"Chad Irby" wrote ..
"Paul F Austin" wrote:

Nope, I just used weight as an example of the "cost" paid for a gun.
And my question stands: At the initial design stage of an aircraft
when you're making choices, is a gun worth more than a couple of
SRAAMs?

Yes. For flexibility, and for having a system independnt of the missile
system.

But you aren't buying "a missile system". Because you're building in the
interfaces (structural and electronic) for any missile that meets the
stowage and attachment envelope and interface specification, in fact the gun
is "less flexible" since over the life of the platform you can roll in a new
AAM every few years. With the gun, aside from changing ammunition natures,
you're stuck with the original decision for the life of the platform.


Yes, the "no-guns" fighter was 'way premature in 1955, the year the
F4H configuration was frozen. It's_really_not clear that's still the
case now.

Funny, the fighter pilots keep telling us differently.

Corporate experience is valuable but can sometimes lead us astray. As
another example, just about every fast mover pilot I've ever talked
to_thoroughly_believes "speed is life" when it comes to CAS/BAI. If that
advice had been heeded in the late sixties, there would be no A-10s.
Experience has shown that the original analysis, that using an airframe
that's tough enough and slow enough that the pilot can get lined up and nail
a CAS or BAI target first time is lots better than a Speed O'Heat pass that
minimizes the exposure to ground fire but which misses the target and means
you have to make another run. Now of course, since we have ubiquitous PGMs,
"speed is life" looks better and medium altitude weapons release looks
better still.

The point of that interminable one sentence analysis of a complex subject is
that technology really does work better now than it did in 1970 and because
it does work better, the answers to key questions changes with time.

High utility of an internal gun in air combat isn't what's reflected in
recent air combat experience nor in systems evaluations of latest-generation
platforms, sensors and missile systems. In fact, some reports I've read from
Air Force evaluations of off-platform sensor fusion and intraflight datalink
operation seem to say that even SRAAMs are rarely be used. That's one of the
reasons the Europeans bought Meteor. AAMs really have improved tremendously
in thirty years. The minimum range of SRAAMs has moved in, squeezing out the
place where guns clearly had utility and the effectiveness of current
seekers combined with helmet-mounted sights is clearly much higher than a
fixed gun. The 0.15 Pk days for AIM-7Es is 'way distant

So you really do need to justify a gun's place on the airframe on more than
"it might be useful and you never know"..


It's not just weapons fit either. The vibration from gun firing costs
significantly higher failure rates in electronics near the gun.

That's a nice theory, but not proven anywhere, and it certainly didn't
show up on the F-4Es I used to work on.

That's a good point and one I didn't know. From an analysis standpoint, an
F-4E's RADAR system should have experienced higher failure rates, especially
since that generation of avionics had much higher base failure rates than do
current systems. Reliability "analysis" as opposed to failure analysis and
"lessons learned" incorporation has always had a high bogosity index.