AI simulates hypersonic air battle, offering tactic for winning Mach 11 dogfight | Hacker News Reader

AI simulates hypersonic air battle, offering tactic for winning Mach 11 dogfight

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20 pointsetiam25 comments

Do i understand that correctly that it says: If you see the enemy, fly away and fire your missiles backwards? Translation is a bit wacky on "to zoom ahead".

On a side note it would be generally good tactic for wars if both sides agree to it. Even better if you dont fire your missile. Just go home and enjoy our lives.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

If you fly at Mach 11 and the enemy at Mach 1.3, you fly at vastly different altitudes. You fly roughly at 80 km, and the enemy at 15 km height. The enemy has nothing they can shoot at you. Whatever you decide to do, either you hit, or you miss, but you don't lose. Of course, you are still vulnerable to ground-based missiles, but in the context of an air battle, you have nothing to fear.

Aren't dogfights a relict of WW2? I don't think modern fighter jets would ever enter one, unless they have to rely on their cannon only. I think almost all A2A kills today happen out of visual range with long distance fire-and-forget missiles.

That is true of America (Gulf War, not WW2), which has enjoyed air superiority in nearly all of its conflicts in the last few decades.[0]

But here’s a video of a dogfight between Russia and Ukraine fighters: https://eurasiantimes.com/ukrainian-su-27-flanker-dogfightin...

[0] https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/are-the-days-of-dogfights-over-...

That article itself seems to throw doubt on whether that was really a "dogfight":

>EurAsian Times reached out to Aviation Analyst Prashant Prabhakar, who sounded a more skeptical note.

>According to Prabhakar, “Dogfights – a term used to describe close-quarter aerial combat between fighter jets has been a major component of aerial wars at least until the early 90s. Modern terminology for the same is air combat maneuvering (ACM).

>As significant as they are, such maneuvers are hardly routine in modern air combat, much less seen by civilians on the ground.

>From what is reported, a Ukrainian Air Force Su-27 Flanker fighter is said to be deploying infrared flares to spoof an infrared-guided air-to-air missile, or AAM, fired by a Russian fighter jet, which again isn’t clearly shown in the video.

>As fascinating as it looks, I’d still be more interested in a more, perhaps clear video of the said “dogfight” for a better conclusion. Dogfights in the 21st century? Sounds too good to be true? Perhaps it is. or maybe not”.

I'd agree with his take. Dogfights, as the term alludes to, is close-quarters and scrappy, on top of each other. This appears to be more of taking evasive manoeuvers and ACM is more appropriate.

Do you think what the OP article describes is likewise not a dogfight?

Yes, I agree, that's interception.

Nothing concrete in the evidence. The so called Ukrainian fighter was never in the picture.

I nominally agree, although a WSJ military reporter saying this does add credence.

Pilots train dogfights a lot. They're not what you're thinking though. A 1v1 dogfight is over in one or two maneuvers and depends heavily on what kind of planes are involved.

Honestely, the chance of getting even in a 1v1 dogfight is just super slim. Missiles and radars have beyond view range capabilities so the fighter would already be death before a visual can be taken.

Regardless, I don't think a "dogfight" would happen at Mach 11. The energy involved is staggering, I imagine you'd have more casualties due to tearing apart the airframe from g-forces than weapon's fire.

A quick review of Wikipedia shows that the F-35 and F-22 are both capable (or are always equipped?) with multibarrel cannons. Why? When was the last time a US or NATO plane scored an air-to-air combat kill with a gun? I can kind of see the justification for the F-35 since it's a multi-role plane, with some configurations designed for closely supporting ground forces.

In Vietnam ROE were tight enough that the BVR sparrow couldn't be fired until within sight leading to dogfights.

> To defeat enemy in aerial combat, hypersonic plane should zoom ahead and launch missile backwards, according to computer simulation

Not counter intuitive at all. This was my favourite dogfight setup in one of the greatest games of all time, Star Control 2.

You put a lot of dynamos on your ship, then use just one weapon slot that shoots backwards, and add guiding hardware. A short burst of shots, from big distance and any enemy ship is history, without any damage.

I almost think a fleet of high altitude balloons is all you need to take down a hypersonic aircraft. Basically, mine your airspace. The aircraft itself provides enough kinetic energy to destroy itself if it hits anything.

And how do you radar-shield all these balloons to prevent the enemy aircraft knowing about them 100s of km before they enter that airspace?

Radar filters out objects with small profile because otherwise noise makes radar useless. Make the balloon + payload smaller than this size and/or augment the small size with stealth techniques to minimize footprint.

The balloon payload can be an origami-like foldable structure that unfolds into something much larger than its collapsed size to cover a larger surface area than its initial radar profile. This is common for things we launch into orbit.

The turn radius of a hypersonic object is very large, so you signal the balloon payload to unfold in the general region the aircraft will pass through such that it can't turn in time to avoid that region. Boom.

Alternately, the balloons themselves could explode just before the craft passes through that region and the debris itself gets scattered with a certain probability of hitting any passing aircraft. The debris acts as shrapnel because of the aircraft's velocity rather than the explosive used to blow it up.

The article makes zero sense the way it's written now.

When you're going Mach 11 in one direction, you don't "toss" anything "over the shoulder" and run away. You either slowly turn the plane around, with a turn radius of 70-110 km depending on how much you want to torture the pilot, then lob an (admittedly extremely dangerous) missile at them, then turn the plane around again and run, possibly losing speed in the process, or you actually shoot the missile backwards, in which case you need a powerful radar looking back to guide it, and you need an insanely overpowered missile able to brake from Mach 11 in one direction and accelerate to lethal speeds in the other direction (that's around Mach 3 for a solid kill probability). In either case, you're so incredibly technologically advanced compared to your opponent that you essentially don't have to care about them at all.

Sorry China, my AI did this 5 years ago. :(

Also the tactic it came up with was done in The Expanse a couple of years ago.

im a little sad they did not include some cool graph explaining whatever this is supposed to mean:

> But the pilot, guided by AI the team developed, flew to an unexpected position far ahead of the enemy aircraft and fired a missile “over the shoulder”, tossing it backwards towards the foe.

does this mean the ai crossed the slower foes' course, practically leaving the missile like an aerial mine for the foe to fly into?

looks like the mach11 fighter would do better with a different style of weapons than slow missiles

Why don’t we have missiles that can fire in any direction around the fighter? Would that make dogfights where you have to line up behind the enemy to get a good shot obsolete?

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