>be F-35 design team
>USAF wants muh internal gun
>try to argue that modern missile tech makes the gun unneeded
>Vietnam boomers throw a shitfit and insist on the gun
>your choices are as follows
>venerable old M61 Vulcan that's been on every cannon armed jet the USAF has used for the past 50 years
>25mm meme gun that's an attempt to make the Harrier's cannon lighter
>decide to go with 25mm and force the USAF to buy new ammo
>the USMC won't even be operating any variants with the internal gun so their existing 25mm logistics chain is irrelevant
Was it spite?
You will always end up gunfighting in fighters against a serious opponent. Always.
Only because your definition of 'serious opponent' is 'anyone who actually manages to get into a gunfight'
except that never happens outside your videogames
[citation needed]
If you are fighting a peer, you've already lost.
History is full of serious opponents. Between 5th Gens the problem actually thickens. The detection ranges are short, where a Raptor sees a J-20 at 12 NM and so does the other. It's gonna end up in a merge. 12 NM at a cruise speed of 500 knots = 44 seconds. They both fire, they both evade, they end up close anyway. The one that has better maneuverability, better weapons AND more weapons wins.
The F-22 pilots were already worried to run out of missiles with 8 AAMs, imagine the F-35 with 4. UAVs aren't going to add that many missiles.
> a Raptor sees a J-20 at 12 NM and so does the other.
Ell
Oh
Ell
For many reasons.
Found the moron
more like you get a bra from the all seeing sauron eye mystery homie in the sky (or your datalink) and you launch an amraam 100 miles out towards the hostiles general direction so they're forced to go defensive or perish and you never even get your own radar lock because you've turned around to bait them into your web of air defenses
guns are mostly used for accidentally strafing schools during training missions
This! We saw the Ukrainian forces do this in the opening days of the war. Beautiful! We saw them dance across the sky shooting down fighters with their autos.
I remember back in 2010 /k/ we would argue all day about what fighters would win what. Now we know it is the SPIRIT of the pilot, not the plane, that wins dogfights. Why do you think the autocrats can’t maintain air superiority? Well, it’s the guns of Ukrainian migs. Can’t wait for NATO to give them the F-16s and F-35s. They will be dancing in the sky with MIGS shooting down ziggers in a beautiful DANCE for democracy.
F-35's main gimmick is VOTL and being able to hover like a helo, so being able to shoot something sustained makes sense beyond the memic dogfight that's never going to happen.
>the F-35 is going to hover around like an attack chopper on the battlefield
Gungays, this is who you're siding with.
>less than three seconds of ammo
>sustained
This feels like a false flag it's so obviously bait.
Im imagining 40 f35 hovering 50m off the ground in formation while occasionally firing micro burrrts into a tree line for a total of 3 minutes before flying away like some kind of lazy Martian invasion
>F35A
>VTOL
Black person
'mureens will use same gun in pod on their F-35's when mission requires one.
Why? The pod will screw with RCS and offer little more than some CAS capability
That's the only thing the gun is for in the first place.
>and offer little more than some CAS capability
That's why they want it, so yeah...
Because sometimes you just want to cheaply shoot down some low cost drones or balloons.
If you're doing CAS with the gun then low radar signature doesn't matter.
>what does marine aviation do, exactly?
Close Air Support, Air Interdiction, Aerial Recon, Anti-Ship warfare (the same as the Navy)
wrong.
Wrong my ass
The USAF is the one who mandated the gun. They wanted the 25mm. Everyone else didn't want or need a gun. That's why the f-35c and the f-35b have no gun.
>They wanted the 25mm
Can you strafe a dug-in fieldgun position or a stalled supply truck with an AIM-9X or an AIM-120C?
Why does the F-35C have an optional 25mm gunpod designed for it, if the navy doesn't want or need a gun?
>Can you strafe a dug-in fieldgun position or a stalled supply truck with an AIM-9X or an AIM-120C?
Nah, but you can with a JDAM
I think the idea of CAS is moving towards small-diameter bombs vice 20/25/30mm guns.
Minus the A-10, most "fighter jets" don't really carry all that much ammunition. By using SDBs, they remove the need for proper run-up and boresighting required for effective gunning.
less risk of friendly fire as well, since the guns are not well known for their accuracy if we are going by A-10 standards.
The navy doesn't want it most of the time but still sees a need for it.
>Can you strafe a dug-in fieldgun position or a stalled supply truck with an AIM-9X or an AIM-120C?
it's cheaper to drop a jdam on something than to perform a gun run on it
sounds like USAF is the only ones with some common sense. We have been through this "missiles phase out everything!!" moronation many, many times
The problem isn't that the F-35A has an internal cannon; The problem is that the weapon had so much funding allocated to it for something that barely contributes anything to the F-35's combat potential. Guns have accounted for an extremely small amount of A2A kills in recent years, with the vast majority of kills going to BVR MRAAMS [6, pg. 10]. Similarly, in Desert Storm the majority of AFVs were killed by guided munitions. But, a cannon can provide a far cheaper solution than guidid ordinance in permissive environments. 28 million was allotted to the GAU-22's development, but the weapon was over budget, and still had issues with safety and performance four years after the gun's 2017 development deadline [2][3][4], pg. 6].
While a cannon can be useful, spending 28 millions developing a new gun which will likely never see use is rediculous. Especially when viable solutions like the M61A2 already exist, which has less than 2/3 the recoil that the GAU-22 has at similar rates of fire[1][5]. You could likely cut the magazine by 1/3 with the smaller rounds alone. If the F-35A was expected to use the GAU-22 as it's primary CAS implement and carried 2'000 shells, the desire for a better cannon would be justified. But in the age of IR missiles and cheap PGMs, spending that much money on a custom gun is foolish.
Tl:dr the F-35 should've either came with an off-the-shelf cannon or without one at all.
[1]: https://www.gd-ots.com/armaments/aircraft-guns-gun-systems/gau22a/#:~:text=The%20GAU%2D22%2FA%20is,air%2C%20land%20and%20sea%20platforms.
[2]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a30718538/f-35-flaws/
[3]: https://time.com/5774422/f-35-military-jet-assessment/
[4]: https://www.dote.osd.mil/Portals/97/pub/reports/FY2019/dod/2019f35jsf.pdf?ver=2020-01-30-115432-173
[5]: https://www.gd-ots.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/M6A1A1-M61A2.pdf
[6]: https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/Air-to-Air-Report-.pdf
>Guns have accounted for an extremely small amount of A2A kills in recent years
Guns have very rarely been used for A2A in recent years. They tend to be used for interdiction and ground targets. If you need to take down an airliner, you don't hit it with a missile. You blow out the engines and give it the chance to glide, and if it opts to go straight down well oh fricking well you tried. Guns are politically expedient.
> You blow out the engines and give it the chance to glide
No you fricking don’t, you actual literal moron. If there’s a reason to shoot down an airliner, it’s because someone on board wants to do a no good very bad thing. In which case you want to shoot it down ASAP to reduce the chance of the pilot crashing it into an orphanage or something.
Depends where the airliner is intercepted, I'd imagine.
No, it doesn’t. If the decision is made that an airliner (or really any plane) needs to be shot down, then it’s shot down. Period.
And no, “warning shots” aren’t used either.
All airline hijacking scenarios are not 9/11. 9/11 is the only one of it's kind ever, it's an outlier. The vast majority of hijacker's plans involve surviving it.
Okay.
That doesn’t change the fact that if a shoot down is ordered, the F-16 or F-35 or whatever is absolutely not going to “blow out the engines and give it the chance to glide.” They’re going to use a missile, or, if for some reason they only have the gun, they’re going to aim for center mass
>blow out the engines and give it the chance to glide
I'm not the one who was suggesting that. Yeah, that's pretty silly and far-fetched.
Actually, let me rephrase that to head off future moronation.
If the order to open fire is given, the pilot will use a missile or sim for center mass.
>center mass
>on an airliner
>the part of the airplane that contains all the passengers
>the part that contains no fuel or engines, maybe you'll hit some linkages if you're lucky
lmao imagine the backlash
> no fuel
>he doesn’t know
alright correction
>some fuel
>You blow out the engines and give it the chance to glide
How, when your hot as frick, inaccurate cannon rounds just penetrated the wings the engines are attached to, and blew up the plane because wings have fuel, and are need to glide. Congrats, you just did the same thing a missile could do, but less effective. You're a moron, that needs to stick to vidya. Now, leave, you moronic underage homosexual.
I'm not saying that having a cannon is completely unnecessary- there are certainly a few scenarios like the ones you describe (unique interceptions, ground strafing, anti Mi-8 duties, etc.) where it would be somewhat more convenient than an AMRAAM; It's that these scenarios are not only unlikely to occur, but also don't really imperil the F-35 in question. And none of them whatsoever would be meaningfully altered in the slightest by having the F-35A equipped with the same M61A2 used on the F-22A and pretty much every other tactical fighter in U.S. service.
I'm just saying that between the logistical problems created by the unique ammunition (more for our allies than for us), recoil-induced airframe problems and the extreme rarity of the scenarios in which the gun is likely to be used, saving money with the M61A2 would've been a better decision in the long-term. From a cost-benefit perspective, either adopting the vulcan or skipping the gun entirely and spending the money on something more useful (like say, giving the AIM-9X LOAL capability or the IWBs the AIM-120 sidekick rails sooner) would have been a better idea, and being spared the need to experiment with a new, mostly irrelevant weapon would save the jet a lot of development headaches.
Heh, speaking as your ally, don't worry. Besides the 20mm Vulcan, we got 30mm Bushmasters, 35mm Oerlikons, 30mm 2A42 Shipunovs, 23mms, 40mm Bofors, 57mm naval... It's not really a problem, gun ammo is cheap compared to PGMs. We can now ditch the 20mm entirely. Ammo doesn't have an infinite shelf life anyway.
The gun was not one of the F-35s development problems. That 28 million $ is also sure some engineers at GD have a roof over their heads and cheese on their sandwiches. Pretty sure all the Vulcan engineers were already retired. Sometimes it's useful too look at the price tag, but not always. Keeping both engineers and production line workers employed is added value in itself. Lay them off to save a few million and the next time you need them to work again, you'll need to pay a billion.
The gun is not for enemy aircraft, it is for strafing.
They made the same argument back with the Phantoms and they put the guns back on them.
No they didn't, stop being moronic.
They didn't put a gun on the F-4 because its sole job was to lob missiles at bombers. 60s missiles were perfectly adequate for shooting bombers down and the gun is actually unnecessary for that role. If the F-4 actually sees the bomber up close, then the bomber has already launched missiles at the carrier.
And yet they put the gun on it despite the fact they thought missiles were a perfectly adequate replacement.
No they didn't, moron, they reassigned the fighter to other roles and then modified it with a gun. Missiles were and still are the replacement for shooting down bombers, nobody is ever going to use a gun for that.
You are coping.
Have you ever played a sim like Ace Combat? Using guns on slow targets like bombers is essential.
>sim
>Ace Combat
>And yet they put the gun on it
In the Fighter Pilot Podcast a former Phantom pilot and WSO talked about the gun for a minute or two, and their opinion was that while they did want the gun the E variant of the F-4 was negatively affected by the added mass in the nose and the smaller radar.
"And yet they put a gun on it" has the same energy as the early computer manufacturer who was tired of the perception that their CPUs overheated so they added an obnoxiously loud fan to the case that did not improve performance but shut down the complaints.
>Design mistake
Not our problem then
They didn't need guns on the Phantom either, but USAF pilots were slobbering morons. USN pilots, who weren't morons, saw their kill counts decrease after the gun was added.
25mm is a trade-off between 20mm and 30mm. You get more rounds for the same weight/volume than 30mm, but you have more HE filler than 20mm.
The gun is only gonna be used for strafing infantry, most likely. Having more HE increases your Pk.
I'm struggling to imagine a situation where you would be using a fricking F-35 near ground level to do a strafing run on infantry, or how anybody could order that without immediately being relieved of command. The last place you want your $100 million aircraft is in range of MANPADS or whatever AA they have on hand.
>I'm struggling to imagine a situation where you would be using a fricking F-35 near ground level to do a strafing run on infantry
>I'm struggling to imagine a situation where you would be using a fricking F-16 near ground level to do a strafing run on infantry
>I'm struggling to imagine a situation where you would be using a fricking F-18 near ground level to do a strafing run on infantry
>I'm struggling to imagine a situation where you would be using a fricking F-15E near ground level to do a strafing run on infantry
>I'm struggling to imagine a situation where you would be using a fricking B1B near ground level to do a show of force run on infantry
Except these are nothing alike.
F-35 was designed for what role again?
Oh yeah, CAS
Repeat after me:
>CAS DOES NOT MEAN THE PLANE HAS TO BE CLOSE TO THE TROOPS
>IT MEANS THE KABOOMS ARE CLOSE TO THE TROOPS
Why is this concept so hard for /k/ to grasp, after all these years there is still this misconception? F16s did the majority of the CAS missions in Afganistan using guided bombs
That's why it carries GBU's, my moronic fren. Most CAS missions are dropping bombs on morons from 20kft+ at 0.70 Mach. Most CAS is done by bombers and strike fighters. So, I fail to see how it can't fulfill covering the CAS role in place of the F-15, F-16, F/A-18, or B-1. The F-35 was designed to replace the F-16, F/A-18 Hornet, Harrier, and A-10. CAS is a very minor role for the F-35.
>I'm struggling to imagine a situation where you would be using a fricking F-15E near ground level to do a strafing run on infantry
Strike Eagle squadrons actually train to do strafe run, even at night
>actually train to do strafe run, even at night
that sounds challenging damm
There's a 100% chance the F-35 will use its guns in strafing someday, the closest thing you'd have to a valid argument is saying that it'll be too rare to happen.
The F-35 isn't a princess, if it's nearby and ground forces need air support then it'll strafe.
Interceptions in peacetime don't mean anything. And no, the gun won't be used in interceptions during wartime, including against stuff like recon drones. It'll be shot at from many miles away.
In a war where the F-35 will be used properly, we will not be sending F-35s to do fricking gun runs as if we had a bunch of poor Army privates stuck in a valley near Kandahar being shot by Uncle Jahim and his friends.
F-35s will be nowhere near the ground fight. That's the entire point of the system. They get to MAXSOR, drop their munitions, and frick off before being detected. All that expensive technology does nothing if you're going to be anywhere close to MANPADs and in a visually-identifiable environment, such as during the day.
>
In a war where the F-35 will be used properly, we will not be sending F-35s to do fricking gun runs as if we had a bunch of poor Army privates stuck in a valley near Kandahar being shot by Uncle Jahim and his friends.
Yes we will, and that is a proper war, moron. Nobody cares about stealth in the COIN role, nobody cares about stealth in the CAS role once air superiority is established, and pretty much every plane participates in that. Eventually the F-35 will be used in this role once it turns out there's no A-10 in theatre.
Repeat after me, the plane is not a princess.
The plane costs more than some small nations. It's a fricking princess.
No it doesn't.
u mad
Repeat after me, the plane is not a princess.
>
Repeat after me, the plane is not a princess.
redditor detected.
>Repeat after me, the plane is no...ACK!
>Year 2025
>Vids of F-35 downed by Iglas when they try to strafe Russian trenches in Ukraine
This is the type of stupid fantasy you have to concoct in order to claim the F-35 won't be used in the way it is meant to be used.
The way it's meant to be used is sitting at 40k feet, yet having a clear as frick picture of everything going on in their AO and on the ground, able to drop ordnance or hostile aircraft without actually moving much.
The only details of any combat operations of the F-35 that we have is Israel following terrain masking into Syria. The gun is meant to be used in support of ground forces. If Israel had ground forces that needed assistance, then you could bet the F-35 would be providing.
>The gun is meant to be used in support of ground forces
No it fricking isn't. If it is, that is the absolute peak of moronation. Sounds like some Pierre bullshit.
Terrain masking doesn't work against modern AESAs
>Modern AESA can see though mountains.
Wow. That's some impressive tech.
Terrain masking doesn't mean flying in the canyons, it means flying low to exploit ground clutter. Also doesn't work if the observer is up in the sky with sufficient altitude
No, terrain masking is when you fly behind terrain. It's very useful if you have mountains to dive behind and the enemy is over water or otherwise flat terrain. Them being high up increases the lock range for fighters that are below them. Terrain masking is not mitigated by altitude. It's a straight advantage if one side has the terrain to do it.
The majority of the world doesn't have that. Being high gives your radar better range as with your missiles. My perspective is better flying high, and mitigates terrain masking because I can look down. It works well for LOS ground based systems
Most BVR starts with both sides up high and then they both descend into denser air to defend against incoming missiles. The side with terrain to hide behind has the advantage here. Radar looking into the sky has better range than radar looking into the ground. Furthermore, missiles fired into the ground are what terrain masking mitigates. It can not only act as a physical shield. It can break the lock from the enemy plane and make the incoming missile less effective at locating its intended target.
Most of the earth is flat or slightly hilly.
Also, radars have azimuth and elevation, which in the case of the Raptor's and F-35's radar it has a 120° x 120° search area. It points at both ground and air. Unless you're flying between the valleys, ground masking isn't there and let alone ground clutter which isn't an issue anymore.
You end up closing in anyway.
Fights usually don't get closer than 12 miles if both sides have fox 3's. At that distance there's about 20-30 seconds of travel time for the missiles. This is more than enough for a plane to duck behind a ridgeline or mountain while defending.
Radar can look at "ground and air" all it likes but we know that being the only solid object a radar wave hits will make said object stand out. This is why looking down, into ground clutter, reduces the detection range of any radar, while looking up does the opposite.
More like networked sensors.
That's what SDB and APKWS2 are for. A small guided munition is more accurate and effective than a manually-aimed gun run.
why the frick would they ever waste resources on gun runs, when they can just load up all the pylons with precision bombs that are more accurate, with way longer range, that don't risk the aircraft? the answer is they wouldn't
>In a war where the F-35 will be used properly, we will not be sending F-35s to do fricking gun runs
The F-35 being used properly will replace the role of F-16s in USAF service and F/A-18s in Navy service. Both F-16s and F/A-18s did gun runs during the GWOT.
A F-35 used properly will be used like 4th gens are being used now, because they sell like hot cakes.
And we now have so many fricking smart munitions that a gun run is a fricking waste of time that could be better spent RTB to rearm with things that will actually kill a target, without even looking at the cost/risk analysis of using your expensive fricking fighter to try and do a low and slow pass at ground level to try and spray some lead into the right targets without eating a MANPAD or other forms of organic AA that can't threaten it at height. The fricking SDB was invented to solve this issue by allowing a multirole to carry enough munitions to drop something on everyone instead of having the massive overkill that is a 500lb bomb against some dudes in a field.
Still, a MK84 2000 lb bomb is about 3000 $ worth while and SDB is in the 40 - 70K+ range. A Mk84 JDAM is in the 27,000 $ price tag
MIC is literally a meme
>shrinking electronics and guidance systems makes them expensive, especially when compared to some iron and HE filler
>SDB hasn't been mass produced over decades to get the price down
The cost of the munitions are negligible to the cost of the plane and the pilot, as well as the higher probability of actually killing the target that if you're calling in a fast mover to strike, is probably going to destroy more then 40k worth of your side's stuff since that's less then the cost training a single crayon eater, much less his equipment these days. Iron bombs and gun runs are a dead meme these days simply from the economics of it, much less the efficacy problems, risks of blue on blue, and high risk they put on the plane and pilot.
You’re not wrong.
But seeing a fighter bomber loaded drown and dropping a stick of moronic bombs at low level tickles my pickle in a way that a stealth fighter plinking away from thirty thousand feet and fifty miles away just doesn’t.
Imagine a stealth fighter bomber at low altitude lobbing a dozen SDBs at once each with their own target. Imagine watching their wings deploy as they soar off towards the enemy. Pure kino.
You're just a philistine who can't appreciate artistry of dropping 8 bombs on 8 different tank's heads in a single pass from fricking nowhere without ruining the grass around them. It's okay to like big booms, but there's a time and place for them. I, for one, cannot fricking wait until the NGSW scope rolls out and gets properly datalinked so grunts can mark targets on their own for the local air support to just download the GPS coordinates and dispense some very localized freedom to whatever needs it.
I can buy two 2000 lb JDAMS for the price of an SDB.
Huge part of why SDB is as useful as it is because it is so small. You can drop 'em lot closer to your own troops than 2000 pound JDAM's, not to mention risk collateral damage is much lower. Also plane carrying SDB's can strike more targets than if it was carrying 2000 pound JDAM's. Against more targets you would need more planes armed with JDAM's, leading to all expenses of another sortie and possibly even more costs for extra tanker support. Against some targets 2000 pounder absolutely is more useful than SDB, but in case of CAS... probably nope.
Yes, the SDBs are smaller and more "surgical" than JDAMS in terms of safety range and warhead size. They were meant to bust bunkers mainly, not bomb the enemy per se. That's why they have a steel tip with a low fragmentation body. JDAMs are for bombing EVERYTHING, you can even fill them with concrete to bomb T-55s parked in school gardens
SDB II StormBreaker has a cheap but good uncooled thermal imager that lets it hit moving vehicles.
>SDB II StormBreaker
230,000 $ price tag
LOL
I'm gonna shoot it with a 99k$ hellfire... it's better anyway
If you go buy a brand-new Hellfire now, it'll cost you over $322 000. Plus the SDB II has a range of +70km against moving and 110km against stationary targets.
dude even foreign sales get 150k$ at best brand new
My bad, I was thinking of the JAGM.
Which AMRAAM? AIM-120A & B, or AIM-120C-8 and AIM-120D-3? The latest AMRAAMs are quite new. The extra speed of the Meteor and AIM-260 are nice and improve probability of kill a bit, but an F-35 can get the job done with an AIM-120C just as well.
They're not cleared for use on fast-movers, just helos and slow UAVs. JAGM is intended for use on fast-movers, and specifically the F-35 (externally, I presume), but it's even more expensive than a Stormbreaker (at least, until it gets out of LRIP; I don't know what the expected FRP price is supposed to be).
Another cheap option is APKWS2 (wiki says $22,000, not integrated with F-35, but *is* with F-16/F-18, so it should be relatively straightforward, albeit definitely external-only). In addition to the price, it has the advantage of having the smallest lethal radius of any option, which could prove useful in danger close situations.
Laser guidance only makes it seem substantially less practical even if the F-35 has the fancy targeting systems that allow it to maintain a lock on in the rear aspect since you have to nail one target at a time vs the SDB and other systems which have some sort of optical or GPS guidance system so you can sprinkle all the targets in a single pass.
GBU-53/B "StormBreaker". The first "No drive zone" enforcement weapon. 110km against stationay targets, 70+km against moving targets. An F-35A can take on even a 92N6E "Grave Stone" when armed with GBU-53/B. You're not going to do that with the 8km range of a Hellfire or JAGM (16km on the ER models), or the 20-30km range of a Maverick.
SPEAR 3 is a "better" but more expensive option too. Kongsberg JSM can also be used against ground targets, it was considered as a DEAD option for the Rafale to take on the Grave Stone too. Maybe not very good in terms of penetration, but it'll frick up a radar harder than a HARM.
*Correction, the JSM was used to hunt S-400 TELAR, specifically. Not radars. But I'm sure it can take out a 92N6E.
>or the 20-30km range of a Maverick.
Against tank Maverick is 6-10 km range capped by lockon range, depending on the target background and contrast. 30 km is ballistic range only achievable against something big as ship.
I can carry 16 SDBs for the weight of 2 2000lb JDAMs, which is far more valuable then making two targets really dead 99% of the time since you don't need a big bomb to kill a target if you can drop it at their feet.
At twice the cost, with almost no fragmentation, almost the same accuracy. It's a surgical tool to destroy ground shelters. The real bombing is done with JDAMS
>The gun is only gonna be used for strafing infantry
Stop saying this, everyone. A gun is useful for interceptions.
>You get more rounds for the same weight/volume than 30mm, but you have more HE filler than 20mm.
>The gun is only gonna be used for strafing infantry, most likely. Having more HE increases your Pk.
Anon only round they made is 25mm APEX. it has small HE filling (its mostly AP round with delayed fuse) and it has no fragmentation effect at high angle strafing (larger than 30 degrees or so), rounds dig into ground and explode underground. At lower angles they ricochet from teh ground and burst in the air with ok effect.
25mm is probably enough to fit an airburst mechanism. Maybe they just haven't gotten around to making the cool ammo because it's moronic expensive to shoot.
25x137mm has way more armor penetration than 20mm, so we can assume it is more effective against targets like light armor. F-35A has 180 rounds, B and C has 220 rounds with gun pod. That is way less ammunition than most 4th gen fighters have. In theoretical air combat situation, gun doesn't even fire unless it is practically guaranteed to hit the target, that is what they can do with ballistic computer, electro-optics or radar. Ammo they use is tungsten tipped HE with delayed fuse.
They put the gun in Phantom because missiles of 60's weren't adequate for air combat with fighters. Bombers weren't only thing they were going to fight with. 60's heat seeking missiles had really little off boresight capability and were unreliable. So USAF started fitting their gunless Phantoms with gun pods and later variants of Phantom got internal gun.
USAF Phantoms got 15 kills with gun in Vietnam. US Navy never had Phantoms with internal guns. Bongoloids had to modify their ex-USN F-4J's to fit SUU-23 gun pods, ones they got in 80's as stop gap due to Tornado F3 being delayed. If I recall correctly, they got hardpoints for gunpods salvaged from already retired USAF F-4C's or F-4D's.
> missiles of 60's weren't adequate for air combat with fighters
Nah, the missiles weren’t actually that bad. The primary issue was that pilots were not familiar with the limitations of said missiles. Which is why the Navy started Top Gun
Training issues makes sense, but I don't think it completely eliminates limitations tech back then.
I wouldn't surprised at all if there were minor differences between USN and USMC F-4J's, hell USN might have had differences between different production batches of F-4J.
The US Navy had gun pods for their F-4J, similar to the F-4C, which was what I was referring to rather than an internal gun in particular. Albeit, I could be confusing USN and USMC Phantoms, so apologizes if I messed up.
Guns are useful on figters. I'm tired of computer dorks saying otherwise
>muh internal gun
Is this board really filled with fricking historylet morons that dont know what the frick fighters use guns for other than A2A?
You grew up durimg the war on terror, how can you be this dumb?
>180 rounds at 3300 RPM
>3 seconds of trigger time
So one strafing run and some change?
This isn't you firing a Browning, it doesn't take much to frick up a convoy of trucks filled with infantry.
@58940055
someone is mad
Everyone wanted the higher velocity 25mm. You're not doing as much of crossing shots as you would with legacy fighters and being able to pounce with passive sensors was more valuable.
old M61 Vulcan that's been on every cannon armed jet the USAF has used for the past 50 years
>>25mm meme gun that's an attempt to make the Harrier's cannon lighter
Larger caliber was result of air to ground requirements.
It was required to defeat BMP-2 from 10000ft slant range (range that has enough stand off to protect attacking fighter from return fire with BMP-2 gun and HMGs from tanks). 20mm is to weak to defeat BMP-2 armor from such range, 25mm does the trick.
>muhhhh brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrtt
Was such requirement justified? You decide.
Basically, a gun is useful for interceptions, shooting targets close to civilian planes, and dogfights, which are somewhat common when both sides use terrain masking and/or stealth.
The idea that the gun on f-35 is purely for ground attack is full moron. The reason the f-35a has an integral gun is because guns are often incredibly useful in air to air interdictions. You can do things with them that you can't with missiles, like fire warning shots and engage from super close distances. The f-35a is the airforce variant and probably to most likely jet to get into these situations, which speaks volumes about how the airforce perceives guns.
The f-35c and b are operated by the navy and marines. Them cutting the gun purely for weight reasons makes a lot of sense, since they need all the range they can get. I can see them being the ones mounting the gunpod only for CAS missions. Especially since that's all the f-35b will ever do.
>The idea that the gun on f-35 is purely for ground attack is full moron.
Caliber choice was driving by ground attack requirements.
There is no 25mm APEX round use by other branches. No other 25mm round is qualified for F-35.
>Muh caliber means muh gun can only do one thing!
Oh boy, a bunch of peacetime intimidation you can accomplish with literally any arms. That's the reason for the gun. Yeah.
You also fail to realize it'll be useful if you want to, lets say, wipe out an observation drone, (enemy or one that's lost control) with something less than a million dollar missile.
Why waste a million dollar missile on a 5,000 dollar drone that's moving in a slow moving straight line?
>You also fail to realize it'll be useful if you want to, lets say, wipe out an observation drone, (enemy or one that's lost control) with something less than a million dollar missile.
>
>Why waste a million dollar missile on a 5,000 dollar drone that's moving in a slow moving straight line?
modern fighters operate such on the edge of their fuel and energy limits that flying down to intercept a slow moving drone with your gun and then getting back up to super cruise at altitude would not be worth it
If it's actually a $5000 drone then it's insignificant to the air force and is the army's problem. Actually useful drones that can reach miles into your territory cost millions of dollars.
in b4 the moron tries to talk about Iranian wonder weapons.
in 20 years drones that are built to half the size of those things with half the range and more mass produced hardware made from 2020 refurbished phone chips and 4k cameras will be 5000 dollars.
It's just looking to the future.
moron
> Why waste a million dollar missile on a 5,000 dollar drone
Because you have approximately a frickton more
What do you do if you actually sneed to do some peacetime shit, and the F35 is for some reason the only plane you have for hundreds of nautical miles? You gonna wait for the rust bucket to arrive for efficiency's sake? You aren't always gonna get a ton of pre planning for what it goes into
you certainly dont use a weapon that could seriously risk civilian casualties from stray rounds, just to show off whos dick is bigger in a peace time pissing match
I wasnt the anon specifically referring to warning shots. Rather low intensity but still serious tasks including things like shooting groups of loitering drones, balloons, or smaller seacraft.
I dont think I would use the guns for any of these scenarios except the sea craft (provided I dont have any kind of ground attack ordinance)
Any drone thats worthy of the attention of a fast moving fixed wing asset is going to be worthy of a missile, we are talking something the size of a Reaper or TB2, anything smaller and its under the realm of ground fire and electronic warfare to deal with. Same goes for balloons as we saw a few months ago when China was spamming those across the country.
The risk of stray rounds fired from the cannon is simply too great to use outside of CAS/COIN and BFM with another enemy pilot and even then I wouldnt use the gun unless I was being opportunistic or im out of missiles.
the 25x137mm round is shared with other shipboard weaponry. Every branch currently has a weapon chambered in that caliber.
I'm laughing at all then Black folk who say that a cannon on a plane is useless for air to air combat.
Black folk.
It's looking like the "guns are only for CAS" guy is getting properly BTFO. I guess he's just throwing a tantrum at this point.
You sound upset.
Did you know that the F-35 gun is for COIN and CAS?
We don't give a frick about the F-35 specifically, it's a jet with 4 missiles and a gun with 3 seconds of fire.
You give a giant frick and you're very upset.
Did you know that the F-35 gun is for COIN and CAS?
I don't, I actually pretty much laugh at all this shit because EVERYBODY has guns except you Black person morons spamming this shit every time.
>I laugh
You are mad as frick.
Did you know that the F-35 gun is for COIN and CAS?
I don't, I actually pretty much laugh at all this shit because EVERYBODY has guns except you Black person morons spamming this shit every time.
You do know the J-20 doesn't carry a cannon, don't you? Can you tell me how many gun kills have happened since 'Nam?
>Did you know that the F-35 gun is for COIN and CAS?
Considering caliber choice was to defeat armor it was surely not for COIN. But supposedly for gun CAS against mechanized troops (cringe)
How much gun kills were scored in Ukraine?
It is not. It's just wasted weight if your reason is for A2A. It's for other roles.
It's great for A2A
Implying ukraine is a real war, has a real air to air war with 5th gen fighters and sufficient available HUD footage and reports to claim which kills have been made with what, when, by who and how.
Black folk
> It's great for A2A
It’s no. It’s unneeded if your pilots are competent and you possess high precision munitions.
LOL. It is. A competent pilot isn't a metric for declaring a weapon useless. A competent pilot will place a group of 20 mils on a sukhoi and saw it in half, if that's the case
We don't need guns on the plane because you don't know what you're doing, anon.
Oh shit, you're chimping out homie holy frick
A competent pilot means that they will understand how to use their missiles. Which means that they will shoot down the enemy long before cannon shells are remotely useful.
A competent pilot would use his AIM-120D at 70 miles out while the SU is completely blind, and follow up with an AIM-9X if need be. If you're in a dogfight in an F-22 or F-35 you're an extremely incompetent pilot in over your head.
In an ideal scenario, maybe. But life isn’t always ideal.
It would be useful in the reasonably probable scenario of F-35s fighting a swarm of J-20s in the SEA. Even second-rate Chinese stealth combined with needing to pull the AWACS out of intercept range increases the chance of merging with a bandit with very little prior warning.
Isn't there 5 times more f35 than there are j20?
Maybe across the world, divided among the countries using it, US international airbases and there's a few f-35c on carriers. But locally, over the ranges of the South China Sea and Taiwan, the J20 is more numerous. That's where the fight would be.
>the J20 is more numerous.
Got verifiable proof of that? Sat data shows them to have less than 100 J-20s TOTAL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_States_naval_aircraft
The US navy currently only has 26 f-35c, and 13 of those are for training. We know that the chinese have encountered f-35c planes lately, so I'm guessing that means the 13 active f-35c are on carriers in the pacific. 236 more are on order, but its likely that j-20 production will far surpass 250 by the time the USN is done getting their f-35Cs.
But there's also the US marines. Currently they have somewhere around 30 f-35b/c. I can't get the hard numbers for this time period. They plan to have 430 total.
As for f-35a, I'm not sure how many are in range of the SCS and Taiwan.
Oh, it's the "the F-22 can't shoot missiles" moronic. Carry on, my shill fren. good luck on your further baiting.
Not sure who you're talking about or what you mean. I feel like you're not getting the point that America's forces can't all be in the pacific, while China has everything they've got in the theatre.
https://www.flightglobal.com/download?ac=83633
The section on America is in page 33. As I said, the Navy has 13 f-35c. The Marines have 85 f-35b/c. The airforce has 153 f-35a. China says it has 19 j-20.
It's looking there's probably a higher number of f-35 in the pacific than there are j-20, at least for now.
These figures do not add up to the over 750 F-35s in service.
Well then your own source is wrong.
Actually your source is wrong. The Navy has always been steady in that they plan to buy the F-35 when it reaches block 4, which began manufacture last year. It's also just handwaving on the Chinese numbers, and you're being inconsistent in that you're not even using your source's stated J-20 number yet you're willing to use it for American aircraft. Meanwhile you conclude that China produces more J-20s (and for some reason you b-line a comparison between the two even though that's not how military power works) per year than the Navy will be procuring F-35Cs even though China probably doesn't produce very many J-20s per year.
No one cares, bud, the USN alone is a giant threat to China, and the USN isn't alone anyhow.
You have no source. If you looked for one you'd just find my sources because those are the most up to date ones. Maybe you need to try harder this time. If not for me, then for yourself.
>my sources
You have one source, and so far you've used it incorrectly. And it's not a good source in the first place. I don't need a source to point out that you're wrong.
>I don't need a source to point out that you're wrong.
I've got a source that says you're wrong, and you've got nothing. It's being cited correctly as I have listed all the numbers from it and even pointed you to the appropriate sections. You probably didn't even read it, and all you're doing now is burying your head in sand. I have no recourse other than to believe you're being defensive because you know what I'm saying is valid, but you're unwilling to admit it for emotional reasons.
>Wikipedia
Do better.
>It would be useful in the reasonably probable scenario of F-35s fighting a swarm of J-20s in the SEA.
J-20s lack cannons, so they're not going to be going for a merge with anyone. They would lay back and shoot missiles. So, I fail to see where a cannon would help you? Can you use it to shoot down the missiles screaming at you at Mach 4 with the ability to pull 50G+? If not, you're going to die with a full load-out of ammo burning full, and taking up weight that could be used for something else like fuel, or more towed decoys. A cannon is useless, and has been since 1970, it's time to admit it.
>Even second-rate Chinese stealth combined with needing to pull the AWACS out of intercept range increases the chance of merging with a bandit with very little prior warning.
How would the J-20 know where the F-35 is? The F-35 has much better sensors, better trained pilots, and a much broader and detailed threat library for said sensors. The EW suite is able to "see" the J-20 at DOUBLE the range that the J-20 would be able to detect the F-35 - if it can(I doubt it), due to the inverse square law for radar return strength. If the J-20 uses its radar, the F-35 will see it, and the EW suite will triangulate the position, the F-35 then avoids them. The F-35 radar is LPI, so, it can't be detected when in use, allowing the F-35 to use it's radar in contested airspaces. Like I've said ITT already, if you're in a dogfight in an F-35, you're a moronic pilot, or you were sent on an absolute suicide mission by your commander.
>It's great for A2A
It's not. F-35 squadrons fly so far apart they don't see each other during their missions. It's just dispersed planes firing missiles at targets through a network of sensors. They don't get close to enemy aircraft.
If you are next to an enemy plane in modern combat then you're doing something wrong.
>4 missiles
>flying in ships of 4
Dude, for real......
But why are you so mad?
>It's just dispersed planes firing missiles at targets through a network of sensors
ideally yes
>famous NATO CounterAirOffensive
>F-16 flying to dogfights Russians with gun
>we will show how this is d...ACK!
>We still haven't given them Vipers so...
>They're literally pushing Mig-29s to the extreme with maintenance squads of 40 people...
LOL
>t.vietnam boomer
missiles can be jammed or diverted
but good luck evading a ballistic projectile (if it ever had a chance of hitting you in the first place)
Guns are for when you are out of missiles and need to return to base, so you aren't completely fricking defenseless if you merge with enemy bandits. YOU FRICKING moronS.
>hey guys I brought a gun to a missile fight
No it isn't. You'll be shot down by a missile from 40 miles away in that case.
I said if you MERGE with a bandit, dumb frick. And you can avoid BVR missiles in a plethora of ways. Terrain masking, notching, flares, etc...
I heard you. And I said you'll be shot down from 40 miles away. I'm right and you're wrong. Your situation won't happen and mine will.
>And I said you'll be shot down from 40 miles away.
Maybe, maybe not. But remember, the F-35 is stealth, fricktard. It is not a given that a long range missile will get it. In fact, against a competent pilot, it's less than 50%. I'm right and you're wrong. Deal with it.
>In fact, against a competent pilot, it's less than 50%
This type of stupid factoid is something a teenager posts on the internet.
Everything you're proposing is so obviously wrong. A fleeing plane doesn't stand a much better chance because its carrying a gun. If a plane is so fricking stealthy you can't hit it with a missile then you can't chase after it to get into gun range either, you need to have an effective track in either situation. You'd never choose to spend more time chasing a plane that you can shoot a missile at now. Modern battlefields are littered with missiles and the only thing an anti-air missile would be more prioritized to over something like an F-35 would be a full blown bomber.
Make no mistake, you are wrong and I am right.
Why the frick would you merge with a bandit if you have no missiles? And neither does any of your flight?
Holy frick you are so moronic it hurts. You are like a child who wanders into a theater when the movie is half over. In a large scale encounter, an F-35 may run out of missiles and be retreating to base when they are intercepted. Shit like that happens all the time is large air missions in major wars. Dogfights are not a thing of the past as much as people want to say they are.
Prior to the advent of radar, maybe.
> an F-35 may run out of missiles
And then it returns home with his wingman who likely still has ammo. And on the off chance an enemy aircraft just happens to be between them and the airfield, they would see it from hundred of miles off and detour around it. Or they wouldn’t, and then they’d get blasted by the guy who still has missiles and the gun is still irrelevant.
Okay, moron. I'll let the US military that their fighter jets should have LESS tools at their disposal because you said that certain scenarios, that have happened in every large scale war, will somehow not happen in the next one.
And they’ll probably tell you “Yeah, we know guns are stupid. But the Brbuttholes pitch a fit and screech about Vietnam every time we point it outl
>Terrain masking
Now you have no energy, even your missiles are at a disadvantage, and only lasts as long as it takes for the opponent to move.
>Notching
Is a finite resource.
>Flares
Lmao.
None of these things will actually help you win a fight, but they might extend your life by under a minute or two.
They can all save your life, dumbfrick. And in any event, even MORE reason you would want guns if you are out of missiles. You can't truly be this dumb, can you?
What the frick are you gonna do against a target with an alt advantage of ten angels or better that knows exactly where the frick you are?
>after I've put myself in an unwinnable dogfight by using terrain masking to have zero energy, my gun will save me
People don't MERGE all fricking gentlemanly like in your DCS 1v1s you spastic moron.
Would you give up tactical advantage on an enemy who's location you know, just for a MERGE?1?1?1?
frick no. if you had F-35 stealth you'd stay as far away as undetected as possible for a clean kill.
MERRRRRGE
God damn, frick off.
your mission: go to x to do y
terrain: hills and mountains
enemy knows he will lose in bvr combat
he stays low, uses mountains and hills as cover, you dont see him coming, suddenly he pops up from under you and targets you with infrared homing missiles, and there we have it, you are now in a dog fight.
> you dont see him coming
Except you do because look-down shoot-down has been a thing for more than forty years
Look down shoot down is just dopler radar against the ground, it doesn't magically make mountains and terrain obstruction vanish.
In the age of peer to peer stealth I expect air combat will return to early Cold War combat.
Dogfights will be common as the 2 stealth fighters get closer for weapon engagement. Fox 2 and guns will be the majority of fighter kills.
Long range radar guides missles will return to only being useful for large far away targets like awacs and cargo
I would expect that too.
If China or Russia actually had peer stealth.
Actually, I wouldn’t expect that. Because the best counter to stealth is big frick off radar on AWACS aircraft. And Russia and China don’t really give a shit about AWACS
That's why I said peer to peer and not modern stealth. This would be future shit where everyone's "frick you" range missles are just waiting for an awacs to be in the sky and stealth fighters are flying like buccaneers trying to hide from Irst and get close enough for a radar/ir lock
Picrel buccaneer low level flight
IRST can get a lock from 50km away from the frontal aspect and 90km from the rear aspect. That can't really be increased tho, you run into basic laws of physics with light getting diffused and diffracted by the atmosphere. Those CUDA missiles start to make a lot more sense when you consider that. I've been saying missile range is an overrated factor, but increasing speed would instead make more sense.
The range of IRST is based on your elevation in relation to the target. If both are forced to tree level that range drops from bvr to just vr.
You always need them, but these idiots can't grasp anything of that. Even the Raptor pilots were worried about running out of missiles with TWICE the amount of weps the F-35 has. It's nonsense. Plus, you may need to gun down other aircraft if you're doing air to ground like Marine aviation does
>Guns are for when you are out of missiles and need to return to base, so you aren't completely fricking defenseless if you merge with enemy bandits. YOU FRICKING moronS.
this scenario is so fricking dumb because you probably have enough fuel to use afterburner for like 30 seconds and you'd die in a dog fight just from your severe disadvantage even if the oponent had only guns. like your scenario makes ZERO sense
Also it’s fricking dumb, because there would be tankers nearby. So the hypothetical lone missile-less F-35 would go drink off of that for a little while while they radio in where the bad guy is so that it can be dealt with by fresh assets
you realize the F-35 is mostly an attack aircraft and would have air superiority escorts like F-22 on any real mission, right?
F-35 is easily capable of being an air superiority fighter on it's own. "Air superiority fighter" does not mean "superior air fighter, the most supreme of them all". And an inability to conduct strike missions does not make a fighter better for gaining and maintaining air superiority.
Now you're just blatantly shitposting
This white guy saying canned phrases like for real/homie holy frick is really mad.
Get the frick back in your grave sprey
I'm just gonna drop this here
https://www.rjlee.org/air/ds-aakill/
>ordnance
>GBU-10
It's a good story, though in the interview he says it was a Hind
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/that-time-an-f-15e-shot-down-an-iraqi-mi-24-attack-helicopter-with-a-2000lb-laser-guided-bomb/
Dread to think what the aftermath was like, pic related
Likely means a maneuver kill, but I am having a giggle picturing a Psyker telekinetically throwing a rock at someone.
>Target: Bo-105
>Ordnance GAU-8
poor guy
>ordnance
>ground
There was a growler that got into a dog-fight with something and used their target-fixation to out-manoeuvrer them and had them dive into the ground but the credit went to an armed aircraft that had failed to shoot them down in the same engagement.
when it says Ordinance 'ground' does that mean a maneuver kill, if so fricking out skilled
Yes. Iraqi pilots were flying low to the ground, easy to make a mistake when something spooks you.
Yeah, that EF-111 kill has an interview, it was a ground strike. It is a bit controversial, some believe it was the same F-1 in Graeter's second kill report.
I will choose to ignore it because it upsets me. Sparkvark supremacy.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/ef-111a-ewo-explains-why-the-raven-aerial-kill-scored-during-operation-desert-storm-was-a-low-altitude-maneuvering-kill-and-not-an-f-15c-air-to-air-victory/
EWAR > stealth
No. You cannot change my mind.
EWAR + stealth >>>>>> EWAR
>4
6 with the Block 4 that's being built rn. Why are the F-35's detractor always stuck on 4? Not saying you're one tho.
$28 million is nothing, it's 1/3rd of a single fighter's flyaway cost. A single Nordic country's order of Stingers is in the $100-200 million ballpark. Everyone's saying the F-35 is such an expensive hangar-queen it cannot possibly afford the risk of tarnishing it's skin with soot and powder residue. If you scale that $73.5 million flyaway price tag to inflation, it's just as affordable as the F-16 and F/A-18 were in their day.
Didn't know Block 4 was getting 2 more missiles, that's a good thing. The problem is that 6 missiles is still a very low number... BVR ranges drop the pK of missiles like hell, this is why I'm worried about having too few of those. If the Raptor pilots were worried with 8 (which is the US standard more or less), I'd be worried more with less
Now, I hope they can fit the AIM-260 in there (which in that case 6x AIM-260 is bettter than 6 AMRAAMs)...
It's called the Sidekick. Mounts 2x extra AMRAAMs total on the bay doors.
Yeah, it would be nice to have more missiles in a strictly stealth config. I wouldn't really care about AIM-260 and Meteor that much. If it were going in a strictly stealth vs stealth fight, the effective lock-on range would likely be around what the max range of IRST is, so 50km from the front. Higher speed would have value on it's own, and fighters aren't stationary targets.
The AMRAAM is old. I know this sounds hard, but even with the better electronics, the Meteor or other new missiles are simply better. The AIM-260 should be the right choice IMHO
You can't be both stealthy and an EW platform, or at least not at the same time.
You are 100% wrong. Passive radar stealth amplifies the effectiveness of EW by a huge order of magnitude. It's much easier to fake or drown out a tiny radar signature than a large one.
???
Using EW on a stealth plane is like decorating a ghillie suit with christmas lights.
Ad hominem was omitted but implied.
No, it's more like trying to see a guy in a ghillie suit with an image intensifier, while being blinded by a magnesium flare, vs a guy in a shiny tin-foil suit. Stealth and EW are mainly about denying radar locks, not "being unseen". It's much easier to fake or drown out your radar return if it's the size of a 2mm ball bearing like an F-22, than the size of a seagull like a Gripen.
A targeting radar does not have the same capabilities as a home-on-jam seeker or an anti-radiation missile. It just emits radiation and observes the radiation it's receiving antenna catches, and compares it to expected timings. It's all about denying them a usable firing solution. Passive stealth augments EWAR, always.
The F-35 does actually have some capability to jam the ranges of early warning radars, not just targeting radars. But they're still fairly tight-lipped about it. A Lock-Mart rep was heavily implying it a couple years back. A smaller signature helps in this, too. Unlike the F-22, the F-35's passive stealth also works against some of the larger wavelengths of early warning radars. It wasn't originally a goal, mostly just luck with a little intent behind it.
>he doesn't know about jamming burn through
What are you even doing here , nub?
I though he's read about something like an Exocet having home-on-jam capability and thought a targeting radar can thus automatically just pinpoint the exact location of any jammer that's jamming it.
I really don't know anything about actual jamming techniques used, but there's tons of them. You see most modern fighters having those EW emitters on their wingtips, those are part of a "cross-eye" jamming system that's used to make them appear much closer or further from a radar.
It's not just flooding them with white noise. Jammers can fake multiple duplicates of the plane. Imagine if you're a radar looking into the sky and you see a perfect line of tiny ball-bearings in the sky, from the front of your nose out to 3000 kilometers away, one every 100 meters. Only one of them is an F-35, but which one? That's not a real "jamming technique" tho, like I said I don't know much myself either. Faking a larger signature drains more raw electrical power from the jamming emitter, and calculating power from the computer. Painting 300 B-52s into the sky is not as easy.
Oh right, and you need to have an algorithm pre-written in place to figure that out in less than a second, automatically. You don't have the time give that radar return to a bunch of nerds to figure it out.
I see two gun kills, mission successful.
>"Cheese" Graeter
>"Tater" Tate
>'Cherry' Pitts
>'Mole' Underhill
>'May Day' May
I fricking love call signs
missed the best one
>"chewie" bakke
surname based nicknames like "Cherry" Pitts or "Mole" Underhill are the most basic level of callsign.
The next level is nicknames based on innate characteristics like "Big Joe" McCarthy, "Winkle" Brown (because he was a based turbo manlet) , "One Armed Mac" Maclachlan etc. The final level is nicknames based on amusing incidents like "Wrong Way" Corrigan or "Butcher" Harris
The rarest callsigns are those whose origin is lost to history like "Bunny" Currant.
The Last Intruder has a good scene on how people get their callsign. Usually a frick-up of some kind.
There was one F-14 pilot with the callsign "Crunch" because during taxiing he ran into another aircraft causing a very expensive fender bender.
"Gigs" Hehemann
>"Rico" Rodriguez
Someone was a fan of Ska
Guns seem like a joke until you need guns.
>EF-111A got a maneuver kill
Imagine getting outplayed by an electronic warfare plane
so why the 25mm and not the Vulcan?
If only there were multiple posts in the thread explaining that.
summerize them for me
Okay. Basically the 25mm can fire stealth rounds that won't betray the F-35's location on radar or IR sensors and will safely return to the F-35's gun like a boomerang if they miss, saving ammo.
very reasonable
Strafing has to be the worst form of ground attack, minimal impact on target and exposes the aircraft to even small arms fire.
The Gau-12 was a great cannon though that was in a sweet spot of good firepower without being too heavy.
I've even seen British exchange pilots that flew with the marines in the 80s said it was much better than the ADEN 30mm (used on the Sea Harrier and Harrier Gr3) and the Suu-23 Vulcan pods (used by RAF Phantoms).
Could a gun be used to intercept stuff like slow big bomb drones ? Direct plane interceptor V1 style like the British ? Or does a flight hour cost so much you can do the expensive missile spam AA any way?
>big
the drones that are being used to drop "bombs" don't wind up being THAT big. Relative to a fighter jet flying 250+kt, shooting one of those down with guns would be very difficult. Plus, you'd have to factor in what is past the drone - so you'd have to make sure your angles were good before you fire off a BRRRT
>Could a gun be used to intercept stuff like slow big bomb drones ? Direct plane interceptor V1 style like the British ? Or does a flight hour cost so much you can do the expensive missile spam AA any way?
guns are useful for anything that can't shoot back in situations where not wasting your A/A ordinance is wise i.e Pucharas getting blasted by 30mm in the falklands.
>the bulge
every time
Lasers.
There is so much Reddit in this thread holy shit. Go back NCD
I think guns would be pretty useful for taking out cruise missiles right? You might not want to waste your million dollar turbo-encabulated gigasonic AASFUkK missiles against them
>I think guns would be pretty useful for taking out cruise missiles right?
You can do that with a 70mm Hydra with a laser guided seeker bolted to it, with much, much better results. Which is exactly what the US has done, tested, and proven to work.
Sounds like something said about the phantom II when it went to Vietnam. "Oh you don't need guns, you have rocket pods". It turned out that guns were more accurate and useful for getting through trees, saturating cover and such.
>Sounds like something said about the phantom II when it went to Vietnam.
We've been over this already 100 times before, and I know you know it. F-4s with missiles had more kills than F-4s with cannons. The Air Force refused to use the Navy's superior Sidewinder at first, and used pilots straight out of cargo plans with 4 weeks total training in a plane completely opposite to their flight training for cargos. They also were using a new missile system mot seen before in fighters, along with very limiting ROEs, that made them hit the min. launch distance before having the ability to even shoot their missiles.
>"Oh you don't need guns, you have rocket pods".
>It turned out that guns were more accurate and useful for getting through trees, saturating cover and such.
Is it 1960-70 anymore? Bombs aren't gravity bombs anymore, grandpa, time to stop refusing to update your info pass "Nam or Korea.
It was even, worse. USAF refused to do maintenance on the missiles. Which resulted in multiple failures to launch, track, or even fly.
And they refused to train the pilots in anything about the missile past "launch on tone". Which for the early missiles was...
Well, let's say that the USSR training for missiles from the era resembles a dog fight as you want to get your opponent in a position where the missile does not need to maneuver as much.
>Why not repeat the Phantom II's problems all over again!
Part of me wants this because it would be funny, but no, it needs a gun option.
>How would the J-20 know where the F-35 is? The F-35 has much better sensors, better trained pilots, and a much broader and detailed threat library for said sensors. The EW suite is able to "see" the J-20 at DOUBLE the range that the J-20 would be able to detect the F-35 - if it can(I doubt it), due to the inverse square law for radar return strength.
You're making a shitton of assumptions here. Like for example that the fight isn't happening near a powerful ground-based Chinese radar or AWACS able to vector the J-20 to intercept, the J-20 keeping emissions off to ambush etc. There are plenty of scenarios like that, especially considering the fight would most likely be happening on Chinese turf. If merging was an impossibility, why even design the F-35 with such large control surfaces? You don't need them for missioe truck duty. It's not just the gun. Many aspects of the F-35 design signals that the USAF thinks that dogfighting is still somewhat possible.
1: F-35 radar can track without emitting by using other radar's returns. Thus the Chinese radars will paint their own J-20's for the F-35.
2: You need the control surfaces for evasive maneuvers. As when you see the enemy missile gliding down to you, you can actually dodge it in terminal.
Nope. You're in the NEZ, which means you're dead.
>F-35 radar can track without emitting by using other radar's returns.
No. You're confusing stuff. What you're talking about is ISAR (Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar) which is almost identical to SAR, except that ISAR technology uses the movement of the target rather than the emitter to create the synthetic aperture
>Like for example that the fight isn't happening near a powerful ground-based Chinese radar or AWACS able to vector the J-20 to intercept
First they would need to be able to detect, and track the F-35 from a tactically relevant distance. Can you tell me the detection range of Chinese ground radar, or AWACS for a target with an RCS of 0.0001m^2? As that is what the average RCS of the F-35 is. Seeing as they would be radiating, their location, and scanning direction would be picked up by the F-35 at double the distance they would be able to detect the F-35 due to the inverse square law. The F-35 pilots, and plane know where the RCS peaks are, and the detection range of those radars, and would be able to hide from them, or destroy them if they're in their way, long before those radars would know an F-35 is around. Chinese radars are about the same as Russia's as those are who built them, or got hired by China to design them. Sans some AESA Israel helped them with. Their ground based radars haven't fared too well in Syria, have they?
opinions on the idea of about only 200 NGAD manned aircraft?
Like the F-22: 1B$ wunderwaffe, maintenance intensive, low weapon load, too few in numbers to make a difference. Pure MIC shilling in short...
The real problem with the F-22s price tag is it wasn't allowed for export. That made all the costs of production and development all on the US. While the F-35 has international buyers helping deal with the costs. It also helps that a fair bit of development lessons from the F-22 have carried over.
Nobody would do that either. The advanced tech is simply too valuable to be exported. But that's not the actual problem, it's the production scale. Even the F-16, which is the most produced modern jet fighter, still costs 60 - 80M per plane even if half the world uses it.
They're intended to clear the sky to allow F-35s to operate with impunity, and the loyal wingman system means they're going to have incredible magazine depth so the limited number of platforms can punch far above their weight when thinking about modern airframes. If they get a mere 2 loyal wingmen per manned unit, that's kind of the equivalent of 600 airframes worth of missiles in an highly distributed package that minimizes casualties to pilots meaning lower costs and less of them are needed. As long as there's enough NGADs to have them spaced around the globe to have a sufficient number at the battlefield, a lower number of manned platforms really doesn't matter.
More like
>not be poor
>choose best gun for plane
>build massive supply chain for it cause frick you
>export success
Let me get this straight: it's common knowledge (except for moronic gun fetish fat Americans) that an A-10 gun is an overweight and mostly useless piece of shit in times of PGM. Yet a F-35 should strafe with what is compared to that a peashooter from a much more modern and yet much less optimised for CAS platform?
Whether the gun is worth it in A2A is doubtful, but I understand that you might not want to repeat the Vietnam mistake. But in cas just use a fricking PGM with with the same weight.
> moronic gun fetish fat Americans
Nah, we know that the A-10 is shit. It’s the boomers in Congress that think it’s still 1970 and that the only way to kill a tank is with a big gun.
>Was it spite?
Just thenold procurement fund scam. They's buy each 25mm round for 30k each and pocket the rest.
Same deal as the ATF spending 18m dollars for firewood per year
Does it have to be a gatling cannon? Why not a revolver cannon like the BK27?
Zlol brvause revolvers are obsolete.
Do you know what isn’t obsolete? A dictionary. Learn to fricking spell you maroon.
Lmao the bk-27 is a massive turd.
It does however excel at training pilots and ground crew on how to handle misfires...
A gun makes sense for shooting things not worth spending a missile on, such as large drones or transport planes. So you can conserve missiles for things more worthwhile, such as other fighters.
A gun means that the massive quantity of these planes around the world stationed at every american airbase can do things like low risk intercepts of flight space incursions.
They can fire warning shots to show they mean business or even potentially target a wing or an engine without having to completely blow the thing out of the sky.
Just gives them a little more versatility.
I'm just waiting for when they'll announce an EA-35 "Howler" or something. I know the F-35A basically has empty space on the right side of the fuselage on the opposite side of the gun, and a lot more elsewhere too. But will they use the A or C as the basis for it? Seems like USAF doesn't have a dedicated EA anymore, at least in a fighter format? So maybe C for the navy if they'll want to retire Super & Growler.
>I'm just waiting for when they'll announce an EA-35 "Howler" or something.
Will never happen, as EW is becoming more decentralized onto smaller UAVs. The F-35 alone is an extremely capable EW platform, rivaling the EA-18 - especially with its stealth (allows for lower powered EW suites), Conformal load-bearing antenna structure (CLAS) technology (Much better gain, and range (17 times the range for comms) than the EA-18 vert tail antennas), Much more powerful processors than the EA-18, etc. It's why the USAF stood up "Spectrum Warfare" squadrons for the F-35s. Not only that, the F-35 can infect IADS with malware, allowing it to control the enemies IADS radars with a Cyber Warfare program called SUTER. It can even use its MADL data-link antennas. The F-35 is a monster, that has yet to be allowed to show its true capabilities, and may never unless there's a huge war.
The C is the least manufactured variant, so I'd think they'll prefer to use the A frame for keeping costs down. Just take out the gun and you've got tons of space.
That's why I thought the A would be the most obvious choice if it were designed, at first. Except, why doesn't the Navy just use the A instead of C? Oh right, it needs to be able to take off and land on a carrier. They're supposed to be almost the same to maintain anyway, that's why they all had to fit into the "same" airframe.
Oh yeah, and the Air Force originally wanted a 25mm as far back as the 70's when the F-15 was still on the drawing board. Kind of stuck on using the ubiquity and "proven" status as an argument when it's so forced.
Reminder that muricans got the chink balloon with guns.
AIM-9X, actually.
Oh really? Welp.
Supposedly a pair of Leaf CF-18s tried to kill a weather balloon over the Atlantic back in 1998 using their guns but it didn't have much of an impact: it started losing helium, but at such a slow rate that it still stayed airborne for 9 more days.
>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64546767
>The instrumentation was sent back to Canada and reused (though there were some bullet holes on the instrument package and its parachute). Mr Sommerfeldt said.
>decide to go with 25mm and force the USAF to buy new ammo
They were already keen on 25mm for the AC-130 though
What anti armor options will F-35 posses? Since it's replacing Maverick trucks like A-10 and F-16 you'd assume it would have some similar capabilities.
The truth is that it'd have been possible to build a US drone that's both more cost effective and stealthier than the F35 for typical strike. SEAD missions a decade ago. The Chinese and Russians are already doing it and it'll be in service soon.
The US had it but let it slip, presumably due to the pilot lobby being too strong. Instead they have prototypes and technology demonstrators.
> Chinese and Russians are already doing it and it'll be in service soon.
Just like armata?
I give it a decade before they swap it for a pulse laser.
A laser weapon in addition or instead of the cannon for the F-35 is in the works. It's got that right-side gunslot free and more unused space elsewhere.