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galliumscan posted:IMHO, the 757 is the Constellation of our age. Beautiful aircraft. Man, I think the 757 is really ungainly looking. I love the MD80 series in terms of appearance.
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Mar 9, 2010 16:52
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The plane is really only as useful as the missiles you hang underneath it.
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Mar 10, 2010 22:54
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Yeah at this point if there's a significant air to air engagement and you get within cannon range, someone done hosed up.
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Mar 11, 2010 18:13
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Tindjin posted:They thought the same thing after Korea with the F-4 until we started loosing pilots. You field planes designed for air superiority without guns (or some short range offensive capability) and you leave a gaping hole for your enemies to take advantage of it. I'm not saying that it's not important to retain the cannon for the "Oh poo poo" moments, but if you are getting to the point where you are using the cannon, especially in the kind of wars we fight against fourth-rate regional powers, someone hosed it up.
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Mar 12, 2010 16:42
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jandrese posted:You know, as practical and cost effective as the Combat Caravan probably would be, I have to think that at some point the 5 year old mentality that infects the armed forces is going to get the project shitcanned. They should just make a new version of the Spad. Thing's a beast. Here's a picture courtesy of Wiki:  The loiter time might not be that phenomenal, though. I'm sure if you used a more fuel-efficient modern engine you could improve it!
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Mar 12, 2010 16:46
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The effective range of a 20MM (or 23 or 30 for the russkies) revolver cannon or Gatling is like sub-1000M. In order for combat to take place at that range, both sides are going to have to have incredibly stealthy aircraft, which seems somewhat... unlikely, for the foreseeable future.
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Mar 12, 2010 16:55
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So I shut the gently caress up about air combat hypotheticals I am going to post one of my favorite airplanes of all time! BEHOLD THE MAJESTY OF: THE BOULTON-PAUL DEFIANT.  British people are loving phenomenal at coming up with crackhead ideas. Sometimes they are totally ballin (make a plane out of wood, make a plane with thrust vectoring) and sometimes they are not so succesful (like this one). See that little turret in the back? It's a powered turret that has four .303 machine guns. In theory, this allows you to shoot in about a 360 degree arc around the plane, and also allows you to change elevation. Want to pop a Do-17? You can just fly in one of its blind spots below and to the side, and your turret gunner can whip the turret around and take it down! ACES! The turret was designed so you couldn't shoot off the propeller, or the tail and whatnot because when you pointed it in those directions, the electrical firing circuit was not completed. (the radio mast and antenna were located on the underside of the fuselage so you couldn't hit them either) Smart poo poo. So far there aren't really any downsides. It had roughly the speed of contemporary traditional RAF fighters (about 300MPH in level flight, Merlin powered) and although it was a little heavy and unmaneuverable (due to the second crewman and the fuckoff huge powered turret), it had low wing loading and was pretty decent to fly. In the beginning of the war, Defiant squadrons had success against Luftwaffe bombers. One big advantage was that the turret allowed multiple Defiants to shoot at the same enemy from lots of different angles at the same time, making it harder to slip out of the way. (This also led to huge overclaims by Defiant gunners). They also had some initial success shooting down fighters who tried to bounce them from the rear. Japanese ace Saburo Sakai had a similar problem when he mistook a Dauntless for a Wildcat. Now we get to the downsides. First off, the minute that the Defiant got in to a maneuver fight with a 109, it was hosed. It was less maneuverable, and trying to coordinate the shooting of the turret with the plane was very difficult. You remember the low wing loading? Yeah that was because it didn't have any guns that fired forward. The turret wouldn't fire forward unless it was pointed up to avoid shooting off the prop. The pilot didn't even have a gun sight. His job was just to drive the bus so the backseater could get shots off. This made it pretty difficult to coordinate in a dogfight. Also, the backseater didn't have room to wear a traditional parachute so they wore a specialized suit that contained a parachute and didn't work well at all, so a lot of backseaters died when the aircraft was shot down.  Click here for the full 800x563 image. If you are an ME-109 driver and you see this view of a Defiant, you can paint a little Union Jack on the side of your cockpit in advance. Also, holy poo poo look at how ugly it is. BUT: When used as a night fighter with radar it was quite effective at shooting down bombers - who tended to look for threats below and behind. Defiants could attack from nontraditional profiles, which made them really dangerous. This is in part why the Black Widow and Mosquito night-fighters had powered turrets on early variants. The Fleet Air Arm had a similarly retarded airplane called the Blackburn Roc, which was a horribly slow piece of poo poo powered by the Bristol Pegasus (220MPH). All in all, the Defiant was a really ingenious idea that didn't work out all that well in practice. If it had been fitted with even a pair of .303s for the pilot, it might have fared better, since most Defiants were shot down from the front. But it was more expensive to produce than the Hurricane and less effective in a huge furball,and the turret and single engined design made sure that it would remain underpowered compared to Mosquito night-fighter versions.
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Mar 12, 2010 17:24
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slidebite posted:Fair enough, but if they are not detected at, say, 9nm and closing fast you get into that range pretty darn quickly. If things are really that undetectable people will just fly around blundering in to each other like retards though and the quickness of closing the range will make it very difficult to bounce people or get a good pass off. You're talking fighting WWII dogfights at 3x speed.
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Mar 12, 2010 17:25
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It ain't WWII. If you're making strafing passes with your F-15, once again, you are doing it wrong. The military has aircraft and helicopters designed specifically for strafing. They use cannons. They're also slow and have good loiter time because that is important for ground attack aircraft. Strike versions of the F-15 and F-16 use guided munitions, not their twirly peashooters. And the cannon is not a perfectly capable weapon. It's a last-resort backup. It's useful as a last resort backup, but people haven't scored cannon kills since loving Vietnam because now ROE isn't designed to close to cannon range. Dogfighting isn't dead, but it isn't something you want to be doing, especially with the US' technical advantages. It is a useful weapon, I don't get why everyone is bitching. But it's like a combat infantryman's sidearm - if you are pulling out the M9 in a firefight, something has gone horribly wrong somewhere. I'm not advocating that the cannon be eliminated, but dogfighting is a lot less relevant in modern combat than it was in the past. decahedron fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Mar 12, 2010 |
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Mar 12, 2010 17:59
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Mr.Peabody posted:Pilots don't rely on radar during dogfights, it's visual identification. That's why they have such nice big canopies on fighters. Radar is great when a target is out of visual range, but once in visual range, it's a lot better to look at them than watch your radar screen. Well yes, my point was that with low-observable stealth aircraft people are going to be getting to within visual range before they can plan to engage, and it will probably be a little bit difficult to find people to kill when everyone is super stealthy (which is a future that is decades off, because nobody the US is fighting is going to have stealthy equipment for a while).
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Mar 12, 2010 18:00
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Russia is notorious about selling not-front-line weapons systems to anyone who will buy them, you mean. edit: I get your point, but the whole scenario here is that BOTH aircraft are very stealthy so they're both effectively radar blind. That makes it very difficult to accomplish really anything at all, as far as I can tell, which is why I talked about a reversion to Great War type engagements but way, way loving fast. It'll be interesting to see what happens when everyone has stealthy poo poo, but I don't think that's going to happen within the F35's lifetime, unless the F35 pulls some sort of B52 poo poo or receives a huge amount of modifications, effectively making it a different aircraft. decahedron fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Mar 12, 2010 |
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Mar 12, 2010 18:10
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Mr.Peabody posted:I get what you're saying, and having both defender and aggressor as stealth air craft will present new challenges. It will really boil down to visual identifications, and you would be surprised at how a pilot can see. Legend has it Chuck Yeager used to spot enemy aircraft during WWII from 50 miles away. I would imagine that the next sexy sexyness is going to be low-visual observable. Plus, UAVs are going to open up a whole new can of worms.
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Mar 12, 2010 18:32
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Autism Sundae posted:How is it a really ingenious idea? Some dude basically said "hey check this out, you know tanks have like turrets on top? Let's do this poo poo on a plane". Nobody else did it because in every other air force there was another dude that took about ten seconds to think about it and said "no, that poo poo's retarded". If you were intercepting bombers, it would allow you to engage more targets quickly than a traditional fixed gun fighter that has to make multiple passes at the target. Plus, traditional fighters were relatively vulnerable from a variety of angles (especially with the RAF squadron-element tactics) and the Defiant was designed in part to work in a mission that was already obsolete. And anyway, the Defiant had a significant amount of success until some squadrons got equipped with them and decided to fight them like they were Hurricanes, which obviously wasn't going to work. If you described an ever-descending spiral to get down on to the deck, it would be very easy to keep a pursuing fighter engaged nearly continuously with the turret. Keep in mind that when the Defiant was designed, like someone else pointed out, nobody really had any idea what the gently caress was going to work and what wasn't. Thus the Germans dropped a bunch of money on the Zerstorer type fighters which were total poo poo, the Italians continued to pursue biplanes long after they were viable, and the Allies continued to outfit their strategic bombers with tons of defensive armament and additional crewmembers (not to mention the USAAF's lol precision daytime bombing). People did dumbfuck things even during the war after they should have known better. Also do you mean that turret armed fighters continued to be a popular idea later in WWII? Because the Mosquito night fighter and the P61 were outfitted for turrets, and the German Schrage Muzik system was very similar in execution (although fixed). The Defiant would probably have been pretty successful as a night fighter if the airframe was better - the problem was the Mosquito was so much faster and with longer loiter time that it didn't make sense to spend more money on the Defiant - plus you could make the Mosquito out of wood.
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Mar 15, 2010 15:50
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But even less reliable. Probably has a vacuum diagram that makes the FD vacuum diagram look like Malevich's Red Square and Black Square.
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Mar 16, 2010 20:12
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NOTAR designs for helicopters are pretty cool even if they're just the MD compressed air type tail rotor. Way safer, and maybe more reliable? At least less vulnerable to bird/wire/tree strikes.
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Mar 18, 2010 16:30
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Nebakenezzer posted:It's been mentioned a few times in the thread that newer designs are often less reliable/harder to maintain then older designs. Is this because the engineers building it are much less likely to have hands on experience? Or because design requirements have gotten way more ambitious in the past 30 years, or what? Probably the same reason that cars are now more difficult to maintain - increased technological sophistication.
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Mar 25, 2010 14:33
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Strabo4 posted:JESUS CHRIST how have I never heard of this before Because it was a raging underpowered piece of garbage that wasn't as good for 70% of ground attack missions as the FW-190 and the other 30% (big cannon time) was amply handled by the Stuka. Basically, the Armored Bathtub idea only really works when you get to modern turbofan engines. Without air superiority, slow fighter bombers get hosed up (like the Stuka) and so the FW-190 was really a way more useful aircraft. Anyway, we learn from pretty much every WWII design with anything bigger than maybe 30mm facing forward that it is REALLY loving HARD to hit something going at 300MPH and 100 feet AGL with a cannon. Which is why we've moved to either the great big forward firing autocannon model (A-10, SU attack aircraft, etc) so that you can actually get rounds on target in your pass, or the Orbit Around with a Great Big Howitzery thing like the AC-130. Big cannons in the front of an aircraft are fundamentally a huge waste of time. decahedron fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Mar 28, 2010 |
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Mar 28, 2010 00:02
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You probably are also graying out so you won't give a gently caress that the wing's all curvy.
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Mar 31, 2010 18:22
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Radiohead71 posted:Wouldn't the wings look like that if the plane was headed straight down? Glad the 87 is coming along nicely.  Come on dude.
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Apr 1, 2010 17:26
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Cmdr Will Riker posted:Goddamn the A-1 was badass. Anybody who loves the A-10 (which seems to be pretty much everybody in this thread) should love the A-1. People pretty much love the A-10 because of the GAU. Which is sad. It is totally bitchin even without the GAU.
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Apr 1, 2010 17:27
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Going slow is probably an advantage (up to a certain point) in that type of mission.
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Apr 1, 2010 19:37
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Considering how cheap the Spad would be at this point you could probably throw up enough of them that you could dispense with the speed problem.
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Apr 1, 2010 19:44
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Mr Crucial posted:It's not so much an intentional advantage that the designers went for. The A-1 is a WW2 era design, it was meant to replace the SB2C Helldiver (max speed 295mph) and the TBF Avenger (max speed 270mph). An extra 30mph with the A-1's bomb load was a large improvement for the time. Well right, I'm just saying that going BALLS OUT FAST in your A-1 was not really a priority and I know that people like slow as gently caress aircraft for COIN. I don't think that the designers were like "let's make it slow so it will rule poo poo at COIN missions" I think that after it was hanging around people said "man that thing is slow and can loiter for hours and can carry a gently caress ton of bombs, that will rule poo poo at COIN."
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Apr 2, 2010 00:40
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The only reason the I-16 was around in WWII was because the Russians were idiots. It was obsolete by '38.
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Apr 2, 2010 20:14
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