Best dogfight gun?

On 11 Dec 2003 17:44:42 -0800, (Tony Williams) wrote:

Alan Minyard wrote in message . ..

You have no idea. The Mauser was an inferior weapon.

Sources for that statement, please.

These quotes are from an official JSF press release:

'Citing lower costs, greater lethality and improved supportability,
The Boeing Company has selected the Advanced 27mm Aircraft Cannon for
its next generation JSF combat aircraft.....The gun is also a
candidate for the Lockheed Martin version of the JSF...."It's the
lightest, most accurate and reliable gun based on our initial studies"
said Dennis Muilenburg, JSF weapon system director for Boeing. "Our
comparative assessment found the 27mm cannon to be more affordable,
more lethal and more supportable than any of its competitors".'

Inferior, yeah.

That release is ancient history, but the, you have never let the facts get
in they way of your "opinions".


In contrast, the press release from GD just mentioned that they were
proposing the GAU-12/U instead because it was cheaper and the ammo was
already in US service (you mean, that hadn't been realised before?).

If indeed the 27mm had become too expensive in the meantime, there is
only one likely explanation: the Americans spent too much time futzing
about with it to 'Americanise' it instead of simply adopting it. It's
been a reliable and effective weapon in European service for about two
decades in the Tornado and Alpha Jet, is also in service in the Gripen
and is about to enter service in the Eurofighter Typhoon.

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

The aircraft that you mention are not in the same league with the F-22 or the F-35.
I know that it breaks your little heart, but we are talking real weapons, not the ones
that you and Mr Arndt fanaticize about.

Al Minyard

On 11 Dec 2003 17:47:30 -0800, (Tony Williams) wrote:

Alan Minyard wrote in message . ..

Your anti-US bias is noted. The best is the M-61.

I gave lots of reasons for my statements. You haven't. So who's biased?

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

You gave lots of unsubstantiated, dated, and incorrect "reasons". That
hardly improves your reliability. Any one can put up a web page
full of inaccuracies and innuendo.

Al Minyard

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 22:36:54 +0000, "Paul J. Adam"
wrote:

In message , Chad Irby
writes
In article ,
"Paul J. Adam" wrote:
...and you're quoting the same sort of logic they used back then.
You're comparing planes and equipment, but not *missions*.

Okay, so let's get to the bottom line: how many F-4 sorties were *not*
intended to kill the enemy and break his stuff or directly support that
aim?

(Or to photograph it before and after being broken, or to keep fighters
off the breakers, or to stop his SAMs and AAA interfering, or...)

Or to strafe or nape his troops in contact. When all you have is a
Phantom, every problem has a Phantom solution.

Part of the problem with F-4 sorties is that F-4s were RFBA-4s. In
"One Day In A Long War" this was really obvious. The USN launched
F-4s to protect the A-7s, while the USAF launched fighter F-4s to
protect the bomber F-4s, and the USAF RF-4s and USN RA-5As took happy
snaps.

Because of this, you can't lump all F-4 sorties together. Ethel and
Price don't, for example. They differentiate by role, which is how it
has to be done. Bomber and attack and recce F-4s aren't fighter F-4s,
any more than A-7s are. The F/A-18, that could fight its way to the
target, wasn't invented yet.

If your chosen tactic hauls sixty aircraft in rigid formation along a
predictable course and is vulnerable to a slashing attack by one or two
MiGs on a vulnerable element, then that's bad... unless it gets two
dozen strikers on-target and stops you losing half-a-dozen aircraft to
SAMs.

Shades of Bomber Command? Remember that the Vietnam War was only a
little more than twenty years after WW II and there were pilots flying
in SEA who had flown in WW II. When you talk about strategy and
tactics, you have to keep that in mind.

Trouble is, all the guns you like won't stop #4 of one of the escort
sections getting an unseen Atoll up the tailpipe and won't help you
chase that MiG-21 down and kill him.

Guns on fighters didn't stop the Luftwaffe from picking off B-17s,
either. Or the escorts. So what's new?

For example, the Navy planes flew sorties against coastal areas, which
meant that they were flying over relatively undefended airspace on the
run in, as compared to the large number of SAMs that the Air Force
fighters and bombers went over.

So produce some numbers. Relative SAM losses per sortie, for instance?
I'm open to data, I just get wary about assertion and anecdote.

The data is there, but it's so often lumped into aggregate numbers
that it's hard to tease the real answers out. You have to ask how
many AAM kills per aircraft that sortied with AAMs or how many SAM
kills per SEAD aircraft or how many enemy infantry deaths per aircraft
with guns and nape and willy pete or how much materiel destroyed per
bomb truck. If you don't, you get very deceptive numbers.

One other note: of the 21 MiG kills by the F-4E during Vietnam, five
were gun kills... pretty good for something so useless.

This aircraft has Sparrow and Sidewinder, and by the time the F-4E is
flying they're demonstrating performance (the Sidewinder was up to 50%
Pk in its AIM-9G form). Yet it's making a quarter of its kills with
guns? Where did that battery of AAMs go in those engagements?

They were back at base. Bomber and attack and SEAD F-4Es only have
guns to defend themselves. They left the AAM at home to carry bombs.
Fewer than half the USAF F-4 were fighters with AAM. Since the
non-fighter F-4s would have been carrying their ordnance during the
inbound half of the flight and only been able to get into the fur ball
outgoing, I'd say guns were under-represented in kills. This probably
proves that the escort F-4s had more chances at MiGs than the
home-going non-fighters.

Betcha didn't think of that, did you? I didn't think of it until
about the third time I read One Day and actually studied the tables.
It's like adding in B-17 guns kills to the escort kills to pronounce
on the effectiveness of the escort fighters guns, I suppose.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003 08:15:44 -0800, Mary Shafer
wrote:

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 22:36:54 +0000, "Paul J. Adam"
wrote:

In message , Chad Irby
writes

Mary adds some info and makes some big errors:

Okay, so let's get to the bottom line: how many F-4 sorties were *not*
intended to kill the enemy and break his stuff or directly support that
aim?

(Or to photograph it before and after being broken, or to keep fighters
off the breakers, or to stop his SAMs and AAA interfering, or...)

Or to strafe or nape his troops in contact. When all you have is a
Phantom, every problem has a Phantom solution.

But USAF and USN didn't only have Phantoms. Regardless of whether you
are talking about Rolling Thunder or Linebacker, both services fielded
an array of aircraft including F-105, F-100, F-5, F-8, A-4, A-7, A-6,
A-37, A-1, B-57, etc. etc. etc.


Because of this, you can't lump all F-4 sorties together. Ethel and
Price don't, for example. They differentiate by role, which is how it
has to be done. Bomber and attack and recce F-4s aren't fighter F-4s,
any more than A-7s are. The F/A-18, that could fight its way to the
target, wasn't invented yet.

Sorry, but the F-105 could fight its way to the target and so could
the F-4. The F/A-18 isn't going to engage any current generation
fighter enroute to the target successfully with retained iron. In
fact, the current generation of interdiction aircraft doesn't even go
to the target. That's the big advantage of stand-off PGMs.

If your chosen tactic hauls sixty aircraft in rigid formation along a
predictable course and is vulnerable to a slashing attack by one or two
MiGs on a vulnerable element, then that's bad... unless it gets two
dozen strikers on-target and stops you losing half-a-dozen aircraft to
SAMs.

Shades of Bomber Command? Remember that the Vietnam War was only a
little more than twenty years after WW II and there were pilots flying
in SEA who had flown in WW II. When you talk about strategy and
tactics, you have to keep that in mind.

There weren't many, although there were a few. Robin Olds being a
primary example. But you certainly wouldn't hang the charge of
stereotyped or obsolete tactical thinking on Robin. There were a few
more Korean era vets, but in large numbers the Vietnam War, even
during Rolling Thunder was folks on their first combat.

The weapons and tactics were developing and being fielded as quickly
as possible. In '65, at Nellis, the instructor cadre in F-105s got
trained in pop-up ground attack tactics while we were in the course
and trained us the following week. The syllabus changed almost daily
to incorporate new formation, new concepts, new weapons, etc.

One other note: of the 21 MiG kills by the F-4E during Vietnam, five
were gun kills... pretty good for something so useless.

This aircraft has Sparrow and Sidewinder, and by the time the F-4E is
flying they're demonstrating performance (the Sidewinder was up to 50%
Pk in its AIM-9G form). Yet it's making a quarter of its kills with
guns? Where did that battery of AAMs go in those engagements?

They were back at base. Bomber and attack and SEAD F-4Es only have
guns to defend themselves.

Absolutely incorrect! All, repeat ALL F-4s always carried Sparrows. We
didn't always have room for AIM-9s, but I never saw a combat sortie
flown by an F-4 when I was there without Sparrows.

They left the AAM at home to carry bombs.

Sparrow wells don't hold bombs.

Fewer than half the USAF F-4 were fighters with AAM. Since the
non-fighter F-4s would have been carrying their ordnance during the
inbound half of the flight and only been able to get into the fur ball
outgoing, I'd say guns were under-represented in kills. This probably
proves that the escort F-4s had more chances at MiGs than the
home-going non-fighters.

The reason that A/A loaded F-4s got more kills is more subtle. It has
to do with the politics of "ace-building" between the USN and USAF and
the mis-guided over-classification of TEABALL. See Michel's Clashes or
Thompson's "To Hanoi and Back".

Escorts didn't even get many shots as they were often used to provide
blocking or herding of MiGs to direct them to a kill zone where the
555th was being vectored on a discrete frequency to do the shooting.

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003 23:13:38 +0000, "Paul J. Adam"
wrote:

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? )

I got a fair way toward a conference paper on it, with the help of the
guys at Wright-Pat. The conclusion is very limited because it's based
on very limited data, more like randomly-collected anecdote, long
before AWACS or modern RWR. I wouldn't use it to try to support my
arguments about modern air warfare.


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).

I don't think that's right. We know that two A-10s nailed helos in
'91, so the possibility of helo-A-10 combat has to be considered.
If an A-10 can get a helo kill with a gun designed for air-to-ground,
then a helo with such a gun can do the same thing to the A-10.

Restricting armament to its advertised role is silly. Just ask the
Argentineans in that ship that the Royal Marines pasted with their
Carl Gustavs. Or the F-15 that nailed the helo with the 500-lb dumb
bomb. Having seen those happen, the idea of an A-10 going up against
an enemy aircraft doesn't seem so far-fetched.

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.

I don't think it's that kind of limitation. I think it's more like
there being too many scenarios to really predict accurately. Most of
them are going to be kind of unexpected, which makes it hard to
predict.

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 fighter world decided this once before, you know. They were wrong.
That was back when NATO faced the WarPac military, though, as well as
before AWACS, etc. A lot of this discussion is assuming, rightly or
wrongly, that the only scenario is the overwhelming Western military
against some over-classed small country. That may not be a good
assumption.

What about India and Pakistan? Are they going to be fighting the same
kind of air war? Probably not. The UK and Argentina fought something
a lot different from either anti-Iraqi action.

We design and build most of our aircraft for export as well as
domestic use (for pretty much every current "we"), so it's important
not to get too fixated on one combat scenario. We may have to put
guns into fighters to keep aircraft salable, after all.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 18:34:42 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:

In article ,
"Paul J. Adam" wrote:

That's an extremely large "if", given the extensive air-to-air sensor
suite fitted to the A-10...

It's called a "radar warning receiver," and it tells you which direction
you're being radiated from. If the other guy isn't using radar, they're
proabably not going to see you in the weeds at all from any rational
distance.

As I recall, AWACS talks to A-10s. That's a pretty extensive sensor
suite for the A-10.

If we're talking about anything like a realistic scenario, there's
going to be an AWACS.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

"Magnus Redin" wrote in message
...
Hi!

"Paul F Austin" writes:
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"..

A gun is probably the cheapest way of killing low-performace targets
like UAV:s, cheap targets that an enemy can produce in large numbers
forcing you to deplete your stock of expensive AA-misiles.

The gun system reuse all the expensive parts, radar, electronics for
aiming the aeroplane and the gun while the ammunition can be dumb
and is easy to mass produce.

It is of course possible to develop a fairly cheap and small low
performance AA-missile but it is hard to get it as cheap as a gun
system. This gun competitor might be developed if someone decides to
arm small UAV:s with AA-missiles for killing other UAV:s and
helicopters.

And it's cheaper still to have a dedicated anti-UAV system, possibly like a
turboprop P-51. Using a $60M+ fighter to bust $100K UAVs is stupid. It's
also nearly impossible. A low signature, low altitide target loitering along
at 100kts is tough to manage in a fast mover. You'll blow though a tank of
ammunition killing very few UAVs.


And I realy like the idea of a backup weapon if the enemy has superior
countermeasures for your AA-missiles. But you can have that with a pod
filled with unguided rockets.

That's also why you have the next generation AAM. A major portion of the
AIM-9 development over the last 50 years (!) has been improvements to
seekers to get Pk up, including in the face of better countermeasures..

"Kevin Brooks" wrote in message
.. .

"Paul F Austin" wrote in message
...

"Kevin Brooks" wrote
"Paul F Austin" wrote

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

Now, here's a question: for the 200Kg or so weight budget (I
have
no
idea
about volume) of an internal gun and ammo tank, would you rather
have
1,
2
or 3 more AIM-9Xs/ASRAAMs?

It's not a question of "just weight," or we'd just build C-5s with
a
big
automated missile launcher in them.

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? Or some
of
the
other goods that you snipped. Those are real choices and a gun has
to
earn
its place on the airframe just like every other piece of gear. You
(the
customer and systems designers) make choices that affect the
aircraft
thoughout its life.

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.
Minimum range engagement? ASRAAM claim 300m minimum range and with
"looks
can kill" helmet sights, it's really not clear that a gun brings
much
to
the
table.. Strafing? Having 6 SDBs tucked away seems more useful.

Minimum safe distance (to friendly troops) for surface targets using
the
20mm is 25 meters (according to a USAF chart included in the 1996
edition
of
CGSC ST 100-3). The same chart indicates minimum distance for bombs
under
500 pounds is 145 meters (for protected friendlies, ie., bunkers,
trenches,
fighting positions) or 500 meters (if friendlies are in the open).
Even
given a significant reduction in the latter figures for the smaller
SDB,
it
is going to be substantially more than 25 meters. So what do you use
to
engage bad guys located in the 25 meter to something-under-500 meter
gap
if
you have no gun? This is not a purely hypothetical--it happened during
Anaconda.

That's a good point and one I can't answer. If it was me though, I'd
expect
that the answer would lie with more organic fires available at the
battalion
level rather than depending on CAS for "men in the wire".

There is not a soldier around who would disagree with your objective,
since
groundpounders generally prefer having "their own" support completely
in-pocket. But that does not change the fact that there will be
situations,
like during Anaconda, where the organic support assets are either not
available (i.e., no arty tubes were within range) or unable to handle the
scope of the mission (i.e., the mortars that the Anaconda troops did have
were over-tasked due to the unexpected number of concurrent targets, and
ammo resupply was problematic being fully dependent upon helos in what had
already become a less-than-helo-friendly environment). That is where the
internal gun on the CAS aircraft becomes a means for the commander to
remain
flexible in how he responds to these "knife fight" situations.

If there's enough of a requirement for gun support in CAS to justify guns
across the fighter fleet, there's an alternative requirement for a
dedicated gun/CAS platform that can live in opposed airspace. We're also
splitting into the a cannon with a_very_large tank of ammo to address the
many, many soft hostiles application and the few, hard targets that require
something like a 30x173. Remember that some of the gun/aircraft combinations
discussed on this thread only carried 150 rounds or so. You won't make too
many passes with that.

In article ,
Mary Shafer wrote:

On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 18:34:42 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:

In article ,
"Paul J. Adam" wrote:

That's an extremely large "if", given the extensive air-to-air sensor
suite fitted to the A-10...

It's called a "radar warning receiver," and it tells you which direction
you're being radiated from. If the other guy isn't using radar, they're
proabably not going to see you in the weeds at all from any rational
distance.

As I recall, AWACS talks to A-10s. That's a pretty extensive sensor
suite for the A-10.

....but sometimes, AWACS is just not available, or is too busy to talk to
everyone in range.

If we're talking about anything like a realistic scenario, there's
going to be an AWACS.

That was kinda the point. It was an "edge" scenario.

--
cirby at cfl.rr.com

Remember: Objects in rearview mirror may be hallucinations.
Slam on brakes accordingly.

"Chad Irby" wrote
(Tony Williams) wrote:

We know the Mauser works, too - it's been in service in large numbers
for two decades. The initial assessments by the JSF team concluded
that the Mauser was the most cost-effective choice, and they knew all
about the GAU-12/U then.

Part of that "cost effectiveness" appeared to be a lowball pricing
structure that fell through on closer examination.

Here's the prospective from a contractor's point of view: non-incumbents
bidding into a new requirement have the advantage of the valor of ignorance.
Because the contract is cost plus, in the absence of experience, a new
bidder can make bidding assumptions that erm turn out to be different from
reality. The_incumbent_has to know more about the real costs and as a
result, often bids a higher price.

Bidding to fixed price is different. A contractor's management with make
sure the bid price is high enough that they_will_make money. Then there are
disasters like BAE's Nimrod rebuild which scar a generation of managers (the
ones that don't get taken out back and shot). I suspect that BAE will not
bid a fixed price contract again for twenty years.