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Sturgeon's House

Bash the F-35 thred.


Belesarius

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I have already mentioned the fact that the thing is designed for too many roles. Aircraft should be designed for one main role, and, well, it’s fine to use them for something else if they work well for that. The recipe for success is the one which has historically produced good airplanes: the P38 Lightning, the Focke-Wulf Fw-190, the F-4, the F-16, the Su-27, and the A-10. All of these were designed with one mission in mind. They ended up being very good at lots of different things. Multi-objective design optimization though, is moronic, and gets us aircraft like the bureaucratic atrocity known as the F-111 Aardvark, whose very name doesn’t exactly evoke air combat awesomeness.

The mental gymnastics required to say 'an aircraft can be good at a lot of different things but designing an aircraft to be good at a lot of different things is moronic' is simply stunning.

Edited by Ramlaen
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9 hours ago, Ramlaen said:

The mental gymnastics required to say 'an aircraft can be good at a lot of different things but designing an aircraft to be good at a lot of different things is moronic' is simply stunning.

Yeah. Seeing the F-111 Aardvark thrown under the bus was funny considering it destroyed over a thousand Iraqi tanks during the Gulf War and dropped the preponderance of the laser guided munitions during that war. 

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It goes without saying that the A-10 was required to be highly survivable (physically well armored), fast enough (also improves survivability), and carry a high payload  to allow loadout diversification. Just because it didn't get the chance to fully perform to its envisioned potential, doesn't mean it was a bad decision to design it the way they did.

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11 minutes ago, Mighty_Zuk said:

It goes without saying that the A-10 was required to be highly survivable (physically well armored), fast enough (also improves survivability), and carry a high payload  to allow loadout diversification. Just because it didn't get the chance to fully perform to its envisioned potential, doesn't mean it was a bad decision to design it the way they did.

Don't get me wrong, I like the A-10. But its role has been obsolete for decades, so they've instead used it as a glorified Skyraider.

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F-16's were more survivable in the first gulf war, the gun and armour needlessly slow it down without helping it in strike missions. The niche it was designed for does not exist, and has not for many decades. Being slow, it's too vulnerable in a proper war; and for COIN you want something cheaper (because no aircraft can be in two places at once)

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And yet, I hold on to the personal opinion that designing a replacement in the form of a single turboprop engine low/mid size aircraft (e.g A-29) would be wrong. Too much of a 'what if' situation. Better spend a little more on fuel and development than risk being caught with your pants down.

Because you could as well argue the F-15 is obsolete since its original role of an air superiority fighter was replaced with a heavy bomb truck. 

 

F-16's were more survivable in the first gulf war, the gun and armour needlessly slow it down without helping it in strike missions. The niche it was designed for does not exist, and has not for many decades. Being slow, it's too vulnerable in a proper war; and for COIN you want something cheaper (because no aircraft can be in two places at once)

True. Speed is at least as important for survivability as physical armor plates. But going for a lightweight attack aircraft would be too limited to low-danger zones. Who knows what might happen within the next 5 years? Short range AA missiles (e.g Igla) might become as common for insurgents as ATGMs are. They are going through a sort of technological revolution recently after all.

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1 hour ago, Mighty_Zuk said:

And yet, I hold on to the personal opinion that designing a replacement in the form of a single turboprop engine low/mid size aircraft (e.g A-29) would be wrong. Too much of a 'what if' situation. Better spend a little more on fuel and development than risk being caught with your pants down.

Exactly how would a Super Skyraider get caught with its pants down in a way that an A-10 would not? Especially with wingtip AIM-9Xs...

1 hour ago, Mighty_Zuk said:

Because you could as well argue the F-15 is obsolete since its original role of an air superiority fighter was replaced with a heavy bomb truck. 

Air superiority is a role that still exists, we're just extremely good at it. That's not a reason to retire a class.

The A-10, in contrast, was designed for a specialist role. It's like the tank destroyers of World War II. Sure, twenty, even thirty years later and an M18 is still useful, but it as a type is obsolete. A Stryker with a 30mm is a much better fit for the current paradigm. Same with the A-10, it's a very specialized bomb truck designed to zap whole columns of shitty tanks. That job simply doesn't exist anymore.

1 hour ago, Mighty_Zuk said:

True. Speed is at least as important for survivability as physical armor plates. But going for a lightweight attack aircraft would be too limited to low-danger zones. Who knows what might happen within the next 5 years? Short range AA missiles (e.g Igla) might become as common for insurgents as ATGMs are. They are going through a sort of technological revolution recently after all.

I think they will, and that's a strong argument for F-35 over A-10. Plus, your cheap, lightweight attack bird doesn't have to be poorly armored.

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With the A-10 I think the biggest issue isn't that it's a good bird. It's just that it's reputation is incredibly overrated to the point that it has achieved a super hero status. This is due in no small part to its use supporting ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you're a Marine or Army grunt pinned down by ground fire, no one is going to tell you that the Warthog isn't the best thing ever when it's Brrrrrrrrttttt... comes to save your bacon.

But one must question whether any other <insert ground attack plane here> would engender the same affection if it was being used instead.

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1 hour ago, Donward said:

With the A-10 I think the biggest issue isn't that it's a good bird. It's just that it's reputation is incredibly overrated to the point that it has achieved a super hero status. This is due in no small part to its use supporting ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you're a Marine or Army grunt pinned down by ground fire, no one is going to tell you that the Warthog isn't the best thing ever when it's Brrrrrrrrttttt... comes to save your bacon.

But one must question whether any other <insert ground attack plane here> would engender the same affection if it was being used instead.

Yeah, it's an impressive weapon used solely to support the infantry. The psychological math there is pretty straightforward.

If you want an aircraft like this, take a PW100 or a T64 or something, strap it to a decent sized bird with a shitload of pylons, and clone the AH-64E's avionics suite as much as is practical. Then strap a couple of Bushmaster chain guns or maybe a couple of GIAT 30s, and go to town.

Or just buy Super Tooks.

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4 hours ago, Mighty_Zuk said:

Because you could as well argue the F-15 is obsolete since its original role of an air superiority fighter was replaced with a heavy bomb truck.

I don't follow this logic given the just the USAF alone uses ~150 F-15C's in their original air superiority role.

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Since the A-10 debate has come up it is time once again for my favorite interview.

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A-10s vs. F-16s

Q: Did the war have any effect on the Air Force's view of the A-10?

A: No. People misread that. People were saying that airplanes are too sophisticated and that they wouldn't work in the desert, that you didn't need all this high technology, that simple and reliable was better, and all that.

Well, first of all, complex does not mean unreliable. We're finding that out. For example, you have a watch that uses transistors rather than a spring. It's infinitely more reliable than the windup watch that you had years ago. That's what we're finding in the airplanes.

Those people . . . were always championing the A-10. As the A-10 reaches the end of its life cycle-- and it's approaching that now--it's time to replace it, just like we replace every airplane, including, right now, some early versions of the F-16.

Since the line was discontinued, [the A-10's champions] want to build another A-10 of some kind. The point we were making was that we have F-16s that do the same job.

Then you come to people who have their own reasons-good reasons to them, but they don't necessarily compute to me-who want to hang onto the A-10 because of the gun. Well, the gun's an excellent weapon, but you'll find that most of the tank kills by the A-10 were done with Mavericks and bombs. So the idea that the gun is the absolute wonder of the world is not true.

Q: This conflict has shown that?

A: It shows that the gun has a lot of utility, which we always knew, but it isn't the principal tank-killer on the A-IO. The [Imaging Infrared] Maverick is the big hero there. That was used by the A-10s and the F-16s very, very effectively in places like Khafji.

The other problem is that the A-10 is vulnerable to hits because its speed is limited. It's a function of thrust, it's not a function of anything else. We had a lot of A-10s take a lot of ground fire hits. Quite frankly, we pulled the A-10s back from going up around the Republican Guard and kept them on Iraq's [less formidable] front-line units. That's line if you have a force that allows you to do that. In this case, we had F-16s to go after the Republican Guard.

Q: At what point did you do that?

A: I think I had fourteen airplanes sitting on the ramp having battle damage repaired, and I lost two A- 10s in one day [February 15], and I said, "I've had enough of this." It was when we really started to go after the Republican Guard.

Initially, much of the air assets were devoted to strategic targets, to make sure we got those down, while we were also hitting the frontline forces. As we killed off the research and development stuff-storage, those kinds of targets-we brought more and more assets into the Kuwait Theater of Operation. We really started heating the battle up in the KTO.

Q: General Schwarzkopf said that he didn't care to kill the Republican Guard; his goal was to break its will.

A: He never emphasized the killing of people. I think that is personally abhorrent to him, as it is to most of us. It really didn't serve any purpose other than to ensure hatred in the postwar era. What we had to do is destroy the enemy's capability to inflict casualties on us. Since we were fighting tanks, the way you do that is destroy tanks and artillery. I think we were very successful at that.

 

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Has the air force become interested in doing CAS? Because for the most part they only want the role for the money, and its somewhat why the Army went whole hog with Helicopters.

At one point, I'm pretty sure they wrangled control of all air assets in Korea, and then force the Marine Air Wings to bomb strategic targets, because that would have more effect on the war or some shit, and they could only do CAS when they had no real missions, or their was some kind of emergency.  

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Yep, the good old Key West Agreement. 

 

Armed fixed wing was all the Air Forces deal, the Army got to keep unarmed Choppers, after a battle, and light aviation stuff, but nothing armed. The Army snuck in arming Choppers, by hiding the programs from the Air force until it was to late. 

 

All the while the Navy and Marine Corp sat on the sidelines and laughed, since the air force sucked at CAS anyway, and they got to keep their air assets, and told the air force to f off. 

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