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Japanese Stealth Fighter Announced as 'Return of the Zero'
reporter writes "According to a news article by the Associated Press, Tokyo has begun developing an indigenous stealth jet fighter that will be deployed in 2016. Mitsubishi, the prime contractor, has already developed a full-scale model, of which several pictures have been accidentally leaked to the press. The model is named 'Mitsubishi ATD-X"'. A laboratory of the French government has evaluated the "stealthy-ness" of ATD-X, and given it a high rating. Will ATD-X achieve air superiority over the F-22, which Washington refuses to sell to Tokyo?"
Well, given that the F-22 has made more than one appearance in Japan, I am certain the Japanese government is interested. However, this raises more than a few issues, specifically related to technology and sociopolitical issues as well. The JDAF (Japanese Defense Air Force) has been so named as it has been a Japanese Constitutional issue that their armed forces are for defense only and not aggression. The interesting thing about stealth technology however, is that it is almost exclusively used for aggression rather than defense if you play your strategy according to tradition.
I got a quick tour of the F-22, but no pictures allowed of the F-22 during my last visit up to Hill AFB and the F-22 is making the rounds and is being explored for possible basing in other countries, but there are technology sales issues with the aircraft as it will be almost impossible to strip the sensitive technologies out of the aircraft and make it "saleable".
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While the external frame is very important to any airplane, stealthy or not, what matters is what goes into the plane and what materials is it built out of. You can't just build a life-size carbon fiber chassis and call it a stealth plane if you put a whole heap of non-stealthy stuff inside.
Stealth is a defensive technology anyway, meaning your fighter is stealthy only until a single weakness is found. You can't really say at this point if this is a project that will succeed. Or if it's even meant to succeed. I mean, would you put it past the Japanese to force the US hand to sell them to F22 by threatening to build a competitor which they might sell to god-knows-who to finance the development. the previous sentence is an artistic liberty I took to get my point across, i'm sure the F22 is more advanced than the F15 in areas other than stealth.
Precisely. All that equipment we're carrying to detect gaseous anomalies - the thing's got to have a tailpipe!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
But what about the transforming capabilities? How many vehicle modes does it have? Will it have just the standard 2-arms and 2-legs robot mode, or will there be a third hybrid form that looks like a crab or a squid, or something?
It is very much like building your own state of the art, deep submicron IC fabrication plant. In the early days it was relatively easy to stay current, and in the 1970's even some universities could have a bleeding edge fab. As the technology gets more complex, the costs go up asymptotically, and the small players have to fold.
Many canadians remember the "Avro Arrow" the last fighter jet built here. To bring it into production would have taken up the entire defense budget, and once you have built enough fighters to satisfy the needs of your own air force, how do you keep the team together to maintain it and build enhanced versions? You either sell your aircraft to foreign nations, (often unstable and/or war torn 3rd world dictatorships that have disproportionately large military budgets) team up with foreign nations to increase your market and share the costs. (like the newest eurofighter) No matter how good the arrow was, (the project is still controversial) it couldn't be built economically without selling it abroad.
The Israeli's tried and failed with the Lavi project. Technically they could have done it, but it didn't make economic sense no matter how badly they wanted control and ownership of their own weapons platform.
Other countries such as Sweden and France manufacture high tech fighters - the French were notorious for selling their all over the world. I predict the project will probably fold after spending billions of dollars, and just maybe cranking out a factory prototype or two.
The US can do it simply because they are such a large country with the world's biggest military budget. Even they have run into problems where the production run was completed, yet they didn't want to lose the technology and expertise when the production line shut down and the team disbanded, so wound up buying more aircraft than the air force wanted.
My rights don't need management.
Several years later in the Balkan war, our own stealth fighter was downed reportedly with Russian technology.
To which I call BS. The shoot down was not a technology failure. The shoot down was a tactical failure of the worst kind. If your commanders REQUIRE that your super secret plane flies the exact same route, while low to the ground, day in and day out, over populated areas which can observe this pattern, guess what, you can create an ambush for it. No super secret Russian technology required. As a result, the plane was shot down but firing a large number of visually aimed missiles. Basic math and physics won.
Mandated operating procedures were changed and heads did roll. The cause of the shoot down was American stupidity and not a Russian developed, anti-stealth, counter measure. The Russians did loot the crash site afterwards to obtain material samples.
Fighters are about air superiority regardless of offense or defense. This has been the case since WWI.
The Luftwaffe didn't send fighters over the UK to defend Germany from British Bombers, but rather attempting to keep the RAF out of the sky. Whether shooting them on the runways or when they attempted to attack the German bombers didn't matter.
Of course the Luftwaffe had its role switched to defense in 1944, but it was still attempted to gain air superiority against allied fighters and bombers.
The role of the fighter is to destroy other aircraft. It can be used in defense or offense, but its key role is not defense like SAM or Flak batteries.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Internally it can hold 6 AIM-120Cs and 2 AIM-9s. That's it's primary configuration for air-to-air. With everything inside it is as stealthy as possible and as efficient as possible. Externally it can carry 4 fuel tanks, or two fuel tanks and four missiles (of varying types). Obviously hooking on external weapons makes it less stealthy, as well as increasing drag.
Remember: This isn't a bomber, though it can carry two bombs if needed (as the expense of 4 missiles) it's an air superiority fighter. It is designed to be fast, light, stealthy, and to kill other planes. Maneuverability and stealth are more important than maximum payload.
Sheesh, what's wrong with you realists? Well duh! That's like asking if it's gonna have a landing gear.
You can't take the sky from me...
I'd recommend reading Downfall, by Richard Frank, to get the facts straight.
The Japanese were interested in a conditional surrender with four conditions: keep the Emperor, no occupation of Japan, evacuation from occupied areas to be done by Japan on a Japanese schedule, and war crime trials of Japanese to be conducted by the Japanese. That's the minimum that would be accepted by all members of the Liaison Council, and that council had to act pretty much unanimously. The Allies offered a conditional surrender, although with rather harsh conditions. The Japanese did not surrender before the nukes. They decided to use the Soviets as intermediaries, but never could decide what to ask for. There were some unofficial feelers through other countries, which the Japanese government stepped on hard.
Given that the Japanese weren't surrendering, and couldn't even agree on a proposal to start negotiations, the US really did have to use whatever means available to force surrender. Some people claimed that Japan was going to surrender in a few more months. I regard these claims as seriously optimistic, given that even in the circumstances there were plenty of Japanese willing to stage a coup to prevent the surrender. (Even so, delaying the surrender by three months would have killed far more civilians than the nukes did.)
There has, of course, been a lot of anti-American propaganda on the subject. Don't fall for it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
to my original sentence below
A laboratory of the French government has evaluated the "stealthy-ness" of ATD-X.to create the following sentence.
A laboratory of the French government has evaluated the "stealthy-ness" of ATD-X, and given it a high rating.The modification by Zonk is a significant error. Neither Mitsubishi nor the French laboratory publicized the result of the evaluation. The result is highly classified.