NGAD / F/A-XX - General Discussion and Speculation

[NMaude]

but I believe their level 4 and 5 stealth engineers with top secret clearance get paid like 50k less than what Northrop offers.

Corporate penny-pinching?

 

[Scott Kenny]

@joshjosh asked for some charts to compare my concept of the FAXX with some relatively similar aircraft, and I got a set that aren't terrible. It's been a long time since I've fought with LibreOffice to spit out neat charts, so these are still uglier than I want.

As a reminder, my concept for FAXX is a 40,000lb empty aircraft with 28,000lbs internal fuel and 12,000lbs internal weapons capacity for an 80,000lb takeoff weight. This was based off of carrier limits, primarily the 55,000lb recovery limit talked about with Tomcats and the 6 Phoenix load. If the EMALs has enough horsepower to throw an aircraft over 90,000lbs, then we can assume 12k external weight plus full internal fuel, but I was originally assuming launching the planes with 16k of fuel onboard and tanking immediately after takeoff in the max-strike mode. But you'd absolutely have to drop the external ordnance to land back on the carrier if you were in "Beast Mode."

If you look at the loaded and empty weights, my idea isn't outrageous. The only really sketchy part of this is fitting 28,000lbs of fuel into the airframe. That's 5000lbs more fuel than F-111B or Su57, and both of them have a higher empty weight than my concept.

My current visual model is basically an extra-thicc Su57 with a bay ~55" wide by 25" deep between the engines in place of the existing tunnel, and weapons bays on the sides of the intakes instead of the weird armpit bays of the Su57. Probably tailless, and flying either a Lambda or a Delta wing.

 

[flateric]

...

 

[Sferrin]

...

Looks like the old Boeing one.

 

[FlyGuy369]

There's a Boeing video and it shows the guy picking it up out of a 3D powder bed.

 

[BorisC]

Thought this was interesting in relation to the Area-51 satellite photo of a Saab Draken type shape photographed a few years ago (if wrong thread/forum please move):

https://twitter.com/x/status/2077702835928490339

View: https://x.com/RAeSTimR/status/2077702835928490339

 

[flateric]

quite an old placeholder graphics
https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/artificial-intelligence-reinforcements

 

[FlyGuy369]

Was shared somewhere on here some time ago, was noted that it appears to be the same as the area 51 satellite photo jet

 

[dark sidius]

Was shared somewhere on here some time ago, was noted that it appears to be the same as the area 51 satellite photo jet

Strange that this drawing look exactly the same than the Satellite Area 51 picture.....

 

[donnage99]

Strange that this drawing look exactly the same than the Satellite Area 51 picture.....

you ever wonder if an PR intern fed it to the AI to cough up that image?

 

[FighterJock]

Would not surprise me since AI seems to be everywhere these days donnage99. I will just be glad when the F/A-XX winner is finally revealed.

 

[Training_Dummy]

its probably not a good time to mention that in more than a few very large corporations, a shocking fraction of token consumption was traced back to interns and young FTEs doing using vast compute resources to do very mundane things that were more often than not near-busy work, or at least not substantively accretive or tangential for important business purposes.