The Cold War lasted a long time… :confused:

If you look at rough time periods, here’s my ranking:

1950s: Mig-19??? I’m not enough of an expert…

1960s: F-8 Crusader
Clearly more maneuverable than F-4, Mig-21, Mirage III, BAE Lightning, while still retaining good (only slightly inferior) acceleration/climb performance.

1970s: Mirage F-1
The most maneuverable non-fly-by-wire supersonic fighter in the West (beat only by the Mig-29 in the East). Achieved this without sacrificing acceleration/climb performance and while incorporating a credible BVR capability, which allowed it to compete with “non-dogfighters” such as the F-4 & Mig-23.

1980s: F-16 / Mirage 2000 (tie)
Both fighters were extremely maneuverable thanks to fly-by-wire. In particular, a delta wing dogfighter became possible for the first time. I would rate the Mig-29 & F-18 slightly below. The Mig-29 was simply too limited (fuel, electronics, service life) to justify its possibly marginally better dogfighting capability. The F-18 was competitive at low speeds but outclassed in many possible scenarios (initial merge, interception etc).

A transport with two TP400-D6 would compete head-on with the C-130J, not the G.222.

It’s called the A410M, actually. 😉

I dreamed this baby up 3 years ago – a more “tactical” variant of the A400M, with common engines (but uprated to 13,000hp from 11,000hp), avionics, cockpit, fuselage (shortened by 5 meters), cross-section etc. Only the wing would be entirely new and some of the structural arrangements changed because of the lighter take-off weight.

Compared to the C130J, the main improvements would be in the improved internal cross-section and higher payload, allowing for 25t armored vehicles or larger helicopters, for example. The swept wing would also improve cruise characteristics and range.

Here are the notional specs I came up with:

Confused

Super Hornet Block II+/Rafale F3, license built in India, with 50% offsets, full technology transfer, radar codes and the right to integrate competitors’ weapons and systems, all probably for an impossibly low price…

Am I the only person who thinks the Indians are dreaming?:confused:

They may get one or two of the above concessions, but I don’t see how in the world any of the bidders is going to just hand over their hard-earned, bleeding-edge technology for a bargain basement price. MRCA may be a (potentially) lucrative competition, but none of them are stupid. Or are they? :confused:

@ Edlaw

The whole point of the reverse angle deck is to minimise overhangs, which reduces the deck pitching a lot.

Got it. Don’t know if we’re saying the same thing, but I’m also thinking that the reverse angle deck allows the arrestor wires to be set closer to the ship’s center, where there’s less pitching movement, since the landing area extends all the way to the bow. This gives pilots an easier target to hit.

@ Jonesy
I know I’m not going to change your mind, but I’m still hoping Edlaw and I can win this “Battle of the Atlantic”. :p

On the surface a CVL with 10 S-2’s, however many of those left with shot/traps left on their airframe lives by the 80s!

Well… dozens of S-2s are still operational in 2007. And firefighting operations aren’t exactly easy on airframes. The aircraft that went through the Turbo Tracker upgrades in the early 1990s were also stated as being good for 25years. So I think it might be no more of a nightmare than keeping the F-14 in service…

10 Hornets may seem to be of value, BUT, in reality what could they achieve?.

BARCAP….with 10 aircraft?. 2 aircraft on a CAP slot plus 2 on DLI ‘Alert5’ and 1 set-up with an emergency buddy pack and there’s half your airgoup gone…for the provision of a single CAP pair!!!. Even if you cycle pilots through the Alert birds you have 2 cabs struck below under maintenance, 2 up on station, 2 on deck and the buddy tanker…that leaves a whole three aircraft…be still my wildly beating heart!

I’m going to assume that you’re a fan of the Invincibles. 😉 So how is 10 F-18s worse than 8 Sea Harriers on an Invincible? I understand it’s not enough for a 24h sustained BARCAP, but it’ll still provide you with more air defense capability than any carrier at the time bar the U.S. supercarriers.

Given that a 20k ton CVL is going to seriously pitch and roll in a standard-issue Atlantic seaway, and catobar ops are going to be an interesting proposition, a 20k ton CVS with 10 SHAR FRS1, 12 HAS.Mk5 and a few AEW.Mk2’s is going to be, operationally, the far better proposition.

HMCS Bonaventure seems to have conducted North Atlantic operations just fine for more than a decade. So I’m to take a giant leap of faith and assume that a modern carrier with stabilization systems should be able to replicate the performance of a 19,000t WWII design… 😀

x07,

According to my Google searches, 25 de Mayo never actually operated Super Etendards, because she was determined after trials to be too small to do so effectively.

Same thing for the Rafale on Clemenceau. The Rafale landed during trials without any stores, and both the Rafale and F-18 were determined after technical evaluations to be capable of operating off the Clemenceau in the air-defense role. But the French Navy was desperate for a Crusader replacement, so we don’t know how compromised these operations would have been. For example, could the Rafales/F-18 bring back more than a couple hundred kilos? And could the Clemenceau’s shorter wires stop a 14-16t Rafale/F-18 doing a hard landing in rough seas without breaking anything?

I’ll compromise and concede you a couple of meters: the PROVEN minimum length to land a Hornet-sized aircraft without significant operational constraints is 195m. That’s the design length of the Charles de Gaulle’s angled deck back when it was intended to operate only Rafales. The French then decided to buy Hawkeyes after construction had started, and everyone knows the consequences… 😉

The rationale for reverse angled decks IMHO is that they are the only way you can fit the required ~200m (650ft) angled deck needed to operate F-18 sized aircraft on a postage stamp sized 20,000-25,000t carrier. 😉 (200m is the size of Charles de Gaulle’s angled deck – likely the smallest F-18 capable carrier)

A normal angled deck will run only say ~3/4 of the length of a carrier, which is fine on a large carrier. It also works (barely) on small carriers as long as you limit yourself to operating aircraft the size of A4 Skyhawks. Clemenceau’s angled deck was 165m (540ft) and I would imagine that the angled decks of HMAS Melbourne or 25 de Mayo were even smaller, though I wasn’t able to find any data. 🙁

The overlap between the angled deck and the catapults is a non-issue. First, it would probably be inevitable even with a normal angled deck, assuming you want 50m+ length catapults (Clemenceau didn’t have an overlap with 50m long catapults, but was also significantly – about 40m – longer). Second, a small carrier only has about 20 aircraft, so efficient air operations are much less of an issue than on a supercarrier with 80 aircraft (4x as many aircraft to recover, 2x as many aircraft to launch per catapult on a Nimitz 😮 ).