Why is the F-35 replacing the A-10?

Salute!

The A-37 might have made it if the 23 or 37 round hit the wing tip. With all cables and pushrods, the thing could prolly fly.

...

Once again, thanks for your input Gums

I have one question regarding this subject:
- What's in your opinion the diference in terms of destructive power between a (single) 23mm and a (single) 37mm round?
Is it "small"? "big"?

One of the reasons why I ask this is because this IMO seems a very hard question to answer since information about this is quite hard to find and I fell that usually the best sources are in most cases are those who have been there (like you).
All of this compared to other sorts of information about the same subject. For example its easy to find that the maximum effective range of a ZSU-23mm is around 2.5 km while the maximum effective range of a 37mm 61-K gun - ZSU-37 for example - is 4 km (BTW, I would say quite higher or even much higher compared to the 23mm).

My preference is to not test the armor! Heh heh heh.

Gums sends...

I can easily understand that for sure
(which goes in line with the relevancy of agility/speed versus armor regarding this A-10 discussion)

Salute RIC and CL !!

@ RIC The 37mm we saw in SEA was close to the 57mm WRT shootdowns, with 57 leading the pack. A Mig got one of my friends, but the other few dozen were mostly guns and a few missiles. 'course, my 1964 classmates also got the most Migs!!! The 23mm was decent due to higher cyclic rate. The 85mm guns were usually in an array of several tubes and had Fire Can radar for aiming. I'll try to find my RHAW audio and you can esily pick out the radar for the Fire Can and Fan Song ( SA-2).

The enema must surely have a good idea of effective time of flight, so maybe we could figure out the calibre by the airburst altitude ( you know, prevent live round rom coming back down on yourself). Over Downtown, there were clear layers of smoke for each gun. Very impressive, and I am sure that if we had more early daylight raids over Baghdad we would have seen the same thing. I was at the tail end one day and the 23's were bursting very low, like 6 - 7,000 feet and seemed to be tracking, as the puffs were serpentine as if following another A-7 below me. The 37's were up at 10k or so and short bursts in a fairly straight line. 57 was up there at 15-16,000 feet and same pattern as 37. The 85's bursts were in a cluster between 20,000 and 25,000 feet, and I saw that a lot on my 3 missions during the Christmas blitz, as our ingress was 20-25,000 for LORAN drops or descending for visual roll-in and drop around 8,000 or so ( A-7D/E had about 50 meter CEP from that altitude in 30-45 deg dive, about 20 meters for a second pass as we had the INS drift figured by then).

The problem with attacking a gun is that he has a zero deflection shot if he sees and only needs to elevate or lower and not "track" like shooting a duck from the blind. So guess how we took out guns at AnLoc, BuDop and DakTo and over the Trail? HINT: We normally flew as a two-ship.

@CL Hawg strafe was about 5 or 6,000 feet slant range on a shallow dive ( 15-20 deg), so very low altitude AGL if you do the trig. High angle strafe would be like 3 - 4,000 feet altitude and only one burst. The Hawg was the only plane USAF allowed to "shoot - look -shoot again", a double burst. Rest of us had to fire closer and only had one burst. The A-7 and F-16 computers had an 8,000 foot slant range pipper, but that was only for a 6 mil accuracy, and the 20mm had lousy ballistic coefficient.

Gums recollects....

Pretty harrowing accounts, Gums. And AAA continues to evolve.

The ALaMO round is bigger than the 57mm that Gums faced over Vietnam.
But it has an active seeker and divert motors. And it's $13,000/round in LRIP.

And we haven't gotten to HVP fired by tube artillery though that may
depend on sensors that are more vulnerable to SEAD.

I have one question regarding this subject:
- What's in your opinion the diference in terms of destructive power between a (single) 23mm and a (single) 37mm round?
Is it "small"? "big"?

One of the reasons why I ask this is because this IMO seems a very hard question to answer since information about this is quite hard to find and I fell that usually the best sources are in most cases are those who have been there (like you).
All of this compared to other sorts of information about the same subject. For example its easy to find that the maximum effective range of a ZSU-23mm is around 2.5 km while the maximum effective range of a 37mm 61-K gun - ZSU-37 for example - is 4 km (BTW, I would say quite higher or even much higher compared to the 23mm).

I have some personal experience with 23mm (ZU-23-2 version), 35mm (Oerlikon) and 57mm (ZSU-57-2 gun) systems from ground perspective. 35 mm Oerlikon probably approximates 37mm Russian gun (round for round), although Oerlikon is likely the more powerful of the two due to higher muzzle velocity, better aerodynamics and higher explosives content. But the difference is likely not that big in most situations. Overall Oerlikon guns are much superior due to much higher rate-of-fire and much better ballistics. But round for round the difference is likely not that big even though I'm sure it's still noticeable.

Anyway, the difference between 23mm and 35/37 mm is huge. Each 35+ mm round weighs several (3-4) times more with several (3-6) times more explosives. Not sure about 37mm rounds, but 35mm rounds in Oerlikon guns will penetrate somewhat before exploding whereas 23mm rounds explode as soon as they hit something. 35mm rounds are also much faster especially at longer ranges. This means 35mm rounds will have even bigger destructive power on target. I'm sure 37mm is no slouch either. In my estimate each 35/37mm round would break any jet into half with decent hit, whereas 23mm rounds will make decent holes in targets like A-10 or Su-25.

23mm gun has been used a lot in Finland and effective range is pretty much 1,500-1,800 meters and max firing range for incoming target is usually between 2,000 and 2,500 meters depending on target type, speed and if it's diving or not. 35mm gun has max effective range of about 4,000 meters and can be effectively fired at longer ranges in suitable target conditions. I'm sure 37mm gun is fairly close to 35mm in range capabilities.

Pretty harrowing accounts, Gums. And AAA continues to evolve.

The ALaMO round is bigger than the 57mm that Gums faced over Vietnam.
But it has an active seeker and divert motors. And it's $13,000/round in LRIP.

And we haven't gotten to HVP fired by tube artillery though that may
depend on sensors that are more vulnerable to SEAD.

Modern AAA is extremely deadly within their effective range (which is nowadays about 4,000 to 6,000m). For example the 35mm Oerlikon gun proved very deadly against both British Harriers (and ground troops) and Argentinian aircraft in Falklands. In almost all cases the crews were lost and aicraft disintegrated when hit by the 35mm guns. Modern ammo is even more lethal and have longer effective range. 30 to 76 mm guns all have modern and highly lethal ammunition (like AHEAD, 3P, ORKA, PFF, DART etc). Modern fire-control systems are extremely accurate and fast.

No armour in any aircraft is going to handle that. Even A-10 would be like paper plane against those. Basically the only sane option is to keep away from those guns.

Salute!

Hornet is correct and has good poop for the more "modern" guns.

Not sure about the guns for the Falkland fray, but they were not the 1950's guns USAF faced in North VietNam. The big number from that fiasco was the very low cost per round per kill. It was vastly in favor of the gun and not the SA-2. The missiles were very expensive and most missed! Yep, the Pk wasn't close to 80 or 90% per launch, maybe 15% max on a good day. I would have to find the de-classified Corona Harvest reports about those things, However, I witnessed one explode co-altitude right in front of me as it went behind another flight up front, and it was a huge, ugly fireball. Helluva damage radius and had a humongous 400 pound warhead, GASP!

Best I can find was that the Hawg armor was for 12.7 and 23 mm. As Hornet says, the difference between 23mm and the big boys was day and night. Besides ballistic coefficient, think "volume". It's a cube function.

The current smart weapon array we have has a decent $$ per kill ratio for high value targets. Only the LGB's are close to a good ratio for a jeep or light armor target. I might add that the Maverick is fairly cheap compared to some other, newer PGM's

Gums sends...

MANPADS accounted for half of the A-10 losses in GW1; the other half was attributable
to the heavier truck-mounted IR missiles (Gaskin and Gopher). The biggest SEAD campaign
in world history failed to suppress them.

Their modern derivatives would be imaging infrared + datalink or active RF + datalink.
Both are pretty resilient to SEAD and to platform self-defense techniques and the A-10's
armor is not designed to withstand their warheads.

With all of the emphasis on kinetic counter-UAS and counter cruise missile, low and slow is a bad
place to be for a manned platform on the modern battlefield.

The other part of the story not told in the lost airframe stats is the large number of A-10s that made it home after being struck by AAA, but were taken out of the fight. Faster and higher flying jets didn't eat anywhere near as many AAA hits.

Also, while the A-10 did indeed survive AAA hits much more frequently than other platforms, the data does not suggest it's "armor" or "ruggedness" did anything against missiles when compared to how often fast jets survived damage from SAMs.

The other part of the story not told in the lost airframe stats is the large number of A-10s that made it home after being struck by AAA, but were taken out of the fight. Faster and higher flying jets didn't eat anywhere near as many AAA hits.

Also, while the A-10 did indeed survive AAA hits much more frequently than other platforms, the data does not suggest it's "armor" or "ruggedness" did anything against missiles when compared to how often fast jets survived damage from SAMs.

Add on to this, many of the other aircraft simply were not hit at all. Back to what Gums said earlier, would you rather be hit or not hit?

Add on to this, many of the other aircraft simply were not hit at all. Back to what Gums said earlier, would you rather be hit or not hit?

Not even observed. Was never even there. Oh, those big explosions? Not me. Wasn’t even there...

@Gums and hornetfinn,

Thanks for your very insightful and informative posts! I did really learned a lot more about these systems (AAA)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N2a-kAvmRo

Had to post video related to topic of thread.

There’s 29 seconds of my life I can’t get back. What a waste of bandwidth. What kind of crap is that? Animated cartoon. The scales are even wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N2a-kAvmRo

What exactly was the point of that?

This is far more entertaining... got to see it in person


Also got to see the Hind up close and in person! Damn near splooged myself

There’s 29 seconds of my life I can’t get back. What a waste of bandwidth. What kind of crap is that? Animated cartoon. The scales are even wrong.

Absolutely!

(sorry for the "smiles" above but sometimes images are indeed worth of a thousand words...)

Salute!

BE NICE, STEVE!!!!

Gums sends...