Japan’s Sixth-Gen F-X Fighter Jet

What heuristic do you employ to decide what part of the article is marketing and what part indicates "a well managed project"?

> If you're shielding against EM weapons, the weight will quickly stack up more than just the signal wire.

Agreed. The signal wire while being large antenna for EMI isn’t a problem at all. Filters, rugged transceivers, chokes and your problem is solved there.

EMP is a threat where you are able to load all traces on the PCB and in the chips themselves with varying potentials instantly.

We’re used to securing transients on the signal lines. Not on the 10mm trace from chipA to chipB.

Lots.

Your modulator/demodulator went from being a simple transceiver chip to a whole laser module. Fiber optics handle cuts and “wire” damage poorly compared to copper. It isn’t as easy repair or maintain, even a simple continuity test now requires specialized equipment and you can’t probe but rather need to plug in at each point, ok but what if your issue is the connector? Fiber is always point A to point B, which doesn’t mean you can’t HUB or DaisyChain or STAR, but isn’t as easy as some copper systems like CAN, FLEX, and maybe others that can just splice together. Double any complexity because these systems are redundantly run.

I’m not sure how big an issue is with EMI. Nor do I know the bandwidth. It’s just that the most complex vehicles today, they’re most well under 800kbps for the chassis bus (assuming some vehicle at 1Mpbs and 80% load). Not sure if anyone is actually making use of production 4-8Mbps systems yet. So I assume that rugged Ethernet for data haul and CAN for sensors would work as well as it is now for jets.

They must be doing some serious data transfers I don’t understand.

Close in dogfighting isn't a very big part of modern air combat, the real use for crazy manoeuvrers is avoiding missiles and those are already not burdened by keeping a human operator alive.

There is some scope for a manoeuvrers competition between the larger fighter class UAVs and current gen missiles, but the purpose built and smaller machine will always win the agility fight eventually so it doesn't seem like a very fruitful contest to enter from the perspective of the fighter manufacturer.

I was going to lob a joke about Japan having already tried the drone thing in WW2 but I think the real advantage there is situational awareness. Drones might become extensions of the fighter jet, and probably the right 'next step' after all the amraam generation. I feel they're signaling that they're going for 'skin in the game'...

The advantages of UAVs are massive, numerous, and obvious.

The only military advantages I can really think of manned fighters would be the increased situational awareness of a manned craft: the pilot has a panoramic view of their surroundings thanks to the fighter's canopy and being able to look around. Although, this seems like something drones could achieve relatively easily, providing a 360 degree view to their remote pilots.

Manned craft also have the ability to function autonomously if communications are down due to jamming, I guess? Drones could proceed toward a preselected target even without comms, of course, but a based on my layman's understanding of air combat decision-making is a huge element of combat flight. Things are messy, confusing, and ever-evolving.

6th gen fighter designs are trending towards significantly larger aircraft. The amount of hardware a human needs for support is relatively fixed so as aircraft size increases, ditching the pilot becomes less and less beneficial. Most fighters are also not limited by human G endurance but rather by structural limits.

Fighters are growing in size because engagement distances have massively increased thanks to the proliferation of high quality sensors and long range missiles. This ultimately means that the fighters need to have more range (fuel capacity), more powerful (bigger) sensors, more electrical generation capacity to power those sensors, and they need carry more and larger munitions.

For an aircraft that meets those requirements you can take the pilot out and you won't see many benefits. It's still going to be large and very expensive.

Smaller, cheaper drones can supplement this but they are not a replacement.

How would it solve the problem? What about communication between the jet and C&C center? Or why not use a number of UAVs as a retransmission hubs to conceal the C&C?

These are very different things.

An sacrificial ablative coating which survives 1800C° is different from a turbine spinning 25000RPM doing the same for thousands of hours.