X-45 Drone bomber

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Admiral Valdemar
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Post by Admiral Valdemar »

The UCAVs use SATCOM anyway so no one is going to jam the microwave transmission or duplicate it.
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Sea Skimmer
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Post by Sea Skimmer »

Antares wrote:Right.

At the moment interceptor pilot can take how many G's? 8-12? And this only for seconds.

Unmanned stuff can fly curves which generate G-forces equal to the material stress the weakest part of the object can take or at least close to it.
Only in theory. In practice to do that you need some massive fighter with engines and flight controls from god to do that. At the moment just about all fly by wire planes lock the controls when your pulling nine g's, there is one, the French Rafale I believe, which has an override to allow the plant to pull up to 13.4g's for a very short period. A few fairly recent non-fly by wire desinges can slightly exceed 9g's as well. However none of it is really very useful except for break maneuvers to avoid missiles. Pulling a lot of G's means burning away a vast amount of speed, only a handful of ultra high end planes like the F/A-22 and Su-37 can hope to sustain a 9g turn for any length of time, and while many airframes can take upwards of twenty or even thirty g's, the aircrafts weapons and fuel tanks will rip away before then.

Simply the vast amount of weight a fighter would need to reach and sustain such a high speed high rate of turn fight would make doing it pretty prohibitive, many warplanes can't even pass 7g's or mach 1.4 with anything like a realistic warload, though when clean or near clean they might easily hit 9g' and mach 2.2.
When to pilots with same experience and with the same interceptor fight each other the one wins that can take more G's because he can fly smaller curves and thus out-maneuver his opponent.
No, whats going to happen is he'll end up wallowing along slightly above stall speed and be easy fodder for anything else in the sky, even if it does allow that aircraft to down the one enemy.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
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Sea Skimmer
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Post by Sea Skimmer »

Admiral Valdemar wrote:The UCAVs use SATCOM anyway so no one is going to jam the microwave transmission or duplicate it.
Well people might well try, however the jammer's putting out power by the hundreds of kilowatts or even megawatts to do it will be pretty easy targets.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
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