MarcellogoThe Phoenixes had 0% Pk because they were used solely against fighter sized maneuvring targets. OTOH, they were forced to be used at fairly short ranges because the IFF capability of the F-14As sucked hard compared to USAF F-15s.
For what I remembered the ones that was launched by the USN was all at about the maximum range and in head on engagements.
They failed because of that: the Iraqi planes knew F-14/AIM-54 all too well and as soon as their RWR identified the F-14 radar (so let’s sayTWS doesn’t seem to work in the way it was hypotized) they just broke contact and ran away. well, almost is a mission aborted.
IRIAF has claimed a way greater percentage (60/70%) but for what I have read they used them in more conventional air combat maneuvers, tail-on and at a closer range so to put enemy in a no escape zone i.e. the way missiles have to be used against fast and maneouvrable targets.
MarcellogoI know right? The Aspide was SO different from contemporary Sparrow variants produced (F and M). Sarcasm aside, the Aspide was a major improvement over early U.S.,Sparrow variants. Sparrow gets a bad reputation from the poor performance in Vietnam. The later ones had little commonality other than name and airframe.
No ,it was not SO different.IT was just A COMPLETELY ,ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY other Missile.
Different seeker, different control surfaces, different warhead, different control engine all with not any US component inside: only thing that was taken from Sparrow was the external body frame for compatibility with existing launchers.
For the rest Sparrow M was a fine one, just arrived five years later.
MarcellogoF-104S? If my memory is correct, the 20mm cannon was removed to make space for the additional avionics needed to allow the use of Sparrow missiles.
Well, Sparrow was just a stopgap, the real one we aimed to use was the Aspide but we had to wait until 1986 to have it.
And no, F-104S doesn’t had BVR capability, the radar they had was not enough powerful for such a range.:(
And about the Aim-54: i didn’t know what the system US navy used to reach the 100% MISS percentage they get but the result speak for itself…
MarcellogoThey’re minimum thresholds… and from my experience in the corporate world, I don’t think you’re cynical enough.
If Lockheed hadn’t of dropped their performance KPI’s, how do you think their executives would be able to justify patting themselves on the back and giving themselves a pay-rise after exceeding them?
+1000 Have they published any data about climb rate?? I mean, have they have reached IOC and the data is still not public?
MarcellogoScorpion out.
The Northrop one is the most T-38/F-5 like, ok.
We are genetically incapable to doing something not looking beautiful and classy.
T-50 was ok but Lockheed ruined it completely.
I’m surprised instead that Saab, that has gifted the world with Draken, Viggen and Gripen’s pure beauty can have done such an horror.
MarcellogoThe idea was more to increase the effectiveness of MANPADS. In a high intensity scenario, the enemy planes would probably be flying at low to very low altitude, so the reaction time would be very short. Imagine a soldier wearing a helmet and the incoming threat is deplayed on the visor, he would just have to align his MANPAD. The datalink/computer equipement could be carried by a mule, an exoskeleton or maybe mounted in an IFV, depending on the situation, with like 4 MANPAD carrying soldiers ready to launch connected to it via a short range inexpensive datalink system.
I agree it would probably not be a good idea to replace SHORADs with such systems.
Anyways, I don’t want to divert too much from the original topic, let’s get back to CAS. Could CAS planes be partially replaced by short range very light artillery systems that could be transported on robotic mules? Such a system wouldn’t have much firepower power compared to a CAS plane, but maybe it could be made more precise to compensate. That would be obviously when heavier systems cannot be transported.
I think you start from an incorrect point : actually, I reiterate it for the N time is possible to spot and engage enemy forces from medium altitude even using unguided ordnances, so planes would simply stay over the Manpads ceiling.
Wih attack helos it would be however different : they would stay very close to terrain but this is quite a different thing, almost in the west where they are considered army assets, not airforce ones.
Still also in this case best thing is to carry heavy weapons, MANPAD included on a car or towing them instead of thinking about exoskeleton.
Weapons like the Mistral and RBS-70 too heavy to be shoulder fired are considered to be MANPADS also, you just have to assemble them before use or mount on a pick up back, not such a deal. A conventional army would use a more refined version of it like in the case of Avenger mount but the outcome would be the same.
MarcellogoI wonder if it would be worth it to combine exoskeletons with MANPADS. An exoskeleton is rather expensive ( about 50k ) but maybe it would be worth it. With an exoskeleton the soldier could carry a link-16 terminal with the batteries and a computer to display the position of the enemy planes. That would increase the probability of engaging incoming targets, especially planes which leave very little time to react. A soldier is much easier to hide than a truck.
Actual system of defending against such AA features is just to implement systems to hit from a quote superior to their maximum ceiling, something that actually is fully possible, i reiterate also with unguided ordnance like RuAf but also AC-130 and A-10C have showed in Syria.
So maybe what it would be needed is to have larger missiles able to reach higher quotes coupled maybe with some system to spot them.
Said so the solution that you propose seems me overcomplicated.
It seems me that sometimes we tend to consider combat like occurring in a vaacum: a plane againstg a single men with a MANPAD and nothing in between.
At the contrary the same concept of CAS stems from the presence of an infighting between both enemy than friendly force engaging in battle, forces that as light as they are ecquipped would have almost some heavier ecquipment and means of transportation, maybe even a civilian car or mules able to carry them near to the battle zone.
In the present case even civilian pick-ups or jeeps can carry the system you ask for with ease, together with anything also was until now necessary for waging a several years long full scale war, so why to reinvent the wheel just for saying we use MANPADS, instead of, let’s say, a SHORAD?
MarcellogoI think that calling Starstreak a man-portable air defence system is a bit unrealistic. It’s always on a vehicle, or on a launcher which breaks down into several sections for transport, in the pictures I’ve seen. Thales says the missile weighs 14 kg. Add the launch tube & laser guidance unit & you see why it needs a stand, & once you have the stand you may as well add a couple more launch tubes . . .
Yes, and? Did you think that having to install it on the back on a pick up is such a great problem also for the most rag tag insurgents? Or will call it unfair game if is not really single man portable? It would mean something like restricting the available ATGM to just the Javelin because it’s the only one that is shoulder fired. No 0.50 Mgs or conventional mortars also in such a way.
What if the CAS weren’t jets? What if they were turboprops with highly masked exhausts? Wouldn’t a plane with almost no infrared signature be much harder for a MANPAD to lock onto? Aren’t all the MANPADS reliant on an infrared heat source to chase down? Maybe not, I mean all Hind’s that were taken out by Stingers…You’d think there was an architecture you could follow that could defeat something as limited as a MANPAD.
Even there, why such a fear? Modern targeting systems allow for using even unguided ordnances, guns included, from a medium-high quote , both the russian planes than A-10 & Ac-130 have abundantly showed this capability in the current conflict in Iraq/Syria. And also Hinds are being used in it with excellent results, with a very low number of them being shot down.
Certainly if you start from the concept that modern air force pilots are holy cows that can be even put in the slightest situation of danger is all another matter: just be you the one to say it to the grunt on ground, please.
There’s also precision artillery in the mix, a MS-SGP, ATACMS or GMLRS+ can get there well before any plane can. In fact longer range guided artillery is probably being overlooked right now.
Not just now, one of the most useful way to perform Close Air Support , above all in peace enforcing missions like Afghanistan is providing targeting data to arty units on ground.
So we consider the most important asset on our own AMX the RECCELITE pod and its real time data sharing capabilities.
Do you think they (somebody?) has to have a catastrophe of being over run before they start to continue development of the a CAS? I’m not sure what strategy you use. If your enemy has strong, mobile ground force and is defended by by some capable MANPADs. They’re coming and you can’t use, don’t have or your CAS is neutralized by their air defence. What do you do? Get overrun and die? That seems the only scenario we’re coming up with.
It used to be a small firebase could be defended from the air…is that no more?
+1000 It’ what we learned or better got as a refresh in with the above mentioned five days battle: ours AMX were then restricted into recce mission with only the inboard gun available (a M61, just imagine…:stupid:), still it were their own loitering capability to save the days, preventing Talibans to overrun the trapped soldiers between one of the periodical passing of others air assets (F/A-18 and A129 mangusta) that instead did the actual killings…
@RpR (AbiNutz beats me on the line):A B1b can be there in a very short time and loiter for hours. Understand that if you want to to stay up there for hours, you’ll perform better in a large aircraft with multiple crew, large magazine and confortable fuel reserve than cramped, always short of munitions and an eye anxiously watching your fuel gauge in a sexy fighter jet (this includes the a10).
Most of the conflict where those CAS are done involve ground forces maneuvering inside enemy controlled space where orbits have become the most efficient way to provide air support. Classical CAS aircraft are systems working with moving FLOT. And the the presence of modern IADS in most of the case renders them non-survivable unless built to be stealthy or heavily supported (what eats your critical reaction time).
Yes, it’s because of it that I use to say that even a B-1B can perform CAS role better than a multirole fighter: come fast, loiter , loiter ,loiter, loiter & talk with grunts of ground!.
The CAS essential is this, all others things, the plane, the weaponry, the range the quote are mere accidents.
So, let’s be consequential: given that in our opinion the B-1B is better than a dedicated plane in CAS and obviously is also the best possible one in conventional bombing, let’s buy them again instead of almost an half of the scheduled amount of F-35…
It doesn’t obviously like so, as soon the fighting were not restricted and concentrated in a tiny area like Kobane they stopped sending them, no reason to use them to cover an hundreds of km wide front from bases afar against an enemy using hit and run tactics and moving in platoon sized units until the very moment of the assault.
So, in the very end, you can surely perform most parts of the CAS mission using other air assets or a combination of them. Still no one single asset can perform it better than one plane designed with this as its primary mission.
An armed drone has even greater loiter capability than a dedicated plane but cannot come fast in case of a surprise attack.
A multirole fighter would be come fast but it would start from farTurboprops are cheap but ther positions and would not have enough loiter time in any case.
Turboprops like Tucano ere excellent for COIN but they would fall short against any serious opponent,
Long range bombers are excellent for big battles or paradoxically for a scenario like Afghanistan were fighting are ineed rare but for conventional fronts with continuate and widespread infightings they would not be in any way sufficient…
So I think the best thing is to shift from the idea of a plane specialized for the single role into that of one dedicated to the mission but capable of performing also other ones.
The ones instead of adding CAS capabilities in other type of planes it’s IMHO absoutely futile: CAS is a very specialized one and have the need to be performed for hours in a row, it’s NOT a part time work in which you can came, drop our entire load against enemy and going back for a new task.
MarcellogoWing loading comparison is always misleading without respective lift coefficients, if we was to compare actual wing area only ( no body and engine) then PAK-FA wing is even smaller than Mirage 2000 wing
F-35 is a blended wing body too
The term (blended wing body with engine pods) have to be intended there as an inseparable one: what characterize modern russian planes is having no fuselage, intended as a shell like structure in which internal components (engines, electronics, landing gear, even fuel) are stored and which wings are attached to or, in case of modern blended wing body, fused into.
In russian planes , the engine nacelles are instead hanged under the wing itself, separated by a quite wide tunnel while the cockpit compartment (with radar and front wheel) is fused to it in the frontal part, sitting all above the said tunnel and not overlapping in any way the pods.
So in this case are the other components that are attached/blended to the wing (yes, wing because it is a monolithic structure) and not the contrary.
In the case of F-14 instead, there are engine nacelles and central tunnel but there are not blending wing structure.
At the contrary, the variable swept wings are attached to the nacelles themselves as they would have been with a conventional fuselage.
Tu-160 has real engine pods instead but they are hanged under a blending fuselage and the variable swept wings are attached to it.
So the F-14 is a fast and agile plane despite its own great weight ’cause the aerodynamical advantages of having not the drag of a conventional fuselage but is not manoeuvrable as its variable swept wings doesn’t allow it while, at the contrary the F-35A is scheduled to reach both high G numbers and AoA thanks to its blended wing body configuration but it is the slowest of the whole lot (in clean configuration) because of the drag of its (large and short) fuselage.
Russian planes configuration get the best of two words and they are willing to pay a lot for keeping it as efficient as possible as the position, shape and dimensions of the weapon bays on PAK-FA clearly show.
MarcellogoThe same thing can be said about Su-27, PAK-FA, F-15, Rafale, F-14.. etc, how is it a problem?
No, in this case allow me to correct you : you cannot say this about russian ones as they are blended wing bodies with podded engines, meaning that there is not any real fuselage there, just the so called stinger acting like the spinal cord in a vertebrate and that generate a lot of lift anyway.
MarcellogoWhy do people write without checking the basic facts with Google?
The dam thing is much faster than the likes of the A-10 and SU-25, with a ATG combat load it will fly at the same bracket speeds that a Tornado would use, and its combat Radii its comparable to a Hornet and bigger than the one of the Froogfoot.
The thing was striking Serbian SAM sites with PGM´s in 1999 without Growler backup, and from them on, it was used in combat conditions for a decade and a half. Its combat record is impressive, the thing is that it was used by the AMI and no one else but the italians reads… italian, had it been used by the likes of the RAF, the RAAF or the USAF and there would have been written endless books and articles in English on how good it is.An old article (in English) about its combat debut.
https://theaviationist.com/special-reports/ghibli-italys-amx/
Thanks, in thruth also our aereonautics was in the beginning quite dubious about it and it had to conquer its own reputation in the hardest of way , on the battlefield.
Its most impressive feats was however in our eyes the so called five days battle in August 2012 where it saved the lives of a group of bogged down (for their own fault) Us grunts in Afghanistan.
And if there were anglophones in it there would be a film on this and it would have been more impressive than the same Blackhawk down.
Marcellogobrazil is a bit different, there is no threat using manpads so it is like Africa. amx is useful there.
Emh, I’m ITALIAN and so also AMI (aereounautica militare italiana). :eagerness:
And rest assured that we have found it extremely usefus both in Kosovo than in Afghanistan.
MarcellogoI posed a question to MSphere viz. ‘how can a PR office respond to a technical/operational query without prior direction from technical/operational depts?’.
Its not a rhetorical question so I’m not sure what ‘in particular to Vnomad‘ is supposed to mean.
In the post you quoted there is not any reference to a PR office, just to pilots, so from it I cannot in any way have hints to your precedent one that started all the discussion between you two.
So I inferred that the question you was referring to is instead the one contained in the above post, that is a (sort of) rethorical question itself i.e. the one without a real response possible.
Hence my own one reply that parodied (another rethorical figure) the list of Q&A you have posted earlier, with the difference that the answer on mine are really factual although ironic while some of the replies in your own seems me to be just PR stunts.
In any case given that my own supposition was wrong, please accept my apology.
P.s. As an example, A2 is just buying time at the beginning and declaring it comparable with legacy planes from the late seventies /half of the eighties in the end. Comparing it with Typhoon, Rafales , advanced versions of Fulcrum and Flanker anyone ?
MarcellogoFor our corrispondents on the other parts of Atlantic and in particular to Vnomad:
Q. What is a Rethorical question?
A It’s a so called figure of speech i.e. a expedient, codified form of figurative language.
Q2. What are its peculiar form and use?
A2 Rethorical question is a typical Trope i.e. using a common usage phrase in an altered way.
In particular it use the interrogative form not as a way to obtain a real answer but to assert one’s own convinction or even better reinforce a precedent assertion.
Q3 Is it a rare, obscure occurrence in literature and/or dialogue?
A3 At the right contrary! It’s probably one of the most widely and efficacely used rhetorical figures. It’s considered extremely efficent in aumenting the pathos in both poetry and theater. Auctors like Vergilius, Shakespeare among the others has used them with great, immortal effects.
Q4 Is its own usage somewhat waned in recent times?
A4 Uh?
Q5 So you have not to reply at it? Really?
A5 For God sake not! Trying to do so means falling right into a trap.
Only possible dialectic response is to recognise it and calling for it openly but it’s however improbable to counter at all its own efficacy even so.
Q6 And so how it come we keep on falling for it?
A6 Not sure about that: it can be that you have a sort of Pavlov-like reaction to adverse posts and automatically switch yourself into response mode instead to look inside the post itself.
Probably also the general mentality & educational systems are somewhat different between you and us but in this case i’m kinda wildly guessing.
MarcellogoAnd how can you be so sure that J-20 will out perform F-35? we dont have any figure related to its kinematics performance yet
Garry, the one of MSsphere is a sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question: you are not supposed to give a response to them, really.
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