TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
Power is important because it's what drives the machine. If you sacrifice on power you have problems. The engine needs to produce enough thrust to drive the fighter and gain lift. It's got to produce enough thrust to do that despite its weight, the pilots weight the fuel load the armament and rest to a point where in enough lift is established to negate the weight of the machine.
If one engine won't do that you go to two.
But it's not just power. If the reliability is poor there is no point in putting it in the machine. It needs to be able to operate problem free for a set ratio of thousands of flight hours to maintenance or it's a no go.
You could build a key engines to lift a Y20 off the ground all on its own but if it only works once there is no point.
Service life is critical as well if you can only fly 50 hours then need to pull the engine it's worthless you may be able to skimp a little on in service life like the Russians used to but that got made up for in production.
Production is the ability to build them in numbers, if you can't build them in numbers then all the other points are null as you can't actually equip the fighters with them. If you short fall in production then you need a way to prolong service life as the engines become more valuable.
Efficiency kicks in at the end as that factors for range that is where variable cycle comes in more for late 5th into 6th gens.
If one engine won't do that you go to two.
But it's not just power. If the reliability is poor there is no point in putting it in the machine. It needs to be able to operate problem free for a set ratio of thousands of flight hours to maintenance or it's a no go.
You could build a key engines to lift a Y20 off the ground all on its own but if it only works once there is no point.
Service life is critical as well if you can only fly 50 hours then need to pull the engine it's worthless you may be able to skimp a little on in service life like the Russians used to but that got made up for in production.
Production is the ability to build them in numbers, if you can't build them in numbers then all the other points are null as you can't actually equip the fighters with them. If you short fall in production then you need a way to prolong service life as the engines become more valuable.
Efficiency kicks in at the end as that factors for range that is where variable cycle comes in more for late 5th into 6th gens.
