SchorschIf having to choose between the F-102, F-104 and F-106 which would you really want to bring to the air-to-air party? The 102 lost against the MiG in Vietnam. The 104 was an interceptor with the rear quarter weapons not unlike the F-8 but no where near as nimble. The 106 would have beat the performance of the the 102 and 104 hands down. That jet would have been my choice over both of the others.
If it was 1965 and my opponent are MiG-21, and the whole thing without a ground station guiding me? I would bring the F-104 into battle. Each equipped with 4 to 6 AIM-9 and M-61. The can’t play dag-style against the MiG, but they can out-accelerate them and are hard to track due to small size, the pilot have good visibility. And the Starfighter can go low and fast if necessary.
SchorschSo enlighten us.
I just know enough to know exactly, that I don’t know it. 😀
You can potentially predict the drag of a subsonic aircraft from its shape with simple tools, but for supersonic aircraft that is a totally different ball game.
SchorschAccording to LM the F-22A can supercruise at M1.82.
The YF-22 demonstrated M1.58 and, as has rightly been pointed out, had less powerful engines and a dirtier shape. One would expect the production aircraft to supercruise faster so 1.82 seems a plausible figure.
Max a/b speed is M2.25, limited (like many aircraft) by air friction temperature limits rather than power or shape.
If the world was linear, I would be pope by now (which apparently I am not, not even Bavarian). Maybe we should take a deeper look at the engines, the conditions, the weight, the drag of the aircraft, the inlet and outlet system. There are so many things that can mess my speed.
Some other things might limit the max speed, too, for example stability and the inlet system (becomes really a pain in the a++ over M1.5).
SchorschThe smaller fins are also going to produce less drag. The big differences come in the fuselage though. If you compare say the rear half of the YF-22 to the F-22A they are significantly different particularly on the underside. It seems to be much slimmer than the YF-22A which should improve the area rule.
You are an engineering ace. Maybe you should write a book about trans- and supersonic drag predicition. Students would love it if it was that easy.
SchorschYup both metz and dozer talk about this , basicall most jets find that the best way to go about getting best climb acc is by going subsonic till altitude and then doing a Rotowski profile to go supersonic , apparently the best for the raptor is acheived by going supersonic (climbing) from the get go .
The climb rate is always achieved were the balance of drag and speed is best. Maybe the F-22 can “go through Mach” earlier than others, which normally would do that at 20 to 30kft if clean, but accelerate to supersonic and then start climbing doesn’t seem very useful.
SchorschThanks for the newsflash ace. It might be linear if it were STATIONARY but it’s moving so you get more air crammed down the inlet than if it were just sitting there. Also bypass ratio matters. Also the speed the engine was optimized for matters. In a nut shell you really haven’t produced much of an arguement.
He actually has. Take a deep look at the power of a turbo-jet over MAch-number and altitude and then come back and report. At 60.000ft, the dry thrust is not sufficient. Best relation between thrust and drag are normally achieved at 30 to 45kft. Above that, every normal fighter (excl. SR-71 or MiG-25) will drop in speed again.
SchorschBut the Super Hornet cannot give its missiles the kinetic advantage of higher supersonic speeds (Flanker can), neither can it run away from anything except maybe F-5.
I like the idea of an A-6F or A-7F. Give them modern afterburning turbofans and they can defend themselfes much like a SH. Supersonic speed isnt needed, it would be provided by NATFs.
Maybe so, but only under equal conditions and these are the least probable. On the defence, the F-18 has all advantages, foremost better radar cover and the the shorter way back. If solely relying on its own radar, the Flanker will have its problems identifying the enemy early enough to field its missiles with highest energy. Even if they do, an opponent can normally evade the missiles by just making a 180° turn. The Flanker sure is superior over the F-18 A to F in terms of pure flight performance, but that does not mean that some Flankers might but the air defence of a carrier to rest. If the Flankers are used as bombers or AShM-carrier, that it’s good night flight performance.
SchorschThis Soviet bomber threat was taken so seriously that the superlative F-106 was kept in CONUS and not used in Vietnam. Even the 106’s weapon, the AIM-4 had four kills in Vietnam when shot from air force F-4’s. I beleive the F-106 could have been very successful in Vietnam.
No, the F-106 would certainly not have brought any value. First, the F-106 is an interceptor build for GCI – Ground Controlled Interception. Secondly, the cumbersome process of launching a missile was even more demanding for a single F-106 pilot. Thrid, if engaged in close combat the F-106 is prey. Fourth: Take a deeper look at the real range of the F-106. It is not that great.
Not until the F-4 communties came to an understanding that their primary weapon, the Sparrow, with an 84% failure rate was a liabillity did they begin concentrating on how to employ the Sidewinder more effectively by learning how to fly the Phantom as an ACM machine and not an interceptor. For the F-8’s and the MiGs, having a gun made all the difference in the world.
Is this “84%” the amount of missiles that didn’t hit its target or the missiles that were really unusable? If first is true (and that is probable), the 16% success rate is pretty reasonable giving the tactical circumstances and the low performance of late 1960s equipment.
SchorschTalking about inlet performance in the transonic/supersonic regime: You *need* a variable inlet, otherwise you will have a design optimized for *just one* flight regime. It’s an operational trade-off (weight/maintenance vs mach-related performance) and the USN decided higher mach performance is not important. Not entirely wrong given the way they operate these jets as bomb/PGM-trucks.
It is possible to go there without, but your engine will lose efficiency in a drastic manner. Look, in earlier times every Newton of thrust was needed to get where they wanted to go, that aim was Mach 2. Nobody needs Mach 2, and actually only a few aircraft hit this mark in an operationally useful manner. Normal shock difuser so is OK, if high supersonic speeds (beyond M1.5) are not needed.
I quote Klaus Hünecke, author of “Modern Combat Aircraft Design”:
Up to flight Mach numbers of M=1.5, the pitot intake functions stably and efficiently enough to make more complicated inlets with variable geometry superfluous. The increased performances of today’s engines make this intake type operable even up to airspeeds corresponding to Mach 2 (F-16, F-18), but, because of the shock losses which occur, this is the upper limit.
SchorschDamn, now I have to update my own little fighter proposal at least to 7th generation to stay competitive, and I have to figure out how to fill this non-sense description.
One question:
Where is this “company” from?
SchorschHi!
I’d like to answer a question that was posted earlier in this thread on why the slow performance of the SH when going transonic to supersonic.
… The answer is the intake design. To lower the RCS, the designers created a ‘snake’ shaped tract to prevent the compressor face by from been hit by radar. Once you do that you pay a big hit in overall thrust efficiency. When looking at overall acceleration times to TOP SPEED for that altitude, drag and weight; you can basically say that the SH goes back to the F4’s overall acceleration to get there.
When compared to the smaller and lighter Hornet, the SH’s overall acceleration to hit the big number to do a serious intercept or bugout would take almost FOUR TIMES to at the same supersonic speed. In comparison to the LAST big NAVY Fighter F14B/D, it takes HALF the time to get this speed.
In the end, the SH will do its job well because of the ‘mini van’ novelty of it to load it up with gadgets and keep everyone happy. Overall, abundance will misdirect some of the shortcomings about the aircraft’s raw performance.
OT:
I have been a lurker on this forum for such a long time and these comparative posts particularly with T:W has to go stop because one: thrust is DYNAMIC versus Mach and height and two: T:W is only ONE part of the equation when looking at aircraft.
Olla Doggy!
Nice to have another aviation specialist around here. And I really appreciate your post bringing new information in the “discussion”. Maybe you can explain that a little bit more in detail. The F-18ABCD hat a normal shock difuser. the F-18 doesn’t use an adaptable intake, either, or does it?
So the problem is not the drag itself but the pressure recovery in the transsonic and supersonic regime, that darstically reduces engine efficiency. A little bit like in the figure I posted?
SchorschI wish I could, because I sure as hell would. The Royal Norwegian Navy doesn’t have its own air component, though, and neither does the Army. And we don’t even have a Marine Corps or anything like that.
But you have a Royal in front of every fighting unit, the Americans can’t beat that in 100 years. 😀
But on the mission: From my perpective there are no “showstoppers” for eiter aircraft. I think the advantage of being stealthy counts less in Norwegian hands, as the missions are mostly defensive or do at least not hit against defended enemy airspace. A “real war” would only be thinkable with other NATO allies. So I guess the Grippen would be the small solution, and the Eurofighter and the JSF would both be more sophisticated solutions.
I think personally that especially small air forces having huge countries should still rely on numbers. Most air sovereignty duties can be fullfilled using F-5s, so no need to provide top-class combat aircraft for that.
SchorschAs ELP said, in a pure strike role, the F-35 will not be that far ahead of the Super Hornet.
The F-35 is still a compromised aircraft. It won’t be as dominate as the Raptor on the battlefield. It will be a escort/strike fighter with stealth features unlike its precedesors. However, the Lightning isn’t best for every air force.
But it will be useful. The Navy – or in general the armed forces of the USA – have the luxury of chosing from a wide variety of weapons and can normally field them in superior numbers with reasonably trained personal and the logistics to keep them in action for a prolonged time. So they can cope with little weaknesses of their material.
SchorschMy only interest is a no-peer aviation wing on the carrier deck. A real, real scary one. JSF, being such a wide program, means we will have one of the most technically compromised aircraft flying off of a carrier deck. So compromised, that the Chinese will be deploying knock-offs of this thing by 2020.
You can always compensate by numbers, tactics, strategy and other more important things than the aircraft involved. When you look at real conflicts, how often was the outcome decided by the weapons used (or better: by one particular tactical airborne weapon system)? And how many countries do their decisions on which way to chose with respect to one particular tactical airborne weapon system? After all, doesn’t matter too much.
USA was overwhelmingly superior in most of the conflicts since ’45. Did they ever really score a big one? Was it the Navy’s fault?
SchorschHere you go 😀 …. ok, its only an F-16A MLU and not being an F-16 fanboy I don’t know how authentic this material is. But it took (literally) less than 60 seconds to find on Google which quite frankly is midly scary since this aircraft is still in service with a number of countries.
Pretty boring stuff. Some systems, some combat manuevres. Nothing really “confidential”. A manual only is of value if one can assess the performance of an aircraft by it, for example range and speed with particular load, turn and climb performance. Or one can see detailed technical solutions, engineering considerations, etc.
You won’t find that in these Sim-Manuals, which are a first class dust-catcher.
The “aerodynamic manuals” given out by airwar.ru are actually of a useful class. OK, some people will miss the funny pictures, but with some knowledge you can figure how tight a MiG-23 can turn and what the excess power at 30kft and 4 missiles attached really is. It even doesn’t hurt too much that it is in Russian. 😀
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