Kevin Brooks wrote:

"Guy Alcala" wrote in message
. ..

snip

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?

I'm not sure that you could call the design frozen now. But the F-35 is the
most recent one of the bunch (and it dates back to at least 1993, and its
precursor programs even earlier), and the service most likely to be flying
missions where a gun could come in handy, the USMC, has decided that they don't
need one (internally). Personally, I've always thought that it would have made
far more sense for the USAF or USN versions to be sans gun. I'd love to see the
study that the USMC undoubtedly did that led them to that decision.

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.

I have seen no concrete evidence that it was a "purely economic" decision (but
see Tony Williams' post). I'm sure cost played a part, but I imagine there were
a multitude of factors involved. I don't doubt that a lot of RAF people
screamed at the idea, just as many people have screamed at virtually every
deletion of some weapon capability (or loss of their personal warm and fuzzy),
no matter how little utility it may have in changed circumstances. The
battleship people screamed too. Who's right in this instance has yet to be
proved. We all agree that there are some cases where a gun provides a useful
capability, but then so does a sword. As always, it's a question of tradeoffs.

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.

I said it was (becoming) generally accepted by analysts, not (necessarily) by
the user community. If it were possible to provide for every possible
contingency, someone in the user community would want to have it all, but that's
not very realistic.

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.

But that assumes that they have something better to put in its place, can afford
to buy it, can afford to design and test the installation themselves, and their
governments are willing to do so. None of that is cheap or easy. There have
been gun deletions (or de-emphasis) in the past, either in whole or in part --
the Tornado F.3 lost one BK 27 (space needed for Skyflash avionics, I think);
the Mirage F.1C when upgraded to the F-1CT multi-role variant lost one DEFA 553
(replaced by the LRMTS boxes, IIRC), the F-4G lost its M61 for antennas and
avionics (and the screams of the crews protesting that decision were loud and
long); the F/A-18G will apparently lose its Vulcan for the same reason, and so
on. And of course, the F-15E gave up over half its gun ammo (and some fuel)
compared to the F-15D, because DECM was considered more important for its
mission; the same thing happened to the F-8 during Vietnam. As in the past, I
expect the gun will stay in a/c that already have it, until the operators decide
they've got something more important to put there, which is worth the
development effort to do the installation. I expect that it will most likely
involve ECM, Laser or HPM weapons, or EO/FLIR/Laser targeting devices. Which
one(s) reaches a deployable state first, and is considered valuable enough that
a major operator (like the US) decides to do the R&D to install and test it,
will almost certainly determine what gets widely installed by second-tier users.

Guy