Introduction
As EJ-230 turned out to be too expensive for estimated cost of aircraft, I have decided to replace it with commercial engine. Gun will also be replaced with 30 mm version of GAU-12 (henceforth GAU-32). 20% increase in size will result in gun being 2,53 m long, 0,31 m wide and 0,35 m tall. Projectile dimensions will be 30×173 mm, same as GAU-8. Rate of fire will be 4.200 rpm, with muzzle velocity of 1.000 m/s. Projectile weight will be 378 g, with total round weight of 681 g. Muzzle energy will be 189.000 J, and maximum output 13,23 MW. Gun itself will weight 211 kg. Recoil is (4.200 / 60) * 1.000 * 0,378 = 26,46 kN.
Design
Length: 12,04 m (12,6 m with tail)
Wingspan: 12,97 m
Height: 3,2 m
Wing area: 26,5 m2
Empty weight: 6.500 kg
Fuel capacity: 4.900 kg
- Rear tank: 160x110x199 cm = 16x11x19 dm = 3344 l
- Forward tank: 220x110x110 cm = 22x11x11 dm = 2662 l
- 1 l = 0,82 kg
Fuel fraction: 0,43
Weight: (30 mm GAU-12 round: 681 g, AGM-65: 300 kg)
With 100% fuel + 1.200×30 mm rounds: 12.217 kg
With 50% fuel + 1.200×30 mm rounds: 9.767 kg
With 100% fuel + 1.200×30 mm rounds + 4 AGM-65: 13.417 kg
With 50% fuel + 1.200×30 mm rounds + 4 AGM-65: 10.967 kg
Maximum takeoff: 13.940 kg
Wing loading:
With 100% fuel + 1.200×30 mm rounds: 442 kg/m2
With 50% fuel + 1.200×30 mm rounds: 350 kg/m2
With 100% fuel + 1.200×30 mm rounds + 4 AGM-65: 487 kg/m2
With 50% fuel + 1.200×30 mm rounds + 4 AGM-65: 395 kg/m2
Weapons:
1xGAU-32 with 1.200 rounds
6 wing hardpoints (70 mm rocket pods, 12 rockets each; AGM-65 Maverick, AGM-114 Hellfire, AIM-9, ASRAAM, IRIS-T, MICA IR)
1 centerline hardpoint (jamming pod or 500 kg fuel tank, or any of above)
Gun: GAU-32
Length: 2,53 m
Width: 0,31 m
Rate of fire: 4.200 rpm
Muzzle velocity: 1.000 m/s
Projectile: 378 g
Round: 681 g
1-second burst: 70 rounds / 13,23 MJ
Engines: ALF-502R-5 (statistics represent each engine)
Maximum thrust: 6.970 lbf (3.162 kgf, 31 kN)
SFC at maximum thrust: 0,408 lb / lbf hr
Fuel consumption at maximum thrust: 1.290 kg per hour
Cruise thrust: 2.250 lbf
SFC at cruise thrust: 0,72 lb / lbf hr
Fuel consumption at cruise thrust: 735 kg per hour
Length: 162 cm
Diameter: 102 cm
Wing loading:
488 kg/m2 at combat takeoff weight
395 kg/m2 at combat weight
Thrust-to-weight ratio:
0,47 at combat takeoff weight
0,58 at combat weight
Speed:
Maximum: 860 kph
Cruise: 490 kph
Combat radius with 10 minute combat: 1.093 km
Combat radius with 10 minute combat and 2 hour loiter: 603 km
Sensors:
radar warners
laser warners
missile warners
Countermeasures:
chaff
flares
Unit flyaway cost: 9.184.000 USD
Cost per flying hour: 1.000-1.500 USD
Sorties per day per aircraft: 3
Sorties per day per billion procurement: 324
Notes
- large tank: 140*98*122 px = 12,38*8,67*10,79 dm = 1158 l
- small tank: 56*52*122 px = 4,95*4,6*10,79 dm = 245 l
- wing tanks: 2 * 504*84*8 px = 2 * 44,59*7,43*0,71 dm = 2 * 235 = 470 l
This will allow extensive combat and loiter time even if one fuel tank is punctured.
ALX combat mission fuel usage will be like this:
* takeoff – 7 kg
* 10 minutes to 10.000 meters – 430 kg
* 10 minutes of combat – 430 kg
* descent – 250 kg
* landing – 4 kg
* cruise to combat area – 1.640 kg
* cruise from combat area – 1.640 kg
* unusable fuel – 10 kg
* reserve – 489 kg
Ammo capacity:
l:72 px / 63 cm, d:92 px / 80 cm
area: 450 rounds
length: 3 rounds
total: 1.350 rounds
weight: 702 kg
Wing area: 2*210*582 + 97*215 = 244.400 + 20.855 cm2 = 26,5 m2
A-10 costs 16 million USD at weight of 11.321 kg, for a cost of 1.413 USD/kg.
Naval variant will cost 11 million USD.
EDIT:
A-10 has a minimum takeoff distance of 945 meters and landing distance of 610 meters. Its takeoff weight is 21.361 kg for CAS mission, with TWR of 0,38, wing loading of 454 kg/m2. ALX has a takeoff weight of 13.417 kg, TWR of 0,47 and wing loading of 488 kg/m2.
Decrease in takeoff distance is proportional to increase in TWR. 10% increase in takeoff weight increases the takeoff run by 21%. 10% increase in landing weight increases the landing run by 10%. 10% increase in wing area (9% decrease in wing loading) decreases the takeoff speed by 5%.
Thus the ALX takeoff distance is 427 meters. (945 m > 407 > 427)
Loadouts
Comparision with other fighters
AX’s weapons loadout allows it 24 attack passes; A-10 for comparision has 22 firing passes of gun ammo and 6 missiles, for total of 28 attack passes. A-10s unit flyaway cost of 16 million USD and 3 sorties per day per aircraft however mean that while A-10 can fly 186 sorties per day per billion USD, AX can fly 324 sorties per day per billion USD; a 1,74:1 sortie generation advantage; this means that AX offers 7.776 attack passes per billion procurement USD per day, compared to 5.208 for the A-10. AX is also less visible and somewhat more maneuverable owing to higher thrust-to-weight ratio and smaller size, resulting in greater survivability.
Comparing it with other fighters that are supposed to perform CAS is nowhere near being a fair play: aside from being completely incapable of performing actual CAS, fast jets are also too costly. F-16C costs 70 million USD flyaway and can fly 1,2 sorties per day, resulting in 16 sorties per day per billion USD (a 20:1 advantage for AX); F-35A costs 184 million USD flyaway and can fly 0,3 sorties per day, resulting in 1,5 sorties per day (a 216:1 advantage for AX).
F-16C has 4,7 1-second bursts from gun and can carry up to 12 bombs, for a total of 17 attack passes; F-35A has 2,6 1-second bursts and can carry up to 10 bombs, for a total of 13 attack passes. Thus per billion procurement USD, F-16C offers a total of 272 attack passes, and F-35A offers a total of 20 attack passes. From this it can easily be calculated that, for equal procurement cost, F-16C offers 13 times as many attack passes as the F-35A, A-10 offers 260 times as many attack passes as the F-35A, and AX offers 389 times as many attack passes as the F-35A.
It is also interesting to compare it to several proposed CAS fighters. First one is Pierre Sprey’s CAS fighter (America’s Defense Meltdown, pg 161). Sprey’s fighter has 30 mm cannon, 8.000 kgf of thrust, 6.350 kg empty weight, 4.500 kg of fuel (fuel fraction of 0,41), 11.300 kg combat takeoff weight; likely cost is 9 million USD. Another Fighter Mafia’s proposal, “Blitz Fighter” by James Burton (made into concept at LTV Vought Company), an airplane with empty weight of 2.300-4.500 kg, using 4-barreled 30 mm Gattling gun and a minimum of sensors; it would have cost 7,4 million USD (adjusted for inflation to 2013 USD). AX has 30 mm cannon, 6.324 kgf of thrust, 6.500 kg empty weight, 4.900 kg of fuel (fuel fraction of 0,43), 13.417 kg combat takeoff weight, and while it can carry guided AT missiles, it relies primarly on its gun and dumb weapons; it costs 9,2 million USD. It can be seen that while AX is not as radical concept as other two fighters, it offers most of the same advantages.
3D design by Riley Amos (added 16.8.2016.)
https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model.html?id=6844bedc-c4b9-4d53-9f7c-5babdd827953
Related content
Defense Issues 
Picard,
Another thing that I forgot to mention with respect to the turboprop vs turbofan debate is that the turboprop is far more efficient with fuel. Well i mentioned that, but I overlooked one of the conclusions, which is that a turboprop aircraft needs less fuel to go the same range, and far, far, less fuel to slowly loiter over a battlefield at 160kmph or so. What all that adds up to, is an aircraft that doesn’t need as much internal fuel as the same aircraft but as a turbofan. You could probably get away with a fuel fraction as low as 30%, or even 25%.
I say that because, based upon some graphs I found of airspeed versus turboprop/turbofan/turbojet efficiency, even at a speed as high as 360kmph, the turboprop has 45% more efficiency than the high bypass turbofan, and the effect increases as the speed decreases (although not as much as I had previously thought, because turboprops actually become more efficient at higher speeds up to a point). High bypass turbofans only start becoming more efficient than turboprops around 720 kmph, which is above the top speed of these planes anyway. Of course, all of this depends on the specific engines, and the prop design, but it is just a general rule.
What that means is that, for the same effective thrust generated, you are, realistically, using 31% less fuel or more (1/1.45=0.689). On top of that, because the engines themselves are lighter, you need less thrust to simply stay in the air, although that might be a wash with a payload increase, but then you get an increased payload. However, if we are using about 30% less fuel to generate the same thrust, then we can just simply put 30% less fuel on the plane. That means that we can have an even smaller, plane, since we don’t need to carry all that extra fuel. It also means that we are going to have reduced takeoff weight, which means reduced takeoff distance and speed. Which we could then use to increase our payload, or simply enjoy. And all of that is using 30% somewhat unoptimistically, since fuel savings are more like 35%.
LikeLike
To use a real world example. Mainly using wikipedia as my source I’ve found the OV-10 Bronco had a typical takeoff weight of around 5000kgs. Internally the plane had a capacity of 954 litres, which it usually held Jet Fuel A in. At 15* Celsius, that JFA has a kg/volume conversion of 0.8kg/L almost exactly, which means the plane had a fuel weight of 763.2 kg’s of fuel. They typically added a centerline tank to the plane, which held 150, 200, or 300 gallons. Let’s say that they were always using 300 gallon tanks, which equates to 1152 liters of fuel. That means that the plane had a combined fuel capacity of 954+1152 == 2106 liters, which works out to a weight of 1684.8 kg’s. I’m sure that the plane was actually (potentially much) heavier than 5000kg’s at this point, but even still at this weight the plane has a fuel fraction of 33.7%. There are reports of pilots who flew them who actually complained that the plane had too much endurance. That after five hours of flying the thing it was too hard on the pilot to keep working. Some of them flew as much as 7 hours in the things, albeit mostly loitering.
So in addition to simply being cheaper per flight hour, the savings in terms of fuel loadout are enourmous here. A much smaller fuel fraction gets the pilots actually more air time, just because the turboprop is so much more efficient than the turbofan. This in turn makes the plane much easier to design, and lighter overall, due to the decreased need for fuel tank size.
LikeLike
Yes, but in a more modern observation aircraft you could include an autopilot. Autopilot pilots along the set route, one crewmember observes the terrain and second crewmember sleeps until they switch. But it is true that fuel savings would be enormous, which is important in a frontline aircraft.
LikeLike
Yes, turboprop is far more efficient. That is why I used it for my FAC/COIN/light CAS aircraft:
https://defenseissues.net/2014/08/16/forward-air-controller-aircraft-proposal-revised/
Endurance of 9 hours, combat radius 1.850 km, fuel fraction 0,17, albeit estimates may not be entirely accurate.
Turboprop aircraft is ideal for COIN work precisely because it does not need much fuel to loiter for long time, so it can have more armour, weapons etc. for given amount of fuel and range.
LikeLike
So if I could make one last comment here as a sort of compendium as to the benefits of turboprops:
-Cheaper to buy
-Cheaper to maintain
-~45% more fuel efficient
—-Less fuel required in plane
—-Cheaper to operate per flight hour
—-More thrust for same fuel expenditure
-Engine itself much more easily armoured
-Lighter
-Smaller width, height
-(Negative) larger length
The only real unknown is whether or not the propeller itself can be adequately and practically thickened in order to not be the weak link in the chain. If it can be, then I really don’t think there’s any benefit left to turbofans, although I’ll happily listen to others who can come up with reasons.
LikeLike
I also support the turboprop idea. Turboprops are much cheaper, lighter, smaller, more efficient than turbofans as you have already mentioned.
You can look at current attack helicopters, like Mi-28 for ideas about the blades armor — ” A new design of all plastic rotor blades, which can sustain hits from 30 mm shells, has been installed on the Mi-28N Night attack variant.” (quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-28).
I propose to use the P&W PT6 engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_Canada_PT6) because it is already powering many trainers/light attack aircraft like the Pilatus PC-9, PC-21, Embraer Super Tocano (which is currently used as light CAS in Afghanistan by the US forces), and similar aircraft that are already widely used and well integrated in many of the western airforces. It also used in a huge amount of civilian aircraft and can be serviced in many locations around the world.
LikeLike
Great find with respect to the plastic rotor blades. Assuming this can be put onto a plane propeller, and there’s little reason to suspect otherwise, then we’ve definitely increased the survivability of all prop aircraft for CAS, including my idea of the modern A-1. However, I do still think that the raw thrust advantage of a turbofan is unavoidable, so I no longer believe that any turboprop fleet can totally replace a modernized A-10.
LikeLike
Although I should point out, I’ve been thinking of a sort of “Killer Bronco” idea that I’ve been having. Take the Bronco. Get rid of the asinine 1000 lbs of needless electronics, as well as the 1000 lbs of “it needs to be a dirtbike” landing gear. Get rid of the cargo compartment as well. Use our experience finding that a big gun and small frag bombs are the most useful at CAS. Then put in something like the Gsh-30, or some self-designed 30mm Gast Gun. Give it a few light utility pylons/sponsons for whatever you need. Now, for the coup de tat, give it the top of the line 1900hp PT-67A engines, and give it two of them, just like the original.
According to Beckett, the original prototype plane had a loaded weight of 5800lbs, and less than 7000lbs when doing CAS in its original configuration. Assume our changes lead to an increase in weight when doing CAS to a full 9000lbs. That’s going to give us 0.42 hp/lbs ratio, which is absolutely nuts. Compare that to the 0.21 hp/lbs ratio of the BF-109 Messerschmidt, which I believe had the best P/W ratio of any production prop aircraft ever.
An aircraft like that, which I’m calling the Steroid Horsie, could very well not work out for a number of different reasons. Potentially poor endurance, too much non-centered weight, etcetera. However, it’s worth a prototype or two at the very least.
LikeLike
Now, on to the next point of interest, the gun. The GAU-8 currently on the A-10 weighs “only” 281 kg’s, but the complete weapon system including the feeder and ammunition drum with the ammunition weighs in at an amazing 1800kg’s. The GAU-12 weighs only 120 kg’s, but I can’t find the weight of the entire system. If we extrapolate using the GAU-8, then it should weigh about 768 kg’s. That’s for the 25mm version though. Using the ALX, the gun + ammunition collectively weigh 1027 kg’s, and I’m not sure whether or not you’re including the ammunition drum and feeder system in that calculation or not. I certainly like the amount of ammunition, but the weight itself is kind of ridiculous.
I think the gun specifications are pretty open for debate. One of the problems I have with the A-10, and I love the plane don’t get me wrong, is that the gun was originally designed to kill 1960’s era Soviet battle tanks. Well tanks make up about 5% of the battlefield at an absolute maximum. Carrying around a gun that can kill them is awesome, but the weight penalty is quite high. We know from friendly fire incidents that the Bradley’s 25mm rotary cannon can disable Abrams tanks. If my above calculations are correct, then the weight savings from switching to a 25mm rotary cannon can be more than 60%, or over 1000kg’s. Furthermore, if you’re dealing with a bunch of tanks, then you really should be loading out with recoilless rockets with anti-tank warheads. That way you have the flexibility to carry them or not carry them, and you can also see which weapons actually work and which do not.
When we focus on the other potential victims of the GAU-8 I think we can see that the 30mm explosive round is overkill. I know it might be sacrilege, but I would actually go all the way down to a 23mm or even 20mm cannon as the main weapon. You don’t want to skimp out on the weaponry, but the weight and volume savings are very difficult to ignore. You can pocket the weight reduction, or you can use it for more ammunition. The gun can still consistently kill thin skinned vehicles, can destroy machine gun nests, slaughters infantry out in the open, etcetera.
Ultimately, to even have an educated best guess we need to talk to the pilots, soldiers, mechanics, and engineers. Figure out how damaging a reduction in per-bullet firepower would be to them in actual practical reality. Then, with an eye to what we can actually build, we can make a proper, well balanced gun. Although I will miss that lovely BRRRRRRRRRRRRRT of the Avenger.
LikeLike
Thing is, it is not just main battle tanks. There are many more protected vehicles on the battlefield: armoured personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled artillery, and there is also an issue of attacking bunkers, shelters and such. So gun still needs to have sufficient penetrating power, range, muzzle velocity, rate of fire and shell weight. You also have to keep in mind that you don’t need to penetrate armour of an MBT for a mission kill: destroying targeting and other sensory systems is quite enough. But while not inside the main armour, they are still protected, so I am not sure 20 mm gun is enough for that. Depends on the ammo, I guess.
LikeLike
Actually my thinking on this has evolved quite a bit. I was trying to make it work where we could use one single plane to replace the OLX and ALX, but I’m starting to wonder how possible that really is. The main reason being the gun that my “Destroyer” would need for Heavy Direct Fire Support. I now favour something very similar to your OLX and ALX concepts, although if I were made emperor of the world I would just build the modernized A-1 Skyraiders and modernized A-10 Warthogs, probably in something akin to a 10:1 ratio. You can do a lot with unguided rockets and bombs on hardpoints, to try to solve the lack of heavy firepower that the absence of a large caliber gun gives you, but those can’t really replace a heavy gun, and you’re still stuck with the low T/W problem for acceleration unless you put overly large dual engines on the thing, which causes lots of problems with fuel economy and range. So having said all that I got to thinking about what kind of gun we would need on an updated A-10.
As I wrote with regards to your Fighter Proposal 6, in my opinion, by far the best gun for a fighter plane is a smoothbore sabot revolver-cannon, of which 20mm is probably a caliber that we can get away with using. The reason for this is pretty simple, when it comes to armoured targets, sabot rounds reign supreme. It doesn’t make any sense to have a HE round fired less frequently, at half the velocity, and with worse effects per round, because all we’re ever firing at are essentially lightly armoured vehicles. Unfortunately, we have something of a dilemma with our ALX, since we need its gun to destroy targets ranging all the way from MBT’s to exposed infantry in the open. The guns and shells required to do those two jobs are fundamentally at odds with each other, a Sabot penetrator for the MBT, and a pure HEI rifled shell for the infantry. That got me thinking, why not just have two different guns?
When it comes to exposed “soft targets”, such as infantry, bunkers, aircraft on the ground, roads, runways, or even unarmoured buildings, we want as much explosive effect as possible. HEI gives us basically the effect of a frag grenade first slightly penetrating the target before exploding, for each round. If we were to upgrade the caliber of the gun on our ALX to 35mm, then we would expect a round weighing ~50% more, for the same velocity. Personally, I think we can go even lower. The velocity of the shell is relatively unimportant compared to the rate of fire, and the size of the explosive. A lower target for velocity, say of 800m/s, gives us a lot of weight savings from some combination of shortened barrel, as well as lesser propellant. To use the Oerlikon 35mm as an example, to get to a velocity of 1175m/s for its HEI projectile weighing 550 g’s, it takes a round that weighs 1.58 kg’s, giving a projectile/round ratio of 35%. This compares to the GAU-8’s 681 g HEI round, with a 380 g projectile propelled at 1020m/s, for a ratio of 56%. The GAU-8 has a barrel length of 2.3m, which is 7.67x its caliber, compared to the Oerlikons 3.15m barrel length, which is exactly 9x its caliber. So in order to get a measly 155m/s velocity increase we need to use massively more propellant and a much longer barrel, all of which add considerable weight. To get our lower velocity round we would in reality share the weight savings between barrel shortening and propellant lessening, but pretending that we keep the round weight the same, in order to go from 1000m/s to 800m/s we can shorten our barrel to 64.1% of the original length, and that’s ignoring the reality of increasing friction with increasing velocity, which would exaggerate these results even more. In fact, again ignoring friction which exaggerates this effect, if we outright halve the barrel length, we still retain a velocity of 707m/s. Of course, like I said earlier, we would utilize some combination of lesser propellant, along with a shorter barrel, but the point is that there are serious weight and volume savings to be had here from a lower velocity shell. All of this can be used to either upgrade to a larger caliber shell, or simply have a smaller version of the GAU-8 with lighter rounds, but the same projectile.
As for the sabot round, due to the inherent high velocity of the round, we don’t need to build a particularly long gun with enourmous propellant charge. The effect against heavy armour is unparalleled, and when it comes to armoured vehicles I think the “snapshot” advantage of a revolver cannon shouldn’t be ignored. Additionally, the increased practical range strikes me as being of the utmost importance in the presence of enemy AAA. Probably most importantly, due to the radically different ballistics of the round we could never simply mix it in with the ammunition of the other gun, since nobody could actually aim with that. For that last reason we absolutely need a different gun, and since we’re already using a different gun there’s no reason not to use a smoothbore revolver cannon that’s really good at murdering armoured vehicles.
With all that being said, I think that my upgraded A-10 would have both a 6-7 barrel 30-35mm rotary cannon shooting HEI possibly with some SAPHEI mixed in, as well as a 35-40mm revolver cannon shooting APFSDS rounds, to take care of those pesky MBT’s. Having said all of that, it’s not about what’s great on paper, but what is practical to design and build in an aircraft, effective in the field, as well as easy to maintain. It could well be that for layout reasons it makes more sense to have dual smoothbore cannons placed in the sides of the vehicle, similar to the IA-58 pucara layout. It might also be true that a rotary cannon is the wrong choice for the HEI, although I certainly hope not, but I have heard that the weight of the GAU-8 combined with the placement makes servicing the thing a pain. This is just the rough draft, and actual engineers, mechanics, and pilots would need to be brought in for revisions.
LikeLike
One thing I might add is that we don’t have to go entirely full anti-armour and full anti-personnel. We can utilize a mix of HE, HEI, and SAPHEI for the rotary cannon, and a mix of regular APFSDS, along with heavily frangible APFSDS for our smoothbore revolver cannon. The former is to give us a great mix against various soft and semi-soft targets. The latter is to make sure that we don’t just pass right through lightly armoured vehicles. The ratio at which these rounds should be mixed in is unknown to me, and would need to be decided on after experimentation.
LikeLike
It’s worth taking into consideration that discarding sabots… discard, and they do so directly in front of the muzzle, resulting in a cloud of sabot material to fly through and for the engines to injest – for your proposal it may be worth knecking down an existing cartridge instead. Regarding the use of revolver cannons for heavy sustained fire, preference may be given to a multi-barrel option such as a the Russian’s Gsh-xx-2s which have a lot of the same benefits if you can overlook the non-externally driven mechanism.
Another point is regarding your mixed feed idea, it’s got obvious advantages but consider that different types of shells will have different ballistics, a HE rounds will not hit the same spot as a saboted penetrator.
I would suggest triming some fat, drop the rotary cannon to 4 rifled barrels (no less for vibration reasons), if you’re only lobbing HE I am thinking 30×113 will work a treat, and for the larger cannon I would suggest using a regular 30-35mm cannon with 40-50mm barrels and working around the sabot problem, perhaps using a non-discarding sabot which would solve the weight issues but not the drag issue.
I like where you’re going with this, I myself was playing around with a 30mm/105mm RCLR combination, keep me updated.
LikeLike
Picard, please delete my comment below at 1:36am. There was an error uploading this comment earlier.
Yeah I’ve been thinking for the past week or so of this very problem. It’s actually worse than you think, because for the A-1 Skyraider, there’s a good chance that some aluminum sabot fragments will take off the propeller. It also means that my fighter proposal doesn’t work right either, since there is a good chance that the aluminum sabot fragments will get sucked into the engine intake. Even if the odds of any one bullet causing this is low, when you’re shooting ~2000 rounds/min from every single gun, then you have some pretty bad odds.
To solve this problem I came up with a few frankly bad solutions. The first was to have a plastic sabot. This might work, but it’s frankly very questionable. Plastic sabots are used in shotguns (so low velocity), and 5.56mm and 7.62mm rounds, that don’t reach velocities of over 1km/s anyway. Again, might work, but there’s no real guarantee that the engine can just eat all the hard plastic any better than aluminum, and the plastic sabot will still potentially damage the propeller of the A-1.
The second solution was to use ammunition similar to old HVAP or APCR rounds, which are the predecessors to APDS and then APFSDS rounds. Still, these give us very good muzzle velocity, at the expense of equally bad sectional density, which is probably better overall, but far from ideal, or even a guaranteed win over something like an APEX round. For reference, the US used some 76mm HVAP after WW2, which had muzzle velocity of over 1220m/s, but still suffered from accuracy issues.
In the end, when it comes to AP, something like an APEX round is probably the way to go, alternatively PELE or FAP. For those who don’t know, an APEX round (Armour Penetration, Explosive) has a tungsten penetrator inside of it, and is wrapped in low density explosives. This gives it the advantages and disadvantages of the old APCR rounds, high velocity, but poor sectional density, but instead of an essentially useless aluminum case, we have explosives instead which are triggered on a delayed fuze. This means that, theoretically, we have explosives that propel the penetrator further into the object, as well as going into the created hole themselves. A great example of this is the Raufoss Mk 211 .50 cal bullet. We could probably tweak things specifically for AP, but the concept remains the same. Basically the advantage is that the light filler, being explosive, isn’t just worthless dead weight, like it is for the old APCR round.
Unfortunately, while a combination of smoothbore gun firing APFSDS, and a rifled rotary cannon firing LV HE is an obvious win, if the revolver cannon has to fire APEX rounds at muzzle velocities of around 1150m/s, with much worse in flight characteristics than an APFSDS round, then we need to reconsider whether or not it’s really worth it to us to have two different guns. In this case something like the BK-27, with it’s 1100 m/s muzzle velocity is about as good as it gets. Pairing that with something very similar to the US M230, and its 30x113mm ammunition, fired at roughly 800m/s isn’t a bad idea. However, WW2 saw some experiments with very LV medium caliber weapons. For instance, the Japanese took the Oerlikon 20mm cannon, with its 20x72mm dimensions, and scaled it up to 30x92mm, which had a velocity of 710m/s, while only weighing a ridiculously small 51kg’s. Obviously, we want multiple barrels, and a higher rate of fire, but this is basically the direction we’re going in here.
Even further in that direction, there was the German Minengeschoß guns, which had fantastic HE/weight ratios. The 30mm, for example, had explosive filler of 85grams, which compares very favourably with the GAU-8’s 56 grams. They ended up going with a 72 gram version for aerodynamic performance, but I’d argue that’s irrelevant when the rate of fire of the GAU-8 is taken into consideration. On top of that, the Minengeschoß round was a mere 30x90mm round, fired at ~540 m/s. Clearly very poor against fighter planes, but apparently effective against bombers, and exactly what we want out of our ground attack weapons. All being fired out of the MK 108 revolver cannon, weighing just 58 kg. A modern shell would have slightly lower proportional HE, in order to improve fragmentation, but the small amount of propellant and short barrels can be kept.
The decreased weight of this gun allows us to really scale up the caliber. I imagine we can have a 35mm gun which, with the same 1000 rounds as the A-10, weighs just as much all together, and yet has enourmously more impact against ground forces. Couple that with, again, something similar to a tweaked BK-27 for armoured targets, firing high velocity APEX or PELE rounds and I think we’ve got ourselves a winner.
LikeLike
Nevermind, I’ve figured out the solution, squeeze bore cannons. The Germans already used this in WW2 for their 28mm/20mm PzB 41, 42mm/30mm Pak 41, and their 75mm/55mm Pak 41 cannons. All cannons performed very well, but were discontinued because the Germans couldn’t get enough tungsten for them, and steel simply shatters on impact at such high velocities. In fact, they found that the penetration from the 42/30mm cannon was almost equal to the 50mm Pak AT gun at 500 meters, which is extremely impressive considering that it can be considered a 30mm cannon in terms of ammunition weight, and less than a 42mm cannon in terms of barrel weight.
The principle behind a squeezebore cannon is that you have a tapered barrel, and a shell that has angled hinges, that close in upon itself progressively as the shell is forced down the narrowing barrel. This gives us all the advantages of APCR or HVAP, which have a dense tungsten core wrapped in low density aluminum/plastic, but also the streamlined shape of an APDS round. In fact, I think it probably is superior to APDS rounds, but in exchange it requires a tapered barrel. The English also built a squeezebore cannon, or rather an adaptor for their 2pdr gun, taking it from 40mm to 35mm, and increasing the muzzle velocity (and the flight profile) to 1,143 m/s compared with the 792 m/s original velocity of the 35mm gun. They called this APCNR, for Armour Penetrating, Composite, Non-Rigid.
Although due to the slowly shrinking caliber of the round, the pressure does not drop off as much as with a regular gun barrel, leading to greater efficiency for the same amount of powder, with the invention of superior APFSDS rounds it makes perfect sense that we would ignore the squeezebore APCNR round, just like we, for all intents and purposes, ignore APDS rounds for smoothbore guns. Additionally, since the hinges bring some challenges for rifling, the Germans started their rifling after the taper was over for instance, it again makes some sense to simply ignore for ground forces and use APDS even for rifled guns. But for aircraft, which can’t afford to fly through what is essentially shrapnel of their own creation, squeezebore appears like a godsend.
As a matter of fact, I think this could be a big deal with small arms as well.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I meant to say in the previous comment, that this implies that we can now use this technology in a revolver cannon that we stuff in our updated A-10, or Picards’ ALX.. So my original idea of two seperate cannons (or maybe dual AP revolver cannons + 4-6 barrel HE rotary cannon) still potentially has a ton of value to provide. Additionally, in the updated F-16, or Picards’ FLX, we can use a squeezebore revolver cannon (or two) to get a massive advantage over all other modern fighters, using something around a 28mm/20mm cannon, or potentially even much smaller. The same gun can be put x2 on the A-1 Skyraider, giving it serious armour destroying capabilities, and the other two cannons can be made to shoot LV HE.
LikeLike
Riley, I think you may have misunderstood my proposal. The entire purpose of having two different guns is so that we never fire HV AP rounds and LV HE rounds from the same gun. That would make it impossible for the pilot to hit things, and requires differently designed guns anyway. I specifically stated that there will be a rotary cannon firing a mixture of low velocity HE/HEI/HEF rounds, and at least one revolver cannon firing super HV APCNR rounds. The pilot will choose between the two as to what he will be firing.
When you say “a regular 30-35mm cannon with 40-50mm barrels”, I assume that you mean with 4-5 barrels, not to literally use barrels shorter than the rounds themselves. One of the main advantages of designing the round to be LV, or even ULV, such as <500m/s (which I think might be too slow), is that we're going to be using much shorter barrels. Since the barrels are shorter, they will also weigh correspondingly less, which means that it's not as urgent for us to reduce the amount of barrels at all costs. While there's a sweet spot, I think that rate of fire is so important here that there's no reason to skimp, so we might as well go for a 7 barrel gun here, with a rate of fire of 4000-6000 rpm. This is even more true for my gun, since the reduced velocity will necessarily affect the accuracy of the gun.
Recoilless rifles are a very interesting idea. However, I was thinking about them and I'm not sure what they can do that can't be solved with a mixture of 127mm rockets and 70mm rockets. Secondly, the backblast from them is significant, so there are some practical issues with mounting them on a plane.
LikeLike
I’m convinced I’m up to speed with your proposal now, my apologies. The reason I waver on the idea of a smaller cannon for HE is that often times a single large explosion is more desirable than multiple small ones, I large warhead throws fragments further, and the larger shock wave has obivous advantages – consider the use of the large cannon for not only MBTs but also for bunker-busting and other things such as smoke laying, larger shell = more smoke.
By “30-35mm cannon with 40-50mm barrel” I am refering to barrel changes to suit Super-40 and 50mm Supershot rounds, knecked up 30mm and 35mm respectively – the capacity for powder is propellant is expanded (especially in the APFSDS variant) and the projectile is of couse more volumous. Forgive my think out loud in my replies, I am very interested in finding a way to fire saboted projectiles to take advantage of these rounds. The cannon itself would be a single barrel, externally driven if possible but gas would suffice and would be MOTS – I don’t like the idea of >4 in any form of aircraft cannon. The larger the cannon the more accurate fire will matter to conserve the limited on board ammunition, and with that, rate of fire becomes less of an issue.
My recoiless rifle proposal presented itself as a twin-boom aircraft with the rifles in said booms, venturi nozzle at the extreme rear and with the muzzle only barely breaching forward. The feed system was ultimately the let down, however I have a better idea now which focuses on a high-low pressure mechanism.
You raise a good point regarding the benifits over unguided rockets, the reason I pick the cannon is for; lower cost ammunition, smaller ammunition, far more efficient use of propellant than rockets, internal mounting with far less drag, easier loading, and lower cost.
Shoot me an email if you want to chat, I’m having issues with my comment notifications it seems: rileyamos0@gmail.com
LikeLike
I like the squeeze bore idea a lot, I had it in mind but gave up because of non-AP rounds, but the idea of AP only is intrueging. Again, keep me updated.
LikeLike
I think that discarding sabot might remain the best option if the technical problems could be solved.
It is likely that if taper bore weapons were anywhere near as good as sabot, they would be used in modern MBTs.
LikeLike
Advantages and disadvantages of RCLR vs Rockets:
The problem that I see with RCLR is just that I’m not sure how we’re going to handle the backblast. This could amount to nothing, or it could be totally unworkable. All I could find are some forum posts that claim the English and Germans both tested these, with failure. That seems pretty reasonable to me, as the backblast is easily enough to shatter glass, it seems fairly scary to me to put one on an aircraft.
If you could do it, the benefits would be significant. As you mentioned, replacing the fuel with gunpowder gives us significant weight savings. If you can place it inside the plane, then it would be much more aerodynamic as well. Personally, I can’t imagine that working unless you had the waste gases piped all the way to the very back of the plane, which seems impracticable. You could also maybe pipe them out the side, but that would require a second RCLR firing at the same time for balance reasons, and redirecting the gases gives us some recoil anyway. I couldn’t think of how you managed the internal venting, and when you place the RCLR on the wings you still deal with the backblast effect, which is a huge deal on the A-10 since the engines are behind the wings.
There is a second issue which I largely agree with, which is that generally larger shells are worth it, and require a lower rate of fire to be effective. The main counter I have to that, is that I’ve never seen a high rate of fire autocannon that was more than 40mm, and we actually want a high ROF, and relatively low force, just for practical reasons, in order to reduce the amount of shaking induced in the plane. If it is possible to build a 105mm RCLR or LV Cannon, that fires >120 rpm, then that would be amazing for HE/HEI/HE-Frag. It’s actually even better than the simple size increase, as it becomes practical to put proximity fuzes on our HE-Frag shells, for even more efficient anti-personnel use in some situations. Having said that, the increased area damage from shrapnel that a proximity fuze is designed to give you (triggered upon distance from the ground) means that we can’t really use it to replace a gun.
Also, although RCLR have great initial velocity compared to rockets, the velocity of them is still fairly low, and over a large enough distance the rocket ends up being superior. To give some real numbers, the US M40 106mm has a muzzle velocity of 503 m/s. This is actually somewhat high for RCLR, a lot of them that I saw online have muzzle velocities of less than 400 m/s. All of this makes sense, the disadvantage of allowing the explosion to travel out the back means that we lose a lot of additional propulsive force over a gun. In comparison, the muzzle velocity of a hydra 70mm rocket, is 700 m/s. The rocket is also going to have massively more firing range, with Wikipedia give an effective range of 8km, and a max range of 10.5km. If you wanted, you could increase the payload/weight ratio simply by removing fuel, and still have vastly superior velocity to a RCLR. On top of all that, the rocket exhaust is a pretty minimal concern, and the accuracy of rockets like the CRV7 is actually greater than the GAU-8, 3 milliradians vs 5. There is some sweet spot between payload and effective range, but RCLR are at the very opposite end of that, and rockets provide us more flexibility with respect to range.
Finally, if it is absolutely necessary to have a giant HE explosion, good old fashioned dumb bombs are an option. As antiquated as they seem, bombs have the absolute best payload/weight ratio by far, having no propulsion themselves. So if absolute efficiency is what is required, then we would use bombs. If we’re not interested in pure efficiency, which I imagine we’re usually not for practical reasons, then we’re going to pick something else on the range of payload/weight in exchange for tactical/strategic use. Here’s basically the whole concept summed up:
Bombs -> Great P/W, terrible accuracy-distance
RCLR -> Good P/W, poor accuracy-distance
Rockets -> Poor P/W, great accuracy-distance
HE Rotary Cannon -> Good P/W, good accuracy-distance, fantastic ROF
AP Revolver Cannon -> Specialized anti-armour.
So if you can get a working RCLR onto an airplane that is definitely valuable. If not though, it’s not really such a crushing blow to us. The most important weapon I feel is obviously the gun, since it essentially peppers a very small area with frag grenades at 70-100 rounds per second. I’m actually doubtful that there’s much on the battlefield that can survive being targeted by 10 or so 40mm shells, and for the holdouts that’s why there’s an AP gun, rockets, and dumb bombs.
LikeLike
This comment was accidentally posted here. It was originally meant as a response to Riley.
LikeLike
Easier to reply if it’s seperate.
I totally agree with everything you’ve said there, I’ll still comment on a few things:
Recoilless rifles have been tested and from what limited information I can find, worked well enough (at least no catastrophic failures), the limiting factor seemed to be the single shot. As I mentioned my layout has the venturi nozzle mounted to the EXTREME rear of the empennage, a twin boom with a high mounted horizontal stabiliser (very similar to an OV-10). Assuming a blast of 45* to either side, there should be zero problems with it.
https://out.reddit.com/t3_2fzfem?url=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FIjhVN7f.jpg&token=AQAA81asWksFSemyDMCoCJKLNkWij9sQlMj5iS9ZaqdKvS_BQ7rM&app_name=reddit.com
The rifle I am using as the basis is Sweden’s Pvpj 1110, a 90mm RCLR with a 650m/s minimum muzzle velocity. Rockets of course have the advantage of continuous burn, but a rocket assisted projectile is possible, although I don’t like the added complexity and cost. Supposedly 800mm RHA penetration can be achieved, suits me!
My reasoning for cannons over rockets boils down to HEAT diamater, the best hope for destroying tanks will be in my opinion HEAT over kinetic for the weight and size allowed. A 70mm rocket isn’t going to be very useful in that regard, a 127mm rocket will be sufficient but at that point the weight and cost have skyrocketed to the point that a 90mm shell will be ten fold cheaper. The maximum kinetic power we can get would likely come from CRV7s with those penetrator flechettes, however the drawbacks occur. Upon this, only the CRV7 achieves an acceptable accuracy, all other unguided rockets start spinning outside the pod and tend to drift.
Tapered bore cannons are tempting, keeping in mind however the stress placed on the barrel. Squeezing a steel skirt down on a projectile travelling extremely fast, and at a rate of 10 or 20 per second puts an incredible amount of strain on the cannon. Barrel life suffers drastically (500 rounds for the sPzB 41) and by virtue of the mechanics I would not like to be near it when it fails. Rifling is… complicated, you could have a fin stabilised projectile, however it would mean the projectile would have to be designed with exposed fins and not be squeezed down to more than the span of them. I’ve averaged a reduction of 28% in diameter for tapered bores, velocity increase over full caliber may be a similar figure.
As I mentioned my sights have turned from recoiless rifle to high-low pressure cannons, which can be safer (no back blast), smaller (a huge reduction in propellant required as there is none wasted on countering the shell), lighter and cheaper, although we sacrifice velocity.
Before looking into large cannons on aircraft I had considered 250lb iron bombs to be the bread and butter, and 80 class bombs are still a massive part of my thinkings, however they lack the standoff range of a cannon, and as you mentioned; the accuracy isn’t fantastic.
That list you’ve made sums it all up, maybe there is no best choice. I’ll mention again, I agree with everything you’ve said, I only mean to spark discussion.
LikeLike
Well I suppose the major difference is that I believe that my AP revolver cannon would absolutely be able to destroy any MBT in the world. A 40/28mm squeezebore with a tungsten core would penetrate between 160-240mm of RHA, which would easily disable any MBT, and probably even outright penetrate through the top armour. The 25mm APDS round of the Bradley disabled the Abrams through friendly fire multiple times in ODS, so it’s just kind of ridiculous to think that a MBT would just shrug off a 40mm round. Personally, the only reason I even went for a 40/28mm cannon in the first place, is just that it is guaranteed to do the job. We can almost certainly get away with something much smaller.
Secondly, there aren’t even that many MBT’s on the battlefield nowadays anyway. So if you’re expecting MBT’s, and for some strange reason the AP gun isn’t doing the job, then it really isn’t all that inconvenient to go for some 127mm rockets, which do still provide better range. Again, there’s no reason to expect that our AP guns won’t work, but even if they do, we still have a way of dealing with the MBT’s, to say nothing of the less heavily armoured fighting vehicles.
No duplicate.
LikeLike
Having said that, the High-Low Pressure Cannon is extremely interesting. Reading about the weight savings from wikipedia, from my understanding we get essentially half the velocity, but at weight savings of potentially many multiples more than half. The only problem I have with the system is totally understanding it. If I am getting things correctly, based on the diagrams from Wikipedia, then we have a small inner core with holes that let the pressure of the initial explosion expand into the larger barrel, but there is a perfect seal on that larger barrel. I can’t be understanding that correctly, because in that scenario we’re not really saving any recoil that way. Alternatively, we have holes in the barrel itself, but a solid back plate, so we essentially get a muzzle break all through the barrel, at the expense of significant losses. I just can’t quite wrap my head around it.
Anyway, mounting that on a plane would give us some value for sure. Definitely they would replace the RCLR’s, and would be an extremely useful option. Having said that, I still don’t think it’s a valid approach to hitting armoured targets. Tanks have a nasty habit of moving, and aircraft will always be at or beyond long-distance (for tanks) range when engaging them, so I don’t think there’s much value to be had there. However, I see this as being potentially extremely useful for anti-structure/building/demolitions work, essentially giving us an infantry gun to carry around with us when we feel like it.
LikeLike
The velocity loss is probably more of an issue than I am making it out to be, the saving grace may be the fact that velocity is what the cannon can produce + the speed of the aircraft at, say, 100m/s (360km/h). This of course applies to every single other cannon we can mull over.
You’ve understood the concept correctly, as I’m sure you’ve read it’s the same system used in 40×46 rounds, the equivelant of kicking a ball versus pushing it. Have a look at the PAW 600 if you haven’t already.
I’m really warming to the squeeze bore, I think that a 35-40mm cannon could be used conventionally, and then act as a squeeze bore with just a barrel swap. Barrels will need to be changed frequently anyway, might as well make it a feature! If you want to get fancy, a sensor fused flechette round could be used as an effective anti-UAV/helicopter weapon. My preference would be a conventionally rifled continous caliber barrel, with the last ≈750mm being tapered and smooth bore.
I’m interested to know how you imagine the projectile?
LikeLike
Barrel wear is definitely an issue, which is why I was trying to get a smoothbore version with folding fins working, before largely giving up. Having said that, even the Germans eventually went for a straight barrel, with a tapered and removable adapter screwed onto the end. The adapter can be taken off whenever, and has to deal with the stresses of downsizing the bullet, as well as the absolute highest velocities. So I think we’re mostly in agreement here, although if I’m reading things correctly, I think you want the entire gun to be one piece. I think that’s a mistake, for practical reasons, due to the easier and cheaper maintenance of the adapter, rather than an entire barrel. Additionally, I’m not particularly worried about the barrel just exploding on us, since as the wear increases, we’re just going to see a decrease in the rifling. Finally, my bullet design is basically identical to the tungsten penetrator designs of the English and Germans when firing their APCNR rounds, which is to say, dense tungsten slug inside, wrapped in a thin soft-metal outside.
I have been idling wondering about a smoothbore that is designed similar to torpedos or bombs, where the back cuts away and the fins are actually in line with the projectile itself. This totally solves the folding fin problem, but I’m not even close to convinced that we can get enough spin imparted by those fins. Since the soft shell around the metal will necessarily have some thickness, you can easily do a sort of wasp-waist design, where the second collapsible ring has just penetrator behind it, and the find start to go out from there, but whether that’s enough is unclear to me. I have also been toying around with cutting slanted holes in the projectiles second ring, which cause the gasses to rotate the projectile while still in the barrel, but that could cause problems with warping of the ring, and might not be enough rotation anyway. There’s only so much I can do without access to prototypes, or aerodynamic modelling software at the very least.
Not particularly sold on the sensor fuzed flechette round. I’m assuming you are attaching a proximity fuze to the round, and triggering it above ground? 40mm is probably the absolute smallest possible shell that makes sense to use in that respect, and I can foresee a lot of problems with collateral damage using proximity fuzes in that way. It’s definitely something that we would love to magic onto the shells when convenient, but I don’t see a reasonable way to have the proximity fuze attached and easily load the shell. For practical reasons we don’t want to just mix them in with the rest of the ammunition, and we also want to be able to arm them or not arm them. For these reasons, this is why I am a huge fan of proximity fuzes for bombs and rockets, but much less of a fan for shells from a rotary cannon. It’s not that it isn’t a great option, it’s just that it has some clear drawbacks that don’t exist for bombs and rockets, and in my proposal we would be developing those bombs and rockets for that role. If all we had was the gun I would be a big fan.
As far as utility against UAV’s, helicopters, the squeezebore HV AP gun I imagine would work fantastically well against them. The initial impetus for this concept wasn’t made for my CAS plane, but rather for the gun on Picard’s FLX. Personally, I actually think that a CAS plane like my updated A-10, or Picards ALX, is actually the best way to deal with helicopter/UAV cleanup, but in that role I think that high velocity is a lot more useful than low velocity sensor fuzed frag rounds. Imagine trying to hit something with a 1400m/s AP round with great aerodynamic performance, versus a 600m/s HE-Frag round with a proximity fuze. Seems to me that the AP round is going to get the job done better and safer.
LikeLike
I’ve drawn up a thought for fin stabilisation, really nothing new: https://imgur.com/a/kQbCk
Removable adapter is probably the way too go, the only reason I was thinking of a dedicated barrel is because I assume a uniform taper along the entire barrel would be better than a sharp taper at the end. The stabilisation issue can therefore just be solved by having a rifled barrel and a smooth taper adapter.
Sensor fused flechette is more of me thinking allowed, more as a comment on the merits of a full caliber option for different payloads.
A KE projectile will of course be good for Helos/UAVs, assuming hits are made. The 40x364mm has taken down it’s fair share of aircraft without the need for a direct hit, you could well be correct though.
Exactly what cartridge are you basing your idea on? I have opted for 40×364 as mentioned, from a resurrected and modified Bushmaster IV which I will draw up at some point.
LikeLike
Large calibre cannons on aircraft can be replaced by recoilless rifles, or you can have a dual low-calibre (30 mm) / large-calibre (75 – 105 mm) mount, which IIRC was done in World War 2.
LikeLike
Been a while since I last commented, how is everyone doing?
On that note, I think that there are a few other considerations:
1. If we are going to be using a taper bore (or squeeze bore), then we will need the projectile itself to be tungsten. The WW2 era guns had powder that weighed almost as much as the projectile. There were also issues with accuracy fall off that will have to be addressed with range.
2. I will have to find the thread on recoil less rifles, but we did find some engineering challenges. We never concluded if they were insurmountable or not.
3. I am not sold on the GAU family of gattling guns. They take 0.5 to 1 second to spin up to maximum fire. Revolver will be needed or a gas operated gattling gun, which is what the Russians use.
That leaves us with a weapon with the following:
– Tungsten barreled high velocity squeeze bore
– Very fast spin up time so either 2 revolvers or a gas operated gattling gun
– At least 30 mm to destroy enemy armor
I think that rockets could be used as a secondary wing or fuselage mounted weapon as a supplement to the gun. Possibly a CRV 7 like rocket, for engaging enemy vehicles and buildings.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Too busy to write much on blog, I haven’t posted anything even in online newspapers for a while, let alone on a blog.
And yeah, good ideas.
LikeLiked by 2 people
1. Yes, definitely tungsten.
2. Have to find that thread myself, but I agree that there do appear to be some insurmountable challenges. More than that, I think I raised some good points questioning the point of recoilless rifles anyway, since large diameter weapons can just use fin stabilized rockets, without the terrible backblast issues.
3. We would need to have actual field experience, or at least talk to existing A-10 pilots to plot the best course here. I myself favour revolver cannon for armour penetration, while I believe that a rotary cannon is best for soft targets with explosive rounds.
However, one of the reasons I never really followed up on this much is that we can’t proceed in the absence of actual pilots and engineers. There are lots of valid concepts that I just can’t move past conception. For example, I was thinking of getting rid of the HV armour piercing revolver cannon(s), and instead going with a lower velocity Revolver Cannon, like the GAU-8, but with drastic weight savings due to the decreased muzzle velocity. The rounds would be a combination of HESH, HE, HEI, and HE-FRAG, with the precise loadout depending on the expected conditions. However, to go further with that design I would need to:
1) Talk with a bunch of A-10 pilots to figure out:
– The order of importance of the attributes of the gun, Fire Rate, Startup Time, Muzzle Velocity, Total Magazine Capacity, Accuracy, Armour Penetration, Explosive Effects, etcetera
2) Talk with a gun designer/manufacturer to figure out:
– Weight savings from barrel shortening/round composition change, Magazine Design/Capacity, Lifetime effects due to lower muzzle velocity, etcetera
3) Talk with an Aeronautical Engineer to figure out:
– How to fit the new gun inside the plane, Where to put the Magazine, What to do with the extra capacity (shorten plane, put other things there, etc), etcetera
4) Talk with a experienced mechanic to figure out:
– How to make changing the gun easier/cheaper, etcetera
I’m sure I’ve missed a few people and that’s not including politicians. It could be that the pilots are absolutely thrilled to have something like a 750m/s 35mm cannon with a lower fire rate, or it could be that they absolutely want every m/s that they can get for valid reasons.
LikeLike
Further musings on this topic:
An undoubtedly catastrophic idea I had was some kind of plate projected in front of the cannon muzzle which would have a hole to allow the projectile to fly through but would capture and deflect the sabot, but it would have to be a hell of a structure
In my current CAS aircraft that I will hopefully one day get around to writing about, mounts a single M61 rotary cannon with 550 rounds. The crux of the aircraft is modular stores in two semi-recessed pods, these pods have effectively unlimited configurations. Housed what we have dubbed “The Brrrrt Box” is an Oerlikon KCA with a drum feed – with two of these mounted we have a respectable 2,700rpm of redundant 30mm slinging.
The pod itself is a hold over from the sister project of a light stealth aircraft, the pods are angular and sized to house a 2000lb JDAM.
We have laundry list of pod configurations such as:
– Rotary 70mm or 127mm rocket launcher
– Rotary 152mm HV rockets
– Ferry fuel tank
– Conformal AMRAAM (2), AMRAAM-ER (1) and ASRAAM (3) launchers
LikeLike
Turns out I was wrong about hp to thrust conversion.
Luckily for me, turns out that some people have actually gone ahead and tested how much thrust a prop engine will give you, when actually installed into an aircraft.
Turns out that one HP is going to translate into around 3-3.5 lbs of thrust. I’m glad I finally found some numbers. While there is no real way to empirically test the thrust generated at any given speed and altitude, theoretically the thrust generated drops off on an exponential curve, where the “knee” of the curve seems to hit at around 812kmph. I finally found a graph of what I was looking for here.
https://cafe.foundation/blog/a-different-kind-of-hybrid/
So let’s calculate how much thrust that my “Steroid Horsie” is actually producing. Well, at reasonable, not too hot, temperatures, then at sea level on takeoff the Steroid Horsie is, with 2x 1980HP (let’s say 2000hp for ease) PT6 engines, produces somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 lbs of thrust. At 400 kmph, we’re still going to be getting 90% of that thrust, which works out to between 10,800 lbs and 13,500 lbs of thrust. Considering that the airplane weighs, at combat weight, around 9,000 lbs, and we have quite possibly the most overpowered airplane in existance. I think that we’re probably sacrificing too much for the raw thrust. If we go down to the 1,100 hp version of the engine, then we’re still getting 6,600 to 7,700 lbs of thrust on takeoff and 90% of that in flight. All for much more reasonable fuel consumption during loiter and cruise.
The point is that I have now done a complete 180 on my original belief that a turbofan would be required in order to generate the thrust we needed for our airplane. I now see no reason at all to have one. Turns out, the only reason that the A-10 has a turbofan engine is because the TF34 was developed for the S3 Viking, so they were forced to add it on to the A-10. It’s not like the A-10 ever actually goes fast enough to justify the slight decrease in drag that comes with a turbofan. If we really wanted to upgrade the A-10, we could just stick some PW127 engines on there, producing 2,750 hp, or around 8,250 lbs of thrust, along with drastically reduced overall weight and we have a winner.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Which brings me to my next comment, which is that ultimately, the A-10 actually kind of sucks in some important ways. The A-10 is like some troop transport helicopter from 1965, and the soldiers love it to death, but the USAF wants to kill it because it’s an aircraft that reminds them of the absurdity of victory through airpower alone. If transport helicopters were the domain of the USAF you can bet they would be killing the aircraft every chance they get. Arguments in favour of the A-10 are basically arguments in favour of the mission the A-10 does, just like arguments in favour of keeping our theoretical old transport helicopter are arguments in favour of the helicopters mission rather than the actual specifics of that helicopter.
Going forward with the mission of CAS, I think we can reasonably base our designs on one of three American airplanes, the A-1, the OV-10, or the A-10. All three of these designs have served with distinction, and all three have some advantages over the other two. I feel that we can rule the A-1 out fairly quickly, since it is the worst gun platform of the three. As an aside, I would still be making something like the A-1 to serve as a naval strike aircraft, where raw payload and range matter the most.
Taking the designs as they are, the OV-10 has clear and obvious advantages in terms of overall size and weight, while the A-10 has been designed for a cannon similar to what we’re putting on our ALX. The OV-10 also wastes weight and volume on a second seat as well as the cargo bay. However, I absolutely love the high wing design, especially with sponsons added. The sponsons I feel are a fantastic touch, and the perfect place for our four 7.62mm machine guns. I do also love the A-10’s semi-retractable landing gear design, as well as hiding the engines behind the wing, which I feel is in some ways the best armour.
Ultimately you can make arguments for either one. I personally am going for something in the style of the OV-10 Bronco or the Convair Charger over something in the style of the A-10. TBH, I’m arguing for that mostly because I just simply don’t understand why the A-10 is so damn heavy, and I can more easily extrapolate the weight of my modified Bronco, which feels a lot less handwavy then saying “oh and now the A-10 weighs half as much because we changed the design”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Alright, so what is our Steroid Athlete going to look like? As a brief overview, take the equivalent of the titanium bathtub from the A-10, using modern composite armour. Create a version of the Gau8 that runs on the Gast Principle for weight savings. Add a laser to one of the Broncos Sponsons so it can fire laser guided rockets. Get rid of the cargo bay on the OV10 to save weight, and the second seat for the same reason. Keep the 4×7.62mm machine guns on the Bronco, since that solves the A10’s longstanding problem of not being able to fire in ultra close (<20m) situations without serious risk of friendly fire. Then up engine the Bronco so it has two 1600hp PT6 engines.
Remove the cargo bay from the Bronco. Also remove the second seat, although we might have a version with a second seat. Get rid of the asinine requirement to have such absurdly strong landing gear, and get rid of or maximally shrink the 1000 lbs of electronics "required" to do FAC. According to Bill Beckett, one of the two creators of the Bronco, those two changes added 1,000 lbs each of unnecessary weight. Getting rid of those two drops our empty weight from 6,800 lbs to 4,800 lbs. Get rid of the second seat and cargo bay and I believe we could save another 1,000 lbs. Let's say, conservatively, that we're down to 4,000 lbs, on our very light CAS airplane.
Now we go and add weight back into the airplane. First of all, let's steal the cockpit bathtub idea from the A-10. 1,200 lbs would be added, however, agreeing with Pierre Sprey here, there has been a lot of work done on armour since the late 1960's. Since we don't care at all about HEAT rounds, we need to be armoured against direct hits and airburst with AAA. The current bathtub is armoured against direct hits from .50 cals, and airburst up to 37mm. I think those are reasonable targets. We could probably just steal an idea from back around the A-10's development and go with perforated steel armour, which is basically a steel plate filled with holes, which are themselves filled with ceramic inserts. Back that up with a spall liner, and we've got our new armoured bathtub. Conservatively, we can probably do this for 1,000 lbs of weight, pushing us up back around 5,000 lbs.
Alright, now we have to add the gun. First of all, one of the biggest problems with the A-10 is the lack of a small machine gun or two. This prevents it from truly being used in ultra close contact with troops. If I'm 5m away from the enemy and someone fires a 30mm HEI shell with a lethal radius of 15m at them, even if they hit them perfectly there's a very high chance of me dying as well. This problem can be solved simply by the addition of 2 or 4 7.62mm machine guns, like the Bronco already has, and is probably the only head scratching design decision on the A-10. However, giving us 4×7.62mm guns, with an appropriate ammunition load, let's just keep the Bronco's 500 rounds, also frees us up to remove stored ammunition for our 30mm cannon.
I think you've stated it previously, but the rotary cannon on the A-10 probably is optimistic. Going by Hans Rudel's experience with super dense AAA defences, snapshots are all we're gonna get. Pierre Sprey also came to this conclusion, and I think it's reasonable. I'm very skeptical of a single barrel revolver cannon truly handling the stresses of firing at a very high fire rate, so that's where the Gast Gun comes in. An American answer to the Russian GSH-30-2 autocannon, which fires at a selectable rate between 1000-3000 RPM should give us plenty of fire rate. Considering the higher velocity, and thus higher barrel wear of our 30mm, let's stay on the safe side and say that we are aiming for just 1200 RPM cannon, 600 RPM for each barrel. That still gives us a fire rate of 20 rounds per second. Since we actually get that immediately, due to the linear action, a half second trigger pull still gives us 10 rounds fired. I don't really believe that if you fight a serious enemy you're going to get many chances for shots longer than a second, maybe even longer than half a second, so let's use that as the benchmark. If we want 25 full second attack passes, then we are going to need 500 onboard rounds. Frankly, that might be overkill, and we could very well adjust that downwards if we're having issues with our design and fitting all the ammunition on board. Personally I feel that anything below 100 rounds is probably unacceptable, with 250 rounds probably being a decent serious amount.
The GAU-8 API round weighs 1.62 lbs and the HEI round weighs 1.48 lbs. Call it 1.5 lbs for both of them. Our weight savings going to a Gast Gun are, based on the Russian GSH-30-2 as an example, going to be around 300 lbs. Going from the current loadout of 1,150 rounds down to 250 rounds saves us 900 rounds. At 1.5 lbs per round that's a weight savings of 1,350 lbs. So we've already saved about 1,700 lbs off of the 4,000 lbs total gun system. I can't quantify how much weight we can save with the drum and the complicated dual hydraulic system deleted, but I would be shocked if we couldn't knock this down to well under 1,500 lbs for the total gun system. However, I'm going to again be fairly conservative, and say that the cannon, with all the ammunition on board, and with recoil dampers installed, adds another 2,000 lbs of weight. Now we've been brought up to around 7,000 lbs.
We can keep the hardpoints at the same number and strength as before, although I would like to add that I would cringe if people kept hanging rocket pods off the plane. I mean, why bother with retractable landing gear if you're just going to hand excessively draggy things off the airplane. I do believe in putting a laser pointer on one of the sponsons, and adding wingtip rails capable of supporting the 79.5 lbs of a Zuni rocket, which would have a laser finder at the top. Let's say 100 lbs, just to make the math easy, and we have a rocket capable of doing a lot of the occasional utility work without being an aerodynamic horror show. Adding a FLIR in the nose above the cannon makes a lot of sense. We might want to add some UV MAWS to the tail potentially. None of these things really add too much weight or drag.
So there we have it, a 7,000 lbs CAS airplane when empty + ammunition. An absolute beast. And what luck with the numbers, if we give this thing 3,000 lbs of onboard fuel we're at a fuel fraction of 30%, which, frankly, might be excessive, but would at least guarantee great endurance and range. So now we have an airplane that weighs 10,000 lbs on takeoff and 8,500 lbs at 50% fuel. The remaining question we have to ask ourselves is how much engine do we want on this thing, bearing in mind the increased fuel consumption even at idle for a large engine. All thrust values below are for takeoff at sea level. For thrust at 5,000 ft and 300 kmph, just multiply by 0.8 to get a ballpark estimate. Also, a value of 3x was chosen, to ensure a conservative estimate of thrust. Again, empirically 3-3.5x lbs of thrust to hp has been proven.
Looking at the range of possible engines we have two 600 hp P&W engines. That's gonna get us around 3,600 lbs of thrust. Considering that the combat weight of the Steroid Athlete is about 8,500 lbs, frankly that may well be good enough. However, early users of the 750hp Bronco complained about it being underpowered in the mountains. I heard a conflicting report reading Marshal Harrison's excellent book "A Lonely Kind of War" where he complained occasionally about the low cruise speed, mainly because of the falsely advertised 250 kn cruise speed, which was just a complete joke. I also heard, although I can't remember where, another former OV-10 pilot say that the airplane had plenty of power until they started hanging "all the junk" off the airplane. This strikes me as being more accurate. I looked at Wikipedia and the fueled up weight was almost exactly 10,000 lbs, plus the weight of whatever they wanted to hang on the sponsons. We have to keep in mind that net thrust is a combination of thrust minus drag for any given speed and altitude, and while it's not a fighter plane, excess drag must be avoided on the airplane.
Before we go any further, it's worth mentioning that A-10 pilots complain about not having enough power, which is basically another way of stating not having enough (Thrust-Drag)/Weight. I've said before that the A-10 needs to go on a diet, but, according to Wikipedia, the A-10 has about a 0.42 Thrust/Weight ratio. If that's considered underpowered by A-10 pilots, then we should probably be aiming for that as a baseline minimum. 3,600 lbs of thrust generated from the two 600 hp engines gives us 0.36 thrust/weight ratio, which is probably a bit unreasonably low. For comparison, the old OV-10 bronco, with it's 750 hp engines would be generating 4500 lbs of thrust, at, say, 13,000 lbs, which is a thrust/weight ratio of 0.35, and was considered underpowered.
If we go at the other extreme, two 2000 hp engines is going to give us 12,000 lbs of thrust. I'm just going to rule that out immediately. While it sounds cool to have a CAS airplane that could theoretically take off vertically the fuel guzzling that thing would do just to stay in the air is painful to think of. Although a 1.2 Thrust/Weight ratio is fun to think about.
For something in the middle, two 1,100 hp engines is going to give us 6,600 lbs of thrust. That's a 0.66 thrust/weight ratio, which is probably very solid. If we go up to 1600 hp engines, then we're getting 9,600 lbs of thrust, for 0.96 Thrust/Weight. Probably one of these two choices is the best or something just in the middle. To be honest, I lean towards the less sexy 1,100 hp engines for a few reasons. First of all, I've been keeping the weight the same, but we're actually looking at a range from 325 lbs to 665 lbs going from 550hp to 1,970 within the PT-6T-68, which it turns out is actually a turboshaft. Sticking with the usable engines, the PT6A-68B used in the Pilatus PC-21 weighs 575 lbs and generates 1,600 hp. Actually, I guess the weight difference is really not all that meaningful anyway. Turboprops really are efficient in terms of power/weight ratio. Alright now I'm leaning towards actually going with the 1,600 hp engines, for 9,600 lbs of thrust. We would have to calculate how much much the increased fuel burn cuts into endurance and range, with endurance being somewhat more important. Gas turbines really don't power down all that efficiently, but I think it might be worth it on the Steroid Athlete. We could also potentially be limited by safety should one engine go out. We don't want so much power that the plane flips over, but I can't quantify that danger.
So anyway, that's what I've come up with. What do you think?
LikeLike
Nice. I quite like it.
LikeLike
Great layout, why go for the Bronco over a Pucara as your base?
LikeLike
@Picard578
Thank you. I think it’s arguably fuel efficient enough to be used as a general purpose scout aircraft as well, although very big nations that can afford more specialization may go a different route.
@Riley-Amos
A few different reasons. Firstly, the Pucara is about twice as big as the OV-10 Bronco, or what it was before the USAF and USN added 2,000+ lbs to the airplane, according to Bill Beckett, one of the main two men responsible for the plane. Secondly, I simply lack familiarity with the Pucara, so it’s harder to come up with additions. The use of cutouts on the side for the placement of machine guns is not a bad idea, and I have a lot of respect for the Pucara. They clearly had the same idea that I had with regards to the multiple gun types, although sticking a 30mm out the nose would definitely result in some redesign of the landing gear.
I feel like the high wing design of the Bronco makes a lot of sense for a few reasons.
1) With the pilot forward of the wing you can still see behind and above you fairly well. More importantly, you can perfectly see behind and below, if flying straight and level. However, if you need to roll into something and turn, then there could be some situations where the wing blocks your view, but with the wing back, this should be less of an issue. We can justify pushing the wing back in our design, since we need space to house the gun.
2) The wing mounted engines also have more ground clearance with a high wing, which allows us to use larger propellers for the same clearance, or shorter, sturdier landing gear. Some combination of both would be used. The air intake is also further from the ground, which is a practical concern considering the dusty, muddy areas this trucker is going to land.
3) High wing also lets us “cheat” the internal space and add Bronco-style sponsons, which we’re using for the M60 machine guns, as well as the laser pod. This essentially gives us more internal volume for munitions, can be custom designed, and provides a small amount of lift, partially paying for itself. Drag is not much of a concern for the airplane, so it’s not as horrific as a sponson on a fighter would be. The guns in the sponsons are also extremely accessible to the aircrew, which can only be a good thing.
Definitely, using the Pucara as a base is extremely interesting and justifiable. However, if I was using the Pucara I would ABSOLUTELY use fixed landing gear. The only reason I went with retractable for the Bronco is because the twin boom design makes it cost very little for the retractable gear. If using the Pucara, the extra weight, fragility, and internal volume of retractable gear would, in my opinion, absolutely not be worth it. I don’t think it’s possible to have a centerline gun in the Pucara with retractable gear, so that would be one of the first things to go.
LikeLike
I’ll just comment here that I prefer low-wing designs such as A-10 for multiple reasons:
1) they allow for much wider landing gear, thus allowing superior rough field operations
2) lower wing position should also make rearmament easier – an important consideration for rough field air bases
3) low wing also helps – to an extent – protect the engine from weapons fire and debris, should you use A-10s turbofan positioning
LikeLike
@Picard578
I had another comment above where I discussed some benefits, however, I don’t feel like low wing provides quite the benefit that you think.
1) This is true for fixed landing gear only. However, I’m coming to the belief that fixed landing gear is simply the right decision for CAS airplanes anyway, so low wing may well be much better in this regard. You could mount the landing gear at the bottom of the engine, sort of like a fixed version of the Bronco’s retractable gear, but that’s not be ideal, and it needs to be longer anyway. I wonder if you could mount these on the sponsons, but that might be trading one problem for another, in terms of the stress on the sponson.
2) My vision does not have a lot of wing mounted armaments in the first place. However, to the extent that these are on the plane, it’s much easier to deal with if the wing is high versus low, unless the landing gear is comically long.
3) I thought about this, and considered the A-10’s design much better in that sense. However, you also need the extra weight of the engine pylon, and I was basing my design mostly on the Bronco.
LikeLike
1) Yeah, I consider A-10s landing gear positioning pretty much ideal for a CAS fighter.
2) Not really. Unless said bombs are comically large, you only need to place them below the wing and then “rapple” them up. Much less work if wing is low, as there is less distance to cover.
3) True. You also have the extra weight for engine armour. Though the fact that the engine is away from anything else critical somewhat compensated for that.
LikeLike
One issue is that the second person might be a benefit. So in that regard, the OV-10 might not be a bad idea after all.
There were complaints about pilot workload with a single seat aircraft. For this reason, Picard also added a second seat for his CAS proposals.
LikeLike
1) A-10 probably does have the best landing gear design. Gets most of the benefits of retractable, still gets some benefits as if it was fixed. Still, even the A-10 is so slow that I still think non-retractable gear may not be worth it. Again, low wing would be better for this.
2) I think you’re forgetting the irritation with physically getting underneath the wing in the first place. High-wing airplanes can just be walked under, so you have to hoist munitions higher, but you don’t have to break your damn back in the first place. Now some airplanes are so damn big that even low wings are almost six feet off the ground, but I don’t think either of us want an airplane that enormous.
LikeLike
Ultimately we should be able to make a reasonably well quantified guess as to the survivability of the A-10 pylon mounted engine design versus the OV-10 Bronco style wing mounted engine design in terms of extra losses per sortie. We should also be able to quantify the loss in weight, and the minor loss in thrust due to the more off center thrust, which requires some angling to compensate.
The increased stability of wider landing gear mounted to the wing can also be quantified, versus something like the landing gear of the DHC-6 Beaver. The increased weight of retractable gear, as well as the reduced drag for any given speed should also be calculated. Finally, there are some practical design decisions that may require one or the other, such as fixed landing gear getting in the way of bomb dropping, or a retractable nose gear taking up space for the centerline cannon. Those design decisions actually have to be solved first, because we might find that fixed bicycle gear is the way to go, which necessitates a traditional fuselage, unlike the OV-10’s twin boom design.
However, the most important criteria to design to, within reason, must be the visibility afforded to the pilot, and not in a vague sense, but specifically that which enables the pilot to do his job most effectively. For a high wing airplane, the pilot absolutely must be well in front of the wing, or I believe it would be unworkable, since he’s going to have to look up and back when coming around to attack things, which the wing will obscure. For low wing airplanes, the wings should also be as far back as possible. We have a disadvantage when flying straight and level, but we get a similar advantage when actually turning towards our objective, since the wing now only obscures, pretending a true 90* roll, ground well behind us, and a small amount at that. Paper designs must be made. Preferably, lots of prototypes would actually be flown and compete against each other.
LikeLike
Yes, visibility I think is the main reason why I went with low-wing design for my OLX. Wing positioning does not impact only landing gear, it also impacts fuselage design, and none of the high-wing aircraft I know of has very good rear and side visibility. Which is a problem.
LikeLike
1) Yeah.
2) That I think would also depend on the length of landing gear. If long enough, it wouldn’t matter, but I don’t think that would be practical for a CAS fighter.
LikeLike
One thing I have completely forgotten to mention. If we want this airplane to be used in snowy areas, or land on water, we’re going to need skis or floats. Additionally, due to the very high weight of this airplane relative to bush planes (10,000 lbs vs < 2,000 lbs), we are going to need enormous tires in order not to sink into any muddy ground, just like a land vehicle. That, or potentially tracks. Low pressure tires would need to be actually tested versus tracks, and might be good enough, but my vision is something that can truly land anywhere. I mean, we can pick our spot within a few meters of course, but any clearing should do.
When you're attaching anything to the landing gear wheels, or even just using giant wheels, then you definitely can't retract the gear. That means that you're paying the price in terms of weight and volume and getting absolutely nothing in return.
LikeLike
It’s also a safety feature, since we might need to land immediately and unexpectedly for many reasons.
LikeLike
Low pressure tires would be enough for smaller fighters, tracks IIRC were only used for large dirt-strip cargo aircraft. As for floats, I was thinking whether drop tanks could be used as such in emergency. It would require them to be fastened rather securely.
LikeLike