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

"Chad Irby" wrote

Which means, on cost terms, shooting down a big drone with a gun is
*very* cost-effective (a million-dollar airframe for a couple of
hundred
bucks worth of ammo).

Which makes using UAVs as justification for a gun, daft.

Not "as justification," just "one more type of target."

By that argument, let's ditch all the expensive AAMs. UAVs are no
more a justification for designing in a gun than is a handwave of
"you never know..." which is a good description of the gun
justifications seen here.

So far, we have several different reasons for having guns in planes,
versus "we only need missiles to shoot down other planes."

The argument for not having guns is, overall, pretty thin.

No. To recapitulate: the first offering was "well, what are you going to do
when the troops call for very, very CAS like they did in Operation
Anaconda?". When Paul Adams fairly clearly demonstrated that gunnery CAS was
remarkably ineffective in the event, needing to be followed up with bombs to
actually do the job (remember bombs? They're an alternative to that gun you
like).

Next up was "Well, how about shooting UAVs? There are bound to be so many
that fighters will run out of missiles or alternatively (it wasn't clear)
UAVs are so cheap and numerous as to not be worth a missile."

I pointed out the on the contrary, the UAVs large enough to be engaged by
fighters, like G-Hawk and Predator are in fact high value platforms, more
than worthy of a missile and you responded with (approximately) "You can too
shoot down a Predator or G-Hawk with a gun", missing the point.

You (and others) still miss the point that I made and that Paul Adams made
that in order to justify putting a gun on a new fighter (no fair, strawmen
about stripping the guns off the current fleet), you have to justify the gun
in terms of mission payoff_against other alternative uses of the budgets of
time, money, weight, volume and power_. Because in real life, that's what
you have to do.

There_is_an argument for building a successor to the 'Hog but it has to
compete with orbiting Heavies stuffed full of JDAMs and developments of
JDAM.