endpoint of your measurement is significantly higher than the inner endpoint of your measurement. The aircraft and its bay has a complex geometry--you can't just cut straight across the picture like that, especially with the high level of distortion due to perspective and a wide-angle lens. As far as being able to guess by eyeballing a picture, in order to fit three missiles in that bay, two of them will have to fit in that approximately hexagonal cylindrical volume containing the JDAM. The necessarily sturdy doors are not infinitely thin by a long shot, which is clearly visible in the picture, and take up a substantial amount of the space defined by the bulkhead on the far side. When the doors are closed, the AMRAAM in the picture is tucked right next to the JDAM by design (even more tightly with the Mk 84 warhead), possibly even overlapping a little vertically, and the outer door is shaped to fit around the bomb internally.

The bottom line is that we just can't tell for sure by this picture whether three unmodified AMRAAMs (or two AMRAAMs and an AIM-9X, which is a surprisingly similar circumstance) can fit in a usable manner in a single F-35 bay. You're free to believe what you want, but you have not and probably cannot prove it. We'll find out if and when an operator makes a serious request for this capability.

dwightlooi wrote:

This is the two ways which the F-35 can carry 6 AIM-120C/Ds without modification to the missile.

Your diagram appears to distort the geometry of the bay. From where did you get that long vertical outer wall? The bay you've depicted is not only larger than the real one, but--surprise, surprise--more appropriately shaped to hold more AAMs. Perhaps this is the design that the company should have used, but the real bay looks like the following (note the bulkhead):

Close-up view of the weapons pylon in the first F-35 production representative prototype, AA-1.

hp9577 wrote:

I don't know whether this has been brought up or not, but in reading about the F-35 I have learned that the F-35A the USAF version is the only one carrying a gun internally. Now I know that there is a weight issue with the vertical lift fan, and also with catapault launch off of the deck of a carrier. However, the United States Marine Corps is presently going to retire the Harrier and its F/A-18 fleet in favor of the F-35. Now what is to happen if the F-35 is bounced by fighters and can barely defend itself, I point to the low amount of space for Air-to-Air missiles.

The standard two AMRAAMs are there for self-defense against aerial threats, and although I'd feel better if the F-35 could also carry Sidewinders, these are medium-sized fighters, and you can't have everything (maybe one AMRAAM and one AIM-9X?). That said, in the case of the F-35B, one would think that being able to strafe targets from time to time may come in handy for supporting our troops on the ground, as it has been in recent history.

hp9577 wrote:

The solution from what was read about the fihgter was to put gunpods on it, but that would detoriate the stealth capability that was built into the fighter for survivability.

That's right, while the F-35B and F-35C can carry gun pods, one can't always predict when one will need them, and carrying a gun pod on the centerline station all the time will extract a greater penalty overall than an internally mounted gun would. I'm pretty sure that the stealth penalty was designed to be minimal in this case, but then they'd still have the weight penalty they didn't want in addition to some extra drag.

hp9577 wrote:

Also if mounted internally gunpods would take up space that should be used for ground attack missiles, or bombs lack the JDAM. Does anyone else find this a true discrepancy in the use of a fighter aircraft or am I the only one that sees this as an issue?

Maybe I'm just "old school," but I think that all fighters should have guns and be able to carry enough missiles to be reasonably self-sufficient. Your wingman is there to be your support and backup, not to give two new fighters the firepower of one old fighter. The concept and physical implementation of so-called "net-centric warfare" should be leveraged to greatly increase the efficiency and lethality of a fighting force, not be used as a crutch for fighters that are long on sensors and short on the firepower they need in order to apply their situational awareness to maximum effect.

idesof wrote:

Can you tell me when the last time was that a U.S. aircraft simply got "pounced" by enemy fighters coming out of the clear blue?

When was the last time we needed a fighter like the F-35 or F-22? I'm not concerned about the last time, but the next time, when we may, for all we know, have to face a much more technologically advanced and numerous adversary than before. There's a reason that JDAMs have an INS backup, all F-35s have their own radars, F-22s have ejection seats, and all fighters ought to have guns.

Forum: F-35 Armament, Stores and Tactics

F-35 Loadout question: More internal AtA missiles