Duke Nukem
Hail to the king baby
Make the A10 bigger and give it 120mm rotary cannons
Design an A-10 Replacement
- Thread starter Doomsought
- Start date
paulobrito
Well-known member
If you really want more Dakka, 'just' made a Gattling from the 406mm guns of the Iowa class. Must be enough even for you, right ? But, i'm afraid the plane is going to be 'just a bit' too big...
Duke Nukem
Hail to the king baby
Nah lets give it rotary atomic annie cannons.
Doomsought
Well-known member
No they are not. Current drone designs are replacing strike-fighters on over-watch.
The A-10 is designed for low altitude approaches, flying under the radar in the original meaning of the term, and engaging targets in gunfire.
Which is risky and very inefficient.
Hellfire drones can carry more accurate ordinance in a lesser amount, have little-to-no risk of being shot down (and losing a pilot's life), and can be deployed more expediently from forward bases. They can also return and reload far more quickly, and they can remain at high altitude for hours at a time with no-one knowing they're there.
I like the A10. I think it's cool. But when two missiles can do the same job a gattling strafe can do with pinpoint accuracy? It's obsolete.
Best thing they can do with it now is stick one or two in a museum, then make the remaining air-frames disposable, remote-controlled drones until they're used up (shot down, crash, no-longer air-worthy, et cetera) to squeeze as much life as possible out of them.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
Per-sortie price tag, in other words because it is efficient, even if it's slightly more risky. A gattling strafe is going to be a couple hundred rounds at most. Each of those two missiles costs a sizable fraction of the platform firing them. Hell, a fighter-bomber is quite able to carry ordinance that costs half the damn jet! And in close fire support, where you want to keep hitting things over and over if things are serious, that cost adding up gets very, very stupid.
The big thing is that the A-10 as is fucks with anti-air doctrine from everyone because it's not reasonably going down to gunfire, it flies low enough that the big SAM platforms have an ass of a time locking on because they're not supposed to aim that low, it's got good enough handling to make low-guidance missiles shit in general, and MANPADs have a number of usage issues from that same handling at low altitudes, mostly surrounding them being line of sight weapons.
The aerodynamics of ultra-low-altitude flight and realities of trying to work with radar in that situation provide a great variety of complications with putting down an A-10 that the raw specifications don't give a single hint of. Its survivability is contingent on its radically different usage, such that where the Hellfire Drone derives viability from more direct stealth measures, altitude, and disposability, the A-10's predicated on low operation cost and more bluntly hiding from things.
Notably, the A-10s being out of production for decades and full of systems only they use means their operational costs have been escalating, because maintenance of the things has become nightmarish. But they're fundamentally doing things that missile drones are really bad at, because the missile drones rack up vastly more inherent operational costs due to guided munitions, making them horrible at dealing with plentiful light vehicles or attempting to compromise scattered infantry.
Essentially, as long as counter-insurgency operations are a mainstay of the US military, the A-10's role will be kept unless the deadlock leads to maintenance costs escalating to true absurdity, because it's simply not practical to be launching million-dollar missiles every time you need to deal with a pick-up that had a machine gun bolted on.
paulobrito
Well-known member
A-10 survives well while the insurgents use HMGs and 20 / 23 mm Flak. When they start to use 30 / 35mm (with modern ammo) flak with decent radars that can see better at the ultra low level - software can filter the ground clutter now much better - the survivability of the A-10 goes down very fast.
Knowledgeispower
Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
To be fair the A-10 wasn't really designed with anything larger than 23mm(aka the standard Warsaw pact mobile AA gun size) in mind
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Doomsought
Well-known member
Also when you fire pinpoint missile strikes, they other guys on the red team have reason to believe that you shot your load. With a gun attack, you might be coming back for another pass. Morale is important, there is rarely a war that has been won by attrition.
SuperS4
I'll put something witty here eventually.
No one in their right mind sees a missile strike and goes "That's it boys, they used all their stores! We've got this!" or in reverse, where your own troops go "Shit, we're done for, they launched everything!"
Not to mention, it's the USAF. There are going to be likely a multitude of aerial assets in the area, and they're not going to all launch at once.
Christ on a stick. Drones and modern strike fighters launching PGMs rarely mass volley their stores. It's a single launch, wait for update, launch on secondary and tertiary targets.
And gun runs are the last option if an enemy has a decent defense. Because you are literally flying in a straight line, directly at the enemy. If they have any kind of fire control, you're getting blasted. The whole "A-10s fly really low" is also, not really accurate. Standard gun runs aren't done on the deck, they're in a shallow dive starting from a few thousand feet up, because it will increase accuracy. Unlike PGMs where you can launch them from further away, and not necessarily straight at the target, gun-runs are straight line shots, you're lining yourself up as much as the enemy up. And while yes, in Iraq that is mostly not a problem because they're not carrying 30mm cannons around. But that also doesn't mean the US would waste money making a replacement for the A-10, because replacements are designed to use against peer opponents, and as has been said many times; the A-10s are dead against peer opponents. And any replacement is unlikely to be any more survivable, nor do the task any better then current inventory of aircraft launching PGMs. Note, the A-10 isn't the only plane capable of gun-runs, and the GAU-8 is not some miracle weapon.
I'm starting to wonder if you even have any clue as to what you're talking about, like, at all.
Doomsought
Well-known member
I'm talking about human reactions to combat. You are talking about theoretical attrition in an environment that only exists in the cult of the missile. I'm half expecting you to argue that we should take the guns out of strike fighters to save on the dead weight.
Duke Nukem
Hail to the king baby
Missiles are ridiculously expensive for the enemies we usually face.
Doomsought
Well-known member
Even against a peer, if you use only missiles, while the enemy also uses gun, you will have the worse logistics. PGMs need lots of rare earth elements and exotic metals you need to import.
paulobrito
Well-known member
That's my point - while the insurgency use old weapons is fine, is designed to survive then (more or less). But when (not if) the adversary starts to receive more modern weapons, is number is called.
So as someone who knows RADARs and weapon systems associated with them. An A-10 is low level AAA biggest worry, especially if they are doing their proper sort of flights. Low close to the ground. Radar generally is not good unless it is flat ground for such a thing, mainly because of the way the radar waves work is they bounce off and return, at different frequencies and the like, to allow a way to hit it. THey work at different frequencies and some are better then others, some are worse hen others.
AAA made to take out low flying air craft take into account mainly helicopters and slower aircraft, where an A-10 would catch them by surprise. More likely then not of course.
Also larger caliber generally means slower firing, and that is where smaller caliber generally Is preferred then larger especially for faster moving aircraft
The attack profile for an A-10 against an ADA emplacement (SAM or gun) is to remain within ground clutter until ready to make your actual attack, pop up, acquire target, adjust and dive on target, fire GAU-8 (requires no lock on time, the velocity is high enough that there is zero ballistic drop, it is basically point and shoot), then turn sharply and drop back into ground cover.
Effectively, by the time the site can acquire, identify, target, and engage, the A-10's shells are in the air and the A-10 is dropping back into the clutter. So now said site has to deal with some BRRRTTT.
Assuming it survives this encounter with surprise BRRRRTTTT, the site now has a dilemma... which direction will the A-10 come from next, or will a fast mover at high altitude swoop in, or a stealth platform...
This makes Air Defense Troops very very unhappy with their life choices.
Effectively, by the time the site can acquire, identify, target, and engage, the A-10's shells are in the air and the A-10 is dropping back into the clutter. So now said site has to deal with some BRRRTTT.
Assuming it survives this encounter with surprise BRRRRTTTT, the site now has a dilemma... which direction will the A-10 come from next, or will a fast mover at high altitude swoop in, or a stealth platform...
This makes Air Defense Troops very very unhappy with their life choices.
SAM are less liekly to fire at something so low, but AAA can fire without radar, but like you said the time it takes to acquire is a death sentence
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
So an A-10 replacement should be smaller and more agile to better perform low-level surprise attacks... what about something akin to Blitzfighter proposals?
paulobrito
Well-known member
The problem with that doctrine - the A-10 also needs to identify where the adversary his - for that need to expose itself to see it - during that time can be targeted. Also, modern Russian systems are designed to deal with these kinds of adversaries - very fast reaction time (less than 5 secs), a lot of effort has been done to the radar systems can see at ultra-low altitude, with or accompanied by fast firing 30mm guns, etc. As I said before, is well and good against old tech in insurgent hands for now, but against a force with more modern systems - and that is competent - not so good. Let's be fair - the US as little need to develop these kinds of defense systems, but other nations have the right incentive.
You do know we have systems that can help a pilot identify the target area based on various other intelligence right? We have both Imagery and Signals let alone other methods that can help identify the location of said target.
You also do know that radars can already see from ground level, the thing is the likely hood they are going to pick up said target if unlikely as the amount of interference one will get especially if there are trees or a hill or a mountain the A-10 can use for cover.