Your Nation's Air Force Mark III: Best Korea Edition

[The Akasha Colony]

Crap, missed that part :/ Well there's always in-flight refueling but there's probably something wrong with that too.

Can you safely refuel in enemy airspace?

If you somehow have this capability, then w/e. But no nation IRL has this capability or seems likely to develop this capability, so there's that.

Ok, so if you do need a really long range bomber, how do you get a decent one without building your own? The only one I can find that got exported widely is the Tu-16/H-6 which are about the same age as the ghosts in your basement.

You don't. Nations that imagine they will be fighting wars of that scale are presumably and wealthy enough to afford developing their own bombers. Or they are forced to rely on bomber coverage from a big friend.

[Iltica]

Refueling in enemy airspace wouldn't be the dumbest thing I've tried, but no.
I guess they'll just have to use carrier planes.

[Gallia-]

But you are correct. Any tactic used against an Arab military wouldn't fare well against competent opponents.

That's not what I said at all.

[Zhouran]

But you are correct. Any tactic used against an Arab military wouldn't fare well against competent opponents.

That's not what I said at all.

But if certain tactics works against Arab militaries, it wouldn't be the same against more-competent enemies. The Israeli military is no doubt highly-experienced but only against Arab militaries and ragtag militias, they are untested when facing against non-Arab militaries (in a conventional warfare scenario).

If you somehow have this capability, then w/e. But no nation IRL has this capability or seems likely to develop this capability, so there's that.

Wouldn't the safest be to have your strike planes refuelled mid-air in friendly airspace before they enter enemy airspace, and once they return they mid-air refuel again before landing?

[Gallia-]

That's not what I said at all.

But if certain tactics works against Arab militaries, it wouldn't be the same against more-competent enemies.

I'm fairly sure the Israeli tactic of aerial ambushing would work well enough against anyone without look-down or airborne radars. The problem is that it requires greater experimentation. Arabs are a step above the Green Ivan target.

It's not clear whether the Serbs specifically looked at the U.S. Army's experience in the Gulf and anticipated ways to successfully defuse the U.S. Cavalry's deep raiding in attack helicopters or that they merely understood the weakness of the attack helicopter was its inability to survive in the face of hostile fire and requirement for accurate ISR and suppression of air defenses with long-range artillery. The Serbs weren't stupid, but neither were the Iraqis complete wooden tables either, since the Republican Guard successfully defeated the U.S. Cavalry in the battle of Karbala and preserved the fighting strength of their armored division.

It may also have been helpful that the U.S. Cavalry is probably clinically insane, since it seems to believe that the only way to fight wars is the "raiding" method.

they are untested when facing against non-Arab militaries (in a conventional warfare scenario).

They [Ashkenazis anyway] also have the highest IQ of any ethnic group in the world and have the kind of world class top tier war equipment to prove it.

But no nation IRL has this capability

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_Q_Strike

By the time that the F-16s approached the border some were almost out of fuel. One fighter would have crashed short of Coalition territory had a KC-135 tanker from the Kansas National Guard not crossed over into enemy territory. When the F-16s began refueling in Iraqi territory, it had only 800 pounds of fuel on board, in the words of the wing commander, flying as a wingman, “an eye-watering situation.”

also i forgot to say how absolutely f r e s h this is btw

Having designed my own h i g h m a c h jet I have like a bajillion more pdfs just like those. Personally I prefer heat pipe cooling along the leading edges using cryogenic fuel (assuming an air-breathing, reusable vehicle) but film cooling and/or transpiration cooling has potential as a method of cooling the sidewalls of your ramjet/scramjet engines.

Cryogenics are lame and this isn't super speedy or anything it's only like Mach 5-ish.

It's sort of like puffing up an F-117 or something. A crummy attempt to get a Ultrabomber built when the real Ultrabomber (read: M12 airbreather) is still +50 years away.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

Refueling in enemy airspace wouldn't be the dumbest thing I've tried, but no.
I guess they'll just have to use carrier planes.

Cruise missiles

[The Akasha Colony]

Wouldn't the safest be to have your strike planes refuelled mid-air in friendly airspace before they enter enemy airspace, and once they return they mid-air refuel again before landing?

If your target is 1,000 km behind the lines and your planes have a maximum radius of only 600 km, you're a bit stuck unless you're going to refuel 400+ km inside enemy territory.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

Cryogenics are lame and this isn't super speedy or anything it's only like Mach 5-ish.

It's sort of like puffing up an F-117 or something. A crummy attempt to get a Ultrabomber built when the real Ultrabomber (read: M12 airbreather) is still +50 years away.

No love for M5 penetrator?

In any case assuming a hot structure airframe with a fuel-cooled engine (scramjet) your typical endothermic hydrocarbon fuel (ie JP-7) is good up to around mach 8 or so. Past then and it's LH2 or bust.

[Gallia-]

Scramjets don't work...

Turboramjets do.

The alleged "M5" penetrator looks more like M2-3. Much like Yakovlev's dumb trash PFI thing.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

Scramjets don't work...

Turboramjets do.

The alleged "M5" penetrator looks more like M2-3. Much like Yakovlev's dumb trash PFI thing.

It's designed for M5 cruise with an over/under turbojet/ramjet engine configuration.

Scramjets also work.....but really only reliably with either borane or hydrogen fuel. Hydrocarbons have too long of an ignition delay and are too susceptible to flameout. Unlike say borne which will ignite virtually instantaneously with air, allowing for a short combustor section and removing the need for any kind of complex igniter mechanism.

[Gallia-]

It's

A painting. And from the looks of it has about as much a chance of reaching M5 as this has a chance of out-turning the F-15:

Scramjets also

Don't work, unless you consider 2 minutes of flight time to be an impressive accomplishment or something. Maybe compared to literally fractions of seconds which is where scramjets were in the 1980s.

I'll be impressed when some Chinese megacorporation builds a functional scramjet aircraft in about 50-60 years in Shanghai but I don't know the 214 Radicals so I can't actually read about it in 50-60 years. Scramjets are the nuclear fusion of aviation. They might be solvable in 50-60 years if you can keep a consistent, cross-generational IQ increase going. Which European and its descendant civilizations have failed to do, but PRC is doing, so any substantial work that comes out of aviation of the future will probably be done in the PRC after the 2030s-2040s when the United States' ultimate generation reaches educational peak in their mid-20s and early-30s.

Until then, a few exploding NASA lawn darts and non-recoverable engines with flight times measured in the hundreds of seconds are not impressive. They are literally Aerospaceplane tier.

A functional M5 strike aircraft can probably be built with bleeding edge materials engineering, a lot of wasted money, and curtailed expectations, using a pair of high powered turboramjets. Which is exactly what I'm going for. It wouldn't look anything like your 1950s high supersonic plane, though. It would look like the various hypersonic designs painted on canvas by McDD in the 1970s. i.e. Lawn darts.



This is what I suppose "Ultrabomber" looks like. Not the real Ultrabomber, which is something Galla makes in the 2070s or 2080s I guess, but a lackluster 1st generation hypersonic/2nd generation supersonic bomber. The "it came from the Disco Age" look is because it literally came from the Disco Age. Galla has probably been funding the thing on/off for the past 30 years and it's just now starting to bear fruit as Galla produces the advanced 1990s turbines and ICs that can make it fly properly.

Mostly I'm just wondering how to increase the turnaround times for high supersonic aircraft though. The only way I can think of to shed a lot of heat is transpiration in subsonic or low supersonic flight in the stratosphere.

Besides that I can't imagine it would look much different, internally, than something like XB-70. It would have an internal bomb bay or two for off-axis nuclear missiles. It would have a pair or a quad of turboramjets depending on how big I make it. The pilots would wear spacesuits. And the bulk of its internal volume would be devoted to wetted area. It would obviously be a much different planform, though, because blended-wing bodies are The Future(TM) and they're much cuter than XB-70 which is kind of ugly even though I like him.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

Subsonic loiter pattern at 20-30k feet before landing. XB-70 in level flight at mach 3 took about 30 minutes to heat up to steady-state conditions, I'd assume in your typical descent profile from mach 3+ cruise (which is fairly gradual) the same time-temperature relationship would apply.

Turboramjet at mach 5 might work, although anything past mach 3-3.5 or so it will be operating as a pure ramjet. To avoid drag losses from the windmilling compressor blades it might be better to have an over under turbojet/ramjet arrangement and cocoon off the turbojets while transiting to the pure ramjet flowpath at around mach 3-3.5 or so.

E: the way I do it with my mach 3 bomber is supersonic cruise-climb to target at 60-80k feet, supersonic exfil, then once outside of defended airspace drop down to subsonic at 20-30k feet, find a tanker, and then subsonic cruise RTB. With a 2500 nmi combat radius and assuming 500 nmi is supersonic penetration that gives an RTB time of about 3 hours, more than enough time for the entire airframe to have cooled down to steady-state subsonic cruise temperature upon landing.

[Gallia-]

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[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

The designs for the RTA variable cycle engine (GE120 core w/ ramjet afterburner) I've seen top out at mach 4-4.1. Since in ramjet mode the flow still has to bypass the fan and enter the ramjet combustor through the fan duct you need to somehow design the split-fan assembly so that it can windmill while adding negligible drag losses, easier said than done. With a separate ramjet flowpath you can ignore all that and run the burner hotter since you don't have to worry about any fan/core stage inlet temperature restrictions.

[Vassenor]

Gah, I need to wash the Eurocanard out of my brain before I do something stupid like jump several steps ahead on my rewrite.

[Kanugues Wed]

What do you think of making stealthy pylons and external fuel tanks? Vertical surfaces are bad, so I think the pylons would need to look like this \. Maybe the fuel tanks would be shaped like the nose of the F-35 stuck end-to-end and stretched.

[The Akasha Colony]

What do you think of making stealthy pylons and external fuel tanks? Vertical surfaces are bad, so I think the pylons would need to look like this \. Maybe the fuel tanks would be shaped like the nose of the F-35 stuck end-to-end and stretched.

"Stealth" pylons and fuel tanks... aren't.

There are a lot of practical issues that arise with trying to make "add-on" components stealthy, which is why it isn't a popular option. AFAIK, the only real attempt at the moment is Boeing's effort to sell a "stealth" weapons pod for an upgraded Super Hornet variant, but Super Hornet isn't VLO in the first place so this isn't a very big issue. And to my knowledge, outside of just marketing the concept, Boeing hasn't done any serious work on actually developing such a pod anyway, especially since the USN hasn't shown interest.

Developing the necessary signature modeling alone to support a variable external weapons load would be a fairly costly and time consuming endeavor.

If you must add more payload or fuel, then permanent CFTs with internal weapons bays like F-15SE would be a better idea.

[Austrasien]

Designing an aircraft to be stealthy with and without external stores is a lot of work, to the say the least. Because the RCS of the aircraft and store combined is different (and not reducible) from the RCS of either separately, every single combination of external loads you intend to use needs to be checked experimentally. Even if you do it the resulting aircraft will be stuck with a handful of fixed, certified RCS kosher, external loads. Which is not much more flexible than storing them internally.

[Hayo]

How hard is it to upgrade various systems on stealth aircraft, since you're not going to be able to hang targeting pods and the like on external stores?

They're been talking about replacing F-35 EOTS in Block 4, since it's late 90s/early 2000s technology at this point. Is that going to be a PITA to replace or relatively easy?

[New Vihenia]

How hard is it to upgrade various systems on stealth aircraft, since you're not going to be able to hang targeting pods and the like on external stores?

bound to be bit of problem, especially if hardware change is involved. It has to be designed around the aircraft. Certifying new weapon would also be complicated given the size of the weapon must be constrained if intended to be deployed from internal bay.

---------------
Talking about upgrade... I found a neat equation which relates cooling capacity with maximum emitted power for AESA radar.



I made a thread about it in f16.net detailing example of usage but it has unusually small response. kinda sad given alot of enthusiasms involved whenever someone talks about AESA radar. Would love to see people come up with cooling capacity of various aircrafts. My example only shown that MiG-29 basically have half the radar cooling capacity of APG-79 equipped F/A-18E.

I expect the equation would be handy in predicting what kind of "maximum potential" of one's AESA radar.

[The Akasha Colony]

How hard is it to upgrade various systems on stealth aircraft, since you're not going to be able to hang targeting pods and the like on external stores?

They're been talking about replacing F-35 EOTS in Block 4, since it's late 90s/early 2000s technology at this point. Is that going to be a PITA to replace or relatively easy?

There will probably have to be some additional tests to ensure the exposed portion of the new equipment in the sensor housing doesn't affect RCS, but the biggest issue is really how easily the aircraft is designed to be upgraded. And given that the USAF is well aware they'll likely be stuck with their new crop of fifth gens for many decades, they've intentionally designed them to take into account upgrades. So big upgrades that require replacing the entire radar or something will still be as troublesome before, but smaller things like replacing the processing modules is much easier; it's already been done and is expected to be done again shortly IIRC.

[Manokan Republic]

I just figure you go all F-35's and F-22's and you're done. Maybe if you're Europe you pick a couple of typhoon fighters up or something.

The only real thing of question imo is helicopters and other vertical lift-off aircraft, because there are so many with so many purposes. Like do you have an infantry transport that is also an attack helicopter, do you go with an attack helicopter only, do you go with a V-22 or V280, these are the real questions. How many do you have and how common are they in your military, so on and so forth. What would it take for your elite units to have at least 1 per platoon etc.

Would it make sense to use trucks to transport them and provide maintenance so they could be used more readily in the field etc.

[Kanugues Wed]

I had an idea for what would basically be basic light attack and commando helicopter basic servicing equipment (fuel, armament, basic repairs) built onto a truck convoy. I'm imagining a helicopter a bit bigger and heavier than an OH-6, able to carry maybe four to six men internally but small enough to land in cramped areas. My nation is most likely to go to war with China and is within cruise missile range which makes having as many mobile assets as possible important. The idea is to base everything on the back of trucks so they can land, rearm and refuel helos and move on within an 45 minutes to an hour, hopefully before any GPS cruise missiles could arrive. I've put together the convoy so hopefully the helicopters could be flown as much as possible. For home defense duties (who gives a shit about having a copilot if your state is literally in mortal danger) one pilot would be resting while the other flies missions, swapping helicopters every few hours for 24 hours a day (yay, lets hand out some !not meth). Because of the need to relocate as much as possible, I included crew trucks providing beds and the sort while on the move.

The convoy would be made of HEMTT-style trucks with escort !not humvees. I'm imagining four convoys for each 16 aircraft squadron with one slightly larger command convoy, each convoy with

- 2x fuel trucks
- 1x Command and control truck for directing helicopters for CAS and communicating with the squadron commander. Also includes fold-out beds for 4x controllers.
- 4x medium-light helicopters
- 1x maintenance truck
- 4x flight crew trucks (two pilots per truck and ground crew for each helicopter, basically military RV's)
- 2x ordinance trucks
- 4x flatbed helicopter transport trucks with canvas covers for disguise
- 4x escort uparmored !not humvees
- 1x medical/MRE wagon truck

I'm wondering if this is a sensible idea, or if it would be too expensive and impractical? Also, do you think I should use the multirole helicopters I described above, pure attack helos or a mixture of attack and transport helos?

[Taihei Tengoku]

Why would a helicopter go to another LZ on a truck when it can...go there itself?

[Kanugues Wed]

Why would a helicopter go to another LZ on a truck when it can...go there itself?

I am dumb. I was thinking that in combat they’d go out on a mission from LZ1 and land afterwards at LZ2, because LZ1 is full of Chinese missiles.

I guess they’d be useful in peacetime when you aren’t trying to fly them 24/7??

And I could just set up LZs with a couple conscripts and some cammo netting