The first mistake: they need to at least double the number of aircraft built. Otherwise it becomes a silver bullet instead of a consistent strategy and ops tempo. Not a fan of VR helmets. Information needs to be on see through visors. With no obstructed upwards view. A big deal. It needs to be a 2 seater for proper drone coordination. The integrated picture is the force multiplier. Quick, positive sorting of blue and red. The battlefield airspace gets complicated fast. Especially with a bunch of drones, red and blue. The threat display needs to be dynamic. And so far I am very unimpressed with the fighter drone AI capabilities.
Thanks for that. When it comes to the visor, there are many reasons to be see through, but a couple are: stealth vs stealth are quite likely in the future to end up in visual range before sensor range. Missiles coming at you need a visual perspective to properly defeat them. A lot of experience with that. I once had to beat three in a row. A TD type box would help pick up the missile quickly or help re-acquire it after a maneuver.
I do hate the idea that stealth aircraft are only going to fly high. There are some significant tactical reasons to fly low. Real men fly very low and very fast. 😎😎😎
TOTALLY AGREE ON THAT ASSESSMENT...right now it's just a bunch of let's bring out the goodies package and hope we get funding for this fighter...also, ground crews are going to have training out the wazoo due to the number of "systems" on that aircraft...also, coming into play, the amount of weaponry that can be carried both air-to-air AND air-to-ground...It's great to be able to control the drones but AI can ONLY DO SO MUCH BEFORE GETTING OVERLOADED...just sayin'!!!!! USAF 30 yrs!!!!!!
Sure would be nice to take out some of the tankers spraying chemicals down on us. They're pretty easy to locate, just follow the big trail. Obviously don't shoot them over populated areas, maybe follow them back to their base?? (Sorry, had to vent. I realize there's a lot that's been done we may never hear about.)
"AI enabled". I hope there's a way to check on whose team the AI is on. When early Windows OS started coming down with "viruses", I couldn't help but notice a lot of them were named after certain towns in the middle east. Given what we're discovering within our own government, it would be nice to verify this. Look up the term "QRS-911" for some background.
Lasers: It's amazing that we didn't get very far with Reagan pouring money into "Star Wars". But that YAL-1 Laser plane (747 with gimbal mounted laser guide up front, apparently "misused" to start forest fires and take out cars while surrounding trees are left alone) was built a long time ago. Nothing newer around that could bug zap drones or fighters at phenomenal rates from the ground? Unless the fight moves at the speed of light, it would seem all fighters may be "susceptible" to this..
Don't get me wrong, I like newfangled toys as much as everyone else. I just want to be sure we're giving them to the right people that won't use them against us or sell the plans to our potential enemies. Plenty of current examples on that. 🙄
Lasers have come a long way. One of the problems with stealth aircraft is the limited number of weapons they can carry internally. Missiles “trucks” have been talked about. A laser weapon can solve some of that problem, especially when facing drone swarms.
When it comes to aircraft of the line, you have nothing to worry about. It’s the experimental aircraft that might be used inappropriately.
YAL-1A was never frivolously used as you imagine. It was not built to engage ground targets. I was assigned the task to investigate that application and it was not very promising. There was no way to identify a target, and there was no guarantee of a cloud-free line of sight.
I wrote a decision paper for the AF leadership sometime ago. Explaining which aircraft would be candidates for unmanned and which ones would not. Fighter aircraft would not; tankers would not; and bombers would not. ISR aircraft; cargo aircraft and CAS aircraft were candidates. With that order of implementation. Over the years, I have had to dispel several myths about unmanned fighter aircraft.
SEAD is a possibility for unmanned or teaming up with unmanned. Weapons management software has to be just right.
I agree with your comments. I was startled to see how few were going to be produced. This puts me in mind of the fleet size resulting from Obama's termination of F-22 production. I get the impression that this airplane is expected to operate at altitudes and airspeeds where dogfights are not feasible, relying on its pack of fighter dogs to carry the battle. So, I very much agree it should be a 2-seater. I can't understand why they thought this would be feasible as a one-man operation. (It's amazing. We are warned constantly about distractions while driving, but it appears to be no problem to manage a swarm of drones while piloting.)
I will be very curious to see if and how they integrate a laser weapon into the airplane. The power level would probably be in the range of 100-300 kW optical power at 1 micron wavelength. Electrical lasers have about a 30% quantum efficiency, so that would mean the need to dissipate ~200-600 kW of thermal loading. That might be the limiting consideration on the beam power, as the fuel is the only available heat sink. The problem that is not considered is that this power has to come from somewhere, most likely from the engine turbine shaft as a power take-off. There will be an inevitable RPM slowdown as something like 400-1000 kW of mechanical power is pulled off the turbine, and a corresponding loss of thrust. I tried to make this point to my section manager who was a retired Air Force colonel, but he was oblivious to the requirements of the First Law of thermodynamics. He thought that there was always going to be a surplus of engine power at constant throttle.
The pointer-tracker head will need to be retractable in order to preserve stealth when not operating. Laser operation will probably require subsonic flight conditions, as the optics are greatly affected by the freestream flow and the boundary layers around the aperture, possibly contributing to beam jitter. Contrary to cartoons and movies, the beam is not equally effective in all directions. The worst direction is straight ahead, which is the most prone to beam blooming because transiently heated air stays within the beam column. The best direction is to the side ("abeam" in nautical terms), where the air is moving across the beam and not lingering in it. In an upcoming laser engagement, the pilot might need to assume a diagonal track in order to place the target away from his nose and more toward his wing. Laser dwell times will be seconds. No such thing as an instantaneous hit. The beam travels at the speed of light, but the target effects depend on heat accumulation. The softest target is the enemy cockpit. At open-fire intensities of 100 W/cm2, the beam will go through a polymer canopy as though it were cellophane and bounce around inside the cockpit like a microwave oven. The pilot would be fried to a crisp before he would be aware of it. This kind of engagement would be possible at distances greater than which the F-47 could be seen. Very spooky threat, death out of nowhere.
This introduces the question of whether the F-47 pilot would need cockpit protection from an enemy laser. In our weapon system studies of the late 70s and early 80s, we never got to the point of evaluating an air-to-air laser duel. In such a case, if you can lock onto the enemy laser beam director and shoot into it, that might ruin his beam optics. This leads to the notion of two beam directors, to have a spare if the first one is put out of action by such a tactic. This may be the point at which the airplane adopts an opaque reflective metallic canopy and supports the pilot with video feed from multiple cameras (with nuclear-flash shutters to prevent blinding by a threat laser).
It would be an ideal weapon against sitting duck targets, like transports, tankers, and bombers.
Apparently, there are cadets at Colorado Springs who take the engineering track, and those who take the history track. He was a pretty smart guy and was on an important technical advisory committee, but he seemed to think a weapon laser had a power draw comparable to a radar set: no big deal. The more one looks into it, integrating a laser weapon could involve some significant internal changes in component location and space, thermal management, power management, and airframe isolation from the pointer-tracker. I really have my doubts that so much modification would be tolerated for something as tightly designed as the F-47.
Yes. And I remember every area was stealing a little bit of the F-22’s weapons bay in the design. They had a big crack down and it took practically an act of God to get another cubic inch out of the weapons bay. It was the incentive for me to come up with the Small Powerful Bomb. My energetics efforts faded though and we got the Small Diameter Bomb. Which turned out to be a hit. I really like the ground launched version too.
When I went to Lawrence Livermore in CA, I was being shown around by the head guy. He told a joke: How do you tell an Explosives Engineer? Then he held up his hand with 3 of his 4 fingers showing. It was only a minute or two when I was greeted by an Engineer with 3 fingers. Static electricity is a big deal when dealing with open explosives. They were working on insensitive explosives that were nearly twice as powerful as TNT. I gave them one that was safe and 5 times as powerful as TNT but they needed to figure out how to manufacture it efficiently. It looks like they are migrating to BOM, which is 1.5 x TNT and safe.
Rockets: What is your opinion on taking liquid methane, super heating it with a small nuclear reactor and then added to oxygen. Not sure how this would work out, but super heated oxygen creates an energetic plasma. But keeping it from reacting with the pipelines would be a challenge.
Didn't know about the finger joke, but had one turn handling a double-base (nitrocellulose-nitroglycerine) rocket propellant grain. Absolutely foul smell. We had to wear scuff pads on our shoe soles made of copper sponge, wired to contacts on our calfs, so we were always at ground potential to avoid static sparking. The handling room was equipped with blowout panels in case there was a light-off. Absent that, I calculated that the gas flow out the door would have been over 100 mph. Serious business.
What you describe for an idea was an invention disclosure that I came up with in the 1980s: using a small nuclear reactor to heat up propellants not to expel directly, but to amp up the effective specific impulse upon combustion. The problem was how to get Centaur-level performance out of a stage that could fit into the payload bay of the Space Shuttle. The hydrogen tank was the problem. Too big. And going pure nuclear wouldn't help because the required hydrogen tank was still too large. I was just looking at heating up (e.g.) hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide to injection temperatures several hundred degrees hotter than normal. It looked like it could work, and it packaged fairly densely. Reactor power was about a tenth that of a pure nuke. I think I anticipated NASA's LANTR concept by about 7 years.
As for high Isp, both methane and ammonia have been considered as nuclear thermal engine propellants. The trick there is to heat them high enough to dissociate them into hydrogen and methylene (CH2) or nitrogen, arriving at a lower molecular weight. LANTR would have added oxygen in the nozzle for supersonic combustion. I think they may have been concerned about the reactivity of hot oxygen as well. If that splits into single oxygen atoms, they are terribly reactive. In Dr. Robert Bussard's text on nuclear rocket engines, he points out that one can gain a significant boost in Isp by running a nuclear thermal engine at max temperature and lower chamber pressure, so the hydrogen is dissociated into separate atoms.
When I was in my teens, I was convinced that a way to go was to create monatomic hydrogen and let it react by recombination. I recall the performance numbers were equivalent to a nuclear thermal rocket engine. Easy enough to make: just run hydrogen through an electric arc. Power supply? I speculated a compact nuclear -electric generator. So, the advantage? Separation of the reactor design problem from the direct thrust chamber environment, and no fallout problem from terrestrial operation. (I figured out the benefit later. At the time, it was just a cool idea.)
I am sure China has all the blueprints, "a stealth architecture locked under classified seals". There are so many treacherous people in the United States Gov't.
/s
This is what I am the most afraid of, that Q team doesn't know this.......
The Jews admit that they are not the descendants of the Ancient Israelites in their writings. Under the heading of “A brief History of the Terms for Jew” in the 1980 Jewish Almanac is the following:
“Strictly speaking it is incorrect to call an ancient Israelite a ‘Jew’ or to call a contemporary Jew an Israelite or a Hebrew.” (1980 Jewish Almanac, p. 3).
The first mistake: they need to at least double the number of aircraft built. Otherwise it becomes a silver bullet instead of a consistent strategy and ops tempo. Not a fan of VR helmets. Information needs to be on see through visors. With no obstructed upwards view. A big deal. It needs to be a 2 seater for proper drone coordination. The integrated picture is the force multiplier. Quick, positive sorting of blue and red. The battlefield airspace gets complicated fast. Especially with a bunch of drones, red and blue. The threat display needs to be dynamic. And so far I am very unimpressed with the fighter drone AI capabilities.
Thanks for that. When it comes to the visor, there are many reasons to be see through, but a couple are: stealth vs stealth are quite likely in the future to end up in visual range before sensor range. Missiles coming at you need a visual perspective to properly defeat them. A lot of experience with that. I once had to beat three in a row. A TD type box would help pick up the missile quickly or help re-acquire it after a maneuver.
I do hate the idea that stealth aircraft are only going to fly high. There are some significant tactical reasons to fly low. Real men fly very low and very fast. 😎😎😎
Much appreciated! 🍺🍺🍺
We do, thank you.
TOTALLY AGREE ON THAT ASSESSMENT...right now it's just a bunch of let's bring out the goodies package and hope we get funding for this fighter...also, ground crews are going to have training out the wazoo due to the number of "systems" on that aircraft...also, coming into play, the amount of weaponry that can be carried both air-to-air AND air-to-ground...It's great to be able to control the drones but AI can ONLY DO SO MUCH BEFORE GETTING OVERLOADED...just sayin'!!!!! USAF 30 yrs!!!!!!
T-I...YOU are most welcome...you seem to understand the complexities of things better than most so thank you for that kind comment!!!!
Love this post fren & agree with u/Revodude
Things to think about:
Sure would be nice to take out some of the tankers spraying chemicals down on us. They're pretty easy to locate, just follow the big trail. Obviously don't shoot them over populated areas, maybe follow them back to their base?? (Sorry, had to vent. I realize there's a lot that's been done we may never hear about.)
"AI enabled". I hope there's a way to check on whose team the AI is on. When early Windows OS started coming down with "viruses", I couldn't help but notice a lot of them were named after certain towns in the middle east. Given what we're discovering within our own government, it would be nice to verify this. Look up the term "QRS-911" for some background.
Lasers: It's amazing that we didn't get very far with Reagan pouring money into "Star Wars". But that YAL-1 Laser plane (747 with gimbal mounted laser guide up front, apparently "misused" to start forest fires and take out cars while surrounding trees are left alone) was built a long time ago. Nothing newer around that could bug zap drones or fighters at phenomenal rates from the ground? Unless the fight moves at the speed of light, it would seem all fighters may be "susceptible" to this..
Don't get me wrong, I like newfangled toys as much as everyone else. I just want to be sure we're giving them to the right people that won't use them against us or sell the plans to our potential enemies. Plenty of current examples on that. 🙄
Lasers have come a long way. One of the problems with stealth aircraft is the limited number of weapons they can carry internally. Missiles “trucks” have been talked about. A laser weapon can solve some of that problem, especially when facing drone swarms.
When it comes to aircraft of the line, you have nothing to worry about. It’s the experimental aircraft that might be used inappropriately.
YAL-1A was never frivolously used as you imagine. It was not built to engage ground targets. I was assigned the task to investigate that application and it was not very promising. There was no way to identify a target, and there was no guarantee of a cloud-free line of sight.
I figure they will soon be getting rid of the pilot altogether, a shame.
I wrote a decision paper for the AF leadership sometime ago. Explaining which aircraft would be candidates for unmanned and which ones would not. Fighter aircraft would not; tankers would not; and bombers would not. ISR aircraft; cargo aircraft and CAS aircraft were candidates. With that order of implementation. Over the years, I have had to dispel several myths about unmanned fighter aircraft.
SEAD is a possibility for unmanned or teaming up with unmanned. Weapons management software has to be just right.
I agree with your comments. I was startled to see how few were going to be produced. This puts me in mind of the fleet size resulting from Obama's termination of F-22 production. I get the impression that this airplane is expected to operate at altitudes and airspeeds where dogfights are not feasible, relying on its pack of fighter dogs to carry the battle. So, I very much agree it should be a 2-seater. I can't understand why they thought this would be feasible as a one-man operation. (It's amazing. We are warned constantly about distractions while driving, but it appears to be no problem to manage a swarm of drones while piloting.)
I will be very curious to see if and how they integrate a laser weapon into the airplane. The power level would probably be in the range of 100-300 kW optical power at 1 micron wavelength. Electrical lasers have about a 30% quantum efficiency, so that would mean the need to dissipate ~200-600 kW of thermal loading. That might be the limiting consideration on the beam power, as the fuel is the only available heat sink. The problem that is not considered is that this power has to come from somewhere, most likely from the engine turbine shaft as a power take-off. There will be an inevitable RPM slowdown as something like 400-1000 kW of mechanical power is pulled off the turbine, and a corresponding loss of thrust. I tried to make this point to my section manager who was a retired Air Force colonel, but he was oblivious to the requirements of the First Law of thermodynamics. He thought that there was always going to be a surplus of engine power at constant throttle.
The pointer-tracker head will need to be retractable in order to preserve stealth when not operating. Laser operation will probably require subsonic flight conditions, as the optics are greatly affected by the freestream flow and the boundary layers around the aperture, possibly contributing to beam jitter. Contrary to cartoons and movies, the beam is not equally effective in all directions. The worst direction is straight ahead, which is the most prone to beam blooming because transiently heated air stays within the beam column. The best direction is to the side ("abeam" in nautical terms), where the air is moving across the beam and not lingering in it. In an upcoming laser engagement, the pilot might need to assume a diagonal track in order to place the target away from his nose and more toward his wing. Laser dwell times will be seconds. No such thing as an instantaneous hit. The beam travels at the speed of light, but the target effects depend on heat accumulation. The softest target is the enemy cockpit. At open-fire intensities of 100 W/cm2, the beam will go through a polymer canopy as though it were cellophane and bounce around inside the cockpit like a microwave oven. The pilot would be fried to a crisp before he would be aware of it. This kind of engagement would be possible at distances greater than which the F-47 could be seen. Very spooky threat, death out of nowhere.
This introduces the question of whether the F-47 pilot would need cockpit protection from an enemy laser. In our weapon system studies of the late 70s and early 80s, we never got to the point of evaluating an air-to-air laser duel. In such a case, if you can lock onto the enemy laser beam director and shoot into it, that might ruin his beam optics. This leads to the notion of two beam directors, to have a spare if the first one is put out of action by such a tactic. This may be the point at which the airplane adopts an opaque reflective metallic canopy and supports the pilot with video feed from multiple cameras (with nuclear-flash shutters to prevent blinding by a threat laser).
It would be an ideal weapon against sitting duck targets, like transports, tankers, and bombers.
Excellent evaluation!! I guess your colonel slep through Thermo class.
Apparently, there are cadets at Colorado Springs who take the engineering track, and those who take the history track. He was a pretty smart guy and was on an important technical advisory committee, but he seemed to think a weapon laser had a power draw comparable to a radar set: no big deal. The more one looks into it, integrating a laser weapon could involve some significant internal changes in component location and space, thermal management, power management, and airframe isolation from the pointer-tracker. I really have my doubts that so much modification would be tolerated for something as tightly designed as the F-47.
Yes. And I remember every area was stealing a little bit of the F-22’s weapons bay in the design. They had a big crack down and it took practically an act of God to get another cubic inch out of the weapons bay. It was the incentive for me to come up with the Small Powerful Bomb. My energetics efforts faded though and we got the Small Diameter Bomb. Which turned out to be a hit. I really like the ground launched version too.
Good for you! I like energetics, though my interest was in more powerful rocket fuels.
When I went to Lawrence Livermore in CA, I was being shown around by the head guy. He told a joke: How do you tell an Explosives Engineer? Then he held up his hand with 3 of his 4 fingers showing. It was only a minute or two when I was greeted by an Engineer with 3 fingers. Static electricity is a big deal when dealing with open explosives. They were working on insensitive explosives that were nearly twice as powerful as TNT. I gave them one that was safe and 5 times as powerful as TNT but they needed to figure out how to manufacture it efficiently. It looks like they are migrating to BOM, which is 1.5 x TNT and safe.
Rockets: What is your opinion on taking liquid methane, super heating it with a small nuclear reactor and then added to oxygen. Not sure how this would work out, but super heated oxygen creates an energetic plasma. But keeping it from reacting with the pipelines would be a challenge.
I would like to see the Isp on that one.
Didn't know about the finger joke, but had one turn handling a double-base (nitrocellulose-nitroglycerine) rocket propellant grain. Absolutely foul smell. We had to wear scuff pads on our shoe soles made of copper sponge, wired to contacts on our calfs, so we were always at ground potential to avoid static sparking. The handling room was equipped with blowout panels in case there was a light-off. Absent that, I calculated that the gas flow out the door would have been over 100 mph. Serious business.
What you describe for an idea was an invention disclosure that I came up with in the 1980s: using a small nuclear reactor to heat up propellants not to expel directly, but to amp up the effective specific impulse upon combustion. The problem was how to get Centaur-level performance out of a stage that could fit into the payload bay of the Space Shuttle. The hydrogen tank was the problem. Too big. And going pure nuclear wouldn't help because the required hydrogen tank was still too large. I was just looking at heating up (e.g.) hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide to injection temperatures several hundred degrees hotter than normal. It looked like it could work, and it packaged fairly densely. Reactor power was about a tenth that of a pure nuke. I think I anticipated NASA's LANTR concept by about 7 years.
As for high Isp, both methane and ammonia have been considered as nuclear thermal engine propellants. The trick there is to heat them high enough to dissociate them into hydrogen and methylene (CH2) or nitrogen, arriving at a lower molecular weight. LANTR would have added oxygen in the nozzle for supersonic combustion. I think they may have been concerned about the reactivity of hot oxygen as well. If that splits into single oxygen atoms, they are terribly reactive. In Dr. Robert Bussard's text on nuclear rocket engines, he points out that one can gain a significant boost in Isp by running a nuclear thermal engine at max temperature and lower chamber pressure, so the hydrogen is dissociated into separate atoms.
When I was in my teens, I was convinced that a way to go was to create monatomic hydrogen and let it react by recombination. I recall the performance numbers were equivalent to a nuclear thermal rocket engine. Easy enough to make: just run hydrogen through an electric arc. Power supply? I speculated a compact nuclear -electric generator. So, the advantage? Separation of the reactor design problem from the direct thrust chamber environment, and no fallout problem from terrestrial operation. (I figured out the benefit later. At the time, it was just a cool idea.)
You’re quite welcome. 😎
Holy text wall. I trust all of it. Best of frens here.
Ha cheers! Myfe’s asleep, X22 on, glass o wine. I’ll read it all u/#paw
F (6) + 4 + 7 ---> 17
I am sure China has all the blueprints, "a stealth architecture locked under classified seals". There are so many treacherous people in the United States Gov't. /s
Thunderbolts of all strikes Creeping Death
When are they delivering the first shipments to our beloved allies, the Israelis?
This is what I am the most afraid of, that Q team doesn't know this.......
The Jews admit that they are not the descendants of the Ancient Israelites in their writings. Under the heading of “A brief History of the Terms for Jew” in the 1980 Jewish Almanac is the following: “Strictly speaking it is incorrect to call an ancient Israelite a ‘Jew’ or to call a contemporary Jew an Israelite or a Hebrew.” (1980 Jewish Almanac, p. 3).
Good point. Saving Israel for last even though they are not Israel.
Jacob was named Israel.
We shall find out soon enough.
Thanks friend!