USAF/US NAVY 6th Generation Fighter Programs - F/A-XX, F-X, NGAD, PCA, ASFS news

[bring_it_on]

China - nothing, just general assessment of that China inc does in private sector.
Russia...hard to tell, but that s-70 little Friday fix didn't go well!

So basically nothing concrete or objective. And here you were trying to paint someone else's assessment as 'optimistic'.

 

[Ainen]

So basically nothing concrete or objective. And here you were trying to paint someone else's assessment as 'optimistic'.

@Josh_TN wrote about a way to carve out advantage against PRC manufacturing. As I read him, automated mass-produced CCAs will neuter likely Chinese advantage in aircraft numbers.

Statistics for manufacturing and industrial automatization are heavily against US.
China is massively ahead in that metric(490 to 297/10000), despite having workforce larger than entire population of the US.

Statistics in current aircraft manufacturing (and state of aerospace industry) favour the US. Without human(pilot) element involved, expecting outproducing PRC in these conditions in drones is optimistic; China's ability to setup automated manufacturing lines, and lunes in general, is likely to be higher; whole world is flying on Chinese drones after all.
And, vice versa, current manned aircraft advantage is with US.


It's simple straightforward logic. What's the problem?

 

[Avimimus]

So where will we next go then Josh_TN? A return to speed? Especially Hypersonic speeds above Mach 10 that was considered the holly grail of military aircraft and indeed missiles a decade ago.

Higher speed cruise means massive fuel hungry platforms... which means few platforms, huge logistics dependencies, and low sustained sortie rates - good for a nuclear armageddon but not much else.

I think we need to understand the balance as being more around locatability - a combination of stealth to delay or prevent detection of precise location, with reasonable cruising speeds that can allow relocation... delaying when an opponent can engage and limiting their decision making ability, so as to allow getting off the first shot. Low observability and efficient subsonic/moderate supersonic cruise may be where optimal performance is for not just sixth generation, but seventh and eight as well.

I suppose, the ultimate question is whether there will eventually be extremely powerful radars able to blanket the entire world and detect every bird and baseball... but they would be vulnerable to ARM warfare... and it may be a matter of pocking out each-other's eyes with hypersonics, and then sending something that looks very NGAD/CCA like into the gaps produced.

 

[Josh_TN]

A smaller aircraft does not equal a smaller RCS. In fact, the smaller something gets, the harder it is to reduce the signature across bands. Shaping is effective when the size of features/scattering sources is more than X times the wavelength where X is some number greater than 15. The lower the frequency, the longer the wavelength. A very large object can use shaping to have a low RCS across a broad range of wavelengths. A small object can use shaping effectively in a very narrow range of wavelengths.

I am not sure what is meant here by "exotics".

Most airborne radars are X band, and I would assume that is the focus of any CCA RCS reduction efforts. In that frequency range I thought small physical cross section can still be helpful lowering the RCS, but perhaps I am incorrect. By exotics I mean RAM and/or composite. It looks like the two Incr1 aircraft just use mostly aluminum for ease of production.

 

[Josh_TN]

They have been for about 5 years now. It's called Agile Combat Employment:
"Agile Combat Employment (ACE): a proactive and reactive operational
scheme of maneuver executed within threat timelines to increase survivability
while generating combat power."

This includes large investments in the ability to operate most USAF aircraft from austere bases. Northwest Field at Guam isn't being used for the "RQ-180", it's being used for ACE related training and development:

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/northrop-grumman-rq-180.20900/page-14#post-624238

I am aware of ACE; I meant austere basing specifically with regards to CCA. It is rarely mentioned. I can think of one quote from the program that said something along the lines of “optimizing CCA for the distances in the pacific theater” or something like that, but there really has not been must discussion of CCA with regards to ACE or runway requirements. I assume this is being considered in the background somewhere, hopefully.

 

[_Del_]

It looks like the two Incr1 aircraft just use mostly aluminum for ease of production.

It's a lot easier to field fix or replace bent or otherwise damaged aluminum than it is to lay and cure composites. Cheap and easy to play with. I think ultimately they'd like to explore 3D printing as many parts as possible in the field, but one thing at a time.

 

[Josh_TN]

@Ainen: The PRC has production advantages in most categories, but as far as I know they do not yet produce any CCA like platforms. I assume that changes soon and work is being in the black, but I do not know along what timeframe Similarly I am unaware of Chinese progress in AI software control of aircraft, though I assume it exists in some classified form. I do not assume PRC progress is equivalent to the U.S. as you seem to, but I do not exclude the possibility. In a worst case scenario as you depict, production of CCAs still is necessary just to try to stay competitive, as you say.

As for Russia, we will agree to disagree. While penetrating their world class ground based AD systems would be problematic, engaging their aircraft does not seem difficult. If your argument is that this has been the case since 1991, ok. But Russia is no longer a peer aircraft producing nation in my mind.

 

[bring_it_on]

The Air Force asked for funding to initiate Increment 2 in its fiscal year 2025 budget request, which is still pending approval from Congress, Hunter said during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event.

Once funding is approved, the service will begin concept development, during which it will evaluate different options, he said. “Is it more capable? Is it more affordable? Where on the spectrum will Increment 2 land? Those are questions to be explored.”

Achieving affordable mass with uncrewed systems “inherently implies that there are … capabilities that would be nice to have that you choose not to pursue because they add too much cost, and we try to live within a set of parameters that we believe constitutes affordability,” he said.

Key to making the correct tradeoffs is conducting thorough data analysis and engaging with the user community to understand “what really matters to them, what makes a difference,” he said. “It's that engagement with the user community that helps us sort through if we're going to go for more capability in one area, then we're going to inherently have to accept less in another if we're going to achieve affordable mass.”

The Air Force has already made a number of “trades” regarding Collaborative Combat Aircraft capabilities, and the service has the capacity to make more — and potentially different — tradeoffs in future increments, he said.

Hunter said the service does have “some ideas of how we would see Increment 2 fitting into the broader Air Force force design, and that will help shape [the] dialogue with industry to say, ‘Based on what we think Increment 2 does as part of the force design, is it more affordable? Is it more exquisite, and where does it fall on the spectrum?’”

Different companies will likely have different concepts, and some will be more advantageous and innovative than others, he said. By initiating Increment 2 while Increment 1 is still under development, the service will allow vendors who didn’t win Increment 1 contracts to recompete for Increment 2, he added.

“This is not a high stakes, win or lose for 30 years for industry,” he said. “If they don't succeed in one competition, the next competition is right around the corner, and that's pretty fundamental to being able to sustain competition over time among multiple competitors.”

One place where Collaborative Combat Aircraft will likely save the Air Force some money is sustainment, Hunter said.

“If you think about when we fly our platforms in the Air Force, what are they mostly doing? Well, they're mostly doing training,” he said. “The training is mostly for the crew: the pilots, the maintainers and other elements of the support crew.”

With uncrewed aircraft, “you don't necessarily have to have that,” he said. “The computer is the crew in that scenario. There's going to be some ground crew as well, but it will not be the case … that every CCA has to routinely fly for training purposes as you would see with a crewed platform.”

Additionally, the early increments of Collaborative Combat Aircraft are not designed to last for 30 or 50 years and thus won’t be “going into depot every five years and getting significantly overhauled,” he said. “There's a lot of simplification, a lot of savings associated with not having to do all of those things that you would do with an F-22.”

“On the balance, my expectation is sustainment costs for CCA are likely to be lower than a crewed platform, and I would expect by a reasonable margin,” he said. “But … our costers have to really dig into that, and they're very good at doing this sort of analysis and understand those implications. So, more to come on how that plays out.”

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/12/10/air-force-mulls-choice-between-affordability-capability-for-collaborative-combat-aircraft

 

[Ainen]

@Ainen: The PRC has production advantages in most categories, but as far as I know they do not yet produce any CCA like platforms. I assume that changes soon and work is being in the black, but I do not know along what timeframe Similarly I am unaware of Chinese progress in AI software control of aircraft, though I assume it exists in some classified form. I do not assume PRC progress is equivalent to the U.S. as you seem to, but I do not exclude the possibility. In a worst case scenario as you depict, production of CCAs still is necessary just to try to stay competitive, as you say.

Yes, that's my take.

Let's...see where it goes. I would rather we would not find out who's right; but sadly, I think we will.

As for Russia, we will agree to disagree. While penetrating their world class ground based AD systems would be problematic, engaging their aircraft does not seem difficult. If your argument is that this has been the case since 1991, ok. But Russia is no longer a peer aircraft producing nation in my mind.

My take is, nothing much changed since 1991. Without either + or -.

Spoiler: Russia as air power

Russia is no superpower (no surprise). It's still largely the same industrial and intellectual core, minus Ukraine of course. You can say it's the last great power, surviving relic of an era long gone.

Russian aircraft are more or less within the pack, when it comes to contemporary aircraft. If anything, access to world electronics market made them more even with world level than pre-1991 aircraft, for practical purposes.

Change is that VKS size matches Russian PPP economy. It isn't something especially damning; we don't blame Sweden for failing to match F-35 production?
Russia still outproduces... basically the entire West (without US) in combat aircraft, on its peacetime production tempo. Russian aircraft follow the curve better than all of those, too. Which is remarkable, because Soviet collapse destroyed their whole original evolution path, yet Russian MIC still somehow climbed out.

Russian performance in Ukraine and even Syria isn't about aircraft, more about VKS being firmly stuck in fear of NATO, and investing accordingly.

As a result, since 2000s, it almost gave up normal air force tasks.
Either high level defensive stand off, or COIN. Nothing in-between. Which was kinda sensible in the pre-2022 world.

Is Russia peer? No, and won't be.
Near peer? Yes, it isn't likely to change.

Does it matter for NGAD? Add Russian numbers on top of Chinese.
Plus, Russian development doesn't top out now; it is not a spent force.

F-35s and CCAs produced for Europe ultimately don't come from a separate production line, it's a global pool. This "side investment" will have to continue, because ETO will keep up with world standard.

 

[Josh_TN]

Russian production numbers do not even equal European ones, AFAIK. The majority of their force does not even employ AESA. European F-35s obviously come at the expense of U.S. production, but that assumes the U.S. air arms had the financial capability to buy more aircraft if there were no foreign sales. F-35 provides all the overmatch necessary for NATO. The current Su-57 contract will be outnumbered 2:1 by the purchases of NATO border nations Poland, Finland, and Norway alone.

If China was not a threat, NGAD would have been cancelled by now and the CCAs would be a DARPA project.

 

[NMaude]

Statistics for manufacturing and industrial automatization are heavily against US.
China is massively ahead in that metric(490 to 297/10000), despite having workforce larger than entire population of the US.

Due to China's intractable and worsening demographic issues that advantage is already withering away due to the PRC's population rapidly ageing (PRC demographers also admitted either early this year or last year that they had over-counted the PRC's population by over 100 million people).

 

[dark sidius]

If you don't speed up with China you lose.

 

[Josh_TN]

Due to China's intractable and worsening demographic issues that advantage is already withering away due to the PRC's population rapidly ageing (PRC demographers also admitted either early this year or last year that they had over-counted the PRC's population by over 100 million people).

There’s no threat to PRC production in any reasonable time frame. Defense related industries could simply be prioritized over other sectors of the economy; see Russia. But we are far off topic now.

 

[Hydroman]

China has their Directorate, Replication of Anything made by Someone Else (DRASE).

 

[Hydroman]

In the US, we get hot and bothered over an NGAD and now the bureaucracy kicks in and now we are scrambling between what the USAF wants and needs coupled to CCAs. Don't get me wrong, we do have to balance capability against cost for an NGAD and CCAs are a good idea for integration into the mission structure but I detect a little internal panicking going on. I still think the USAF and USN programs need to be separate. I know others previously posted and they mentioned the F-4. The F-4 was a very good fighter for the time but the USAF does like buying a USN aircraft and they still don't.

We have some good, current off the shelf engines (F135 and F110 as examples) including avionics and other mission systems from F-22, F-35, F-15E/EX and even B-2. The F110 seems have room for upgrading. We have have LO composite airframe design and development down to the tee but we just cannot get out of our on way in some cases. I know this is off topic and I apologize but the Boeing Starliner is DEAD as one example! Cannot keep doing this to programs.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Interesting how much range can be squeezed out of slender, efficient single engine airframe.
Also, 1st ic(verbal) gives some freedom of interpretation.

As soon as you change the payload volume from a pair of BVRAAMs to something bigger, airframe volume goes way up.

 

[NMaude]

The F-4 was a very good fighter for the time but the USAF does like buying a USN aircraft and they still don't.

"Does"? I think you meant "Doesn't".

 

[_Del_]

As soon as you change the payload volume from a pair of BVRAAMs to something bigger, airframe volume goes way up.

Personally, I would ask for enough depth and length for one Quickstrike (Mk63)/JDAAM/MK83, or two staggered AMRAAMs. Shouldn't be too much deeper than the AMRAAM bay.
But there are good reasons to ask for less than that in some iteration, as well. Particularly if you buy multiple types for service.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Personally, I would ask for enough depth and length for one Quickstrike (Mk63)/JDAAM/MK83, or two staggered AMRAAMs. Shouldn't be too much deeper than the AMRAAM bay.
But there are good reasons to ask for less than that in some iteration, as well. Particularly if you buy multiple types for service.

IIRC, the Mk83 body fits into the same volume as a clipped-fin AMRAAM. I'd want volume for Mk84s, Harpoon/SLAM, etc.

 

[Josh_TN]

IIRC, the Mk83 body fits into the same volume as a clipped-fin AMRAAM. I'd want volume for Mk84s, Harpoon/SLAM, etc.

CCA is an anti air platform. B-21 is the strike platform. I do not think the USAF has any interest in air to ground ordnance in the CCAs for the first few iterations. Platform size/power would have to dramatically increase for anything bigger than SDBs.

 

[quellish]

CCA is an anti air platform..

No, the CCAs are not exclusively anti air platforms. There will be CCAs for strike, sensing, EW, etc

 

[Scott Kenny]

CCA is an anti air platform. B-21 is the strike platform. I do not think the USAF has any interest in air to ground ordnance in the CCAs for the first few iterations.

That's certainly what they've said.

The war games have all featured strike capable CCAs.

Platform size/power would have to dramatically increase for anything bigger than SDBs.

Yes, at least a few of the "CCAs" I'm picturing would be most of the size of an F35 or F18. Those would obviously not be very cheap, but ideally you wouldn't need more than a couple hundred of them even in a war.

 

[Hydroman]

"Does"? I think you meant "Doesn't".

Oops, you are correct, I didn't eat my grammar crackers.

 

[NMaude]

Oops, you are correct, I didn't eat my grammar crackers.

Are you going to correct it?

 

[dark sidius]

Air Force, Navy should work more closely to develop 6th-gen fighter, senator says

A key lawmaker on the Senate Armed Services Committee is suggesting that the Air Force and Navy work hand-in-hand to develop their respective sixth-generation fighter jets, rather than take diverging paths.

defensescoop.com

 

[Foo Fighter]

I can see systems being transferable but not sure about the actual airframe. Divergent requirements.

 

[Josh_TN]

The USN has hard requirements that cannot change for an embarked aircraft - eg MTOW/stall speed/length limits. If both services used the same airframe, it would essentially be USAF adopting FAXX, not a compromise between the two requirements. Perhaps a USAF variant could shed some internal structure weight or have more clipped wings like the F-35A vs C, but there would be little room for major changes.

 

[Sevrent]

Some interesting tidbits I found on a web archive. USAF studying 1MW power generation for a future fighter. And Another study on adaptive engines which proposes even further improvements upon AETD for 10% more range. Maybe a glimpse into some of the stuff they want out of NGAD? How does one even go about cooling up to 1MW of total electrical usage on an aircraft? Makes F-35s 80kw~ cooling capacity look incredible paltry in comparison lol

 

[kqcke for you]

Some interesting tidbits I found on a web archive. USAF studying 1MW power generation for a future fighter. And Another study on adaptive engines which proposes even further improvements upon AETD for 10% more range. Maybe a glimpse into some of the stuff they want out of NGAD? How does one even go about cooling up to 1MW of total electrical usage on an aircraft? Makes F-35s 80kw~ cooling capacity look incredible paltry in comparison lol

View attachment 752355View attachment 752356

I remember XA100 was said to achieve 35% more already so if possible (and usable for it) then close 45% or 1.797km is possible for A/C. Thats a lot mate

 

[Moose]

Some interesting tidbits I found on a web archive. USAF studying 1MW power generation for a future fighter. And Another study on adaptive engines which proposes even further improvements upon AETD for 10% more range. Maybe a glimpse into some of the stuff they want out of NGAD? How does one even go about cooling up to 1MW of total electrical usage on an aircraft? Makes F-35s 80kw~ cooling capacity look incredible paltry in comparison lol

View attachment 752355View attachment 752356

Very cool. Also probably dead soon.

 

[sferrin]

Some interesting tidbits I found on a web archive. USAF studying 1MW power generation for a future fighter. And Another study on adaptive engines which proposes even further improvements upon AETD for 10% more range. Maybe a glimpse into some of the stuff they want out of NGAD? How does one even go about cooling up to 1MW of total electrical usage on an aircraft? Makes F-35s 80kw~ cooling capacity look incredible paltry in comparison lol

Pump the heat into the fuel on its way to the engines.

 

[Forest Green]

Pump the heat into the fuel on its way to the engines.

Your limiting factor there is the HP Turbine Entry Temperature. They already operate fairly close to their limit. That said, by heating the fuel, you may be able to use slightly less to get the same heat. This would reduce mass flow rate slightly, but the AFR is very high for jet engines, so this would probably be negligible.

 

[kqcke for you]

Your limiting factor there is the HP Turbine Entry Temperature. They already operate fairly close to their limit. That said, by heating the fuel, you may be able to use slightly less to get the same heat. This would reduce mass flow rate slightly, but the AFR is very high for jet engines, so this would probably be negligible.

Didn't they want to achieve like ~2700° for ADAPT

 

[dark sidius]

Some interesting tidbits I found on a web archive. USAF studying 1MW power generation for a future fighter. And Another study on adaptive engines which proposes even further improvements upon AETD for 10% more range. Maybe a glimpse into some of the stuff they want out of NGAD? How does one even go about cooling up to 1MW of total electrical usage on an aircraft? Makes F-35s 80kw~ cooling capacity look incredible paltry in comparison lol

View attachment 752355View attachment 752356

 

[dark sidius]

Is it me or it look a lot like the MWTA ?

 

[Scott Kenny]

Oops, I apparently forgot to post this earlier...

Pump the heat into the fuel on its way to the engines.

Exactly.

Your limiting factor there is the HP Turbine Entry Temperature. They already operate fairly close to their limit. That said, by heating the fuel, you may be able to use slightly less to get the same heat. This would reduce mass flow rate slightly, but the AFR is very high for jet engines, so this would probably be negligible.

Yes, it is. When you're talking design TITs over 2500degC, though, you can probably get away with soaking a lot of heat into the fuel.

It'd be kinda interesting to know what the J58 max TIT was, since the limiting factor was Compressor Inlet Temp instead of TIT.