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

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[X] [Fighter Plane] Air Defense Fighter Type 3
[X] [Transport Plane] General Transport Aircraft Type 1

Because Cyberenby has some good designs.
 
[X] [Fighter Plane] Air Defense Fighter Type 3
[X] [Transport Plane] Military Aerial Transport - Strategic: Type 78

Because while I like Cyberenby's fighter design, I'm not too sold on the idea of trying to lift the whole strategic airlifter/AWACS on just two propfans that require hearing protection to avoid deafening everyone on board and nearby. And while I agree that with our electronics we could make a system just as good as the A-50's or E-3's for lighter, given that I don't see ourselves operating more than a handful of these I'd prefer t double down on quality and use our electronics to make a system that's more capable than the A-50 or E-3 while weighing the same.

12 hour flight time is great on paper, but IMO in practice that's going to be far beyond the point where crew fatigue has severely degraded effectiveness, and once we crack in flight refueling that number is much less of a big deal.
 
[X] [Fighter Plane] MiS-27/F
[X] [Transport Plane] Military Aerial Transport - Strategic: Type 78

(Gotta vote for my own design even if it's only a variant of the multirole design...and Hex makes some good points)
 
7th Hex said:
idea of trying to lift the whole strategic airlifter/AWACS on just two propfans that require hearing protection to avoid deafening everyone on board and nearby
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I don't do this!

[X] [Fighter Plane] MJF-1 Type 93 (Minxjiang Fighter 1 Type 93)
Nickname Mynas-F, Mynas-I, Mynas-A & Mynas-T (NATO Reporting Name Midas)
Type Multirole Twin Jet
Branch/es Air Force, earmarked for future naval capability
Intended Role Nuclear Bomber Interception, High Altitude Interception, Air Superiority & Ground Attack
Notable Quirks Twin Engine, 28mm Autocannon, Drop Tank Capability, Mach 2.1 with reheat, Supercruise capable at M1.5, BVR missile capability, single seat fighter/interceptor air superiority variant, double seat attacker/trainer variant, large maximum take-off weight (bomb truck), experimental version that cuts down on weapons payload to increase the pilot's ability to function at extremely high altitude, air/ground-scanning radar
Fluff The Mynas (Asian Starling) is intended to defend the homeland from an american nuclear bomber threat, combat high altitude flyovers by unknown presumed American aircraft, combat enemy fighters and perform ground attack missions against targets on land or at sea.

[X] [Transport Plane] MJT-1 Type 228 (Minxjiang Transport 1 Type 28)
Nickname Mazu-C/E/M/R/T (NATO: Crickey (1st encountered by RAAF pilot [Australian])) C = (air Control/AWACS), E = EWAR, M = Maritime Patrol/ASW, R = Transport, T = Trainer
Type 2-engine Turboprop
Branch/es Air Force (Transport, EWAR, AWACS), Naval Air Arm (AWACS, EWAR, Maritime Patrol, Transport), Army (Transport)
Intended Role All purpose medium lift transport with Transport, AWACS, EWAR & Maritime Patrol variants
Notable Quirks Twin Engine, BVR missile capability, air/ground-scanning radar, Torpedoes (ASW/Patrol), semi-modular internal bay; the fuselage is reinforced to enable sustained, intensive low altitude flight and allow for the almost complete replacement of the interior with equipment refits in the factory
Fluff The Mazu is Guangchou's one-stop solution to the significant quantity of roles across all branches of the military that require a large medium-lift capability. There is some discussion of the Transport variant serving as the base for future development for a civilian regional aircraft program.
 
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[X] [Fighter Plane] Air Defense Fighter Type 3
[X] [Transport Plane] General Transport Aircraft Type 1

I defer to CyberEnby with this technical stuff.
 
7th Hex said:
In terms of the whole "can be refit into just about anything" idea it looks like we're on the same page there.

Personally though I'm not to sure about whether this bit is going to be as important as you think though.


I can see why the USSR wanted that capability for their Il-76, since they had to send flights out to military bases across Siberia, where it wouldn't be feasible for them to develop enough paved airstrips to cover everywhere that needed one. Likewise I could see the USA going for that capability since they need to be able to send flights to whichever country they are "liberating" this time, and can't guarantee that the destination would have a paved runway to land on nearby either.

But I don't think Guangchou really has either of those problems? To the point that my original idea, before I scrapped it for being unpractical, was to make a 6 engine transport craft that in exchange for having a limited cargo capacity and needing to operate off paved runways had the ability to travel fastTM​ because that was the only existing niche we had for a cargo plane I could see. With Guangchou's geography as a long thin island, anywhere in Guangchou we are going to be sending the cargo plane is going to be close enough to either or both the ocean or the Dragon's Spine that shipping or rail transport are options. And we're never going to be able to build a transport plane that can carry more tonnage than a cargo ship or or be more fuel efficient than a train, the one thing that a plane has that the other options don't is speed from point A to B.
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The rough field capability is useful for having all your airfields bombed - through OTL that capability was rendered less relevant because everybody got real good at fixing their runways fast. For us it's good because it means our planes can land on a dirt strip in Tanzania - which has obvious advantages for doing developmentalism abroad.

7th Hex said:
[X] [Fighter Plane] Air Defense Fighter Type 3
[X] [Transport Plane] Military Aerial Transport - Strategic: Type 78

Because while I like Cyberenby's fighter design, I'm not too sold on the idea of trying to lift the whole strategic airlifter/AWACS on just two propfans that require hearing protection to avoid deafening everyone on board and nearby. And while I agree that with our electronics we could make a system just as good as the A-50's or E-3's for lighter, given that I don't see ourselves operating more than a handful of these I'd prefer t double down on quality and use our electronics to make a system that's more capable than the A-50 or E-3 while weighing the same.

12 hour flight time is great on paper, but IMO in practice that's going to be far beyond the point where crew fatigue has severely degraded effectiveness, and once we crack in flight refueling that number is much less of a big deal.
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I actually checked! The 737's engines put out 65 kN of thrust each, so we already have spare power to go around. The difference is that the propfan is more efficient and can't go supersonic at all compared to the fighter version of the engine.
That's a good point on our loiter time possibly being higher than necessary, but even if it's not needed for the military mission, it's fantastic for a civilian airliner because it opens up a lot of potential routes that wouldn't be economical otherwise for a medium haul jet.

It's also not really 'deafen everyone around', it's not a Thunderscreech. I just wanted to give it a relevant downside since profans are a very experimental tech, so it felt appropriate for a first iteration. The real advantage of this plane is that we can take another action and make a civilian passenger liner that has all the pros of the 737 while improving on it even further. We know prop fans IRL did meet the FAA noise requirements, so a with a little more research I'd wager we can get them ready for civilian use.

I'm also not sure cramming more signal processing will help - there must be a point where we're bottlenecked by the radar array itself. Through someone with more knowledge would have to weigh in on this.

[X] [Fighter Plane] Air Defense Fighter Type 3
[X] [Transport Plane] General Transport Aircraft Type 1
 
[X] [Fighter Plane] Air Defense Fighter Type 3
[X] [Transport Plane] General Transport Aircraft Type 1
 
dgr11897 said:
Random near midnight thought. Could we make a Flight capable IT.
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So, yes and no. Mechs can make a certain kind of sense on the ground because they can be as efficient as wheels on rough ground, and there are benefits to a humanoid body plan for power loader type mechs used in industry and logistics.

With planes, it's a bit different because the better performance you can get out of stuff like variable geometry wings and whatnot can easily be eaten up by the increased weight of the necessary actuators and structural reinforcement.
The bigger issue tho is control laws. It would be very expensive to develop the sort of dynamicly unstable control laws such a plane would need.

Mind you, there are use cases! One thing I want to do in the future is develop variable geometry v-tails that can go from a traditional v-tail during takeoff and landing to a flat set of elevators in cruise and aerial maneuvering.
This would greatly help reduce radar cross section by eliminating the return from any rudder.

Unfortunately that's kind of the extent of the practical application of mech stuff to aircraft for now. To do stuff with morphing wings, we'd need a breakthrough in aircraft skin materials that would allow it to stretch and flex, and that remains pretty theoretical even IRL.

However. The equation changes when we get in zero gravity....

 
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[X] [Fighter Plane] Air Defense Fighter Type 3
[X] [Transport Plane] Military Aerial Transport - Strategic: Type 78
 
7th Hex said:
[] [Transport Plane] Military Aerial Transport - Strategic: Type 78
Nickname: White Whale
NATO reporting name: Closet - Cargo variant.
Type: Quad-engine turbofan heavy lift transport.
Branches: (As transport variant) Airy, Army. Other variants decided upon design.
Intended Role: Move significant amounts of military cargo where it needs to go. Serve as a base frame for other variants intended for different roles in the future.
Notable Quirks:
  • +Relative ease of maintenance.
  • +Designed with modifications for different variants in mind.
  • +In theory can roll ASCMs out the back ramp while in flight.
  • -Not the fastest cargo plane out there.
  • +/- No turrets.
Fluff: Working with the assumption that with all the other modernization and developments going this may be the only utility aircraft in the near future that Guangchou would have time to design from the ground up, the designers of the MATS-78 made allowing easy conversions of the frame for other roles a priority with the space where the cargo bay normally fits being easily filled in with other specialized equipment instead during the design process. The overall shape of the White Whale follows that of many other dedicated cargo aircraft around the world: a large body held close to the ground, attached to top-mounted fixed swept wings with pronounced anheadral, and a T-shaped tail over a rear loading ramp. With the technology for it and no real reason not too, a fully glass cockpit was also included from the very start. Where the White Whale starts to differ is with the engine mountings, with both CAEs on each side being held side by side in a twin pod rather than their own individual housing to keep from having to run fuel lines all the way down the wings to the outer engines. The use of the CAEs with their inconel alloys and EHAs for the various flight control surfaces greatly simplifies maintenance too, with a much slower rate of turbine wear and not needing to work around a separate hydraulic pump and tubing system. However, while the CAE is impressive at getting 95 kN of dry thrust out of a turbofan that can fit inside the body of a fighter, larger turbofans designed for mounting in external pods for cargo and passenger aircraft have already surpassed the 100 kN mark years ago, leaving the White Whale much slower than its contemporary the Il-76, and faster than the capitalist C-5 only because of how much more the latter masses, even when nearly empty.

Well, here's my toss in the ring for a large cargo aircraft capable of holding the massive early AWACS systems. Somewhat barebones though IMO as there's not much to really describe here other than: "It's a cargo aircraft that can be refit easily."
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How do the twin pods work? Won't the propellers occlude each other?
 
7th Hex said:
The same way they do on planes like the B-47 and B-52.
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Derp, I thought your design used turboprops instead of turbofans.

Through, why are you focusing on making a strategic cargo lifter? As you said, Guangchou doesn't really have a need for one, and military AWACS tend to be based on civilian passenger liners because both are optimized to cruise along efficiency carrying payloads that aren't *that* heavy compared to weapons and armored vehicles.

The way I see it, our plane should aim to be used for civilian air freight and passenger transport. For that mission, our engines are more than sufficient. I keep bringing up the 737 because untill the 2000s it was the best selling civilian air liner of modern times.

For that role, wouldn't it be better to just do a Tao style truss braced wing and replace the propfans with high bypass podded turbofans?
 
CyberEnby said:
Derp, I thought your design used turboprops instead of turbofans.

Through, why are you focusing on making a strategic cargo lifter? As you said, Guangchou doesn't really have a need for one, and military AWACS tend to be based on civilian passenger liners because both are optimized to cruise along efficiency carrying payloads that aren't *that* heavy compared to weapons and armored vehicles.

The way I see it, our plane should aim to be used for civilian air freight and passenger transport. For that mission, our engines are more than sufficient. I keep bringing up the 737 because untill the 2000s it was the best selling civilian air liner of modern times.

For that role, wouldn't it be better to just do a Tao style truss braced wing and replace the propfans with high bypass podded turbofans?
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I was planning on building big for our first AWACS because I don't think that our first generation of it is going to fit in anything smaller, going by the masses of the ones currently in service in this time period and that we have only theory so far and no institutional experience to iron our any inefficiencies. Give us a few decades of experience and unlocking AESAs I think we could do something much smaller, but right now I think our first AWACS plane is going to have to be quite big.

As for why a strategic lifter specifically, I chose that because I don't know when the next time we're going to have a chance to develop a large utility aircraft again will be, what with the submarines, a possible green water navy, more IT stuff so they can actually make use of the modular trait we gave them, and just anything related to actually infantry equipment. And that's just the military, not to mention all the other international diplo, constant agri advances to keep up, infrastructure improvements, and possibly more light/heavy industry to keep up with our expansion.

So I decided to make the biggest plane I thought we would need for a long time, that should have more than enough space to be able to be easily refit the frame into whatever we need it to be. It's probably better for military planning that if you only have a single type of cargo plane, to have it be oversized and spend most of the time flying inefficiently only half full or whatever, then to have a cargo plane that's just the right size to carry the usual loads and be completely stuck when you suddenly have to carry something big and have nothing in your air fleet that can actually move it.

My point about Guangchou not needing something like the Il-76 was less about not needing strategic cargo lifters and more about not needing them to be able to land on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere anyway. We don't have Siberia levels of undeveloped territory that we have to supply military bases across like the USSR. We also aren't constantly putting troops and supplies into "liberating" foreign countries where they don't have the infrastructure for tons of paved runways like the USA either. I could see making our fighter jets able to take off of mountain roads as impromptu airfields, but anything that's important enough to actually be put on a cargo plane and flown rather than a cargo boat and shipped along the coast is likely going to be traveling from one developed city with paved runways to another.
 
7th Hex said:
I was planning on building big for our first AWACS because I don't think that our first generation of it is going to fit in anything smaller, going by the masses of the ones currently in service in this time period and that we have only theory so far and no institutional experience to iron our any inefficiencies. Give us a few decades of experience and unlocking AESAs I think we could do something much smaller, but right now I think our first AWACS plane is going to have to be quite big.

As for why a strategic lifter specifically, I chose that because I don't know when the next time we're going to have a chance to develop a large utility aircraft again will be, what with the submarines, a possible green water navy, more IT stuff so they can actually make use of the modular trait we gave them, and just anything related to actually infantry equipment. And that's just the military, not to mention all the other international diplo, constant agri advances to keep up, infrastructure improvements, and possibly more light/heavy industry to keep up with our expansion.

So I decided to make the biggest plane I thought we would need for a long time, that should have more than enough space to be able to be easily refit the frame into whatever we need it to be. It's probably better for military planning that if you only have a single type of cargo plane, to have it be oversized and spend most of the time flying inefficiently only half full or whatever, then to have a cargo plane that's just the right size to carry the usual loads and be completely stuck when you suddenly have to carry something big and have nothing in your air fleet that can actually move it.

My point about Guangchou not needing something like the Il-76 was less about not needing strategic cargo lifters and more about not needing them to be able to land on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere anyway. We don't have Siberia levels of undeveloped territory that we have to supply military bases across like the USSR. We also aren't constantly putting troops and supplies into "liberating" foreign countries where they don't have the infrastructure for tons of paved runways like the USA either. I could see making our fighter jets able to take off of mountain roads as impromptu airfields, but anything that's important enough to actually be put on a cargo plane and flown rather than a cargo boat and shipped along the coast is likely going to be traveling from one developed city with paved runways to another.
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Looking through various AWACS aircraft, it seems you have a point on bigger being better.

I do think you're being a bit too conservative with your design through. If you're not doing anything funky elsewhere, at least throw in a high bypass turbofan conversion for the engines.
(We have a passive malus reduction to all our aircraft designs now, so it benefits us to push the envelope.)

Oh, and maybe switch to individually podded engines. I seriously doubt it's worth the hit to ease of maintenance - it means each engine can only be accessed easily from one side, and since the fuel tanks are in the wings anyways it's not like it saves a lot of cabling or piping.
 
CyberEnby said:
I'm also not sure cramming more signal processing will help - there must be a point where we're bottlenecked by the radar array itself
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Assuming the radar can physically handle the power being run through it without melting more signal processing will always help. There are certain things where it doesn't help but that has less to do with your processing ability and more to do with physical radar design/sophistication, clutter & stealth.

Some examples;
Radar wavelength, you get more out of having better processing but generally a high frequency is always better than a lower one.
Clutter; nobody is pointing a ground-scanning radar at a city in 1970 and getting anything useable. This is still extremely difficult today, thermal, optical & other exotic sensors tend to be used instead.
At a certain point signal reduction on a stealth aircraft defeats a given radar design and without some kind of development in the radar raw processing won't help. It may help the eventual solution (atmospheric bounce to increase detection range for example) but just putting more computers on the problem running the same calculations doesn't because there has been no fundamental change in operation.
 
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[X] [Fighter Plane] Air Defense Fighter Type 3
[X] [Transport Plane] General Transport Aircraft Type 1
 
I'm very strongly tempted to alter the Tao into to a four engine heavy lift transport in right of all the recent discussions. How do folks feel about that?

Also, help me out here: What naming theme should our space program use?
 
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