thinkin' about how enormous modern fighter aircraft are

(yes i know the Tomcat is almost 50 years old, i still qualify anything post-Vietnam as more or less modern)

alright i feel like threading today,

so here's the thing about this.

fighter aircraft, also called pursuit aircraft or destroyers depending on when and where you are, are a reaction to the problem of recon aircraft and bombers.

(yes i've talked about this before, just deal.)

hitting airplanes with artillery from the ground is a Hard Problem. in the olden days, the ONLY thing that could seriously cause problems for an airplane was another airplane.

early pursuit gun carriers had turrets, as would seem intuitive if you don't know much about airplanes. you had a pilot in front and a turret gunner in the back and the plane would fly up near/alongside its targets and blast at them with the turret.

the problem is that the turret, the second occupant, and having an airframe large enough to carry them are heavy. all that extra weight translates to needing more lift, and having more drag, and being slower.

a plane with the mission of pursuing other planes needs to be FAST.

conveniently, the pilot of an airplane can at least momentarily point it in literally any direction, which means the turret isn't necessary. just fix the guns pointing forward and point the whole plane at the target. get rid of the second person, make smaller and faster plane.

so! arguably, the great majority of R&D in aviation in the interwar and WWII periods was for making planes *faster* with the express goal of making *fighters* faster. sure, reliability and range and altitude and stuff like that is important too, but we need SPEED.

they are generally the most diminutive class of military aircraft. there are civil aircraft that are certainly smaller and lighter, and some that can even go as fast, formula racing planes certainly, but those aren't built to also carry guns and armor.

an aside about armor: it's too heavy, you can't armor an entire plane. plane survivability is more about system redundancy. the small amount of actual armor in a fighter plane is for the pilot, and sometimes the engine.

in a lot of old fighter planes the engine is considered *part of the armor* for the pilot. the goal of armoring a fighter isn't to make it not get disabled/destroyed when hit, but to keep the pilot alive long enough to abandon ship if/when it happens.

but anyway so a fighter plane is generally a pilot, a tiny bit of armor, a few machine guns, some fuel, and some radios, attached to the smallest possible pair of wings, and the *largest possible engine.*

so there's a reason that most racing planes since the 1950s are retired, tuned up WWII fighters with the guns removed. they are absolutely flying muscle cars. they are terrifyingly powerful.

(i still don't like Rare Bear's current paint job as much as the old white and gold one, but it is starting to grow on me a little bit.)

airplane size is a bit difficult to parse. this seems pretty big compared to say, a little civil Cessna 152. but its size is mostly a consequence of the (in this case) enormous 18-cylinder engine and the huge propeller needed to convert that horsepower to thrust.

but compared to other categories of military aircraft of the era, which use similar scale engines, fighters were quite minimalist and diminutive, prioritizing speed and nimbleness over all other things.

and then everything changed when the gas turbine engine nation attacked.

jet engines completely blew the lid off the practical power limit of aircraft engines and bumped the amount of power a an engine of a given weight could produce by an order of magnitude. speed had always been the goal with pursuit aircraft, and now they suddenly got REALLY fast.

now understanding of aerodynamics didn't advance at quite the same time as engines. early jets were still limited by their airframe designs; in top speed they weren't *that* much faster than WWII piston engine planes.

a P-51H Mustang can still push close enough to the sound barrier to get itself in serious trouble just like a MiG-15 can. flight control goes out the window, things start ripping off the plane like control surfaces and, erm, the entire tail.

but their *cruise* speed, the speed at which they fly efficiently over long distances when not in a big hurry, that suddenly increased by a WHOLE LOT. like by hundreds of mph (or km/h, the statement is true either way.)

their maximum altitude in level flight also increased by quite a lot, to where fighter aircraft very quickly had to go from very few of them having pressurized cockpits to just about all of them having pressurized cockpits.

not too long after that - a decade, decade and a half ish - we finally got a solid grasp of supersonic aerodynamics and figured out how to make planes reliably break the sound barrier without losing control. so now their dash speed got really, REALLY fast.

and all that speed comes with a big problem: more often than not now, you're on top of your enemy before you even see them. the Mk.1 eyeball is no longer good enough for target search and track. as your pace increases, so does your range of situational awareness need to increase.

before the 1950s very few aircraft carried onboard radar, mostly only specialized night fighters. radar was big and heavy and clunky and reliable and added a lot to the pilot's workload.

but now, with high speed jets, you really need it to know wtf is going on.

with radar comes other problems tho. radar is a bit like a flashlight - if i shine one at you in the dark, i can see where you are, but you can also see where i am because you can see where the flashlight is. so passive radar warning receivers become a thing.

with radar also comes long-range radar guided missiles. at first these were only for specialized interceptor fighters. but once every fighter is carrying radar and can see and be seen much further away than the naked eye, the start getting strapped onto everything.

you also have the innovation or short-range infrared guided missiles, which are a boon for dogfighting where they give you longer reach and lower engagement effort than guns require. radar missiles are your first line of attack, IR missiles are second, guns are third.

there was of course a short period in the late 50s and early 60s where a few countries tried building fighter aircraft that ONLY had missiles and as such disposed of guns, which turned out to be a hilariously bad decision for Reasons. oops.

but now you're carrying a lot of external ordnance for air-to-air fighting. most fighters can carry bombs and so forth for performing close air support, but aren't expected to make air-to-air fighting maneuvers while carrying a load of bombs.

all that extra crap strapped to the outside of the plane means you need more lift and in particular more control surface authority to remain competitively maneuverable while carrying a bunch of missiles. more lift means more drag, so you need more engine to stay fast.

missiles add another problem: you need a way to defend yourself. you need countermeasures, decoys to confuse the guidance system while you make evasive maneuvers. so now you've got dispensers full of flares and chaff (basically little bombs wrapped in shredded aluminium foil.)

then there are other problems introduced by high speed jets. many of them are so damn fast that they have difficulty going *slow* enough for safe takeoff and landing and require drag parachutes to stop within the length of the runway.

and bailing out when you get hit! somersaulting over the side of the cockpit with a parachute was sketchy enough to begin with on piston engine planes, in high speed jets it's just completely untenable - you need a rocket powered seat to throw you clear of the aircraft.

and then with jet fighters being such incredible gas guzzlers and still needing to do long range escort and attack missions and long-duration combat patrols and so on, you have the advent of in-flight refueling, so you need to include equipment for that!

everything i've mentioned adds weight, and that's bad for speed. it would be completely untenable for piston engine planes - piston engines don't scale up that well, we hit the
practical limit of those in WWII.

jet engines tho, those scale up REALLY well.

so all the crap that you have added doesn't become a problem for speed - you just use a bigger jet engine, sometimes two of them. the engines on some jet fighters are nearly the size of the entire fuselage on some interwar piston engine fighters.

(twin-engine fighters in the piston era kinda sucked for maneuverability - the propellers forced you to mount the engines so far apart that the moment of inertia for rolling into and out of turns is huge. jet engines can sit right next to each other inside the fuselage tho!)

the pinnacle of this problem of feature creep, at least in the west, was a plane called the Republic F-105 Thunderchief.

this is a single-seat, single-engine fighter.

at not point in its development did anyway think to say "y'know maybe we should leave that feature out."

the 20mm Vulcan cannon early on had a problem with feed reliability from the magazine - it couldn't hit the desired 6k round per minute fire rate. on the original F-104 Starfighter installation it was reduced to 4k. but on the F-105 they REALLY wanted to hit that goal.

so as a solution they put *two* magazines and had the gun feed from both of them simultaneously at 3k spm each, interleaving the cartridges as they reached the gun.

the USAF developed a technique for in-flight refueling that the Navy and NATO standardized on, but then developed ANOTHER technique using different equipment that worked better for heavy bombers and standardized on that.

the logistical incompatibility for refueling between USAF and USN aircraft was an annoyance, but not that big a deal.

but on the F-105 they decided to just install both types of refueling equipment!

it has an internal bomb bay so as to not sacrifice speed when doing ground attack missions.

again, it's a single-seat, single-engine fighter aircraft.

it's about the size of a medium bomber from WWII.

there were people who objected to this, of course. the Northrop F-5 was developed basically in direct protest of the existence of the F-105 and is basically the VW Beetle of jet fighters. small plane, small engines, no radar, very minimalist. getting back to WWII sizes!

and in the 60s, back when radar and missile systems were bleeding edge tech, mostly analog, barely becoming transistorized, and not super reliable, this was fine, more or less. you weren't completely outclassed by bloated fighters like the F-105 for reliability reasons.

but feature creep and fighter bloat continued and reliability improved. there were some misses like the mostly embarrassing F-111, but by the mid 70s you've got the F-14 and F-15, similarly Thunderchief-large, but better thought out, and they *worked*.

the objections continued tho, and the minimalist F-16 was built in reaction to the bloated F-15 just as the minimalist F-5 had been to the bloated F-105.

but then everyone realized the guided missile war suddenly got a lot more deadly and all that tactical electronic crap really was necessary for survival, and the F-16 became a clown car of avionics in a hurry to make it stay relevant.

of course at the same time this is happening, Moore's Law is still in full steam. radar systems and such are becoming not only more reliable but smaller and lighter for a given amount of capability.

what used to take a plane the size of an F-15 to carry in the 1970s could now fit into something like an F-16 by the 1990s. what used to take an F-16 could now fit in an F-5. so size has come back down a *little* bit.

but not much.

so yeah, modern fighters are fucking enormous.

alright that's it, i'm done, end of thread, you can go home now.

if you're for some reason new here please also see this: https://twitter.com/StarlightNixie/status/1278394044066873345?s=20