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But, as I pointed out a couple posts up, if we're talking strictly about airplanes/airpower, all you need to focus on is the proliferation of double digit SAMs, not the latest Chinese or Russian fighter. The fact that a relatively minor country like Algeria can afford SA-20s should tell you all you need to know about why the USAF thinks they need something more advanced than the F-16/F-15E tag-team when it comes to TACAIR.
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Jan 17, 2015 09:29
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mlmp08 posted:Understood. But lol, if climate change could be stopped AND reversed for $240 billion, I'm pretty sure the island nations of the world and a handful of philanthropists would have already ponied up for that poo poo. Some problems are more than dolla dolla bills y'all, even though it pains me to disagree with the Wu-Tang Clan in even a minor way. nah dude we just line the atmosphere with dollar bills.
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Jan 17, 2015 10:42
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Dusty Baker 2 posted:nah dude we just line the atmosphere with dollar bills. STILL a better use of money than the loving F-35. I spend a lot of time in real life arguing with "fiscal conservatives" and the poo poo I hear about this airplane is hilariously infuriating. Probably my favorite is, "Well, at least THIS insanely wasteful government spending that doesn't benefit anyone in the entire world except the board of Lockheed is constitutional, not like that bullshit food stamp and infrastructure faggotry you are always going on about!"
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Jan 17, 2015 17:04
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JonathonSpectre posted:"Well, at least THIS insanely wasteful government spending that doesn't benefit anyone in the entire world except the board of Lockheed is constitutional, not like that bullshit food stamp and infrastructure faggotry you are always going on about!" Your answer, next time you see this dude: "Yeah, what if we made the world a better place for nothing". Next, you set up a baseball cap on his head, then smack it off of him. Leave some pause so you can really hear that satisfying echo of slapping someone the hell off. "Quit your poo poo and get good, pops." Then bounce like McFly on your Tonyhawxxx Lockmart hoverboard35 and gtfoooooo
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Jan 17, 2015 17:33
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Armani posted:Your answer, next time you see this dude: "Yeah, what if we made the world a better place for nothing". You could get your next Nexus phone cheaper if you would cancel the F-35. Less defense spending = less taxes. More Steam games, also. Think about it.
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Jan 17, 2015 17:49
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waitwhatno posted:Less defense spending = less taxes. This is not how federal budget or tax policy is approached. EDIT: I mean, I'm pretty sure you're joking, but it never hurts to hammer this point again and again, and again.
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Jan 17, 2015 18:04
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:This is not how federal budget or tax policy is approached. Ahh, crap. Now you spooked him. I think I could have reached him.
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Jan 17, 2015 18:15
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The USMC has come up with a new requirement for its SPMAGTF-CR (an actual acronym  ) rapid response groups. Said requirement boils down to close air support. The plane they want for CAS......is not even the F-35, but the loving Osprey. Which will have short range missiles bolted on. Because puttering around in spitting distance of the enemy is such a great idea. Particularly when in a plane with a record of going up against random schmucks with Kalashnikovs and getting its poo poo kicked in.  God bless the marines.
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Jan 17, 2015 22:31
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:The USMC has come up with a new requirement for its SPMAGTF-CR (an actual acronym Well, it's nice to see that they're keeping up with the absolutely terrible ideas, but what kind of reasoning is there to mount missiles on a transport craft that's that lightly armored and use it near enemies? I mean, not like there are any attack choppers lying around for them to use for that kind of job instead?
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Jan 18, 2015 00:24
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Koorisch posted:Well, it's nice to see that they're keeping up with the absolutely terrible ideas, but what kind of reasoning is there to mount missiles on a transport craft that's that lightly armored and use it near enemies? They also bolted missiles onto tankers. KC 130J's can now bomb taliban while F-35s drop out of the sky 300 miles away.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:35
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blowfish posted:The USMC has come up with a new requirement for its SPMAGTF-CR (an actual acronym No aircraft on the ground will survive RPG attacks. An osprey with missiles is better than helicopter with missiles, it's a fine idea and a much saner approach for the marines than relying on the f-35. If you want to see a crazy thing already in service look at the MH-60 DAP. hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 00:40
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hobbesmaster posted:No aircraft on the ground will survive RPG attacks. Way to kick the Marines when they're down.
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Jan 18, 2015 04:14
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mlmp08 posted:Way to kick the Marines when they're down. I actually meant that in the literal way, not "lol the osprey/f-35 will never fly" way. that article posted:The operation kicked off according to plan. The CV-22s—which can fly like regular planes and land like helicopters—arrived on schedule at the United Nations compound in Bor, where the evacuees were sheltering. The article was complaining about the osprey failing to defend itself while landing/landed to pick people up. You can watch Black Hawk Down if you want to see how a UH-60 takes a hit from an RPG.
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Jan 18, 2015 04:36
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hobbesmaster posted:I actually meant that in the literal way, not "lol the osprey/f-35 will never fly" way. It was a joke about a Harrier squadron getting basically destroyed on the ground when insurgents successfully infiltrated Camp Bastion.
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Jan 18, 2015 04:51
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Is it a nominal total cost or NPV? Not sure, trying to search on my phone quick has failed as well.
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Jan 18, 2015 05:31
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mlmp08 posted:It was a joke about a Harrier squadron getting basically destroyed on the ground when insurgents successfully infiltrated Camp Bastion. Yes, I think it has been conclusively shown that fighter aircraft don't handle RPGs well. Nor do they handle satchel charges very well.
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Jan 18, 2015 05:38
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Koorisch posted:Well, it's nice to see that they're keeping up with the absolutely terrible ideas, but what kind of reasoning is there to mount missiles on a transport craft that's that lightly armored and use it near enemies? It's not like attack helos fare any better under fire. Honestly, I can't think of a good reason not to establish the capability for Ospreys to carry at least Griffin missiles. That doesn't mean sending the Ospreys downtown on their own (USMC planning aside), but like the KC/MC-130's, if they're going to be around the battlefield to AR the helos or airdrop something anyway, might as well allow them to serve as a gunship when they're not doing their other jobs.
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Jan 18, 2015 17:36
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SgtMongoose posted:That doesn't mean sending the Ospreys downtown on their own (USMC planning aside), but like the KC/MC-130's, if they're going to be around the battlefield to AR the helos or airdrop something anyway, might as well allow them to serve as a gunship when they're not doing their jobs. Fixed that for you. 
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Jan 18, 2015 18:48
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hobbesmaster posted:No aircraft on the ground will survive RPG attacks. An osprey with missiles is better than helicopter with missiles, it's a fine idea and a much saner approach for the marines than relying on the f-35. SgtMongoose posted:It's not like attack helos fare any better under fire. Arming the CV-22 is a bad and dumb idea. Let's go through the reasons. Start with the airframe. The Osprey's prop arc is nearly the full length of the wing. This means that underwing hard points are right out, unless you restrict them to non-forward firing weapons. Given the Osprey's altitude and payload limitations, forward firing weapons make the most sense. (I suppose you could restrict firing when the props are tilted into the firing arc, but this is problematic for a lot of reasons, if nothing else than because "unable to cruise and fire weapons at the same time" is a huge step backwards.) Pretend I did a lot of research here about the feasibility, expense and aerodynamic knock-on effects of adding bombs under the Osprey's wings, because I doubt whoever proposed that did either. This means that the most likely location for weapons is inside the cargo compartment, which changes arming the Osprey from an "and" proposition to an "or". Then there's the training aspect. Weapons employment (especially in close proximity to ground forces) requires a lot of training time and dollars. Every flight crew has additional beans and qualifications. AFSOC realized that they had bitten off more than they could chew when they tried to put low level, air refueling, air-land and CAS on the same airframe, and that MAJCOM has more money than your little brother that time you let him be the banker in Monopoly. Finally, there's the logistics aspect. We could theoretically have unparalleled CAS and ISR coverage by forcing every tanker and cargo aircraft in Afghanistan to carry a sensor ball and bombs, but everyone realizes this is retarded. Payload is limited: every pound for air-to-ground is one less pound of fuel (range) or troops carried. Flight and crew hours are limited: every hour a transport is extended to do CAS is an hour it isn't doing its primary mission or being worked on by maintenance. The flight profiles for air-land insertion and CAS are different: a plane can't be in two places at once. I feel like I shouldn't be explaining to people reading this thread that using one airframe to do all your missions at the same time is a bad idea, but it's a bad idea. Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 19:10
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Dead Reckoning posted:Arming the CV-22 is a bad and dumb idea. Let's go through the reasons. Start with the airframe. The Osprey's prop arc is nearly the full length of the wing. This means that underwing hard points are right out, unless you restrict them to non-forward firing weapons. Vertical launch systems on a plane. You know you want to.
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Jan 21, 2015 11:48
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blowfish posted:Vertical launch systems on a plane. You know you want to. 360 degree gun-turret-camera mount in the floor that can be manually rearmed from within, since the Osprey isn't pressurized. Only 10 billion dollars to retrofit the fleet! Cheap when you consider you won't have to use AC-130s anymore, so you can lie and say it'll save more money over time! That being said, pretty sure you could rig up a sonobuoy-type system to launch SDBs downwards, and I can't imagine it would be difficult to make a variant of the AGM-114 that had a 'drop then launch' subroutine programmed into it...not that I'd want to be on the first few flights testing that. Oh christ, I was kidding: 
BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 12:53 on Jan 21, 2015 |
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Jan 21, 2015 12:48
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Griffins already get pooped out the back of c-130s.
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Jan 21, 2015 16:18
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Dead Reckoning posted:If they're not doing their main job, they should be going back to base in order to generate more sorties. Thanks for the post, roughly how many different combat airframes would you suggest btw?
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Jan 21, 2015 18:33
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Mightypeon posted:Thanks for the post, Really as many as you need to perform the roles as best/most efficiently as possible. Parts commonality is great, but if you're trying to shove everything into one airframe right from the start all the big previous examples show that generally just fucks you over, especially when those roles differ significantly. The F-111 and F-35 are BRIGHTLY shining examples of this. Doing things like sharing engines, etc, is all great, but the V-22 is in no way built to do things like CAS well. Nor should the F-35 have been 3 relatively different airplanes trying to fit into the same shell. It's been said before, at least I hope, but if we just went after the F-35A as a F-16 and A-10-when-it-can't-be-low-and-slow replacement, it probably would be a pretty decent program given most of the stuff that isn't crazy, like the EODAS, seems to be pretty good.
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Jan 21, 2015 18:44
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Mightypeon posted:roughly how many different combat airframes would you suggest btw? That's like asking, "how many rooms should I have in my house?"
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Jan 21, 2015 19:11
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Dead Reckoning posted:That's like asking, "how many rooms should I have in my house?" "One VIP transport as the bedroom, an MRTT as the garage, two-seater for the guest room, tactical transport for the kitchen, spy plane for the study, helicopter for the living room, bomber for the bathroom, trainer for the attic, and a jump jet to have a separate toilet."
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Jan 21, 2015 19:38
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Mazz posted:Really as many as you need to perform the roles as best/most efficiently as possible. Parts commonality is great, but if you're trying to shove everything into one airframe right from the start all the big previous examples show that generally just fucks you over, especially when those roles differ significantly. The F-111 and F-35 are BRIGHTLY shining examples of this. Well, the US has a pretty broad array of roles, iirc you would end up with air superiority, tactical bombing, CAS bombing, naval bombing and strategic bombing. You would have to add varieties based on wether they are land or carrier based, and wether you want much stealth or not. You would propably end up with a Stealth Air superiority fighter (Air superiority is more a near peer competitor thing were having stealth matters more), and a stealthy strategic bomber. What I do not know is wether Tactical bombing, Close Air support bombing and bombing of naval targets can be fit on the same plane (maybe?), how much of a payload/price/stealthiness tradeoff there is, and how difficult it is to make such a craft carrier capable. This would result in between 3-5 distinct direct shooty combat plane types. From my understanding, F-35 tries to be a Stealthy Air Superiority Fighter that is also a Tactical Bomber, close air support bomber, naval bomber, perhaps also strategic bomber that can also operate from carriers.
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Jan 21, 2015 19:57
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Mightypeon posted:From my understanding, F-35 tries to be a Stealthy Air Superiority Fighter that is also a Tactical Bomber, close air support bomber, naval bomber, perhaps also strategic bomber that can also operate from carriers. Or, to quote from 8-bit Theater, "A jack of all trades, that is incompetent in all of them." Serious question: Does the plane actually do *anything* well at all?
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Jan 22, 2015 00:44
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I'm so glad you are here to swoop in and make deep, insightful, well-supported observations like that.
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Jan 22, 2015 00:52
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There's a NOVA special from about six years ago about the F-35, it's pretty funny in retrospect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kNszWU7hTw Although to be fair the Boeing plane looked absolutely ugly. e: Oh I'm wrong it was added to Youtube 6 years ago, the video itself is from 2003. I remember watching this as it aired though. computer parts fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 00:56
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computer parts posted:Although to be fair the Boeing plane looked absolutely ugly. And was apparently even worse at VTOL.
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Jan 22, 2015 00:59
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Dead Reckoning posted:If they're not doing their main job, they should be going back to base in order to generate more sorties. This is silly, putting a delay on the rocket motor so that it clears the prop should be a trivial task. Also we've been using armed variants of utility helicopters to great success since Vietnam.
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Jan 22, 2015 04:29
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Dead Reckoning posted:That's like asking, "how many rooms should I have in my house?" All of them. 
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Jan 22, 2015 06:47
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Jarmak posted:This is silly, putting a delay on the rocket motor so that it clears the prop should be a trivial task. I'm not so sure about that. If nothing else you'd be restricting yourself from using gun pods, rockets and anything else that doesn't drop free. Also, what if the movement of the missile during freefall takes the laser spot out of the seeker's FoV? You'd have to program it to "weathervane" towards the spot as well. I suppose you could rig up some sort of electronic interrupter gear instead, but I'm not sure how well that scales up to something the size of a Hellfire, and the whole thing starts to seem like a solution in search of a problem. As to your second point, it seems like we stopped doing that as soon as dedicated gunship platforms were widely available, and subsequent attempts to re-arm utility helicopters have had problems (like the MH-60S pylons). The Army SOF MH-60 and AH-6 variants are notable exceptions, but that has more to do with SOCOM being special snowflakes than anything else.
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Jan 22, 2015 15:00
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Mightypeon posted:Well, the US has a pretty broad array of roles, iirc you would end up with air superiority, tactical bombing, CAS bombing, naval bombing and strategic bombing. You would have to add varieties based on wether they are land or carrier based, and wether you want much stealth or not. Well technically they're separate planes but with an emphasis on the parts being interchangeable no?
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Jan 22, 2015 15:47
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Dead Reckoning posted:I'm not so sure about that. If nothing else you'd be restricting yourself from using gun pods, rockets and anything else that doesn't drop free. Also, what if the movement of the missile during freefall takes the laser spot out of the seeker's FoV? You'd have to program it to "weathervane" towards the spot as well. I suppose you could rig up some sort of electronic interrupter gear instead, but I'm not sure how well that scales up to something the size of a Hellfire, and the whole thing starts to seem like a solution in search of a problem. Guidance systems still work during freefall see: JDAMs. Also firing guns through a prop is WWI tech
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Jan 22, 2015 16:10
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Jarmak posted:Guidance systems still work during freefall see: JDAMs. Well one of their solutions was gluing armored deflectors to the props, which sounds just about right for these things as well.
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Jan 22, 2015 16:26
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Jarmak posted:Guidance systems still work during freefall see: JDAMs. JDAMs are GPS guided, and get their guidance signals from the GPS constellation, and the target coordinates that were input before release. They're also not quite as accurate as a laser guided weapon, and can't really be used effectively against a moving target. Newer JDAM/SDB production is adding laser and radar homing capabilities, to rectify these issues, but at a MUCH higher unit cost. One of JDAMs biggest advantages was hilariously low unit cost, since it was essentially just some flight control fins and a GPS receiver that you bolt to a Mk 82/83/84. Hellfires fired by anything that isn't an AH-64D are semi-active laser homing, meaning that the seeker must be able to "see" the target laser spot. I don't think any version of Hellfire has GPS/INS capability. Griffin uses GPS as well as SALH, so I would imagine that a dual-mode launch where the seeker head cannot see the target would simply be a software issue. GPS gets the missile to the right area/orientation, and the seeker takes over when it sees the target. Griffin is a rather small, lightweight weapon, though.
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Jan 22, 2015 16:39
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Dead Reckoning posted:
Arming utility helicopters is fine. It just so happens that the USA is rich enough to afford dedicated attack gunships in addition to utility choppers. But the marines still arm UH-1s, the SH-60 carries armament, tons of allies roll with armed utility helicopters. Armed utility helicopters are extremely popular these days as sensor packages and guided weapons improve and nations find that expensive attack helicopters that can't do multirole are kind of expensive for what you get.
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Jan 22, 2015 16:41
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mlmp08 posted:Arming utility helicopters is fine. It just so happens that the USA is rich enough to afford dedicated attack gunships in addition to utility choppers. But the marines still arm UH-1s, the SH-60 carries armament, tons of allies roll with armed utility helicopters. Armed utility helicopters are extremely popular these days as sensor packages and guided weapons improve and nations find that expensive attack helicopters that can't do multirole are kind of expensive for what you get. The only SH-60 variant that wasn't designed for ASW or anti-surface as a primary role is the MH-60S, and only because it was originally the CH-60S to replace the Sea Knight.
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Jan 22, 2015 16:48
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