More drones? Price seems waaaay too expensive and just cause they launch vtol?
Indian Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter bd popeye
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Hope it all works out for India to at least make a real headway because I am frankly sick and tired of using the LOL emoji whenever a lot of these huff and puff blew up in smoke.
Indians love to make dumb announcements publicly without shame though so I don't know if they'll ever live up to their perpetual potential.
That's totally incorrect. The F-5 was a major export success, and so were the F-16As that were closest in principle to a "light fighter." The A-4 was also a domestic and export success too. It's just that in modern times, the US has more or less abandoned making light fighters, as they're not profitable enough and the USAF itself sees no role in which a light fighter would be useful in their service.
So was the starfighter, which was another export success. That's a natural development for any affordable American aircraft.
F-5 was - by design - also incapable of actually competing for air superiority against modern air force, i.e. was the exact "light fighter" this forum is arguing against at every corner.
And that's the part we're talking about. This isn't something measured in terms of just commercial success. Mig-21 was clearly a superior air fighting system, despite being more primitive. Though it was also far more successful.
F-16A isn't exactly light in the same sense as F-5. In WW2 terms, it's about as light as Mustang.
And by any stretch of imagination A-4 wasn't a competitive fighter.
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And I think this makes a lot of sense. A light fighter simply doesn't have much room for error. When a plane is near the edge of the kind of performance required, any shortcoming might well render it ineffectual. With a larger fighter, there's simply a lot more room for error. And it's even worse when these light fighters have to compete with heavier brethern in the modern age. Back in the day, a light fighter is often more maneuverable than a heavier plane and that gave it an advantage at dogfighting. But with dogfighting being far less important nowadays, they've lost that competitive edge.
Probably the only modern light fighters today that can stand up to tough opposition are the Gripen and the JF-17. The FA-50 has managed to get a fair amount of sales, but I don't think that anyone would consider it a particularly good fighter.
If we again use early CW migs as a competitive benchmarks - those, if used defensively, stood up to best US jets. Not necessarily with good C
ratios, but they stood their ground, and they were doing it at a massively lesser price/manufacturing point, allowing less wealthy numbers to match the US.I.e. really, if we want a modern light fighter of that kind - it will be a focused, high tech stealth jet(perhaps with moderate RAM use) with all possible connectivity features (i.e., much like the original, offloading bulkier battlespace awareness to the Groun Environment/Cloud).
Gripen, JF-17 are competitive in a sense that they can totally any non-stealth aircraft 1v1. But we're in a stealth world.
This is arguably the sin of Tejas - when it was first conceptualized back in late 1980s, it was meant to be exactly such aircraft by early-mid 2000s.
It was never possible 100%, because F-22 already appeared - but still, it would've gotten a true lease of competitive life in a predominantely non-stealth world(like even now, stealth aircraft are a small minority).
But the problem is now they're a decisive minority. Iran made it abundantly clear. Tejas has no choice but to be a secondary aircraft.
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Will the US MIC bigger than small firearms agree in building supply line in lndia tho? Were there like precidents before?
All the initial indigenous fighter programs successfully persued outside the West and Soviet Bloc are small fighters -- if we exclude China and the J-10. (We are not including early archaic efforts like J-12 and Marut -- which too, are small fighters.)
Besides the LCA/Tejas, I can think of only the F-CK-1 (RoC) and FA-50 (Korea.) Therr is no doubt, proven historically, that it is far easier to go with a light fighter. The J-10 was an outlier.
The KAAN is an even greater outlier that deserves respect. A heavyweight stealth fighter as a first indigenous effort is a feat.
It's far more affordable, and great powers don't normally provide options.
Note that rather promising F-20 from Northrop was killed by US themselves.
From design pow, larger design is easier for the aspiring manufacturer.
It wasn't. 1990s China is many things, but it wasn't a newbie aircraft designer and manufacturer.