"Hog Driver" wrote

, while for bombs that minimum
jumps to between 145 and 500 meters (depending upon whether you are in
a
protected or open position).

And those are the only options that can be considered?

What do you suggest? Since this discussion has digressed from best
dogfight
gun to why you need (or don't need) a gun for close air support, I'd love
to
hear what you have to say about the A-10 and pilots who practice with
their
gun for CAS on almost every sortie.

It says that if CAS requires a gunfire component then we need a 'Hog or
'Hog-equivalent to fly the mission. It says little about whether a gun
should be part of the baseline for e.g., the F-35. A-10s are specifically
designed for that mission with protection, airspeed and ammo tank size all
optimized for it. A fast(er)-mover with no protection, with a small ammo
tank is a move back to the "any old fighter will do" school of CAS, the one
that the Air Force keeps trying to return to everytime the notion of
replacing A-10s with F-16s gets floated.

On the other hand, in discussing the baseline for new fighters here, some
have drug out the CAS argument to buttress the notion that a gun should be
designed into any new fighter. If seems to me that all the arguments in
favor of including a gun are along the lines of "marginal utility in all
roles but covering many roles, low cost, flexible asset" lines which is fair
enough. No one has argued that a gun is a key element of a new fighter,
instead we've been discussing how much a gun offers in the margin in both A
to A and CAS applications and which gun is best for it.