bigron427 said:
As SAC's only fighter developed under the weapons system concept as a "strategic fighter", I have tried to think very hard about what the concept entailed.
Look at it from the enemy perspective. In WWII, one of the primary drivers for the '3X1,000' requirement was simply that all types, including fighters were being base-CAP'd into oblivion and the Luftwaffe could neither protect nor project force with sufficient massed capability as to effect the outcome of the strategic air campaign or even reliably perform high value strike and reconnaissance.
Of course frolicking in the flak trap as baselanes of antiaircraft artillery covering the approaches to any field is not exactly a healthy idea and there is nothing to say that an aircraft which took off at X base would not recovery at Y (as indeed the 'peregrinative period' of the Nachtjagdwaffe showed the way forward on, using all weather beacon receiver radios to accomplish letdown in the typical German muck) which means that this is not a perfect solution either.
Enter the atomic weapon. And suddenly, the ultimate war winner is the COG blast. And your only hope of survival is to layer back behind deep defenses while shuttling as legs-not-radii to the full depth needed for multiple prosecutions on the ingress lane. Unfortunately, Russia's weather is worse than Germany, she has essentially undefendable coastal border lengths and Moscow's location is anything but safe.
So you are down to a 'before they do it to us' or 'from our graves, a dead hand reaches' alternatives. It still pays to make the enemy delivery force suffer monstrous attrition however; simply so that absorbing followon strikes is not nearly as hard a continuing reduction in capability.
Now consider the _Fifteen Minutes_ theory by which the USAF would take off, fly to European bases, mate up with weapons there (assuming a period of international tensions prior to the outbreak of hostilities) and then fly on to European targets (B-29/B-50) which hits a brick wall in 1957 when suddenly Sputnik makes it possible for not just theater but -intercontinental- strikes to come from the interior of a country.
And land in another. Over the pole or across the pond.
And further this image with the certainty that the B-36 takes up to 36hrs to generate an atomic sortie and when it launches it is -incredibly- vulnerable to some Fellow Traveller college student wannabe walking onto the runway and detonating a .2-2KT suitcase nuke modeled on the German latewar Trinks/Schumann designs. What, did you really think that the Russians would send 'Telefon' bombers with a revolver and a couple sticks of dynamite in a suitcase while they scrambled to counter SAC?
Not hardly.
Now understand that the logical way around this (while the B-52 is coming online and the crash program for Atlas, Thor and Jupiter are multi-tree cranked out, stealing scientists and engineers from all across aerospace...) is to again, _forward disperse_ aircraft, away from predictable locations to places which are satellite field beyond the range of casual strikes and isolated enough that you can essentially form no-go zone cordon around the airfield.
Wheelus, Bodo and perhaps Incirlik or Mehrabad/Badaber come to mind for this, as does Eilsen and Chitose if you want to come that far west.
Enemy fifth columnists can't gain ready access to these areas without standing out and they are essentially unreachable by period Frog/Scud/Sandal tactical and theater follow-ons to the V-2.
That said, the threat now also shifts from decapitation and counter-industrial targeting to hardened launch sites which can and indeed -are- located in the middle of the hinterland wastes.
For the B-47 in particular, this target set (Plesetsk, Severomorsk, Sary Shagan, Baikonur etc.) makes the SIOP mission a one way trip, with ejection somewhere in the heart of an Irradiated Soviet Urals all but inevitable. And while the B-36 and later B-52 can make it, halving the return radius by coming through Europe to extranational bases in the surrounds still means more high performance time near the target and/or larger payloads of consecutive strike within the warplan target package.
Big If: The Eastern European defensive belts can be rendered inoperative without much fuss, **before** the high-cruise bombers come streaming through.
Hence 'strategic fighter' means Nuclear SEAD as you can't CAP a primary sector airfield outside Warsaw, let alone Minsk from Bentwaters but you can sure as heck remove it's fuel, weapons and repair facilities from the line up of satellites, permanently.
In this, it must be noted that USAFE got the big stuff early and for awhile, the B43 was the largest weapon in TAC and was exclusively an F-101 munition, after (TAC) transfer to England from (SAC) Texas.
As 'strategic fighters' then, might their difference from tactical platforms be the yield subtype of their Mk.28 and B43? Both were in the Megaton range in their early Mods and the combination of EMP and massive radiation and fire damage from such weapons would make whole areas go dark, tearing gaping holes in enemy fighter interception coverage zones as GCI and later, SAM system radars would also be directly damaged or lose their networking.
In this, it should be noted that the F-101 does well at altitude (124lb/sqft max loading vs. 136lb/sqft for the -105; .74 T/Wr vs. .68 for the Thud. The F-105 cannot even climb above about 17,000ft when fully loaded but has the better lolo navaids, ride and speed) and with another 750 gallons of external fuel, the Wonder has an honest 1250nm radius. Particularly if 'drop tanks!' means cleaning the airframe completely.
Despite this video's admonition-
USN A-7 B43 LADD/LABS Delivery Profiles
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpJUo-Fylas
To 'close the curtain and raise the nose 15`!' you are not going to outrun a 1MT laydown or even toss blast at low level. But at altitude, you might very well be able to do a pitchover from 40,000ft unload to well above the Mach on burner by 25K, dipsydoodle up to a loft and complete the idiot loop while the weapon pararetarded on a delay down to 1,800ft or so for best shock coupling while you again used altitude and _minimum burner time_ to bust 700 knots, going the other way.
THIS being why it was so critical to get the 7.33G rating on the F-101C that they accepted another 500lbs in structural penalties.
Even as the higher yield allows for some inaccuracy due to wind drift under parachute or direct delivery.
F-101A In It's Element
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What was different about the mission versus, say, a TAC F-84G unit?
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Mk.7 is rated to .82 Mach with an 8-61KT yield. It is designed to annihilate Soviet Armored Thrusts on the North German Plain where every pop-flash is radiologic uplift you're gonna have to continue to fight under during the war and the Germans will have to live on, after.
So if you're stopping tank columns (and the W54 showed that this is not an easy proposition, even from Davey Crocket suicidal ranges with a 10KT yield likely to result in only a few vehicles near the hypocenter of the tank wedge actually being disabled) you had better keep your yields low and learn to sacrifice blocking force units to bunch the enemy up.
All of which is pointless if they start to retur the favor under the "It's not how many you can kill before you lose, but rather how many you can lose while still winning." theory.
OTOH, if you blow up the enemy capital by scooting through holes in his radar coverage and then come out through more holes in this defensive barrier states, 'it's all good'. Because the wind blows east and the paralysis at the command level does more to stop the Warsaw Pact than any direct attack as it becomes clear the enemy are fighting for a headless state "And you're next!".
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How did the anticipated mission define the capabilities needed in the F-101?
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Nobody designs a cannon armament system for fighter vs. fighter combat in the supersonic age. It may sound romantic and even wise given the failure rate of early AAMs especially but it's basically a flung booger solution because even at 500 knots, you're doing 844ft/sec which is within 3 seconds of tail chase collision and 1 second of certain FOD from whatever you chunk off the enemy airframe.
While the most basic of tunnel studies should have shown that the Wonder was incredibly vulnerable to pitchup superstall across the transonic range. Yet the F-101 has cannon. The F-102 has rockets and missiles.
I would be willing to entertain the notion that a young Air Force, covering it's ignorance of how the next war would be fought by placing bets across the table, put out a spread of contracts to develop the tech base as an _idea engine_ for new ways of dealing with the DCA/OCA intercept and sweep missions in a world which was, post 1949 dual-nuclear and post-1955 (when Von Ardenne came home) certainly dual Fusion.
In the 101B, the missiles if not the rockets won out. But as the Falcon performs miserably, even against huge radar and IR targets like the Bear and Bison-
(Time Index 7:58)
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4f6ChgiwIU
Such that you have three shot salvos for a single target downing and thus, at most, two target engagements against low agility threats. The notion of a missile armed 'escort' fighter, at depth in the enemy IADS belts, is utterly ridiculous when the enemy has thousands of agile MiG-15/17/19 and the 21 is just around the corner.
But if you are a nuclear laydown platform, your guns can act the same way they might on a Mosquito FB or Ju-86C6, scaring the enemy away from a 30` collision intercept around your nose. While you charge on in at maximum speed to dump The Special.
That is your sole mission. You cannot afford to damage that weapon and you likely cannot maneuver well while carrying it while the enemy guided weapons (AA-1 Alkali as a developed Ruhrstall X-4 and R-13S as an AIM-9B clone) are all but useless against you, having but a tiny cone behind as your race past at 650-700 knots.
While, thirty minutes after you are gone, any survivors from your drop will will be fuel critical and have no place to go.
As the Big Stick or Stratojet comes thundering out of the Ukraine, not wanting to fight the good fight because they are running at best-cruise on vapor.
Again, all of this changes when, October 24, 1953, the YF-102A confirms wind tunnel predictions from mid 1952 of awful performance before crashing, nine days later and the '1954 interceptor' is put on hold. Plans are further disrupted when, in 1955, the need to prestage aircraft or recover into foreign fields is markedly reduced with the service entry of the B-52. It changes again on October 4, 1957, when a 23 inch ball begins to fly across the heavens bleeping FUs into everyone's radio receivers. And it likely changed once more, pemanently, when, on May 1, 1960, the fighter threat was forever seconded to the Surface To Air Missile. Such that even aggressively supersonic platforms, operating at Mach 1.5 and 40,000ft or more, could not survive.
In this it is interesting to place the F-101B whose IOC of January 5, 1959 puts towards the end of this progressive cycle even as it's production numbers (479 two seaters) indicates that it was carried as a program for some year and a half after the May 2, 1957 entry of the F-101A to the 27th Strategic Fighter Wing which would be transferred, within the year, to TAC. And never have more than 124 total airframes of which only 47 were functionally capable Cs.
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The first F-101A was delivered on 2 May 1957 to the 27th Strategic Fighter Wing, which transferred to TAC in July that year,[12] replacing their F-84F Thunderstreak. The F-101A was powered by two Pratt & Whitney J57-P-13 turbojets,[11] allowing good acceleration, climb-performance, ease in penetrating the sound barrier in level flight, and a maximum performance of Mach 1.52. The F-101's large internal fuel capacity allowed a range of approximately 3,000 mi (4,828 km) nonstop.[17] The aircraft was fitted with an MA-7 fire-control radar for both air-to-air and air-to-ground use, augmented by a Low Altitude Bombing System (LABS) system for delivering nuclear weapons,[11] and was designed to carry a Mk 28 nuclear bomb.
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The 81st TFW served as a strategic nuclear deterrent force, the Voodoo's long range putting almost all of the Warsaw Pact countries, and targets up to 500 miles deep into the Soviet Union within reach.
Both the A and C model aircraft were assigned to the 81st TFW, and were used interchangeably within the three squadrons. Operational F-101A/C were upgraded in service with Low Angle Drogued Delivery (LADD) and Low Altitude Bombing System (LABS) equipment for its primary mission of delivering nuclear weapons at extremely low altitudes. Pilots were trained for high speed, low level missions into Soviet or Eastern Bloc territory, with primary targets being airfields. These missions were expected to be one-way, with the pilots having to eject behind Soviet lines
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en.wikipedia.org
When the F-102 hit it's post-entry developmental troubles (the early MG-3/10 were seriously overreaching weapons systems with major reliability issues and likely far easier to integrate into a semi-automatic, two-crew, platform condition than the Deuce airframe with all it's datalinks and coupled autopilot modes etc.) the F-101 dropped the MA-7's autobomb facilities which was essentially a radar ranging LCOSS with autopilot timer linkage for the IP offset and nuke delivery and adopted the new AI suite in it's place.
This heavy weapons delivery modification process (originally denoted as the F-109 by McDonnell, with two crew, -55 engines 8ft longer than the -13 of the single seaters and actually higher top end performance, despite an substantive increase in gross operating weight) should, by itself tell you what the F-101A could never be: as a true Air to Air fighter platform in an arena where targets would not be lumbering bombers but fighters weighing perhaps a third as much the Voodoo itself.
No missiles to solve the FQ collision lead intercept problem = no A2A in the traditional sense because the Voodoo cannot maneuver in competition.
Hence no 'fighter'.