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That Time I Became A Dictator Of A Small Asian Communist Nation

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Is the Vietnam war still running, and will we be deploying our Iron Tigers ever? Because witnessing the combat deployment of honest to god mech walkers is something i have been DREAMI G about ever since we rolled that glorious roll.
 
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Air Defense Fighter Type 2 - Design Proposal
  • Media
    • "Holy Shit! Flogger got a glow-up!"
    - Planegirls (2009)


    Above: A Guangchou Airy Zen painted in marine air defence colours. The witch's hat on the tail denotes a plane belonging to the 3rd Air Squadron, the Night Witches. The Violet on the forward fuselage is Irina Popova's signature mark. ​

    Name: Air Defense Fighter Type 2
    Nickname: "Zen" (NATO reporting name "Fairy")
    Type: Light Fighter
    Branch(es): Airy
    Intended Role: Multirole/Air Superiority Fighter
    Notable Quirks:
    • Almost Stealth
    • Great Situational Awareness
    • Cheap to Build and Operate
    • Joy to Fly
    • Supercruise (but Slow Sprint)
    • Sluggish At Low Speed
    • No Gun*
    Fluff:
    • Based on the MiG-23 airframe, with major alterations to… everything.
    • Eclectic blend of eastern and western military aviation doctrines: on one hand you have an emphasis on energy theory and stealth that's very far removed from the Soviet focus on performance and manoeuvrability, on the other hand while the USAF learned that it couldn't rely on missiles on Vietnam, Guangchou only saw a promising technology going through it's teething problems and have adopted the Soviet roketnaset concept to the air-superiority role.
    • S-duct air intakes hide the engine from radar observation, while the V-tail shrouds the exhaust and reduces RADAR reflections from the sides, while large unitary skin panels reduce the number of edge reflections the plane generates.
    • In hindsight, any aerospace engineer would tell you that developing a plane that's only part stealth was a mistake and Guangchou should have just waited until their next fighter to integrate the full suite of Very Low Observable materials and shaping. As it is, political considerations and technical overreach drove the adoption of geometric stealthing before the full limitations were understood.
    • The Zen has a radar cross section on par with a OTL Rafale or Super Hornet, but achieves it directly through geometric shaping rather than material witchcraft in the case of the later two. Further reductions in RCS are possible with research into radar absorbent materials that can be retrofitted into existing planes, but their effectiveness will fall below that of a clean-sheet stealth design due to lack of geometrical-material harmonization.
    • In particular, there are two major radar return lobes at 135 and 225 degrees where the wings and rear fuselage generate a partial corner reflector as a result of keeping a backwards swept wing in order to take advantage of existing research by MiG into vortex lift (the Zen's wings are an almost carbon copy of the MiG-29s, with minor changes to achieve edge alignment).
    • For its time, the Zen is actually very good through, the built in RCS reduction and enlarged radar compared to the it's MiG-23 parent means that it can usually get off the first missile launch, and the glass cockpit and bubble canopy gives the pilots much better situational awareness than the MiG-23 if they do get into a dogfight. This is especially true if the Zens are operating in hunter-killer mode where a plane in the rear will illuminate the target while one in front closes in using only passive radar.
    • The Plane's electrohydrostatic actuators are much simpler to maintain compared to to traditional hydraulic system and lighter to boot, and when combined with the maintenance light 'Faster' engine, it means the plane has the highest ratio of flight/maintenance hours out of any combat aircraft at the time, making it very cheap to operate.
    • The airframe is made of a combination of titanium and aluminum alloys, the exact breakdown being chosen to balance cost and performance.
    • The more powerful engine combined with more relaxed STOL requirements and the weight savings from titanium alloys also allows for the elimination of the swing-wing. The result is a major savings in mass and a freeing up of the space used to house the wing hydraulic systems (as well as a major reduction in maintenance hours). Alas, this space was promptly colonized by a dedicated avionics bay that houses a central computer based on the Tigerlink terminal developed for the Iron Tiger. This computer is responsible for managing the aircraft's relaxed stability and engine, as well as ECM and ECCM.
    • The more powerful engine combined with the drag reduction incidental to stealth shaping allows the aircraft to maintain a very modest supercruise of Mach 1.1, allowing it to spend longer at supersonic speed compared to purely afterburner based propulsion. However the plane's overall top speed with afterburner has been reduced from Mach 2.35 at altitude to Mach 1.6 as a result of the elimination of the ramp intakes and their replacement with Pitot intakes - a change necessary to meet RCS reduction targets and reduce the overall cost of the aircraft.
    • The plane also gives up some low speed and high AOE manoeuvring capability compared to its parent and other fighters under development by our Soviet Allies. Its manoeuvring characteristics emphasize energy maintenance more than the manoeuvrability emphasized by the USSR. This trade-off was made in order to accommodate RCS reduction features and drive down cost and complexity.
    • The engine nozzle is lined with ceramic tiles to reduce transfer of heat to the airframe and thus reduce infrared signature, as well as hiding as much of the con-div nozzle as possible from RADAR. This low RCS nozzle required the total length of the aircraft to increase, and as a result the tail gained some control authority due to a longer moment arm about the craft's centre of gravity.
    • The all-moving v-tails can pivot perpendicular to the airstream in order to serve as air brakes after touchdown.
    • The side mounted internal weapons bays can mount six missiles - typically four MRAAMs and two SRAAMs.
    • *Gods Above and Gods Below, if I have to hear one more otaku cry 'BUT MUH VIETNAM!!!' I will shoot somebody. The reason you hear this bandied about all the time is because USAF pilots in Vietnam were poorly trained in missile kinematics and kept taking poor shots. The result was the USN creating Top Gun to actually teach the necessary skills, and the USAF just adding guns back in. In the OTL the last gun kill was in 1981, everything after that is missiles with guns being for ground attack. Not even stealth is likely to change this, as you're likely to see a switch to better heat seekers/optical seekers for short ranged missiles instead of a return to gun fighting.
     
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  • Media
    • [X] [COMMIEWOOD] CommiePop
    INB4 We somehow make a few artists go platinum!

    [X] [PLAN] Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy
     
    CyberEnby said:
    [X] [COMMIEWOOD] CommiePop

    A departure from the visual medium, this turn sees Commiewood focus on releasing several music albums featuring their take on western pop music. The so called CommiePop genre borrows the repeated choruses and hooks, short to medium-length, basic format, and rhythms or tempos that can be easily danced to that Pop is know for but engages heavily with political and social themes instead of eschewing them.
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    These better come with music videos. :V

    Commiepop! Goes My Heart:

    View: https://youtu.be/xVkU8dDSC9w
     
    HeroCooky said:
    Oh shit, completely forgot about this, sorry!

    Choose:
    [] +1 to Military Actions
    [] +2 to any Plane Actions
    [] +2 to any Technology
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    Does [] +2 to any Plane Actions go towards every plane project in a turn?

    Also! I have to publish a retraction!

    In my defence, researching radar stealth online is an absolute mess because every arm chair aviation expert seems to have an opinion on it, and it took a good long while to meander into an obscure Discord server where some actual aerospace engineers hang out before I got set straight.

    It turns out I got material stealth and geometric stealth wrong. It's actually material stealth that's easier to develop and provides the bulk of RCS reduction (20% of the total work, gives 80% of the reduction), and geometric stealth is by far the harder aspect and provides the remained (80% of the work, 20% of the reduction).
    This is because material stealth has actually been researched for a good long while and isn't the sole purview of planes: one of the earliest examples is radar absorbent paint for submarine snorkels. And it's a lot easier to test and iterate on it compared to geometric stealth, which is incredibly simulation intensive.
    Now, the reason it's very important to actually do that 80% of the work to get the final 20% reduction in radar signature, is because radar detection range scales with the fourth power of RCS. So 80% RCS reduction only gives you 20-30% reduction in detection range. Which is good! But not F-22 tier.

    I'd like to put forth a retcon of Principles of RCS Reduction from:

    The reason the F-117 looks like a low-poly model is because that was the extent of what computers could handle. Our computers are much better, so we can develop less aerodynamically compromised airframes. The resulting aircraft won't be 'stealth' in the popular conception of the term (we don't have the resources for that sort of program). Still, we can apply certain principles like edge alignment and skin smoothing to reduce their radar cross-section, decreasing the range at which they'll be first detected.
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    To:

    While a full geometric stealth program would require too high an outlay of computing power at this point in time, and a simplified geometric steal program is unlikely to generate aerodynamic performance suitable for a fighter craft, the development of Radar Absorbent Materials is a significantly less resource intensive process.
    The focus of this program will be the development of a paint made up of tiny iron balls coated with an electrical insulator embedded inside a polymer substrate. In order to reduce cost of maintenance, an automated robotic painting rig will be designed to actually apply as well as scrub and reapply the paint to the aircraft in the field.
    This material will be combined with the use of qualitative radar reduction techniques such as s-ducts to block direct line of sight to the engine fan and core, replacement of vertical rudders with v-tails, and a reduction in seams in the aircraft skin in order to achieve a significant fractional reduction in detection range.
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    And that 6 action Radar Stealth megaproject you told us about earlier would be the one focused on geometric stealth.
     
    CyberEnby said:
    I'm my defense, the back of envelope math I did suggested it was fine - I didn't realize how bad it was until I made the spreadsheet.
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    Well, I suppose we can put the Health stuff on the back burner until 1980 - we can make that an easy to fulfill part of the next 5YP. But we do need to fix the Language, even if it might mean slightly going into Overwork.
     
    MrRageQuit said:
    Well, I suppose we can put the Health stuff on the back burner until 1980 - we can make that an easy to fulfill part of the next 5YP. But we do need to fix the Language, even if it might mean slightly going into Overwork.
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    Click to shrink...

    I'd like to do it early in the next 5YP because I think we should focus on international diplomacy while everyone is awed by mechs, and having a language that's easier to learn would help.

    The first turn of the next plan however is off limits: 4 actions to 800nm Process, 8 action into 2 supercomputers.
    And another 4 actions into a third supercomputer the next turn. That will bring up to 15 actions/turn for the rest of the plan.

    edit: @HeroCooky, please sir, may I have another retcon?

    Remember when you said we have really reliable turbines? And I suggested magnetic bearings as a explanation in the fluff? It turns out that the bearings are pretty far from what actually determines the reliability and lifetime of the turbine. The actual bottleneck is hot corrosion of the turbine blades in the high pressure compressor and the power turbines.
    In fact, this is the reason we don't use tungsten airfoils for those, even through tungsten has such a high melting temperature - because tungsten oxide has a lower melting point than the engine generates. I've heard an apocryphal tale of an early experiment with tungsten blades, where they cracked open the engine and found that the only parts of the blades left were the hollow shells of the thermal barrier coatings - the tungsten itself had melted away.
    With that in mind, since I don't think we've actually done anything with our magnetic bearings to date, can I request we retcon 'magnetic bearings' to 'inconel alloys'? It's still anachronistic, but a lot less so than magnetic bearings, which we still don't have for this particular application IRL, and it would make narrative sense given our bonus to metallurgy.
     
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