That is ALWAYS the right answer. 40mm gattling cannon anyone?

just gonna hop on the bandwagon and agree that the A-10 is awesome, but given 40 years there should be some room for improvement, probably mostly electronics though, the basic design is pretty damn good...

was thinking along the lines of fly by wire, cockpit layout and perhaps turreted miniguns/grenade launchers as payload, with a dedicated gunner on the plane, it might do the work of a light weight spectre, just expanding current capacity without diminishing the classic awesome, perhaps recon pod for high altitude spying....although drones probably do that better...

might get better engines too, should have been SOME improvement these last 40 years there...

How much ammunition could be carried? I dont think anybody tried putting a 40mm Bofors on a B-26 or A-26. Besides, what would be the target?

To be honest, the main point of the a-10 is that it's an ugly ass flying warthog with a minimum of electronics. You shoot up a half of it and it will still get home somehow.

It's built to be stable, fixed, cheap and disposeable. I guess you can't expect anything else from an aircraft that won the tender more by chance and was cobbled together from spare parts.

I think we could swing that...



Exactly right! Blow off an engine, tear a wing in half, puncture half the fuel tanks, destroy the magazine, lose all the landing gear and burn out what electronics there are and it will still land. The A-10 has one mission, and it is damn near perfectly designed to accomplish it. Hell, it was designed and built around the cannon.

This is absolutely wrong. I heard Bill Curtis IV talk about the design phase of the A10. They talked to Han-Ulrich Rudel as a design expert. Every member of the design team had a copy of "Stuka Pilot" issued to them. You can't cobble something together and expect it to stay in one piece if it's supposed to carry the GAU 8.

I second that. The only improvement i could imagine would be something like an advanced helmet for the pilot with a build-in display for tactical and communixation purposes. But just as an add-on, not integrated, because the more complexity you add, the more downtime you get.

And fly-by-wire sounds supa-fancy, but actually is the worst and last thing you want to have on a plane in the hot zone.

IIRC the readiness of the A-10 in the 2nd gulfwar was ~96%, and there were only about 5 man-hours maintenance needed for one flight-hour. Compare that to an Eurofighter (readiness somewhere around as low as 20% actually and today still over 100 man-hours of maintenance) and you get the picture.

KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid.

True, but that won't stop the jokes.

I thought that the B was the marine version?

I'd be curious about slipping two or more of the F-35's liftfans into the wing roots for STOL enhancements, but I strongly suspect that it wouldn't work well.

Beyond that, maybe spray it down with some sort of RAM plastic, not to make it invisible, but instead just harder to see. I doubt that it would make much difference, but maybe. Improved anti-IR for the engines?

Ultimately, the core plane is good, at most you'd be talking about improved alloys (I suspect that carbon-fiber etc. would be more delicate, due to shocks), possibly a 2-seat configuration, and accessory equipment. A turreted light gun is certainly an interesting idea (maybe the model used on the Apache?), but the A-10 might already travel too fast to use it effectively (also, it would increase the standard ammo requirements). Possibly stronger landing gear, for harsher runways.

Everything.

ARUGH your right
www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems ... riants.jpg

A = airforce

B Marine

C Navy

The B-25 had a 75mm cannon in one version.



Lots of extra dead weight and vulnerable targets to hit. STOL capability would be better served by uprated engines.



God no. RAM is stupidly expensive and requires constant maintenance. The only radar that A-10s need to be worried about would be something like the Shilka and that probably wouldn't be significantly affected.



My list (in no particular order for the most part):

New engines to reduce fuel consumption, IR and noise and increase thrust
Second seat for a WSO for better situational awareness ala the A-10B
Adverse weather capability improvements again ala A-10B
Improved materials to reduce weight/improve strength
Modular gun bay to support a gun firing a smaller, more common caliber (perhaps the 25mm round the Bradley uses) to allow for larger ammunition loads (heavily dependent on studies to verify that it would still be effective against targets we are actually facing).

Sounds good in theory.
But in practice there is no engine that lightweight in this thrust-class like the TF 34.
So you have to invest ~1 bn $$$ for a new engine, with NO chance of a civilian derivate these days, just to save 2 or 3 gallons of fuel per hour.


Not necessary in the original weapons configuration.
A 2nd man on board means an almost total new construction of the aircraft.


O.K.


Cheap way: Some plastics or carbons here and there. Yes, a few kilos could be spared.
Ultraexpensive way: Boeing-Nightmareliner-Style. Invest bn15-20$$$$, only to find out that you created a maintenance-monster-hog without ANY benefit. (The 787 saves only 300 liters kerosine per leg (!!!) HND-FRA (5100NM) against it´s predecessor 767-300. Ask ANA for long faces, or Lufthansa for an evil grin.)


Not possible, there is no gun bay, the entire plane is build around the main weapon.
HTH.

I find it a little difficult to believe that there's nothing better available 40+ years after the TF-34 was developed. Even if that's true, there's always the 400 variant that would be a slight improvement over the 100s that the A-10 uses.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GAU-8_in_A-10.jpg

Looks like a gun bay to me...

Something (slightly) better is possible today, but it must be developed first.


Not in the classic sense (interchangeability, tolerance to different forces and weights etc...).
Replacing the Avenger with another gun would mean a lot of r&d and testing. And there would be no benefit, a bigger gun doesn´t fit, a smaller one makes no sense. Saving on ammunition? No one in the military cares.

Saving money on ammunition would be the reason for the caliber of the new gun, the reason for to change would be increased ammunition load (or alternately lower weight with the same load). The reason for that would be to allow for more/longer firing passes with the same loadout. Realistically we aren't even facing LAVs that would give the 25mm a run for it's money very often, if the 25mm is capable of, for instance, demolishing/penetrating a standard Iraqi/Afghani building then it's capable of doing what we need while providing greater endurance on the field.

Of course like I said that change would be purely dependent on showing that it would be effective against the targets we're using it on, if not then never mind.

The Air Force's idea of close-air support today is a B-52 orbiting at 40,000 feet with racks full of JDAM's, or a Predator drone carrying Hellfire missiles. Cost is irrelevant; the A-10 is very effective, but anything that flies so low inevitably gets shot down -- the US lost four A-10's in the first Gulf War, the most of any type (tied with the Harrier II). Those loss rates would have been considered very acceptable in a Cold War scenario, but they're not acceptable today when every operation is conducted under a media magnifying glass. They'd much rather spend the money on expensive ordnance than have to deal with the PR nightmare of dead or captured pilots.

So there's not going to be an A-10 replacement... at least, not a manned one. The F-35 may well be the last manned combat aircraft the US ever builds.

Five, another one made it home, but crashlanded and was w/o.
But that was still FAR below the expected numbers, to everybody´s surprise.
And they destroyed sh*tloads of Iraqi stuff, >1000 tanks, >2000 other military vehicles and >1000 artillery units in that short time. Impressive Bang for the Buck, i´d say.


Pff.

ARIOCH: which is sad indeed, just waiting for the day the 'other' guys have a electronics educated guy that builds a high powered EM jammer that makes all those nifty drones so expensive paperweights....

<edit>
and given maintenance, cost and performance, the A-10 is probably the best plane in service ANYWHERE....on planet earth anyway.
seriously though, how difficult would it be to add electronics suite and AA missile capacity? would probably do pretty well against other aircraft too.

Anyone else get a flash of the Gallente drone carriers right there?

Actually from what I understand, ground forces are strongly against the removal of manned combat aircraft. Instead they would strongly prefer if they could get manned fixed wing aircraft into their own forces. Since they do perform better close support than helicopters do, are able to reach the target area faster and allow for more precision than bombers do.

On top of that well integrated fixed wings allow for a lot better coordination, use of halo lights and a bunch of other things.

I second that.


As add-on ni problem.


Hm. Not against supersonic planes with rockets. But well against helis.

But useful for training, probably useful for the spotter role, and if you have the capability to carry a second crew member, then you can also allocate that space to equipment of the same approximate weight as a crew member. As long as the design & construction went well, the resulting craft would be a more flexible A-10.

And what about newer alloys, as I originally suggested? I find it doubtful that we haven't produced improved alloys appropriate for replacing some (or all) of the previously used ones. It wouldn't lower weight (probably), but it would open up the possibility to do so.

Fairly simple solution: give the drones orders. If they can't fulfill those orders (e.g. the communications connection required to authorize weapons fire has failed) then they return to base. You'll wind up with some stuff that doesn't go through, but most things you'll be capable of accomplishing despite the jamming (even some combat strikes, as the case may be).

I thought it originally had Anti-Air missles, for self-defense?

Any aircraft with a medium-range AAM would kill it dead. Against helos or slow transports it would do fine, but it's not going to do well against anything designed for air-to-air. It's not fast enough in the vertical OR horizontal, it's pretty maneuverable, but it can't compare to a dedicated ASF.



Or, you know, borrow it...
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-E ... -the-beast



They can carry Sidewinders, but that's not saying THAT much.

EDIT: On a side note Digital Combat Simulation's A-10C Warthog is 33% off on Steam right now.

Should this A10 discussion be split?

I love the A10...but we're not discussing page 99 much, are we?
Alos, I believe the A10 was recently upgraded. Saw it on Future Weapons.

Depends on what you mean by "recently", FW hasn't had a new episode in like 4 years. That was the A-10C version, new cockpit and updated weapons capabilities.

The A-10 is a wonderful aircraft. The problem is that the USAF wants to kill it since it clashes with both the culture of the USAF and their intended future doctrine. This ties in with the rivalries that occur between the USAF, USMC, US Army, US Navy etc.

They're not dead yet but it's only a matter of time unless someone in the USAF brass gets their head screwed on straight or the USAF allows the US Army to fly their own A-10's for close air support of their ground pounders.