"Douglas Eagleson" wrote ...
Thats for a reasonable repy.

My idea was for a rebuilt A-10, meaning the design goes back to the
manufacturer. All the real professionals here need to complain of the
lack of adequate fighter design, in my opinion.

The F14 was in essence designed to fill much of the requirement you're
postulating, adding the capacity for quick high speed reaction, close combat
handling capacity, a mix of short and long range missiles, plus rapid climb
to station, all qualities unable to be met by even a totally redesigned A10.
The trade off? A much shorter time on station, but then in a combat
environment against enemy strike a/c, any a/c's weapons load would be
quickly exhausted, so loiter time was not the highest priority. On the
drawing boards since the mid60s, the F14 has come and gone, the mission for
which it was designed and expensively developed gone with it.



Supersonic critical airspeed appears a worrysome thing when in fact it
is a simple airframe stress.

Jeez, how can you be that unaware of the realities of basic aerodynamics.
Would you care to predict the Mach number at which Cessna 172s begin to shed
important components? I'm not quite sure if we could bolt a surplus J79 to
a 172, but just for illustration sake the results would be informative for
you. It would take a hell of a lot of airframe stiffening (measured in the
many, many pounds category) to move an A10 to higher (but still subsonic)
Mach ranges, and once there the a/c would be essentially uncontrollable, a
doomed lawn dart.


Nothing drastic happens. An A-10 is a
slow speed design and the basic idea was to do a cheap re-engine to get
an plane suitable for a fighter pilot.


I'm not sure that their are many available choices less suitable than an
A10.

TMO