Best dogfight gun?

The SUU23 pod gun on the F4 centerline would pull the nose down - the
pipper would start to move down on the target about half a second
after firing began, but it was easily compensated with a little aft
pressure in the stick. I once fired a 3-second burst (doing a little
pre-combat research) beginning at 4500 feet from the ground target
(acoustic scorer) and scored 100 hits. FWIW the pod gun's dispersion
was such that it would make a good 'shotgun' for the
knife fight'. The SUU23's shot pattern was about 8 mils in elevation
and about 10 in azimuth; still a pretty concentrated pattern at 100
yards - the length of an American football field, and a familiar
distance to most US fighter pilots.
The 366th Wing at Danang had an F4E (call sign Chico) with two
wing-mounted SUU23s plus the nose gun. It was hogged by the 0-6s who
took it out on troops-in-contact calls. Would have made a heck of a
dog fighter because you could take any kind of shot with a good chance
of a kill - including those hairy head-on passes.
Walt BJ

Superior avionics do not make a superior pilot.

Certainly not, but all else equal, they make a superior weapons system!

The A-10 uses three different A-A sights, and these sights use pilot
inputs
of enemy aircraft airspeed, wingspan, and fuselage length. These inputs
are
usually set up pre-mission (they can be set in the air as well, just
time-consuming) and the pilot can cycle through the presets in flight.
All
three sights are displayed on the HUD at the same time.
A-10 pilots who go through weapons school and get to shoot at the dart
(towed target) say the gun is deadly accurate out to the A-A tac effective
range, which is a lot farther than an M61A1. Granted, it's not a
maneuvering target, but it does prove the sight(s) works.

My take on this would be that you're using gun sights that are 40's-50's
era in their accuracy against maneuvering targets. I would think that would
put you at a serious disadvantaged (especially when couple with the lower
a-a training of attack pilots vs. fighter pilots). How flexible would the
preprogrammed sites be for fighting a Viper vs. a Turkey or Eagle (with much
larger wingspans and lengths- or a Mig-29 vs. Su-27)? Also, assuming he'd
be slashing from the vertical, what would that do to lessen the range
difference (his bullets with gravity, yours against?).
I appreciate that a good pilot is worth more than a
super-duper-great-jet, and I also appreciate that there are circumstances
when a Hog could be a nasty opponent. I just think that against an equally
good pilot in a fighter jet, the Hog would be in serious trouble. But
that's just an opinion from an armchair pilot with no time under his ass in
either a Hog or a fighter. Thanks for your comments Hog Driver, they're
most appreciated. Regards,

Tony Volk

p.s.- 74th squadron or not, all Hogs should have shark mouths (or hog
tusks)!

In message , Hog Driver
writes
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul J. Adam"
That's an extremely large "if", given the extensive air-to-air sensor
suite fitted to the A-10...

Well, using AWACS and mutual support tactics, the A-10 pilots are going to
have an idea where to pick up the tally.

Again, AWACS is situation-dependent, and there's that oft-quoted
statistic about 80% of surviving pilots wondering who shot them down
(tracking that statistic to a source is probably good for a PhD thesis -
anyone up for funding it? )

Once that happens, it isn't the
best 'suite' that is going to win the fight, it's the best BFM to get to the
WEZ.

Depends what weapons the assorted combatants brought to the fight: for
many engagements, the A-10 is totally defensive and manoevering against
RWR indications. (Does it have any IRWR gear? It's a natural platform to
get some sort of missile-warning gear over RWR)

Again, for real life this isn't much of a problem because the A-10
operates in total air supremacy and has never had an enemy aircraft ever
get a chance to shoot at it (rendering the preparations of the A-10
crews to fight back untested).

Are you keeping your ordnance for this turn? How long does it take to
get the nose pointed at the target while still having time to get that
shot off? (driving your required detection range). How much airspeed do
you have left at the end of it, which has a serious effect on your
ability to escape the wingman? And what happens when you discover the
attacking aircraft was firing a missile, rather than making a gun pass?

It all depends upon the situation. Hopefully the A-10 pilot(s) pick up the
tally at least 3 or 4 miles out near 3 or 9 o'clock, coming out of a good
RMD. Then they only have slightly more than 90 degrees to get the nose to
bear. Even with all the ordnance still on the jet, at the most a six to
seven second turn in the A-10 not including reaction lag time. Again,
depending on lots of factors, they may get nose-on in time to hose off a
sidewinder and open up with the gun around or slightly inside 9,000' (no
peacetime TRs to worry about). Most likely it will be a beak-to-beak pass
with the A-10s not getting a shot off, which they will try to drive to a
one-circle if the idiot(s) hang around. If bad guy decides to go vertical,
the engaged A-10 may go with him energy dependant and hose off a sidewinder
to give him sometime to think about, even with an opening Vc. Smart A-10
driver won't continue uphill, instead try to keep tally and get a circle of
hogs going.

Good to hear some of my WAGs confirmed

I guess you could describe my position thusly... A-10s engaged by modern
fighters are in bad trouble, but have a few cards to play (low altitude,
high turn rate and large countermeasure magazines come to mind) while
they can give over-aggressive enemy fighters some very nasty problems to
solve.

If the A-10s get any ordnance off prior to the merge, it might coax the bad
guy into thinking twice about keeping his fangs out. Since the primary A-10
role is to kill them by the bushels instead of one at a time, most A-10
pilots won't hit the emer jett until they get wrapped up with the guy for
180 degrees of turn.

Do you have options short of "full jettison"? I freely confess that my
flying experience is limited to civil propjobs and computer games, but
does the A-10 have (for instance) any option to jettison A/G ordnance
while keeping outboard pylons (Sidewinders and jammer pods)?

Again, situation dependent, lots of 'what ifs' that
you can't know about until you are there.

This is too true, sadly, and imposes all sorts of limits on open debate.

In answer to your airspeed question, the A-10 will be headed downhill the
entire time to maintain corner velocity, and if he's coming out of RMD, he
should know what's coming so he'll probably be carrying extra knots for the
initial turn at the merge.

Trouble with that is, how do you get that energy back, especially if you
started out low? Bear in mind that if there are enemy fighters up and
flying, their IADS is probably still operational complete with
radar-guided SAMs.

(And, given recent experience, what if the Bad Guys have orders that
"anything you can shoot at is hostile" while their fighters have stern
orders to stay high and fast no matter how tempting the diving target?)

But then, this keeps coming back to Bad Guys who can mount a credible
air threat. Not sure where to find a likely enemy that can seriously
sustain any sort of counter-air operations against the US...

The smart A-10 pilot will be flaring and chaffing early and often in
anticipation of that missile shot you are talking about...and keeping the
jet moving.

Again, that's keeping the A-10 defensive rather than having it turn and
fight an attacking Su-27 or similar... just because

If this analysis was accurate, the F-15 and F-22 would be screaming for
27mm or 30mm guns...

I think we both know that the possibility of air-to-air gun fighting today
is highly unlikely. Lessons learned from the past would behoove us to have
them on our jets, or in the case of the A-10, use them to really screw up
the bad guys on the ground.

I hate to be contrarian... all right, I don't. I _like_ being
contrarian. Lessons from the past suggest that getting missiles working
and crews trained is a better path to dead enemies for air-to-air work.
Air-to-ground, guns pull you into IR-SAM range and even for A-10s that
isn't healthy.

The initial question asked was how multi-barrel and single barrel cannons
stack up, and the subject is best dogfight guns. Just because the A-10 is
built around the GAU-8 doesn't mean it is any less of an effective dogfight
gun, especially with the high rates of turn the A-10 is capable of, small
bullet dispersion over the tac effective range, and relatively high rate of
fire.

Sure, just as a modern bayonet is a miserable weapon compared to a Light
Infantry sword (a proper sword that just happened to have fittings to
mount onto a Baker rifle... beat _that_ for close quarters combat! Other
than by eschewing melee and throwing in a grenade, or shooting the
enemy, or otherwise cheating...)

One 2Lt Patton wrote the US Army's last swordsmanship manual... doesn't
make swords a useful weapon, whatever the advantages his technique had
over the enemy's _code duello_, if you find yourself trying to use a
sabre against an enemy with a pistol (or, worse, an enemy luring you
into the beaten zone of a machinegun)

I'd hazard that where a credible air-to-air threat might exist then the
A-10's Sidewinder and countermeasure fit becomes of more importance than
its gun loadout, however reassuring the gun is as a weapon of last
extremity.

--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk

On 6 Dec 2003 19:49:44 -0800, (Tony Williams) wrote:

Chad Irby wrote in message om...
In article ,
"Hog Driver" wrote:

If you actually ever get into the dreaded knife-fight in a phone booth, the
other guy is going to have second thoughts about screwing with an A-10 when
the nose erupts in a huge cloud of smoke well beyond the range he can employ
his gun.

Didn't some Warthogs chew up some F-15s in an exercise that way, once?
Sit in the weeds, wait for the Eagles to get in "close," and gun kill
them from a couple of miles off...

The problem with a GAU-8/A as a fighter gun is that the weapon and its
ammunition tank are so enormous that the plane has to be designed
around them, and they would use up a substantial part of the internal
volume of a fighter aircraft. Better to go with the Oerlikon KCA,
which fires equally powerful ammo in a much more compact package.

Tony Williams
Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk
Discussion forum at: http://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/

Much better to go with an M-61 variant that actually works, is combat proven,
and has a useful rate of fire.

Al Minyard

In message , Alan Minyard
writes
Much better to go with an M-61 variant that actually works, is combat proven,
and has a useful rate of fire.

Trouble is, this gets you back where the US was in 1950; the M3 .50" was
a superb gun in terms of reliability, ballistics and rate of fire and
was a thoroughly proven weapon. Trouble is, nobody convinced the MiG-15s
of that fact, so they soaked up a _lot_ of hits where a larger-calibre
weapon would have made the F-86 versus MiG-15 kill ratio even _more_
impressive.


--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk

"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message
...
In message , Hog Driver
writes
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul J. Adam"

snip


I think we both know that the possibility of air-to-air gun fighting
today
is highly unlikely. Lessons learned from the past would behoove us to
have
them on our jets, or in the case of the A-10, use them to really screw up
the bad guys on the ground.

I hate to be contrarian... all right, I don't. I _like_ being
contrarian. Lessons from the past suggest that getting missiles working
and crews trained is a better path to dead enemies for air-to-air work.
Air-to-ground, guns pull you into IR-SAM range and even for A-10s that
isn't healthy.

Paul, doing away with a tool from your kit without a compelling reason to do
so, along with having a danged foolproof method of handling the situations
that said tool could handle, is unwise. As to air-to-ground use, I believe
the resident Strike Eagle driver has already provided a reason for retaining
a strafe capability, i.e., recent operations in Afghanistan. During Anaconda
the need for up-close-and-personal support (read that as well within the
danger-close margin) was reported. You can't *always* use your LGB's or
JDAM's, which is why the grunts liked the cannon armed aircraft during that
fight. Yes, it brings the air in within MANPADS range--but that is a risk
those guys are willing to accept when the fight on the ground gets hairy
(and thank goodness for that). Arguing that they can't (or never should)
face such a risk is a bit illogical--if all services followed that thought
process, we'd stop issuing rifles to infantrymen because in order to use one
you have to close to within the effective range of the other guy's weapons.


The initial question asked was how multi-barrel and single barrel cannons
stack up, and the subject is best dogfight guns. Just because the A-10
is
built around the GAU-8 doesn't mean it is any less of an effective
dogfight
gun, especially with the high rates of turn the A-10 is capable of, small
bullet dispersion over the tac effective range, and relatively high rate
of
fire.

Sure, just as a modern bayonet is a miserable weapon compared to a Light
Infantry sword (a proper sword that just happened to have fittings to
mount onto a Baker rifle... beat _that_ for close quarters combat! Other
than by eschewing melee and throwing in a grenade, or shooting the
enemy, or otherwise cheating...)

One 2Lt Patton wrote the US Army's last swordsmanship manual... doesn't
make swords a useful weapon, whatever the advantages his technique had
over the enemy's _code duello_, if you find yourself trying to use a
sabre against an enemy with a pistol (or, worse, an enemy luring you
into the beaten zone of a machinegun)

But there are tasks for which that bayonet is oh-so-much better than say, an
M16A2 with state-of-the-art night optics. I saw a fair amount of peanut
butter spread with bayonets; had we had to use our M16's for that it would
have been rather messy. Now that is I admit a rather extreme example, but
again it points out the wisdom of retaining those tools we have even in the
face of longer ranged/more lethal options.

Brooks

snip

Scott Ferrin wrote in message . ..
On 8 Dec 2003 10:14:03 +0100, (Urban Fredriksson)
wrote:

In article ,
Keith Willshaw wrote:

Then again the control authority of modern aorcraft is higher
and the fly by wire control system can compensate for
gyroscopic forces rather better than a human being.

And assymetric recoil as well I assume, but I think I read
that test firing of the F-22's gun induced yaw, but little
enough that the pilot easily could compensate, which must
mean the FCS doesn't try to.


The would really surprise me as the thing tries to use control
surfaces to account for little bumps and gusts on the runway :-)

I understand that pressing the firing button for the off-centre gun in
the F-16 and F-15 automatically adjusts the rudder to compensate for
yaw.

Tony Williams
Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk
Discussion forum at: http://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/

"Hog Driver" wrote in message ...
"Ron" wrote in message
...
Smart A-10
driver won't continue uphill, instead try to keep tally and get a circle
of
hogs going.

Exactly what one of my Viper friends was faced with, going up against some
Battle Creek A-10s....Never was able to get a shot off

I have some great guncamera footage of an A-10 saddling up on a Viper who
had two full bags of gas and decided to stick with the Hog and slow
down...the A-10 driver was also tuned into the F-16s VHF air-air freq, and
the Viper driver says, "I don't believe it...I'm about to get gunned by a
Hog!" Sure enough, a few seconds later guns-track-kill by the Hog on the
floundering Viper.

Incidentally, a three-barrel lightweight version of the GAU-8/A was
developed, firing the same ammo at 2,000 rpm. It was known as the CHAG
(compact, high-performance aircraft gun IIRC) and would I expect have
been fitted to modern fighters instead of the M61 if the gun had
remained more important in air combat.

Tony Williams
Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk
Discussion forum at: http://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/

Scott Ferrin wrote in message . ..
On 8 Dec 2003 03:59:15 -0800, (Tony
Williams) wrote:

"Tony Volk" wrote in message ...
I have been setting up some scenaries with the LO-MAC "Lock On- Modern Air
Combat" Sim/Game,
involving A-10s vs Su27/33, and it often is not too pretty for the Su's in
a
head on merge..The A-10s gun does a good job of reaching out and touching
someone But if the Su survives that, then the A-10 is at a bad
disadvantage.

I have to get that game myself, but it brings up an important point.
What are the avionics behind the gun? I'd imagine that an A-10 would lack
an accurate a-a mode for aiming its gun. The same thing applies to the
other guns mentioned in the debate. A gun's merits are important, but they
don't mean squat if it's impossible to hit anything with it! The
laser-rangefinders on the latest Russian jets (e.g., Su-27 series, Mig-29
too I believe) stand out as an excellent example of using superior avionics
to make a gun more effective. Anything similar on the Rafale, Grippen,
Raptor?

I understand that the SAAB Viggen armed with Oerlikon KCA has an
'AutoAim' system which effectively takes over the autopilot and aims
the plane at the designated target to ensure that the gun is properly
aimed. This enables engagement at up to 3,000m in a head-on attack.


From what I've read (albeit it was years ago) the KCA hits damn near
as hard as the GAU-8. It just doesn't have the rate of fire.

The 30x173 cartridge for the GAU-8/A was actually 'borrowed' from the
KCA, the most obvious difference being that the KCA's ammo is
steel-cased rather than aluminium alloy. The power of the HE rounds is
exactly the same. The KCA was adopted by the USA as the GAU-9/A, in
case the 8A failed (the A-10 would have had two KCAs).

As I've posted elsewhere on this thread, as well as the podded
four-barrel GAU-13/A version of the GAU-8/A, a lightweight
three-barrel CHAG version in 30x173 was also produced, firing at 2,000
rpm. That would have been interesting....

It's worth noting that the current Russian 30x165 ammo isn't that much
less powerful than the 30x173, and they do make a six-barrel rotary,
the GSh-6-30, which fires at 5,000 rpm and weighs only 160kg (M61 =
114 kg, GAU-8/A = 281 kg). If you really want bang for your buck, you
can't do much better than that, but the Russians only ever fitted it
to the MiG-27 for ground-attack.

Tony Williams
Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk
Discussion forum at: http://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/

As I've posted elsewhere on this thread, as well as the podded
four-barrel GAU-13/A version of the GAU-8/A,

I saw a picture once of the original Strike Eagle with three of those
babies on it. :-)




a lightweight
three-barrel CHAG version in 30x173 was also produced, firing at 2,000
rpm. That would have been interesting....

It's worth noting that the current Russian 30x165 ammo isn't that much
less powerful than the 30x173, and they do make a six-barrel rotary,
the GSh-6-30, which fires at 5,000 rpm and weighs only 160kg (M61 =
114 kg, GAU-8/A = 281 kg). If you really want bang for your buck, you
can't do much better than that, but the Russians only ever fitted it
to the MiG-27 for ground-attack.

Tony Williams
Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk
Discussion forum at: http://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/