US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

ougoah said:

This thing they call a CCA is truly about the level of engineering as China's vast range of target drones which probably include scaled down F-22, B-2 and F-35 shaped target drones. At least we've seen those small B-2 and F-22 target drones presented in Chinese airshows.

If you showed me even 10 years ago the UADF A and B and then showed me this YFQ-44, I would have responded with something like "wow US military aviation and technology is still well in the lead. Looks like they've managed to produce supersonic unmanned fighters in the future but China's not doing too badly, at least it has unmanned tech, implying decent enough networking, computing and software".

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140KN vs 20KN

internal weapons bay with likely capacity for 4x PL-16 missiles vs ... well no weapons bay, barely 2x AMRAAMs worth, one under each wing. Same goes for any US CCA currently near service until Lockheed Martin and Northrop bring out their large CCAs/UADFs. By then PLAAF will have the 6th gens in service and the next generation of UADFs near service.

supersonic vs low subsonic

even without tails, the UADFs look like they can still turn much better than this target drone.

ULO vs barely LO.

Only advantage of the American CCAs vs Chinese CCAs or UADFs is that they are all much cheaper and can be made much faster (ironic I know). I bet in this space, China's got plenty of its own attritable CCAs too.

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that’s the frustrating part with the cope — the focus is on the air dominance drones from the 9/3 parade when there are two other drones displayed that look inexpensive and relatively attritable.

siegecrossbow said:

that’s the frustrating part with the cope — the focus is on the air dominance drones from the 9/3 parade when there are two other drones displayed that look inexpensive and relatively attritable.

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So is our focus. It is understandable for fanboys like us to focus on the more prestigious halo projects and flagship platforms. These "lesser" things often make a greater contribution to a military.

The two (actually three since we know of the other ugly CCA they pulled from the parade) CCAs appear to be higher performance CCAs than the American programs (not including Lockmart's Vectis and Northrop's). They are slightly larger and have larger engines, hinting at being powered by engines in the 30KN to 60KN category. I posted a summary of the US CCA programs in the drones thread and they were all 7KN to 30KN.

I suspect China knows this CCA (this one's a mockup) below is basically the limit of usefulness for a CCA before you go down to some drone swarm platform that is capable of air to air. That implies drone swam type of UAVs would be launched from some heavyweight aircraft like H-6, GJ-x or H-20. Maybe even carried by larger missiles. Either way, in terms of individual platforms, this is as small as you go before the platform is close to useless in a peer conflict. It barely carries enough fuel and PL-16 sized missiles for air to air.

Air to ground is another matter and what I think the American CCAs are focusing on. They can't keep up with manned fighters in speed. So essentially we have these American (or allied) CCAs like Ghost Bat, Kratos, Anduril's YFQ-44 are actually more suited to A2G missions since range and loiter time is halfway decent. In this case you should be comparing the in service now and probably second block GJ-11 to the not yet in service Ghost Bat, Kratos and YFQ-44.

The GJ-11 is roughly 60KN max military/dry thrust (no afterburner) vs all these US drones with between 8KN and 20KN. The GJ-11 is also far more stealthy than the YFQ-44 and likely more stealthy than the tailed Ghost Bat and Kratos.

If you want to talk air to air, these things barely can be a match for this ~10m length, ~5m wingspan CCA. Thrust I estimate would be no less than 30KN given its size relative to the 140KN WS-10X powered UADFs.




This CCA is not that much smaller than a GJ-11 and it's clearly more of air to air focused. Why have this as A2G when GJ-11 has better range and loiter time (time in air) with flying wing configuration and superior stealth. This CCA clearly has higher top speed than GJ-11... unknown if supersonic but wing sweep angle and fuselage to wingspan ratio does suggest supersonic. Supersonic A2A missile launch. What is a Kratos or Ghost Bat or YFQ-44 in front of this? Like comparing a superbike with a scooter.

Honestly the American CCA programs like Ghost Bat, Kratos and YFQ-44 is quite confounding. Was thinking they are going in the wrong direction until Lockmart and Northrop announced they have proper heavy CCA/ UADF programs. These three (Ghost Bat, Kratos, YFQ-44) are glorified target drones. They need to be at least 1.5x larger and bring >30KN engines unless they're mostly doing ISR and A2G. A2A demands far more energy, energy density and size for at least 2x AMRAAMs.