Btw, we can draw an interesting scheme of Tejas evolution. Interesting, as most such changes nowadays develop purely on conceptual stage. Here, instead it's a Warthunder progression line.
...the interesting part, however, is AMCA.
As we established, Tejas line, for all it's hardship, is neat and logical, producing two well-rounded and well thought aircraft.
It is more complex with AMCA.
First of all, AMCA itself is more or less a translation of Tejas mk2 tech stack onto a parallel medium weight counterpart.
The more interesting is what AMCA is.
Pylon configuration is complex: 1 standard wide IWB, 6 underwing points; 1 shoulder point for targeting pod.
I.e. jet doesn't carry neither IRST nor EOTS inside.
This is rather counterintuitive: in 5 gen, you can do it 3 ways:
- you don't really think about fighting other 5 gens(f-22) and just aim at bullying 4.5 gens. For this, just one radar set is good enough. A sensible choice for a 2006 aircraft.
- you are strike/multirole, and install EOTS inside. EOTS doubles as a worse IRST v stealth aircraft.
- you are A2A first, and you supplement your radar with means more effective v stealth equals: IRST, DBR.
Some aircraft don't bother chosing (Kaan/Kizilelma).
The problem is that some don't bother picking anything: and that's AMCA.
It doesn't have IRST; i.e. it's ability to target 5th generation is ironically below Tejas mk.2 and potentially even Rafale. It will always lose detection/id race.
It doesn't have internal bombsight either - i.e., as a multirole, it's rather constrained in LO configuration(or, in permissible configuration, it's barely better than Tejas mk.2...for twice the aircraft and golden F414).
Finally, at least to date, India didn't really demonstrate much in suitable internal weapons for it's bays. Granted, 500kg bombs(gravity and glide kits) will probably fit. But this isn't a very high bar, certainly not enough to justify an aircraft.
Do I miss something? What's it supposed to be good at? The only clue I could come up with is AMCA is almost exactly same size with mig-29, i.e. (similarly to LCA) is a heavier interceptor designed to fit into same HAS. But it was never explicitly written, and frankly this isn't enough of a reason to exist.