Now you know why CAS is directed by ground troops in the first place...
Why are you using SDBs at 200 meters? Do you not have MBT-LAWs or M72s?
If you want an actual cannon, ask a helicopter pilot. Helicopters can still work in the FLET for the most part, provided the threat is heat seekers and not laser guided systems like Starstreak or RBS-70.
Yeah, and if the enemy can get that close to a trench, they can have it. I'll be waiting another 800 meters behind in a fallback position.
So have I. It's so rare, the ones that survive missile strikes get saved in museums, apparently. If it were banal it wouldn't go in a museum.
Considering both the A-1 and A-7 did in Vietnam and the A-10 did exactly that in Desert Storm, I dunno about that.
Bad weather is historically quite good for attacking and I don't know why a robot plane would suffer in it. Robot planes don't get dizzy or disorientated for one thing. They may not like flying in a sandstorm or whatever but it can be done provided they can get over it. F-15s were regularly hitting things through oil field smoke plumes with Paveways too.
"Bad weather" also changes depending on the technology of the time. It used to be just clouds and rain preventing visual acquisition of targets. Nowadays, SWIRs and LWIRs are getting cheap enough we can put them on soldiers' heads and let them see through fog and sand. A robot plane in the future might have something like a hyperspectral sensor and multimode radar that lets it fly in the dark and see through sand and smoke, and still be under $40 million or something. F/A-50 does it.
That said, if you can't fly your planes, neither can the enemy, so it's not a big deal.
Yeah my mistake, the projected loss rates for A-10A were around 7% in a hypothetical Central European WW3. No hard answers on how that would affect combat operations in real life: after the Package Q strike the USAF stopped doing daylight raids despite suffering a mere 2.5% attrition rate on that sortie. The Karbala raid was something like 3.2% because a single Apache got shot down and the entire theater stopped doing deep raids.
The TB-2 suffered 7% attrition rate in Syria, with no noticeable effects on combat operations, in a much smaller timeframe than Vietnam (and possibly Desert Storm) though. Same in Ukraine, the TB-2s suffered major losses (possibly as high as 40% attrition) with no major changes in tactics until the Russians got their EWAR working. The Turks also lost a pair of helicopter gunships to Pantsirs or something and decided that they were done with helicopter gunships in that theater.
Meanwhile, the USAF once lost a $20 million drone over Yemen and subsequently retired an entire fleet of drones over this. Do I need to remind you that a UH-60M costs about $25 million? It would be like the U.S. Army crashing a Blackhawk and proceeding to chop up all its utility helicopters, instead of just writing off the airframe as a loss and moving on with its life.
It's a bit silly, to say the least.
Simply put, SABA or Alpha Jet (or perhaps more prosaically, Textron Scorpion and L-M F/A-50) aren't realistic solutions to the modern CAS problem. Anything manned is going to be an issue, as in peacetime you will have trouble finding pilots, and in wartime you will have trouble surviving, which means it should probably just be a robot so the survivability question becomes moot.
The only reason people make aircraft survivable is to bring the pilot back.
Q-58 is quoted by Kratos as costing around $5 million per unit with 50 airframes per year, and $2 million with 100 airframes per year, but it might be quadruple that in both cases. Which isn't bad for a stealthy bomb truck. You could probably buy 3 or 4 Q-58s in reality for the price of a single JSF, which frees up several JSFs to be doing important things that aren't babysitting ground troops or dropping SDBs, like attacking airbases or destroying SAM installations or C3I bunkers.
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Add a few relatively inexpensive things like a small FLIR, or a radar, maybe a slightly larger engine, and bomb bay for 4 SDBs, or a single 2000 lbs bomb. Reserve space for an autonomous flight computer, and you get a neat little machine that can do the job of half a JSF for probably a third the actual flyaway price, or not much more than a helicopter gunship, at around $40 million or so (AH-64E new build).
In reality, it might even end up coming in at the cost of an MQ-1 Predator, at around $15-20 million or so, assuming Kratos is right about their cost estimates for a basic Q-58 being $2-4.5 million if it hits serial production, once you throw in the sensors and the SATCOM for OTH control.
It's a $5 million F-117, controllable by a JSF, for all intents and purposes at the moment. It could easily be something better though.
