PhaidSo according to Lockheed, Top Gun 2 will prominently feature the F-35.[INDENT]
The big news from Burbage’s speech involves Top Gun 2, the long-not-quite-awaited-but-certainly-delayed sequel of the 1986 fighter jock classic.
But Burbage does. Lockheed’s Fort Worth, Texas, factory and flight test center will host production crew in the “next month or so” to start filming, Burbage told the NAA luncheon crowd.
Burbage also confirmed that Cruise will not just make a cameo; he will be the star, and he is playing the role of a Lockheed F-35 test pilot! [/INDENT]
The mind reels.
PhaidRussia is also moving away from the Su-25. Btw, any big-gun CAS in production? Thought not 😉
Think again:
[INDENT]An upgraded version for the Russian Air Force, the Su-25SM entered service in January 2007. The upgrade includes new navigation computer, Pastel countermeasures suite, SUO-39 fire control system and Phazotron Kopyo-25M radar.
The Ulan-Ude aviation plant (UUAZ) made the decision in November 2010 to resume production of Su-25 once orders are obtained from the Russian Defence Ministry and the United Aircraft Building Corporation.
Russia is planning to purchase Su-25UB/UBM aircraft as part of its 2011-20 state rearmament programme. The Su-25UB/UBM will be principally used for training pilots on the Su-25SM, which is currently operational with the Russian Air Force.[/INDENT]
PhaidThat is what the arithmetic says, though you may have overlooked that little word ‘remanufacture’. The contract you cited is reusing some existing hardware.
We don’t know the mix of new to remanufactured, but even if the price is 10 times higher, 600+ rounds to one missile is not favorable for the missile.
But once you have the cost of a burst of cannon fire, the next question is – how many bursts must you fire to the get the same kill probability as you would get from a single missile?
As you say it depends what you are trying to do. Against targets inside a building, the Brimstone may be more effective, and certainly that kind of target lends itself to standoff fire. For real close-in CAS, however, smallish blast fragmentation warheads like those on the Brimstone are not especially useful in treelines or against dug-in troops; a burst of a couple dozen HEI rounds over a 40-ft area is likely to be vastly more effective.
PhaidTo stay serious the much more costly F-35 is no longer an option to take over the A-10’s mission. Ignoring that even the USA will run out of money by such kind of warfare very fast.
Exactly.
PhaidEvery military disagrees with you. They are all going to PGMs and away from bigger guns. The weight cost of the GAU is just too large for the few times it is needed.
Yes, every air force that operates the A-10 is moving to the F-35. All of them. :rolleyes:
A F-35 orbiting will likely have better SA than an A-10 and can take the time to properly engage the enemy without the enemy knowing it’s coming.
Better SA in some situations sure, not in others. Again, all the offboard assets in the world won’t help you find a bunch of guys in a treeline, and neither will the troops in contact if they are heads down.
The F-35 has better SA, range, combat load, penetration ability, ect than the A-10. Again, history is leaving the gun-based CAS fighter in it’s dust.
For a strike mission with internal weapons only, your statement is true without a doubt. But the F-35 cannot match the A-10’s 250 nmi radius for CAS with a 1.88 hour loiter at 5,000 ft and external weapons.
PhaidThis was not the case when the A-10 was designed around the GAU-8. If they had the wealth of PGMs that we have today, the GAU-8 would have never been created.
That is probably true, but not for any good reasons.
LG PGMs will always be more accurate than a gun. They also let you engage multiple targets in a single pass (try that with a gun and NOT spraying an entire area).
Not sure that the CEP of PGMs compares favorably with that of guns. As far as multi-pass, I think you mean GPS PGMs there. Again though you are completely ignoring the realities of using those types of weapons in a fog of war type environment, as well as the obvious fact that no matter how small, you can never carry as many PGMs as you can bursts of 30mm.
The gun has ceased to be an cost effective system in the light of PGMs that allow the accurate delivery of fire from safer altitudes
The facts do not support your conclusion. PGMs are vastly more costly and require more frequent reloading, which only adds to their cost in fuel and lost persistence. That they are safer is little comfort if they are ineffective when used from safe altitudes.
Beyond that, an A-10 can carry more PGMs, for longer, more cheaply than an F-35, AND it has a useful gun.
On the 20k issue, one of the most used CAS asset is the B-52 from high up.
Initially in Afghanistan it was used that way, as was the B-1, simply because of the lack of loiter capability for fighters due to no nearby basing. For the most part a better description of the way those heavy bombers were used is “flying artillery” rather than actual CAS.
PhaidThe F-35 will be operated in the 20s and up there a gun adds nothing to A2G.
You have stealth fighters to stay out of the typical reach from optical guided manpads and AAA.
Right, but then you are ignoring everything we have been saying about CAS, which you cannot do effectively or affordably from 20K feet.
We can agree that, for the way the F-35 will be operated, a gun is not a major factor. The problem is that this also renders the F-35 unsuitable to take over the A-10’s mission, even though it is intended to do so.
PhaidUnsure what the point is of supplying something like this to the ANA. They won’t be able to use them without US support, the US needs to stop wasting lives and money there, so in the end they would sit rusting and bullet riddled at an abandoned airfield.
I believe however that there was some talk of procuring these for USSOCOM. In which case I guess more of a case can be made for them but at some point you have to question the duplication of capabilities there. An F-16 or F-35 is not ideal for that, but I don’t really understand what a Tucano does that an A-10 does not do better. I suppose there is an advantage in austere basing and less visibility, maybe even flying them off of LHA/Ds like they used to do with Broncos.
PhaidWell, that is true if by “fighter” you mean an aircraft whose role is entirely or at least majority air to air.
PhaidYou are not comparing like with like – you need to price a missile against the cost of a burst of cannon rounds, and Gatling guns get through ammo at a prodigious rate.
Well, it shouldn’t be too hard to ballpark the math. In 2011, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, Marion, Ill., was awarded a $32,502,374 contract for the procurement of 1,224,641 30mm PGU-13B/B High Explosive Incendiary Remanufacture Cartridges and 30mm PGU-13D/B HEI Cartridges.
So that works out to $26.54 per round. Compared to the Brimstone with a unit cost of £105,000, that means you could expend 6,310 rounds of PGU-13 for the cost of one missile.
Phaid1. Compared to the Maverick, the Brimstone/Hellfire/JAGM are cheap (and can be carried in much higher numbers). Other PGMs are even cheaper (SDB, JDAM, & LG-Hydra, etc).
A-10C can use Hydra/APKWS, SDB, JDAM in addition to Mavericks etc. And it’s certainly not outside the realm of reason to fit them with Hellfire or JAGM.
2. The gun requires that you fly low & slow directly towards the target. PGMs allow a much safer and more accurate engagement of a target.
Safer, sure. More accurate, not necessarily. In an ideal environment where the friendlies are behind cover, the enemy is in the open and you have all these lightweight UAVs orbiting around to give you 100% SA, sure. But in real life there is always the possibility that troops in contact get confused, are unable to communicate, ran out of batteries for their GPS or simply can’t see what is going on. Even with a camera pod, orbiting two or more miles of slant range away simply will not give you the SA you need.
3. The 30mm on the A-10 had DU rounds, not explosive, so the 25mm on the F-35 is already at a support advantage there.
Nope, the preferred round for CAS is the PGU-13 D/B high explosive incendiary round, not the PGU-14 DU API round.
4. The gun is a “last ditch” weapon on the F-35 for it has much more effective A2G & A2A weapons. The same cannot be said for the A-10.
The gun on the F-35 is nothing like as effective as that on the A-10, in ROF, velocity, mass, or ammunition. And the fact is that no fast jet is ever going to carry enough PGMs to guarantee not needing its gun, which is why so many F-16s and F-15s have done strafing runs in Iraq and Afghanistan – and even then they have over twice the ammunition for their M61s.
PhaidThere were no AMRAAMs in Desert Storm, but Speicher should indeed have had a considerable advantage in situational awareness, theoretically.
Speicher’s F/A-18 was part of a HARM strike package. They were aware of the MiG, and in fact some of the strikers had radar lock on the MiG, but they were not cleared to fire by AWACS. The flight lead kept asking AWACS to declare the MiG a Bandit, but AWACS would only declare it a Bogey due to fears of fratricide. The MiG passed through the flight, Speicher’s Hornet exploded some time later and it has never been completely clear whether the MiG hit his Hornet or a SAM did.
Either way, the MiG was lucky in that the AWACS were saturated by the number of aircraft in the air, and the fact that it was the first night of the war, and was able to slash through a strike package.
PhaidWhat on earth is this wall of text supposed to be about?
PhaidGermany’s eventual defeat came because its industrial and population base was exposed to attack and the United States’ was not. It’s as simple as that. And while Germany had technological superiority in some categories at certain times, they never developed anything that could offset the enormous strategic advantage that America’s protected industrial base gave the Allies.
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