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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

"The Air Force’s F-35A version of the aircraft and hold 182 rounds. It’s slated to be externally mounted on the Marine Corps’ F-35B jump-jet variant and the Navy’s F-35C aircraft carrier version and hold 220 rounds"[1]

The F-35 has no hope of doing sustained CAS. It is another Air Force "drop your bombs and fire a few shots then run home" plane. An A-10 can keep insurgents away from your troops for a fair amount of time.

They should strip the Air Force of its CAS role and hand it back to the Army. Then the Air Force can concentrate on what it likes: strategic bombing and air dominance.

1) http://defensetech.org/2015/01/02/a-tale-of-two-gatling-guns...

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There's a lot more to CAS than simply how many bullets your gun has. In any case, it's often not the preferred weapon. Bullets are indiscriminate. Small, precision warheads are becoming more in favor because the safety margin is better.

We've been seeing quite a bit in Afghanistan now where CAS is actually being performed by a B-1 carrying a SNIPER pod, sitting up at medium altitude with a large load of small precision bombs.

But that shows you the type of environment Afghanistan is, where the Air Force can deploy high value assets like a B-1 to perform CAS, because their anti-air threat is non-existent. The Air Force is not developing the F-35 to fight insurgents, they're deploying it to fight a well equipped, conventional force that will have multiple layers of sophisticated weapons. They'll do everything they can to soften these up before the strike aircraft go in. But there /will/ be some that remain, and its in this environment, that the F-35 needs to survive.

In the low-threat environment against insurgents, you can do that job just as well as the A-10 with the A-29 as the article states, for ever cheaper.

This is the conclusion that the Air Force has come to, and that's why they're retiring the A-10.

My cousin has related stories of the A-10 watching over him and his troops. Bullets most definitely were the main item related. The A-10's ability to stay above his group and fire a couple of rounds every so often allow them to sleep. The F-35 or B-1 is not going to do that. Drones don't currently do that. The goal is to safeguard the troops and bullets work very well.

The Air Force hates CAS and will say anything to get out of it. The fact that a modern version of the A-10 has not been developed (the F-35 is not a modern version) says everything about the Air Force's direction.

> Drones don't currently do that.

Drones would be perfect for long dwell time CAS, as long as they carry enough ordnance for a prolonged sortie.

People need to realize that while the A-10 is a good morale booster, it only carried out 20% of CAS missions in A-stan. The numbers just don't support its continued existence for anything but anti-tank warfare.

The A-10 is an obsolete concept. Weapons are so much more advanced than armor that the best defense is to not get hit. If you want cannon fire supporting you from above then you want an Apache.

Curious why half of your postings are ragging on the A-10 and claiming it is obsolete?

For that matter, the Apache is considerably more fragile than the A-10.

I was a little puzzled about this as well. Specifically, this incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_attack_on_Karbala

> Bullets are indiscriminate. Small, precision warheads are becoming more in favor because the safety margin is better.

How are bullets less discriminate than a bomb?

Bombs are guided.

This assumes, of course, your target identification is correct. Which doesn't always happen. But it's an improvement.

> The Air Force is not developing the F-35 to fight insurgents, they're deploying it to fight a well equipped, conventional force that will have multiple layers of sophisticated weapons.

Essentially the F35 is the blu-ray of fighter planes.

Meh. Blu-ray as a storage medium is a nice upgrade from the DVD. Blu-ray as a movie delivery format on the other hand. Thing is that what blu-ray tried to do for movies, was already tried once before by using DVDs to produce higher bit rate CDs.

Thing is that mechanically neither product more convenience for Joe Consumer.

While the CD brought instant track selection vs the cassette (and was a more practical size than the LP), the DVDA/SACD didn't bring anything close vs the CD.

And similarly the DVD removed the whole rewinding issue vs VHS, never mind that you could now pack a whole series season in the shelf space of a single VHS movie.

Frankly i just wish that we could have something floppy like in terms of UI For BRRW discs. copy, paste, done, rather than having to mess with burner programs etc to lay out the disc beforehand.

Maybe you should also add, that the A-10 can carry 1,174 rounds for its front Gatling (from your link).

The A-10 rounds are a tad bit more effective against insurgents hiding than the rounds shot by an F-35.

The gun on the F-35 is basically pointless. They didn't even include it on the B and C versions. CAS from an F-35 is all about SDB.

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Take a cube, half the size of each edge, and the cube weighs one eighth as much.

In this case, the 20% reduction in diameter, while keeping the same shape means the projectiles are less than half the size.

In a counter-insurgency role, the A-10 fires roughly 65 13.3 ounce high explosive shells in one second. Roughly 54 pounds of high explosive shells per second.

The F-35 is planned to fire 55 6.5 ounce projectiles per second. That's 22 pounds of shells per second.

54 lbs vs 22 lbs is a significant difference.

Though, as others have said, it's the ammo capacity that is the major problem with the F-35's proposed gun. Only being able to make one or two guns runs before being out of ammunition precludes any kind of sustained ground support.

If you’re shooting tanks then sure it's a significant advantage, but when the target is a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted on the back you don't need that much penetrating power.

There are walls and other obstacles in the field that a gun designed to shoot through a tank can go through. You do need that much penetrating power to make sure their hidey hole is not safe.

The A-10 was designed for an anti-tank role. So, I suspect there rounds are generally overkill. A smaller round than you might think can penetrate a brick/cinderblock wall. For hardened targets an Air-to-Surface missile can have a lot more penetrating power. In the end some compromise between the two is probably ideal.

That said if you’re doing dedicated ground support I think you’re going to want a lot more round than an F-35 is designed for.

I am not sure, if you even need 25mmm in this particular case. I would say that with the right aiming even a machine gun will do it.

But when you do not look at the penetrating power alone, but the blowing effect, than a bigger round can hold more explosives (of course, I don't know, if the A-10 Gatling cannon can also take explosive rounds instead of the armor breaking rounds).

But of course the parallel poster is right: there are several things to penetrate -- particularly when partisans are heavily covered.

A-10 cannot penetrate modern armor with it's gun. It had difficulty with T-72 when it was designed and could only kill them from the rear.

The A-10 cannon is not comparable with that of a modern tank. Just compare the numbers:

A-10: 30mm Gatling

M1 Abrams (and other comparable tanks): 120mm (Russland's newest tank has a 140mm gun as much I remember)

That is a huge difference! The only advantage of the Gatling is the high firing rate -- but it is definitively no match for the armor of a modern main battle tank. I also never implied that. When the A-10 was designed, tank armor was less advanced and today the A-10 is mostly fighting against light to medium armored targets. Many countries even in their regular army have still very old tanks in service.

You also get to add the forward velocity of the aircraft so it's Mass * (v1 + v2) ^2. Arguably the largest advantage of the A-10 is it keeps tank designs 'honest' as it's free to engage from just about any angle which forces tanks to add quite a bit more armor.

That is right. Most tanks are designed, that the frontal armor is the thickest and many of the WW2 tanks where very weak at the top. They where basically designed for frontal tank vs. tank (or anti-tank) attacks.

Today's tanks have to take air attacks into account -- with much better top armor but also better armor at the other sides too.

Your calculation is right, I guess, but still 120mm has just overwhelmingly more hitting power than 30mm rounds.

er that is the type of engament that the a10 is designed for top attacks on the thin armour - just as the ww2 stuka with 37 mm wasn't firing at the thick armour but the weaker top armour

Exactly. It is the same with artillery or tank ammunition -- a small increase in diameter makes a huge impact.

It actually does. The 30mm is a heavier bullet (even without taking the depleted-uranium core into account), and the case holds more powder, so it has a higher velocity. Both of which add up to more energy imparted into the target.

The GAU-12 fires 25x137 and the GAU-8 fires 30x173, so it's more than just a slightly larger diameter bullet: http://milpas.cc/rifles/ZFiles/Misc/MILITARY%20CARTRIDGE%20R...

I didn't dig too deeply, but I found recoil force measurements... 4000lbf for the GAU-12 and 10000lbf for the GAU-8.

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