Low manoeuvrability 5th generation fighters... why not?

Avimimus

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I'm curious why we haven't seen more low manoeuvrability 5th generation concepts?

If one relaxed the turning requirements one could get gains in payload, range, and RCS reduction. One might even be able to get improved supercruise efficiency...

Is it dealing with modern SAMs and long range missiles? Playing the kinematic game for defence? If so it would indicate a belief in the transience of stealth (as providing a completely reliable reduction in launch ranges).
 
I'm curious why we haven't seen more low manoeuvrability 5th generation concepts?

If one relaxed the turning requirements one could get gains in payload, range, and RCS reduction. One might even be able to get improved supercruise efficiency...

Is it dealing with modern SAMs and long range missiles? Playing the kinematic game for defence? If so it would indicate a belief in the transience of stealth (as providing a completely reliable reduction in launch ranges).
That’s the most ridiculously absurd idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life (no offense to anyone of course). Fighters can still dogfight at close quarters & we don’t want another Vietnam war where fighters had no close quarters dogfighting capability do we?
 
Dear Fighterreaper97,
the primary problem during the Viet Nam War was that missiles were unreliable during vigorous dog fights. Since then, AIM-9 Sidewinders, etc. have been developed to become far more reliable. Air-to-air missiles have also become far more maneuverable, being able to fire at 90 degrees - or more - off launching airplane heading. Fancy heads-up-displays built into even fancier helmets allow pilots to look off to the side and missiles slave to whatever the helmet is looking at.
Since missiles can turn at 20 or more Gs, they can out-maneuver most fast jets.
Without the need to turn tight, you can build missile-carrying fighters with much higher aspect ratios and much greater fuel-efficiency, which soon leads to much longer loiter times or much greater ranges.
 
Most 5th generation (and the 4.5s like Rafale and Typhoon) where designed for rapid acceleration to, plus good agility in, the high transonic/ low supersonic range to facilitate advantageous BVR combat performance (and specifically missile shots).
That generally also feeds into high (access) energy/ good agility in the VR arena.
The 4th and 5th generation fighters were generally interested in getting into optimal positions for firing their missiles and imparting maximum performance to their missiles. In particular for the 5th generation the gun is a bit of a vestigial item probably seldom if ever to be used in air combat.

What the 6th generation fighters might see is specifically trading some of the 4th & 5th generations high AoA capabilities and the other aspects more relevant to lower speed knife-fight type engagements (and for which the performance of the latest and future generations of short range AAMs would largely compensate). Also the future of the gun in these aircraft is very much open to question with possible retention more to do with institutional resistance than actual need/ utility (at least in the air to air role - likely a token argument about unlikely scenarios air to ground staffing will be made to try to justify their continued inclusion).

Plus the 6th generation likely to see a relaxation of some of the structural and G-pulling requirements to put a higher priority on aspects like fuel load and weapon load to boast persistent and range then absolute turning and G-performance.
 
That’s the most ridiculously absurd idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life (no offense to anyone of course). Fighters can still dogfight at close quarters & we don’t want another Vietnam war where fighters had no close quarters dogfighting capability do we?
oh lord here it is again. vietnam era planes didn't have missiles that can maneuver 20G, way beyond anything a plane can, neither those missiles are equipped with modern reliable sensors across multiple spectrums for redundancy, nor high off boresight targeting allow the pilot to immediately look lock and launch without maneuvering his plane's nose toward target. And that's just missiles.

Air force just deployed first operational laser weapon pod on f-16. you can't outmaneuver speed of light so having low speed agility adds nothing to the aircraft air to air kill or survivable rate. 10 years from now it's only gonna get better.
 
Mike Sutton's Typhoon touches on the Typhoon's 27mm Mauser, how it was going to be deleted to save money but designing the ballast to replace it was perversely more expensive so they left it in. Technical issues with jamming still hadn't been solved when he used it in action in 2014, jamming after just 26 rounds during a strafing run over Iraq.

The problem is that guns are seen as lower priority back-up weapons and their integration and ironing out of mechanical faults takes a back seat when resources have to be channelled into other development areas. A cannon that jams in a relatively stable diving strafing attack is going to be useless in a high-G dogfight.
 
Mike Sutton's Typhoon touches on the Typhoon's 27mm Mauser, how it was going to be deleted to save money but designing the ballast to replace it was perversely more expensive so they left it in. Technical issues with jamming still hadn't been solved when he used it in action in 2014, jamming after just 26 rounds during a strafing run over Iraq.

The problem is that guns are seen as lower priority back-up weapons and their integration and ironing out of mechanical faults takes a back seat when resources have to be channelled into other development areas. A cannon that jams in a relatively stable diving strafing attack is going to be useless in a high-G dogfight.
Hood I don’t mean to brag but even when direct energy weapons & missiles fail a highly reliable robust gun that doesn’t jam should still be used even in the future. Even the most advanced technology can still fail, no matter how reliable & revolutionary they are. Not to offend anyone but even as an autistic person with personal flaws in life still believes that internal cannons must be used with direct energy weapons & air to air missiles. Hell even use direct energy weapons to try & detroy enemy radar air defences & see how it would handle before jumping to conclusions & saying that guns are a thing of the past & should never again be used on any future fighters. Combat reform Blacktail defence defence issues you need to look up before jumping to conclusions please & please don’t be such hypocritical technologists
 
That’s the most ridiculously absurd idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life (no offense to anyone of course).
Please read forum guidelines. You knew it was potentially offensive and couched with "no offense". A better strategy is not to say some thing offensive in the first place. Try something like - "I really disagree with this", and then say why.
Fighters can still dogfight at close quarters & we don’t want another Vietnam war where fighters had no close quarters dogfighting capability do we?
Things have moved on from the 1970s.
 
To quote Col Robin Olds “A fighter without a gun is like an aeroplane without a wing’.
Now imagine that statement being used along with reliable missiles & direct energy weapons in pods.
 
“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.”
—President of the Michigan Savings Bank

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

Things change. If you get to guns range in air-to-air combat today, you are doing it wrong.
 
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I think we need to give pilots pointy sticks. You can't jam a pointy stick. And open cockpits of course.
 
I think we need to give pilots pointy sticks. You can't jam a pointy stick. And open cockpits of course.
And everything has to be bi-planes or tri-planes with rotary engines, because simplicity and what was done in the past is always best….
 
You're all dogpiling on a guy that clearly stated he's autistic.

If his posts are unrelated to the threads he has been posting in, or violate the forum rules in any other way, it would be better to just ignore them or remove them.

Expecting him to make a convincing argument for his thoughts in a forum where the bar for the technical and historical knowledge is quite high, it's quite in bad taste honestly, and tells us more about how we ourselves treat other people rather than how knowledgeable we think we might be.
 
You're all dogpiling on a guy that clearly stated he's autistic.

If his posts are unrelated to the threads he has been posting in, or violate the forum rules in any other way, it would be better to just ignore them or remove them.

Expecting him to make a convincing argument for his thoughts in a forum where the bar for the technical and historical knowledge is quite high, it's quite in bad taste honestly, and tells us more about how we ourselves treat other people rather than how knowledgeable we think we might be.
This is a discussion forum, if someone makes a comment people have the right to respond. Especially when that comment involves insulting another user for a completely reasonable idea
 
You're all dogpiling on a guy that clearly stated he's autistic.

If his posts are unrelated to the threads he has been posting in, or violate the forum rules in any other way, it would be better to just ignore them or remove them.

Expecting him to make a convincing argument for his thoughts in a forum where the bar for the technical and historical knowledge is quite high, it's quite in bad taste honestly, and tells us more about how we ourselves treat other people rather than how knowledgeable we think we might be.
I appreciate what you are saying.

For the smooth running of the forum, it would have been better to ban the user, but that seemed like a drastic step to take. I advised them to step back the posts a bit and do more reading and less posting of "hobby horse" ideas. Then they posted in this topic with "That’s the most ridiculously absurd idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life" which was the opposite of what I had advised.

You certainly don't need to be an expert to participate in the forum. Its hard however to have a meaningful discussion when there is a lack of understanding of basic physical principles, and this, combined with an inability to take on board contradictory opinions, make it hard to continue.

Do we want every discussion on the forum to center on lava-proof landing gear, because of one user's pet idea?
 
For what it is worth I think most of comments were critiquing a common trope that this particular contributor was repeating (and which gets much the same reaction on the forum when other contributors are unwise enough to do the same).
 
The Fighter Mafia position was arguably correct in the 1960s. The radars and missiles of the time were unreliable, and might not have justified their weight and cost in some missions. That doesn't mean that radars and missiles remain unreliable for ever. There have been a number of conflicts since the 1960s where radar and missiles have worked a whole lot better.
 
Do we want every discussion on the forum to center on lava-proof landing gear, because of one user's pet idea?
I took it to mean a lava field or a strip paved with crushed lava (we call cinder), as they make unpaved roads with and as ballast for rail lines where I live. It would be a very unideal medium for operations for a variety of reasons, but didn't seem much more insane than hundreds of others I've read here and elsewhere.

I saw a lot of ideas the past few days that weren't very ... sophisticated, to choose a word gently. I just didn't respond to them.
 
I would posit that "The Fighter Mafia position was arguably correct in the 1960s" for some use cases.

I don't think that Boyd et al ever addressed the US Navy's nightmare scenario of a large number of Bears and Backfires with cruise missiles storming down the GUIK gap to eliminate the CVBGs. Unless it was to define that counter-air mission as being performed by something other than "good ole EM dawgfighters".

If you can't win the argument, redefine the terms until you can.
 
Hood I don’t mean to brag but even when direct energy weapons & missiles fail a highly reliable robust gun that doesn’t jam should still be used even in the future. Even the most advanced technology can still fail, no matter how reliable & revolutionary they are. Not to offend anyone but even as an autistic person with personal flaws in life still believes that internal cannons must be used with direct energy weapons & air to air missiles. Hell even use direct energy weapons to try & detroy enemy radar air defences & see how it would handle before jumping to conclusions & saying that guns are a thing of the past & should never again be used on any future fighters. Combat reform Blacktail defence defence issues you need to look up before jumping to conclusions please & please don’t be such hypocritical technologists
guns still jam (quite often actually). Following your line of argument, should we require pilots to carry grenades to throw out of their cockpit if their gun jam?

putting weapons on a platform, be it ship or airplane (especially airplane) costs SPACE. Sure in a perfect world where each airplane has a magic hat where the pilot can pull out anything from a howitzer to a viking axe, give everything to them in case one fails, there's another.

but in the real world, it isn't like that. A space dedicated to a gun means less fuel, less missiles, less avionics. Imagine if the naval experts insisted on having large cannons on ships at the expense of reduced missile cells. Imagine if IFV still have firing ports at the expense of reduced armor.

Luckily, more reasonable minds have prevailed. Instead of putting obsolete weapons back inside the platform, we make the new technology more reliable and more lethal.
 
B-21 with NG LPI radar based on Wedgetail, armed with AIM-260, would be an interesting option for a high altitude, loitering air defence system. Flying stealthy SAM battery.
Well, then add AESA radar at the upper part of the airframe facing sky, put PAC3 MSE in weapon bays and you have nice 2-in-1 air and missile defense station :).
 
I appreciate what you are saying.

For the smooth running of the forum, it would have been better to ban the user, but that seemed like a drastic step to take. I advised them to step back the posts a bit and do more reading and less posting of "hobby horse" ideas. Then they posted in this topic with "That’s the most ridiculously absurd idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life" which was the opposite of what I had advised.

You certainly don't need to be an expert to participate in the forum. Its hard however to have a meaningful discussion when there is a lack of understanding of basic physical principles, and this, combined with an inability to take on board contradictory opinions, make it hard to continue.
Which is the point I'm trying to make.
I don't think you talk to a 4 year old as you talk to a 19 year old. And you don't talk to a 40 year old as you do with an 80 year old.
You don't explain things in the same way to a baker as you would to an engineer.

Expecting him to change his behavior after telling him off as you would with any other user, and continuing the discussion to convince him of how ill-advised his ideas are, is not a very realistic prospect.
However, dura lex sed lex and I'm not arguing to treat him in a different way than any other user. As I stated before "If his posts are unrelated to the threads he has been posting in, or violate the forum rules in any other way, it would be better to just ignore them or remove them".

Removing his posting privileges for a time could also be an option, if it's too tasking for moderators to check the posts he makes. And in case he kept ignoring the previously issued warnings, banning him could be the right course of action, since it's clearly stated in the rules that "Membership of this forum is a privilege not a right".

Anyway, I feel some people could have refrained from clicking the "post reply" button to avoid a meaningless display of one-upping him and demonstrate how foolish his ideas are.
And it seems to me that some people even felt more emboldened in taking part into this activity after seeing your reply.
Looking at the snarky remarks he received, here and in other threads where he recently posted, I don't think those actions fall exactly in line with the Golden Rule of "Treat others as you would have them treat you" either, and this even before taking into consideration the fact that he's autistic.

Do we want every discussion on the forum to center on lava-proof landing gear, because of one user's pet idea?
To be fair, I think I've seen worse ideas here in the Alternative History and Future Speculation section, by people that are probably not autistic.
I don't think they have received the same amount of flak, though.
 
Are we still talking about the OP? I don't know how such an idea persists when a fully loaded F-35A is designed to maeuver with F-16s and have angle of attack characteristics similar to F/A-18. Maneuverability is stressed in the F-35 design, no less so than it was with the F-22A.

Lasers will make first look very important in the future, even more so than now. No amount of maneuverability will escape laser weapons. But the laws of physics will limit those laser weapons, and until those issues are resolved we will see how they ultimately impact air superiority. You never know, they may be impractical by the time more performance data is in. As much as this topic has been discussed without any version being deployed, there is nothing to suggest it has changed anything at this point.

The 'Growling Sidewinder' channel recently hosted a set of 2v2's using DCS to model F-22A and F-35A against J-20 and Su-57. Its clear the J-20 is broken in DCS as its radar allowed uber-range locks versus the American fighters. Their missiles also liked to snipe other missiles out of the air, rather than other fighters, which was another odd detail. Ultimately the lesson was to spot the enemy first and attempt kills before the latter is aware. The narrator suggested this method to be more preferable and failure to kill on an initial surprise attack quickly devolved to WWI dogfights as all of them were very good at evading missiles. So he and his wingman stayed spread out and took turns scanning radars for a few seconds and took turns checking each other's tails. Once they engaged it was a low percentage first look-first kill, so it clearly fell on experience to win. If the results reflect reality in any was, then training is going to be more important than ever.
 
Are we still talking about the OP? I don't know how such an idea persists when a fully loaded F-35A is designed to maeuver with F-16s and have angle of attack characteristics similar to F/A-18. Maneuverability is stressed in the F-35 design, no less so than it was with the F-22A.

Lasers will make first look very important in the future, even more so than now. No amount of maneuverability will escape laser weapons. But the laws of physics will limit those laser weapons, and until those issues are resolved we will see how they ultimately impact air superiority. You never know, they may be impractical by the time more performance data is in. As much as this topic has been discussed without any version being deployed, there is nothing to suggest it has changed anything at this point.

The 'Growling Sidewinder' channel recently hosted a set of 2v2's using DCS to model F-22A and F-35A against J-20 and Su-57. Its clear the J-20 is broken in DCS as its radar allowed uber-range locks versus the American fighters. Their missiles also liked to snipe other missiles out of the air, rather than other fighters, which was another odd detail. Ultimately the lesson was to spot the enemy first and attempt kills before the latter is aware. The narrator suggested this method to be more preferable and failure to kill on an initial surprise attack quickly devolved to WWI dogfights as all of them were very good at evading missiles. So he and his wingman stayed spread out and took turns scanning radars for a few seconds and took turns checking each other's tails. Once they engaged it was a low percentage first look-first kill, so it clearly fell on experience to win. If the results reflect reality in any was, then training is going to be more important than ever.
DCS mods don’t reflect reality in any way. As for F-35 maneuverability I’ll just leave this here.
An F-15c pilot's opinion on bfm with F-35s
 
Are we still talking about the OP? I don't know how such an idea persists when a fully loaded F-35A is designed to maeuver with F-16s and have angle of attack characteristics similar to F/A-18. Maneuverability is stressed in the F-35 design, no less so than it was with the F-22A.

Lasers will make first look very important in the future, even more so than now. No amount of maneuverability will escape laser weapons. But the laws of physics will limit those laser weapons, and until those issues are resolved we will see how they ultimately impact air superiority. You never know, they may be impractical by the time more performance data is in. As much as this topic has been discussed without any version being deployed, there is nothing to suggest it has changed anything at this point.

The 'Growling Sidewinder' channel recently hosted a set of 2v2's using DCS to model F-22A and F-35A against J-20 and Su-57. Its clear the J-20 is broken in DCS as its radar allowed uber-range locks versus the American fighters. Their missiles also liked to snipe other missiles out of the air, rather than other fighters, which was another odd detail. Ultimately the lesson was to spot the enemy first and attempt kills before the latter is aware. The narrator suggested this method to be more preferable and failure to kill on an initial surprise attack quickly devolved to WWI dogfights as all of them were very good at evading missiles. So he and his wingman stayed spread out and took turns scanning radars for a few seconds and took turns checking each other's tails. Once they engaged it was a low percentage first look-first kill, so it clearly fell on experience to win. If the results reflect reality in any was, then training is going to be more important than ever.
DCS mods don’t reflect reality in any way. As for F-35 maneuverability I’ll just leave this here.
An F-15c pilot's opinion on bfm with F-35s
Doesn't sound like a pilot. How do you know he's a pilot let alone in an F-15C. There is no wizzo in the -C.
 
Doesn't sound like a pilot. How do you know he's a pilot let alone in an F-15C. There is no wizzo in the -C.
He said he was a wizzo in the -E and then moved to to the -C. Presumably they have some way of verifying his identity before letting him do an AMA, but then again it is reddit after all.

In any case, I find it hard to believe that a '3-in-1' 5th gen airframe that happens to be a F-16/A-10 replacement, a STOVL Harrier replacement, and a naval based Hornet replacement with 18k lbs of fuel and massive weapons bays isn't going to have some design sacrifices made. Not to say its a bad airplane, certainly the opposite is true, but you can't have all of that with no weaknesses.

I'll also make note of the infamous "War is Boring" report in which a test pilot stated that the F-35A struggled with energy retention. Yes I'm aware that the test was mainly focused around flight control logic and David Axe's conclusions were nonsense as usual, but you can't fix an energy problem with software.
 
You're all dogpiling on a guy that clearly stated he's autistic.

If his posts are unrelated to the threads he has been posting in, or violate the forum rules in any other way, it would be better to just ignore them or remove them.

Expecting him to make a convincing argument for his thoughts in a forum where the bar for the technical and historical knowledge is quite high, it's quite in bad taste honestly, and tells us more about how we ourselves treat other people rather than how knowledgeable we think we might be.
I appreciate what you are saying.

For the smooth running of the forum, it would have been better to ban the user, but that seemed like a drastic step to take. I advised them to step back the posts a bit and do more reading and less posting of "hobby horse" ideas. Then they posted in this topic with "That’s the most ridiculously absurd idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life" which was the opposite of what I had advised.

You certainly don't need to be an expert to participate in the forum. Its hard however to have a meaningful discussion when there is a lack of understanding of basic physical principles, and this, combined with an inability to take on board contradictory opinions, make it hard to continue.

Do we want every discussion on the forum to center on lava-proof landing gear, because of one user's pet idea?
Lava proof landing gear? Sign me up.
 
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