Grandfather's axe, or how to keep developing missiles & aircraft

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Member for

18 years 9 months

Posts: 13,432

Following on from something said in the Rafale thread, I've wondered about whether the Sidewinder/Standard missile model could be applied to some current fighters, that is, rather than new designs from scratch, just keep developing the old types until there's nothing left of the original.

To some extent it's been done with the F-16, but the basic airframe remains much the same, limiting it. Additional equipment won't fit in that compact fuselage. Gripen seems to be on the way to it.

Could this model be applied to Typhoon & Rafale? Avionics are being upgraded. What if the next development, instead of being a new aircraft, is a new airframe built around the latest iteration (whatever that is at the time) of the systems? It might even be possible to design one airframe for both Rafale & Typhoon systems.

This couldn't be a short-term project, but perhaps for when early models need replacement.

Let's imagine the new aircraft are called Tempest & Zephyr. ;)

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Member for

14 years 2 months

Posts: 4,619

I was told several years ago (no I don't have written evidence) that there had been serious work done on repackaging Typhoon into a truly LO shell. Whether or not it would resemble Replica (a large airframe like that would have all the growth capacity needed for DEW and the like), this is the closest we have to a working design in the public domain.

Indeed, as retold on the Secret Projects Forum, it would appear that BAE were confident of Replica's potential performance at low level as much as at altitude. Furthermore, with all the work they did on non transparent canopies and synthetic vision aids, the lack of a traditional canopy would make it even easier to unman the design.

The only major hurdle would be French pride, unless we let them repackage their upcoming cheek arrays for Rafale (Replica looks like it was designed with distributed arrays in mind) and give them any unmanned work.....