Why are people getting downright defensive?
See sketch below... the width and depth would appear to give ample room for 3 AAMs per bay even accounting for all of the caveats you mention. Look at the F-22 bay, the lateral clearance required between the outer missiles and the bay sides isn't very large and in my example the the missiles aren't even staggered.
I realize that, which is why I assumed an adapter (think an internal triple ejector rack) which fits into the known twin attachment points in the sketch below. Since the adapter needs to bear not only the missile weight (however 3x200kg is less than even a single Kh-58, leaving considerable reserves) but also the loads from kicking them out of the bay, it's clearly not an entirely trivial and potentially somewhat bulky piece of hardware. I may have drawn it too compact in that regard (note the enormous reserve of space underneath though) but it doesn't strike me as unprecedented. Why, for instance, would it be harder than cramming a third MRAAM into the F-35 bay or the quadruple SDB pallet on both the F-22 and -35?
That missiles inside the doors amounts to a major redesign isn't up for debate though - that was just me thinking out loud (and in fact with an eye toward even more serious optimization surgery which this change would open the door to). While 3 MRAAMs per bay is a relatively straightforward upgrade, deleting the SRAAM bays isn't going to happen, not denying that.
Yup, and I'm merely pointing out that there is some interesting growth potential which results from these circumstances
Talk about a can of worms.
Avimimus said:
See sketch below... the width and depth would appear to give ample room for 3 AAMs per bay even accounting for all of the caveats you mention. Look at the F-22 bay, the lateral clearance required between the outer missiles and the bay sides isn't very large and in my example the the missiles aren't even staggered.
Steven said:
I realize that, which is why I assumed an adapter (think an internal triple ejector rack) which fits into the known twin attachment points in the sketch below. Since the adapter needs to bear not only the missile weight (however 3x200kg is less than even a single Kh-58, leaving considerable reserves) but also the loads from kicking them out of the bay, it's clearly not an entirely trivial and potentially somewhat bulky piece of hardware. I may have drawn it too compact in that regard (note the enormous reserve of space underneath though) but it doesn't strike me as unprecedented. Why, for instance, would it be harder than cramming a third MRAAM into the F-35 bay or the quadruple SDB pallet on both the F-22 and -35?
That missiles inside the doors amounts to a major redesign isn't up for debate though - that was just me thinking out loud (and in fact with an eye toward even more serious optimization surgery which this change would open the door to). While 3 MRAAMs per bay is a relatively straightforward upgrade, deleting the SRAAM bays isn't going to happen, not denying that.
flanker said:
Yup, and I'm merely pointing out that there is some interesting growth potential which results from these circumstances
Talk about a can of worms.
