Lawman

Bro we are having this exact argument in the Army over why the Guard won't give up its Apaches and take Hawks instead to support state missions and we can maintain the active duty fleets readiness requirements. Don't open this can of worms. It'll make the A-10 retirement fight look pale by comparison.

It's funny you show a picture of the Combat Air Tractor. It amazed me how hard the Phil's were sticking their fingers in their ears to ignore that aircraft while simultaneously copy/paste'ing the requirements for their new turbo prop light CAS aircraft program straight from the Super Tacano's sales brochure.

In other news, CPT Everding to be fired out of a cannon into a brick wall from close range today. A Justice Dept. spokesman was quoted as saying, "F it, I don't even know where to begin on rehabilitating these kinds of people."

Yeah that's the catch 22 with all this that pisses me off. Hours and hours of having it beaten into you that a woman who even looks at alcohol is not culpable for any of her decisions and therefor is not responsible for her actions or capable of consent. But a man who gets drunk... Well he is fully responsible for his actions or misinterpretation that somehow occurred 24 hours after the fact when she decided she was raped. You don't get to have it both ways people. Predators are predators, but stop acting like two young people getting drunk and making a series of bad decisions that leads to sex is anything on the same level as forcible rape.

It's a niche of usefulness that's slowly growing out of control. Here is the problem. To be a useful gunner my front seater needs to be using the sensor on the aircraft and communicating the picture he sees to the Lead aircraft. If I'm lead and AMC I need my tads, plus my wing on TADS and I'm talking to the ground force as well (who is pulling our feeds). If I want to use a UAV I can only see one or the other, I can't do both UAV and TADS. So I'm basically trying to figure out which eye I want to look through I'm not so much building more SA as changing perspective. Boeing wen through the trouble of showing this one particularly perfect usage where you can mass fires in this 1/100000 scenario but that's all it was, something for somebody cashing checks to metaphorically jerk off too. As far as flying it, yeah low threat no problem just send it somewhere and I can look back there when needed but it's a sensor on call for me. It has preprogrammed waypoints and patterns so I can make it do certain stuff. But the ground station stays in the loop so really they can do the same thing and just tell me and I can grab there picture when I want it. High threat... We aren't sending UAVs (and hopefully not helos either) as we will get them shot down with the training level and systems we have at hand.

Many of the same arguments on expeditionary and austere airfields are what is being made for the A-10. The fact if the matter is doctrinally the Marines must have a fixed wing CAS plane dedicated to them due to their lack of Armor/Arty much the same as the Army brigade needs it's own organic rotary wing because it cannot rely on favorable apportionment to accomplish it's day to day mission. What should have happened is the 4.5 Gen Harrier replacement program shouldn't have been shoehorned into the ATX/JAST programs to replace Viper and Hornet. Then you wouldn't have near the headaches from either services needs.

Do we really want to give Lockheed another pass here.... "I've heard this song before... It was playing the last time I got fucked."

Man.... FA-50 looks creepily like a Viper, this has definite Eagle traits.... Are we really designing anything new or just letting a graphic designer play with it to fool us into buying the same planes at higher prices.

This Japan building its own airplane from the ground up is just to far at the extreme of what their indigenous Aviation industry is capable of supporting. When your only building 80 planes for an Air Force and not 1800 like Lockheed the R&D costs just cannot be offset without massive foreign sales to pick up the program cost. Same reason the Challenger II tank is such a failure compared to the Leo II series. One is only Army the relatively small Army in one country, the other is outfitting half the countries in Europe. I will give the Japanese one thing though, production from the ground up may be way to much a pill to swallow but their modifications to programs we built that they produce under license are amazing. The UH-60 they have was 10-15 years ahead of what we were flying in the Army at the same time. Again though given the size of the fleet they have to outfit that's far easier to keep moving forward.

We have only very recently started learning that lesson. Army and Marine Helicopter development programs have been a long list of terrible failures with a few notable decent jobs that look like unbelievable successes by comparison. That's why we are still 3 years behind the D model with the E model Apache. Somebody was smart enough to say "no we are not making Comanche II out of this, we work with what we have right now."

I'm curious with this whole "how long will it last" rabbit hole. Anybody talked to any engineers on the feasibility of upgrades and how far or many they would limit out at. I know that was the Navy's big problem with the legacy Hornets, they were literally out of places to put boxes and electricity to power them even if they did. Theoretically F-35D/E/etc could happen but won't need to for decades with lot upgrades and architecture built wi the current standards. I wonder what kind of hell in acquisitions it would be to have Boeing make an A-10D 7 years from now so they could stay in the fight.

Yeah it's probably one of those asinine things that you can't believe are allowed.... Like services not using a perfectly good uniform pattern because one group "patented" it with their logo and then sued the Navy for trying to use a logo-less version.

Hard to gauge numbers like that when FMS programs detail specific levels of assistance in training and supply/logistics with dollar values attached based on a case by case basis. The only accurate true "fly away" cost with no added money in the program is DCS and that's not really reflective of how we buy a plane either.

It's had a lot of issues. For one when the Army bought it they pulled the ECS system out because Pilots don't need A/C.... Then they started frying avionics. Second the aircraft has an incredibly weak tail rotor when compared to other similar class helos. It works fine down in a good chunk of the states but in a scenario like say Mountain altitude SAR in Colorado it gets into loss of tail rotor effectiveness very easily. The French actually stopped flying them for a while because of this. It's only really starting to pay off now and break even with the investment provided it's job as a trainer goes off well. Still the cost per flight hour is going to be significantly higher than a 67 just on the grounds of keeping and feeding two motors. But yeah by comparison of other helo programs like ARH-70, the Marine Y/Z Huey program, and Comanche (our 12 billion dollar pile of shame) it looks like a model of success.

There are two students and one IP in pretty much every TH-67 that flies that day. Everything except Apache is also carrying three dudes. That was the big flub replacing Flat Iron Huey's with Lakota. There was the idea that if you responded to a crash and had 3 ambulatory patients you would get to pick 2. The fuzzy logic of justification being that Flat Iron spends 99% of its time being a taxi for broken airplane crews instead of actually doing Medevac.

The Comanche money was repurposed into the F model Chinook and M model Black Hawk and speeding up the retirement/rebuild of A model Apaches. Lakota was its own terrible program entirely. To buy an off the shelf non deployable aircraft to replace both UH-1 and 58 A/Cs in service and to give the states a more economical helicopter to do SAR/Medevac over the Hawk. But once we got a hold of it we ran it in the most ass way possible... And now it's becoming our primary trainer as we retire the 67 fleet.

Agreed. He/She wouldn't be allowed to compete in the Olympics because that wouldn't be "fair," but to call that out in the military and say women need to be at the same physical standard as men your a sexist.

It does look fun, but ammo is going to be a bear. Belted ammo isn't something people just keep in stock, and while yes you can use AR mags, unless they changed the design from the mil model it will eat the mags you use for it. Plus a 249 on magazine feed is just a jam happy monster from my experiences with them.

I'm guessing you've never seen Iron Eagle III? It was the villan's plane.

I don't think we want to start sending our Airmen into harms way in a plane that can be shot down by a P-38....

Your really just adding two major factors: Bullet Jump - caused by the wind impact vs the bullets spin causing it to move up or down dependent on direction of the wind Port/Starboard effect - where the bullet gains inertia in the direction of flight. Neither of these is a factor if you have any kind of weapons processor accounting for these factors. If the gun is mechanically traversed, or the sight adjusts to predict impact so you correct a hard mounted gun to achieve your desired point of impact you negate these factors. Outside that firing a gun forward vs firing a gun sideways isn't really too different. We see slightly wider dispersion on off axis shooting with our turret but it's not significant enough to call it a game changer. Mostly we avoid off axis shooting because it puts stress on the ammo drive carrier increasing the likelihood of a jam.

See that's the funny thing about JSF/F35 Nowhere In the Marines requirement for a Harrier replacement did 5th gen LO become a requirement. It was a 4.5 gen program (like super hornet) to get a VSTOL aircraft that could do more than bring a single 500lbs bomb and a laser maverick to the fight. It was only when they (Congress and the Pentagon) folded 4 programs together to the JSF that 5th gen became something that had to happen with VSTOL. So essentially we had a modernized digital age CAS specific plane in the works.... Then we decided to make it part of the do all Swiss army fighter that has turned into the biggest weapons program of all time.

I honestly think your going to start working against yourself with bigger bullets. Look at the 30 vs 20, you've got 70mm more casing and propellant to get that round to what is essentially the same muzzle velocity as a 20mm. Granted you keep it longer (like any bigger weight bullet will) but now step up again to a 40mm. How big is that casing going to have to be to get to 3500 fps. He old L70 round for the boffors was nearly 400mm long and it's actually slower than your round. Then start figuring out how big the gun to take that massive recoil has to be, oh and we want high rate of fire to give you a good beating zone vs dispersion so we need multiple barrels. No standard breech is going to handle that much chamber pressure while maintaining high rates of fire (gotta keep the breach locked momentarily to dissipate pressure or it might grenade). At some point you hit diminishing returns. Despite what most people would think thanks to pacific rim you can't just take the Gau-8 and multiply all the measurements x1.5 and make a 40mm avenger.

Your not going to get the kind of high velocity high density effect with a Bushmaster family of 30m, at least not the one off the Apache. Your talking 2640fps at the muzzle. It's a low velocity gun for us because you can only handle so much recoil on the gun cradle with it being a turret and not hard mounted. I try to tell people all the time it's less a gun and more a grenade launcher. Now it does give you lots of greater non/light armor ability when it comes to target effect. 4m burst radius with good fragmentation against soft targets, and enough thump to punch into light armor like a BMP and start fires/set off ammunition. We even have an air burst round in the works to get over the loss of fragmentation in that moon dust in Afghanistan (Test results are insane). Still end of the day it's not an anti tank gun. The 25mm on the Bradley/LAV will however chew up tanks (except front mantlet) with the AP loads. But if you've seen how big a Bradley's turret is, that's because the chamber and recoil requirements are so much greater with that guns recoil. The Bushmaster II is modeled off that but your talking a lot of gun to try and fit on a plane that isn't a cargo aircraft. Plus your not talking volume of fire like you get out of 200-300rd trigger pull burst. While we are playing hypothetical A-X program requirements, arguably with the Hawgs history slinging stuff like Maverick and systems like Brimstone or whenever we get JAGM out and working do we need to go as heavy concentration on the gun needing to kill a T-72 from high angle, or would it be better to take a gun that's effective against anything up to an MBT, more effective against softer targets (because explosions woot) and packs more ammo for the game while saving weight for stuff like missiles and gas.

Yeah as GP said above, it's not possible. One of the former Fairchild guys is on another forum and quashed this idea pretty well. Simply put there were literally rooms full of filling cabinets full of blue prints and production tooling designs to build the Hawg. And a factory full of guys with the knowledge and expertise on building it are all retired/extra retired. This stuff wasn't ever put on digits or filed away for posterity it was disposed of. You would essentially have to reverse engineer the current Hawg and design the factory to build it. With the way we run acquisition programs over cost the normal way I can only imagine how much we would bolo that up.