Schorsch, I dont have a dog in this f(l)ight. Nor did I make those graph/s.

But he is not “self claimed”. He is an aeroengineer from a top notch place & well regarded. If he is at fault, please do build up your arguement on the basis of his statements, not his persona/ nationality/ or religion.

If you have checked my public profile (yeah, I do afford that!), you’ve seen that I claim myself to be a “aeronautical engineer”. I haven’t delivered any evidence, though. So, the “self-claimed” was directed on myself.

But honestly, as aero engineer I know lots of my type, and 70-90% don’t really know the rough thrust characteristics of low bypass turbo-fan.

I am not fluent on CFD, either. 😮

An engine company usually provides a performance model of their engine to the airframer, who modifies it to add installation effects of inlet and exhaust. The model runs in Simulink on a workstation. The results are not 2D graphs, but carpet plots.

Which ideally looks something like this, while some parts of this plot are a bit academic (M2@0ft anyone?).
[ATTACH]165350[/ATTACH]

While the pure uninstalled thrust can be predicted with known methods with some accuracy, the installation make it first-class pain in the A for anything that goes faster than M0.85. Still, one can make some predictions, but they don’t suffer to make back-on-back comparisons of two relatively similar aircraft.

It is interesting that the Singapore competition apparently deemed the Rafale as being a bit low on thrust in hot-and-high conditions. http://defence-data.com/current/pageda65.htm

Maybe the performance department forgot about the ram drag when promising performance! 😀

During the Iran-Iraq war there were quite a few gun kills. Of the rest of the examples you cited the US-Iraqi wars were turkey-shoots (at least in terms of A2A action) from whom I don’t really think one can draw many useful conclusions about the value of internal guns. The last time America’s military forces really broke a serious sweat was over Korea although they did get a pretty good workout in Vietnam despite their numerical superiority over the NVAF. The Beeka Valley incident was different but even there there was major technology gap between the two forces and the gap in competence between the command of the IDF and Syrian Air Force and their respective tactics was enormous. Call me when the USAF/USN/Marines have proven guns utterly, utterly, useless in a conflict against a worthy enemy able to match them on every level in terms of resources, tactics, technology, force multipliers, force size and force quality. I’m not holding my breath.

The Bekaa valley clashes were the first with all aspect missiles. They happened mostly within visual range and at low altitude (classic gun territory). In these engagements most kills were achieved with all-aspect IR-AAM, followed by SARH-AAMs (AR-AAM were not available). That it became a Turkey shoot is due to the fact that missiles were used. If the Israelis had relied on their guns instead the Syrians would have gotten more opportunities to fire.

Conclusion: a gun can be a very important asset, but with current AAM technology a well trained pilot will never need it (as he wouldn’t make circles around his targets). It may be useful when the aircraft is out of missiles but not out of targets. Normally, the normal pilot would have left the arena at this point.

For a fighter bomber things may look different, but honestly, I can hardly think of a 100 million USD F-35 making gun runs and getting caught by a 0.01 million stinger or a 0.0001 million USD 37mm AAA bullet.

Regarding airframe technology, the F-14 and F-15 were designed at about the same time, and the F-14’s is probably more advanced, especially in the wing carry-through, drag reduction, use of conformal weapons carriage and especially the use of the lifting body fuselage.

The F-14 was a spin-off from F-111B and started early to mid 60ies. The wing carry-through was a necessity of the swing wing, drag reduction was better on F-15 (which with fixed wing has other priorities though).
Which weapons carriage delivered more drag remains a secret of the actual wind tunnel data, but the carriage on the F-15 wasn’t that draggy, either. McDonnel Douglas put a lot of effort into drag reduction on the F-15.

Although not so in materials or flight control, the airframe design itself is arguably more advanced than the Hornet’s.

Why is that?

The basic question is: do I procure a new 14t OEW fighter that increases my capability or do I stick with a 20t OEW aircraft that cannot match the smaller one in payload-range or flexibility, is costlier to procure and to operate, and only has limited options for improvement?
The advantage of the 20t OEW fighter is the higher top speed and some advantages for special mission requirements. The 20t OEW fighter however does only come as dual seater, and has shown a very significant accident rate. The main weapon of the 20t OEW fighter was recently decommissioned.

What you state correctly: there is one thing what the Navy wants, and another what the government (reflected by SecDef and Congress) funds. In the end (especially in retro perspective of the early 90ies) the Navy had to be happy with anything they got. There was just no political support for an all-new Navy fighter aircraft.

I think a high caliber light weight gun with limited amount of ammunition is no wasted weight. The M61 with 800 rounds is wasted weight. The coupling of IRST and Radar data and own-ship position and movement allows for pretty good aiming.

Current standard is one 27mm cannon with about 100 round of ammunition.

Smart engineering probably would be to have the option to eliminate the cannon in favor of something needed more, let it be fuel (while doesn’t make much sense due to piping and little volume) or rather defense electronics. And that on a mission-to-mission basis.

Australia is about to buy a weapon system and not a dogfighter. If it was just about dogfighting, they have taken just a new F-18.
The F-35 has many advantages, but has to pay a price for it.

Overall mission performance of the F-35 is far better than for any Flanker version.

I’ve not seen anywhere that the range figure is qualified by a target altitude. Do you have a link to that information?

Basic mathematical skills, a piece of paper, knowledge of the earth’ radius and the Pythagorean theorem will get you to the same conclusion.

Not true. Part of the point I made was that it’s a very slow moving target (relatively). To kill an ICBM, you have to put a lot of energy on target in a very short span of time, otherwise the ICBM is quickly too fast, too high, and/or too far away to engage. An AWACS aircraft cruising at 200-400 knots would not have the ability to get away like that. It could engage it for longer, putting considerably more energy on the target in still a very short period of time, enough for a kill, certainly.

The chemical energy in one ABL aircraft suffices for a few short bursts.
By the way, what would would the opponent do?
Paint his aircraft shiny silver.

Yes, when operational, it is supposed to be effective against liquid-fueled ICBMs at 600km (but not solid-fueled). I figure that a hit against a much slower-moving converted airliner filled with sensitive electronics, liquid jet fuel, and people is likely to do enough damage to at least destroy mission equipment and/or kill operators. My guess is that the aircraft would be totally destroyed, however, even at that range.

Logan Hartke

I don’t think that is valid.
The issue is twofold:
First, an ICBM is basically a flying (chemical) bomb with (nuclear) bombs attached to it. That is, the solid fuel is basically able to self-react given enough start up energy. When painted with MWs of thermal power this may happen pretty quick. Painting the same energy on an airliner will not burn a hole in the frame. And even if, that doesn’t destroy the aircraft immediately. The only option would be to hit precisely a safety critical and heat sensitive system.

Second, the range is for objects that are higher than the aircraft. Hence the laser travels most distance in thin or no atmosphere (beyond 30km you hardly call it atmosphere any more). When traveling from an emitter at 40000ft to a target at 40000ft over a distance of 600km, the laser beam would travel exclusively through dense atmosphere. The lowest point is 4900m over ground. Atmospheric damping would consequently dramatically decrease the thermal power.