"Guy Alcala" wrote in message
. ..
Kevin Brooks wrote:

"Guy Alcala" wrote in message
. ..
JDupre5762 wrote:

I'm interested in canvassing opinions regarding the inclusion of a
gun
on future military aircraft.

There seems to be a remarkable coincidence every time that pundits
or
experts
decide that something can never happen again it will. I would think
that the
cost of an internal gun is small enough to be included in a future
design based
on the possibility of it being needed at some time somewhere. The
military
needs to be prepared for almost any eventuality. I know that the
USAF
has had
occasion to use guns ony strafing runs from F-15s in Afghanistan and
would bet
that if someone had said there was a need for that ten years ago
many
people
would have laughed at the thought. I would think too that any
nation in
Europe
with its congested airspace ought to see that at some point it will
probably
become necessary to establish visual range only (VRO) intercept and
firing
parameters lest a lot of neutrals end up dead.

The thing is, modern dogfight missiles cued by HMS, radar or IRSTS are
effective
down well inside classical gun ranges at much higher off-boresight
angles,
making
the gun far less likely to be used for A/A combat. There is an issue
of
countermeasures susceptibility with missiles (as there is with gun
fire
control
systems), but the general conclusion of the analysts, this time backed
up
by combat
experience (unlike the case in the '50s) is that the gun really is
excess
weight
these days, at least for A/A combat use. It still may have a place in
peacetime
for firing warning shots or the occasional troops in contact
emergency,
but the
general feeling seems to be that the first situation can be catered
for
with podded
guns, while in the second the weight/volume otherwise dedicated to an
internal gun
installation can be better used for carrying more A/G (like the SSB or
rockets) or
A/A weapons, fuel or avionics, or can just be left out and the a/c as
a
whole can
be smaller, lighter and cheaper.

If that is the "general feeling", then why will the Typhoon, Rafael,
Su-30
and derivitives, F-22, and F-35 all still have internal guns?

Because most of them entered development long ago,

Design freeze on the F-35 only happened what, a year or eighteen months
back?

and many of them will
probably wind up deleting the guns somewhere down the road (as is the case
with
the 2nd and 3rd tranche RAF Typhoons now),

Come on now--that was a purely economic decision, and a lot of the RAF folks
have screamed about this supposedly "generally accepted" removal of those
guns.

especially if something else comes
along that provides greater utility for the space and weight (whether a
laser
weapon, DECM, fuel, avionics or what have you).

"If" is a long way from having generally accepted that the gun should be
deleted.

Last I heard, the STOVL version
of the F-35 definitely wasn't going to have an internal gun, although that
seems
to change almost weekly. We'' see what happens to the CTOL and carrier
versions
down the line. Of course, should a war come along where the gun
demonstrates
its utility on a regular (as opposed to occasional) basis, the pendulum
may
swing back the other way again.

Well, AFAIK there has been no general consensus regarding deleting the gun
armament, and everyone continues to do so. If there was such a feeling, we
would expect customers to be deleting them left and right as a weight saving
and space creating measure (adding that big spine to the Block 60 F-16's
indicates that volume usage is growing critical with that design), but we
have not seen this happen.

Brooks


Guy