Possible next-generation air superiority fighter for BDF

[tiny estuary]

Congrats on 1000 messages in this thread.
On for another 1000 more comments about doritos.

[modern folio]

Lets throw a party ig

[full willow]

Wasn't Boeing's F-47 selected for F/A-XX?

Edit: Nvm I don't think anything's been selected yet

[scarlet viper]

f47 is ngad

[sudden anchor]

Coming back to this, assuming we go with the 2 different fighter designs i mentioned before. I think it should be whichever side gets the more J-36 style fighter would get the XQ-58 style CCAs and whoever gets the more J-50/F-47 style fighter has the more vectis/UADF style CCAs

Effectively, one has the CCAs escort the fighter while the other has the fighter escorting the CCAs

[pseudo bronze]

Those intakes are very interesting

[onyx monolith]

Honestly, tandem-seating J-36 doesn’t look that bad, although it’s kind of weird now that I’ve seen so much of the actual side-by-side cockpit

[scarlet viper]

j36 seems to place emphasis on coordination and carriage so side by side kinda makes sense to me, it isnt your daily conops

[slim tusk]

A good resource for Ideas is from the NASA report about conceptual aircraft, specifically "Investigation Into the Impact of Agility in Conceptual Fighter Design"

Its a short document detailing NGAD related aircraft designs and the process behind them including illustrations and graphic documentation. An example aircraft included is what people believe to be the new Boeing F-47, or at least an early iteration of it (See Multirole Concept 988-119 @ page 174)

[fallow orchid]

Good find. There’s quite a bit of interesting stuff in there.

Four straight pages of comparing the pros and cons of every control surface and high-lift device design under the sun

[tiny estuary]

Yeah that pdf is a goldmine, hope it informs the next high rank fighter.

[slim tusk]

thanks, it really does have some interesting things I didn't even think of or knew the extent of.

[fallow orchid]

“Ballistic weapons ‘guns’
Benefit: none”
on page 40 made me chuckle.

[slim tusk]

hey at least it has a low chance of failure, also tf is "Hypervelocity Weapons"

[pastel kestrel]

This could be for a smaller darkreach variant

[tiny estuary]

I loved "canards" in strengths on page 216
canard supremacy believers at nasa? (I suppose they have put canards on every damn aircraft in the past)

[fallow orchid]

Extremely fast penetrators, it looks like. “Hypersonic” wasn’t the buzzword it is today back when this was published.

[pastel kestrel]

I see potential in this, refine it a bit.

[slim tusk]

We finally reaching Ace Combat-esk aircraft

[fallow orchid]

Incredibly weird three-surface? I kind of like it.

[slim tusk]

Looks almost like a stealth/ modern version of the early STOL/MTD aircraft

[pastel kestrel]

There's also this thing.

[bleak gyro]

I love this so much

[slim tusk]

and don't forget the F-47?, idk it kinda looks like it

[fallow orchid]

That’s unequivocally a really cool configuration.

[pastel kestrel]

For the three surface, you could inspire it more on the X36, i belive thats how a production model of it would look like

[slim tusk]

Theres even a section on their role for good-ness sake, this thing is loaded with info

[pastel kestrel]

I wouldnt be suprised if the X36 was originated from one of the contenders

[slim tusk]

Those initial air-ground aircraft looking chunky

[pastel kestrel]

i mean they are suppoused to carry a bunch of bombs, so using the b2's configuration and data would be time saving.

[fallow orchid]

They definitely don’t have much interest in maneuverability with the projected 0.3 final thrust/weight.

[onyx monolith]

That initial design for low observable air-to-air/multirole honestly looks perfect for this (maybe add some LeRXs though)

[pastel kestrel]

they are suppoused to be invisible to radar, so as long as they do it right, there's no problem in flying a brick

[slim tusk]

The Air-ground concepts have some funky engines, mounted up top like the B-2 with seemingly only yaw thrust vectoring. 45 DEGREE DEFLECTION?! Wtf

[pastel kestrel]

the name hopless diamond came into my mind

[slim tusk]

I want what these designers were smoking

[bleak gyro]

straight DOD contract money is what they were smoking

[tiny estuary]

Their nosetips do the lerxing, you can see it on the yf23 and such aswell.

[pastel kestrel]

the X 36 looks like the initial concept of the mutlirole with high maneuverability,

[slim tusk]

I think the final config version of that might be an ancestor of the F-47, just look at those front ends

[rain magnet]

god its so good, X36 is criminally underrated by everyone but nasa, who said it “outperformed practically every metric they set for it”

[bleak gyro]

ive never underrated anything about the x36, i wanna see a full size model so bad

[pastel kestrel]

it looks cool in the air

i'm allways a big fan of the X36.

[stray thorn]

you'll notice that these aircraft have no vertical stabilizers

[pastel kestrel]

yeah, no wonder, almost as if not having a vertical stabilizer gives it better stealth properties.

[stray thorn]

yaw vectoring is the only way to make yaw inputs without any control surface deflection, its one of the things that the X-36 tested

[pastel kestrel]

i would have never guessed, given the way the nozzle of the X36 is hidden.

[stray thorn]

pretty sure the X-36 is based on the 988-119 anyways, NASA also made it, a couple years after that paper

[wicked bobcat]

This idea is cool but boscali is a bunch of broke boys it doesn’t sound like they couldn afford any of this

[tiny estuary]

Its the 2070s and we are talking about late 90s concepts.
I would not exclude these aircraft from the realm of possibilities, even for some small island nations.

[pastel kestrel]

Im sure this would be their equivalent of the raptor in thier world, old but still reliable.

[onyx monolith]

Another good equivalent could be the HAL AMCA or TAI Kaan: a fairly modern aircraft with all the characteristics of its generation, but one that entered service much later than the earliest members of that generation, and at a time when the larger powers of the world were already deploying aircraft significantly ahead of it

[rain magnet]

isnt… boscali generally considered the longer standing and more “established” of the two..?

i mean hell they have the DR and Medusa, the two most expensive aircraft currently

[fallow orchid]

Heck, it could be to the sixth generation what the current KF-21 is to the fifth; designed with similar geometry and many of the same considerations, but not quite there.

[pastel kestrel]

that is sure quite the excel page. full of good info tough

[dense cairn]

to the best of my knowledge, neither of those aircraft are actually confirmed to be of either faction yet

[sudden anchor]

this part drives me nuts ngl, like sure there's probably a very logical, very reasonable, very sensible explanation for why it looks like that but I HATE IT SO MUCH

[stray thorn]

Stelf

[pseudo bronze]

Holy shit I got ratioed and I didn't even know it 😭

[onyx monolith]

So many of the designs in that paper do just look... really odd, something about the huge wing area with relatively low sweep angle just doesn't look right on a fighter

Still though, there's a lot of inspiration to be taken for tailless designs (especially those with canards)

[pastel kestrel]

I guess it's the same way as concept art works, over development things get refined and improve their design.

[modern folio]

32 downvotes 😭

[scarlet viper]

give bro a break

[bleak gyro]

https://tenor.com/view/how-many-times-do-we-have-to-teach-you-this-lesson-old-man-hi-there-young-people-spongebob-old-man-old-man-spongebob-gif-5749776374374436142

[scarlet viper]

I have a point though

wait, lmao, anyway

cant downvote me if i do it first

holy crap, I might have found a way to bait people

[pseudo bronze]

I mean it was a bad opinion

[bronze aurora]

Cockpit or casket?

[scarlet viper]

caskpit

[runic lily]

Cockpit all the way

[scarlet viper]

Cocket

[frozen tundra]

So you can say you have an ass so perfect you can craptalk that one?

[scarlet viper]

nobody can insult that gyatt

[silver canyon]

Top 3 messages on the suggestion forum

[runic lily]

(I forgot to post this)

[open pecan]

If the game has a true 6th gen fighter above the Ifrit, it should be called the Monarch

[scarlet viper]

Khan (I had to do it)

[onyx monolith]

Prototype #1 still looks better to me but the changes are definitely interesting

[stray thorn]

Which one is the second prototype

[pastel kestrel]

The one with red highlights

[onyx monolith]

No, the top one is, the one with the red boxes is the original

[stray thorn]

Switched to DSI instead of Caret, probably to simplify though that reduces it's top speed to around Mach 2, got rid of the bogey gears for simplification and weight reduction, now the moved nozzles are interesting, they moved them forward which probably means the engines are also slightly pushed forward

[onyx monolith]

I think the engines themselves are in around the same place, it's just that they have F-22 style TVC nozzles instead of the YF-23 style buried engines of prototype 1, so you can better see how far forward they already were

[stray thorn]

True, so they probably just want high altitude trim control on the aircraft to reduce reliance on control surfaces

[onyx monolith]

Personally I worry about the edge alignments for the new engine section increasing RCS, but if that's what's needed to make it controllable then it's probably an acceptable loss

[pastel kestrel]

Maybe if the control surfaces were too much of a pain to adjust and program, so they went with tvc to increase its reliability

[stray thorn]

Shouldn't mess with frontal angles too much, rear and side are taking a bit of a hit though

[onyx monolith]

It's the B-2 trailing edge changes all over again 💔

[stray thorn]

B-2's TE matches with the LE wha

It's like one of the best angle minimized designs ever made

[pastel kestrel]

I think it's a case that it might be too long to develop the FBW of this configuration, so they want to get this thing into mass production quickly.

[stray thorn]

I can see unwanted trim drag and stealth concerns being the issue, though it does use those fancy control surfaces so reliability might also come into play

[onyx monolith]

I was thinking of how it originally had a single diamond shape like the B-21 but it got changed late in the design to the shape it has now to improve low altitude penetration capability, which caused rear-aspect RCS to suffer more than it would have originally (I might be misremembering though)

[stray thorn]

The angles would still match the same but theres more surfaces that reflect back, it would tank RCS but only at those specific angles that they sacrifice

Diamond wings just kinda suck tho so

[pastel kestrel]

I'm interested in how chinese aircraft seem to aim to stealth mixing the principles of the f 117 and B2 for some reason. They tend to be super angular while retaining some modern semblance of stealth.

[stray thorn]

F-117 principles kinda suck for aero so we tend to avoid that as much as possible by remembering top and bottom aspects don't matter

[onyx monolith]

With the new ones it's mostly about focusing on all-aspect stealth, using more modern FBW systems to try and get as close to the theoretical Hopeless Diamond as possible, and be stealthy from all angles (which the B-2 and B-21 are the best example of all-aspect stealth designs so far)

[onyx monolith]

Huh, turns out I wasn't misremembering

[stray thorn]

Much harder when the thing you want to make all aspect stealth is a fighter that actually wants to fly

[pastel kestrel]

Either way, I do like the idea of each side of the game having their own stealth machine the way the ifrit and vortex do, but inverted.

[pastel kestrel]

The aero's guy dream is the nightmare of the stealth guy's and viceversa

[stray thorn]

Trying to get all aspect stealth(excluding top and bottom) is very hard when you also need kinematics, thrust, aoa, and fuel of a fighter to fulfill

There's like two usable planforms to use and they all have to be single surface or have a fixed plane in the case of F-47

It's all really jank when I think about it because normal 5th gens aren't that compromising at all other than high cost

[scarlet viper]

one shall not shite on a trait if he has not the better