AI can also fly past black/red out thresholds. Even in current aircraft that would be add capability. But having that in the design phase may open up all sorts of possibilities.
There's a big difference between a Predator with Hellfires, a tomahawk, A Global Hawk, or a man portablerecon/kamikaze drone, and finally Project Pluto, the ultimate "F you" device likely ever contemplated.
Are those limits what they are because there wasn't any point in designing stronger airframes if the pilot was just going to black out under higher G forces?
If you take the vulnerable human body out of the equation I wonder if airframes strong enough to withstand that acceleration would actually be feasible.
Given that a plane, then, needs to be capable of carrying multiple pieces of ordnance (otherwise, it's pretty much just a guided missile), it's pretty much fundamentally going to have a higher mass than whatever missile you're launching at it.
There has not been an aerial dogfight in this millennia. The last ones that would really count happened over Bosnia in the 90s. I think a Rafale took down a 1960s era MIG-23 in the Libyan Civil war, but modern fighters are either too hard to hit or too expensive to risk.
Take the human body out, and the airframe is a (possibly, bus) missile.
Today it's all about spotting the enemy first and then the usual logistics of deploying as many weapons on the enemy as possible. An aircraft that can carry 4 missiles and runs out should head back so that it can sortie tomorrow again with a fresh load of missiles instead of starting a desperate dogfight. An expensive plane that can only carry 2 missiles but is guaranteed to return home is more valuable in a war than a cheap one that carries more missiles but gets shot down frequently.
And why in the hell would you fire a missile without a target that would require it loiter unless you were doing something completely mad like Project Pluto? That just doesn't really make sense at all. Though it reminds me of a torpedo from a Michael DiMercurio book that had to be sedated due to it's carbon based computing matrix being smart enough to basically guarantee a hit on an enemy combatant submarine, but not smart enough to understand IFF.
Missiles don't care about stalling. They are on a suicide mission to get as close to the target as possible for the nanoseconds necessary to detonate. Missiles, being small and dense, are much stronger than any aircraft.
Even then, as has been said countless times in this thread, high-G maneuvers don't do shit against modern missile threats. They might be useful for dogfighting with guns, but given the range and accuracy of modern missiles, combined with proximity fuzes, it simply doesn't accomplish much.
Against a weaker enemy, you'll never have the need to pull Gs in the first place. Against an equal or stronger enemy, it won't do a damn bit of difference anyway.
It helps that bullets as small as 12.7mm can be steered.
In case I'm not being trolled: the way to defeat a radar-guided missile is to beam (fly perpendicular to) the radar source. For an missile with active or semi-active radar guidance, this means you need to fly perpendicular to it. And, preferably, fire lots of chaff.
This is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of flying straight at the missile trying to shoot it with guns. Head-on, a missile will close the last mile in under one second. During this second, you need to accurately track, predict the flight path of, and reliably put guns onto a target that's cold (all the fuel has been burnt) and has (in the case of an AMRAAM) a 7 inch diameter. And that very well may not even care about being shot up with bullets; at best, I think you'd kill the seeker, but within the last mile it's not changing course much to have to come close enough to kill you by the proximity fuze (of which I believe there are two, one in the nose and one in the tail). By the time the first of your slow-moving bullets has any shot of reaching it, it will easily be within a quarter of a mile.
This is not even a remotely plausible way to defeat an oncoming missile. It runs directly counter to the actions you already be taking to maximize your chance of survival. And on top of that, bullets are only going to damage the leading-edge parts of the missile which aren't particularly critical to its ability to kill you, at least not within the distance it will be by the time your hail-mary bullet salvo hits it.
You said the missile had some amazing ability to turn, and now you're saying it has no fuel. You can't have it both ways. There is fuel, or there is no energy to spare. Being "cold" isn't generally possible; nothing cools instantly. Modern IR sensors do not rely on engine heat. Supersonic flight generates plenty of heat on the nose.
That last bit deserves more emphasis. Heat was a serious problem for the Concorde and SR-71, despite operating at much slower speeds. The missile is hypersonic. That is the speed at which air molecules come apart from the heat. IR detection will be trivial.
There is a circular circuit board that is very much needed for the proximity fuse. That is full width.
The speed of the missile contributes to its own destruction. Bullet impact will be devastating. The missile can not endure supersonic flight with a lopsided hole and a bunch of cracks, and it wouldn't fly straight even if it could. Tumbling means instant destruction, like Space Shuttle Columbia.
Shooting back is the action to maximize chance of survival. It takes priority; all other options are obsolete.
It becomes slightly more reasonable if you turret the gun, until you factor in the weight of the necessary ammunition to neutralize multiple threats, the turret itself, and the independent radar used for target acquisition and tracking. A B-52 could pull it off, a fighter couldn’t yet. Not without massively compromising their payload and aerodynamics.
Chaff, flares, stealth and jamming are used because they actually work in practice. Jamming is a big one that people don’t hear about much. Wonder how the B-52 is still in service? Jamming. Wonder how wild weasels do their job? Jamming.
When you see a turret like that on a bomber then you can get excited for self-guided bullets shooting down dozens of multiple incoming missiles. But tbh at the rate we’re going it’ll just be a laser instead.
Don’t modern missiles use optical target acquisition in the first place?
BTW, tanks have active automatic ballistic defense systems for a while now.
It is more common to have active electronic systems. For example, one such system fires grenade-like projectiles upward that then explode in a downward direction. The timing is accurate enough that the incoming attack is hit by the shrapnel. Another system is more like a shotgun.
The more reasonable comparison is ship-based defense systems. The USA uses the Phalanx CIWS, which fires simple dumb projectiles of the same diameter as those of a typical fighter plane gun. About 100 are fired to destroy an incoming missile.
Adding an AI to a modern fighter makes it an awful lot like a flying Phalanx CIWS. You have a nearly identical gun with a nearly identical radar.
That helps the defender. The faster the missile goes, the harder it gets hit by defensive shrapnel.
This is the sort of missile a fighter pilot is up against, 20 years ago. Look at what the sidewinder does at about 1:05. Good luck shooting that down.
Impact energy grows with the square of the velocity. If the velocity doubles, that is like quadrupling the mass of the bullet, which is like turning 20mm ammo into 32.75mm ammo.
It's not like a small flightless ant on radar, and anyway a Mach 4 object will be hot from compression heating. Mach 4 is just below what it takes to rip air molecules apart. That's damn hot. IR tracking would be trivial.
There is no limit that says "one bullet only". Typically the Phalanx CIWS fires about 100 shells, and those aren't even equipped with seekers. It's just dumb 20mm shells, about the same as carried by the typical fighter plane, costing about $30 each. We use the Phalanx CIWS against incoming missiles. It works great.
BTW, that was an unimpressive video with no clear point. Yes, missiles can fly and go after targets. We all know this. It works especially well in the missile vendor's promotional video.
I think you're forgetting that a lot of anti nuclear defense systems use nuclear weapons themselves. When you only need to be within a few hundred meters of a target accuracy suddenly doesn't matter at all, especially when you have several hours to predict the flight trajectory of the enemy missile.
If laser based CIWS turns out to be viable on aircraft then we would see a focus on bigger aircraft that can defend themselves against missiles but even then they would not directly fly into a missile if they can avoid it.
The systems to use nuclear warheads against incoming nuclear warheads were decommissioned half a century ago. I don't think that was ever in use against satellites.
Lasers are nice, but definitely not needed. Phalanx CIWS uses about 100 unguided bullets to destroy an incoming missile. Modern US fighter aircraft carry the same diameter ammunition. The plane is like a flying CIWS, minus the software.
Eh, maybe minus the software. If the software existed, it might not be public. Maybe the F-22 or F-35 already have the capability, limited mainly by pilot G-force survival.
I'd like some of that.
Phalanx CIWS was prototyped in 1973 and has been in service since 1980. Shooting down incoming missiles with machine gun fire has been viable for a very long time.
The larger 30mm and RAM were created to extend that range. We planned to engage when the thermal plume was detected on the horizon.
The higher speed of ballistic threats meant that the pK of the SM-3 was pretty low. Luckily finding ships at sea is hard.
In a fight against a first line threat it was best to be in a boomer.
Also, there is no way to install such a system on a fighter airplane.
Well, if it's only Mach 4, it won't ever experience hypersonic flight, so that's pretty much a given.
> Phalanx CIWS was prototyped in 1973 and has been in service since 1980. Shooting down incoming missiles with machine gun fire has been viable for a very long time
Sure, if you are firing at much slower missiles and you've got a platform big enough to mount a rapid-rotating turreted Vulcan on, and even then it's not super reliable which is why it's being replaced or supplemented in newer deployments with systems based around the Rolling Airframe Missile.
Now that no pilot is necessarily needed, different choices can be made.
Even if you could pull an instantaneous 10G acceleration completely perpendicular to your direction of flight without shedding airspeed (think: sideways-mounted rocket motor), in the time it takes a missile to close the last mile, you've moved less than 100ft. And all the while, the oncoming missile is actively tracking you. Even if it misses that's no big deal, since it uses proximity fuzing to blow up at its closest point to you.
High-G maneuvers are great for close-in battles to outmaneuver another plane and prevent a guns solution. They're becoming increasingly useless against modern IR missiles like the AIM-9X, and they're absolutely useless against a missile approaching at ludicrous speeds from 75+ miles away.
With thrust vectoring and a TWR > 1 this is less of a concern.
Sure you can point the nose wherever you feel like, but from the missile's perspective all you've done is given up your ability to make abrupt changes in direction and made its job of predicting your future location easier. Without lift under the wings, you're spinning the plane around on its axis but you're not actually changing the plane's motion vector as much as if you'd made a coordinated turn.
And on top of all this, a missile doesn't actually have to hit you directly to kill you. Missiles are proximity fuzed, so simply blow up next to you. Even a fancy 10G maneuver (a maneuver with thrust-vectoring while stalled, by the way, is ~0-1G since you're mostly just a ballistic object) isn't going to help much against a missile at Mach 4 that can pull 50G.
We already shoot missiles at other missiles. Drones will make that cheaper. In other words i think the biggest change will be in the economics of war. War will become much cheaper in the same way SpaceX's reusable rockets made space travel much cheaper.
It was an economic victory for the U.S. more than anything else. There is always a balance. It's just like the hoopla over hypersonic cruise weapons. Sounds horrifying. Until you realize the trumpet bell makes countering them easier rather than harder as long as you detect them early, because there is simply no way to reorient quickly at those speeds without being torn apart.
Further, no one is saying we should stick with manned fighter craft, only that they won't likely be the silver bullet everyone seems to think they will be, will be fraught with their own weaknesses, may not in the long run be cheaper than man operated, and may Coe with unforeseen doctrinal changes as the enemy adapts.
War is complicated, and rarely does who has the cooler gun perfectly translate to who wins or loses.
I found reading Boyd's biography, so much effort was made before decision makers would use his tactics, even when they were clearly superior.
Even board game like Go and Chess have experienced new and novel tactics from AI despite being much older, with lower barriers to entry. Inversely, dogfighting is new and the barriers to entry are so high its unlikely its close to optimal.