Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

Contains threads on Royal Air Force equipment of the past, present and future.
Ron5
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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

Post by Ron5 »

NickC wrote:
Ron5 wrote:If you read the announcement carefully, the US has flown a full size model aircraft, hardly the same as what anyone would view as a prototype. 95% Trump inspired hype, he's got all the services announcing all kinds of fantasy crap as if it were real.
Airforce Magazine, "Roper Reveals NGAD Has Flown, But Doesn’t Share Details"

"The Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance combat aircraft, intended to complement or succeed the F-22 and F-35 in the air superiority role, has already flown, having been rapidly prototyped through modern digital design, Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper revealed Sept. 15"

What's your definition of a prototype, depends on how long is your piece of string, you might be right but please supply source and if you have a beef suggest you take it up with Dr. Roper the USAF Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
The NGAD has rec'd substantial prior year classified funding and we can now see where some of the money was spent, the FY-21 budget requests ~ $1 billion in FY-21 and ~ $7.4 billion through to FY-25.

PS FWIW in my post only said it was demonstrator :angel:
For once, I wasn't knocking you. Don't get used to it.

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Somebody's been drinking the kool-aid ..
RAF Targets Technology As Review Shapes UK Armed Forces
Tony Osborne September 21, 2020

The British Armed Forces are engaged in a technology race—as opposed to an arms race—as they look to gain the advantage in the government’s upcoming Integrated Review.

Ministers have promised that the review—the largest since the end of the Cold War-—will provide direction for post-Brexit Britain’s foreign policy and defense posture, deliver much-needed reforms and modernization, and in addition bolster the UK’s defense industry (AW&ST March 23-April 5, p. 46).

Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has called on the armed services to be “more capable in new domains,” and “active in more theaters,” reflecting concerns that the UK’s adversaries have spread themselves out across the world.

The Royal Air Force (RAF) believes it can answer that call to arms. Its most senior officer, Air Chief Marshal Mike Wigston, speaking on Sept. 15—the 80th anniversary of the key RAF victory in the Battle of Britain—said it was making investments so that the air force could “understand, decide and then act faster, with even greater precision, lethality, and in more places around the world simultaneously than we do today.”

Wigston added: “Instead of mass and mobilization, defense will focus more on speed, readiness and global reach—what air and space power does best. . . . Air and space power give our government the ability to act worldwide: at range, at speed, precisely and with minimal physical and political risk.”

While the review may not be the existential clash the Battle of Britain was, commanders are hoping that the RAF’s unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), network-centric warfare, accelerated development, preparations for a greater role in space and support of the UK’s prosperity agenda—with grand plans for the UK to develop a Future Combat Air System (FCAS), Tempest—will all combine to help them maintain the status quo and keep their future procurement plans intact.

Although the review is still at least two months from publication, there are some signs the RAF may well emerge as a winner, and largely unscathed; the other services maybe less so.

British media reports that the British Army could lose its main battle tanks have not been entirely dismissed by ministers. “We’re not scrapping all tanks,” Wallace told reporters.

Indeed, he has previously warned that the UK’s “sentimental attachment. . . [to a] static, armored-centric” force in Europe has timed out, and that the UK needed to look more globally.

Developing Tempest appears to be a priority for the review, in part because it is generating “cutting-edge technology,” said Wigston. Just as important, it is stimulating innovation and encouraging international partnerships such as those with Italy and Sweden. In addition, it is creating and retaining jobs for thousands in the North of England, a region the ruling Conservative government has promised to economically “level up” after years of regional stagnation and unemployment.

Work on combat aircraft has boosted UK prosperity. The Lockheed Martin F-35 program is expected to generate £35 billion ($45 billion) for the British economy, while the UK’s share on the Eurofighter Typhoon has brought in another £28.2 billion. Questions remain, however, as to whether the UK can afford Tempest and a full complement of 138 Lockheed Martin F-35s, albeit over the lifetime of the program.

Initiatives such as the RAF’s Astra program are expected to update the RAF’s facilities and infrastructure and—most crucially—prepare its personnel for the information age. It will enable them, said Wigston, “to manage vast amounts of information and make decisions more quickly and accurately.”

The air force is exploring the use of digital air traffic control towers and will soon begin testing one at RAF Lossiemouth, Scotland, one of its busiest stations. In addition to supporting the force protection of airfields, wider use of digital control towers—notably at airfields with only a small number of movements a day—could enable the RAF’s surplus of air traffic controllers to be reassigned to different tasks.

Another base in Leeming, England, is planned to become a live testbed for a next-generation station, with the RAF partnering up with academia and tech companies. RAF Waddington, England, home to the RAF’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms and future home of the RAF’s MQ-9 Protector UAS fleet, will become part of a regional science and technology cluster.

One of Astra’s key aims is to consolidate the numerous networks the RAF operates and transition them to a combat cloud capable of handling terabytes of data. Testing for the airborne element of such a network, known as Nexus and developed by the RAF’s Rapid Capabilities Office, took to the air for the first time on Sept. 15, onboard an RAF Airbus A330 Voyager Multi-Role Tanker Transport aircraft. Part of the RAF’s Babel Fish data link trials, Nexus works off Raven, a micro-virtualized server, which is then able to distribute data from Nexus to compatible air, land and sea units.

Increased combat mass will also be realized through the addition of remote and autonomous additive capabilities. These include the Alvina swarming drones program to overwhelm enemy air defenses, led by Blue Bear Systems Research and demonstrated to commanders in the spring. Meanwhile, decisions are imminent on the next stage of the Lightweight Affordable Novel Combat Aircraft (LANCA) technology demonstration program—also known as Mosquito. One or two of the three bidders will be selected to proceed with manufacturing and limited flight testing of a demonstrator.

LANCA platforms could be an adjunct for the RAF’s frontline fighters, capable of carrying weapons or sensors into the fight. They could also be used in operations alongside F-35s and Typhoons, long before the Tempest platform enters service in the mid-to-late 2030s—a modern version of Douglas Bader’s Big Wing approach to air combat during the Battle of Britain.

More than 90% of the RAF’s frontline combat air fleet is manned, but widescale use of systems such as LANCA and the introduction of Protector will shift the ratio the other way in the coming years, ministers have suggested previously (AW&ST July 27-Aug. 16, p. 50).

UAS also feature in the investment plans of the other services. Funding is being made available for the development of UAS that could eventually be armed to operate in urban environments to reduce the risk to dismounted soldiers. Meanwhile, an initiative called Tiquila calls for a man-portable UAS for ISR in the field, and the Royal Navy is looking at drones that would deploy unmanned underwater vehicles or even lightweight torpedoes, instead of using shipborne helicopters.

RAF commanders are also exploring how to better use the air force’s existing assets, including making more use of synthetic training, targeting a 70:30 synthetic-to-live flying mix by 2030.

Such a move could allow combat aircraft that are currently attached to operational conversion units or training squadrons to then be used by frontline squadrons, enabling an increase in the available operational fleet.

Despite identifying long-range missiles as a threat to the UK and its allies, there was no mention by Wigston of developing an anti-ballistic missile capability, ground-based air defense or seeking a hypersonic capability.

The review is also expected to call for a new medium-lift helicopter to replace the RAF’s fleet of aging Pumas, which are some of the oldest airframes in the air force despite a 2012 upgrade. Such a program could be a boost for Leonardo Helicopters, but the British Army, which is often the primary customer for the helicopter, has agreements with the U.S. Army for “closer affiliation” on its Future Vertical Lift modernization initiative. The review may also outline the need for a new Command Support Air Transport aircraft to replace the four-strong fleet of BAe 146s used for VIP and transport missions.

“It will be the superiority of the decisions our people make that will preserve the Royal Air Force’s decisive edge into the future,” Wigston said. “That’s as true today as it was in 1940.”

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Ron5 wrote:Wigston added: “Instead of mass and mobilization, defense will focus more on speed, readiness and global reach—what air and space power does best. . . . Air and space power give our government the ability to act worldwide: at range, at speed, precisely and with minimal physical and political risk.”
Without the Navy's carriers(*) ? No effing chance son.

(*) not mentioned once

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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F-35 program is expected to generate £35 billion
Nice
a modern version of Douglas Bader’s Big Wing approach to air combat during the Battle of Britain.
A sound bite - but if you take the parallel further, Big Wing took so long to assemble that they often missed the action
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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Sounds like the RAF have been recruiting Squadrons of PR(Spin) Consultants. It also doesn't matter how much you bomb an area you still need the Army to occupy and hold it and the Navy to get it there. Also there was no mention of NATO what so ever which seems rather strange considering it is still the cornerstone of our defence or is the IR going to reposition the UK on NATO's fringes?

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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A UK with allies is a weaker argument for spending on unilateral capabilities.

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Wigston added: “Instead of mass and mobilization, defense will focus more on speed, readiness and global reach—what air and space power does best. . . . Air and space power give our government the ability to act worldwide: at range, at speed, precisely and with minimal physical and political risk.”


Yep

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ArmChairCivvy
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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Lord Jim wrote: It also doesn't matter how much you bomb an area you still need the Army to occupy and hold it
We've done that and outsourced the latter part to Russia (The US held on to the small corner where the oil fields happen to be).
Ever-lasting truths: Multi-year budgets/ planning by necessity have to address the painful questions; more often than not the Either-Or prevails over Both-And.
If everyone is thinking the same, then someone is not thinking (attributed to Patton)

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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SW1 wrote:Wigston added: “Instead of mass and mobilization, defense will focus more on speed, readiness and global reach—what air and space power does best. . . . Air and space power give our government the ability to act worldwide: at range, at speed, precisely and with minimal physical and political risk.”


Yep
Srsly?

You mean like the RAF with their speed, readiness and global reach won back the Falklands?? Couldn't even close the runway for goodness sake.

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Ron5 wrote:
Ron5 wrote:Wigston added: “Instead of mass and mobilization, defense will focus more on speed, readiness and global reach—what air and space power does best. . . . Air and space power give our government the ability to act worldwide: at range, at speed, precisely and with minimal physical and political risk.”
Without the Navy's carriers(*) ? No effing chance son.

(*) not mentioned once
Not a bad attempt, 6/10 ;)

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

Post by inch »

Sometimes the RAF are full of it also ,just Like all the services with interservice rivalry ,come up with some whoppers sometimes ,like in the past the RAF didn't want carriers and said something about airpower reaching ,except they made up the distance nearer than was actually is lol ,so take stuff they come out with with a pinch of salt also

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Only one service with the clout to end the world, and we never bloody hear a peep.

A Silent Service.

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Aviation Week. Kinda long on words, short on facts.
The Nearly Decade-long Story That Led To NGAD Flight Demonstrator
Steve Trimble September 21, 2020

The first confirmation of the existence of a flying, full-scale flight demonstrator for the Next-Generation Air Dominance program by the U.S. Air Force on Sept. 15 dropped like a lightning bolt from the black world of secretly funded military projects.

Flying full-scale flight demonstrator announced. “Broken records” claimed, but what kind?

But the exciting, albeit terse, announcement during the virtual Air, Space and Cyber Conference, hosted by the Air Force Association, comes after a long series of revealing statements by defense officials over nearly a decade that point to the existence of such a program and illuminate critical details about the scope and limits of the project.

Most of the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program details remain among the Air Force’s most tightly guarded secrets. But two parallel objectives are clear: to revolutionize the air superiority mission by fragmenting the mission set among multiple aircraft types and to disrupt how the defense industry produced most of the state-of-the-art combat aircraft during the past half century.

The NGAD flight demonstrator confirmed by Will Roper, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, plays a critical role as a proof of concept for both objectives.

Senior Air Force officials attending the virtual conference declined to elaborate on the only two statements provided by Roper about the NGAD flight demonstrator.

“NGAD has come so far that the full-scale flight demonstrator has already flown in the physical world,” Roper said during his keynote address. “It’s broken a lot of records and is showing digital engineering isn’t a fluke.”

Pressed for elaboration during two follow-up appearances with journalists, Roper offered only one other direct comment about the aircraft’s performance so far: “All I can say is the NGAD [flight demonstrator] test flights have been amazing. Records have been broken, but I’ve been impressed at how well the digital technology transitions to the real world.”

Before Roper’s comments, the closest hint of the flight demonstrator’s existence came about a year ago. In previously unreported comments, Gen. David Goldfein, the then-chief of staff of the Air Force, offered the most explicit, unclassified description of the NGAD program during a September 2019 press conference.

“Here’s our NGAD strategy: We have five key technologies that we’re investing in that we don’t intend to have all come together on a single platform,” Goldfein said. “They will all mature and accelerate at difference paces. As they become ready, you will see us adapting them on existing platforms, sensors and weapons and also looking at new platforms, sensors and weapons.”

With the exception of an adaptive-cycle propulsion system, the Air Force has not specifically linked other new technologies to the NGAD program. But the new family of systems is likely to require further advances in communications and networking, onboard electrical-power generation, thermal management of waste heat and potentially new types of armament and sensors, such as directed-energy weapons and passive detection systems. Such technologies can be developed and tested on the ground but still must be validated in-flight in a relevant air vehicle configuration. In his comments in 2019, Goldfein hinted about the necessity of a flight demonstrator but stopped short of providing a timeline for the first flight.

“There has to be a test article to be able to take some of these technologies to mature,” Goldfein said. “That’s probably about as far as I can go.”

But the Defense Department’s interest in developing new prototypes to support the air dominance mission goes back nearly a decade. In 2014, DARPA completed an Air Dominance Initiative study, in which leading military and technology experts concluded that “no single new technology or platform could deter and defeat the sophisticated and numerous adversary systems under development,” according to written testimony by a Pentagon official to Congress in March 2014.

That study prompted DARPA to launch the little-known Aerospace Innovation Initiative (AII) in fiscal 2015. The official’s testimony outlined the explicit purpose of AII: “to develop and fly two X-plane prototypes that demonstrate advanced technologies for future aircraft. Teams will compete to produce the X-plane prototypes, one focused on future Navy operational capabilities and the other on future Air Force operational capabilities.”

The Defense Department stopped referring to the AII program shortly after submitting the fiscal 2016 budget request, but DARPA’s website remains active for the Aerospace Projects Office, which manages the AII prototyping program.

In 2016, the Air Force followed up on DARPA’s study by establishing an enterprise capability collaboration team to produce the Air Superiority 2030 flight plan. The unclassified version of the plan released in late 2016 echoed elements of the DARPA study, especially the need for a family of systems. “There is no single capability that provides a silver bullet solution,” stated the 11-page summary of the classified flight plan.

But the Air Force flight plan still appeared to focus on one specific member of the family called the Penetrating Counter-Air (PCA) system. This platform appeared to resemble the sixth-generation fighter concepts released about the same time by major defense companies, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The industry concepts invariably featured a large, tailless, supersonic and highly stealthy aircraft with certain exotic capabilities, such as defensive lasers. The flight plan described the role of the PCA as targeting and engaging other aircraft by itself as well as using the data from its sensors to feed targeting information to standoff aircraft carrying long-range missiles.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has used the PCA concept to project Pentagon aircraft spending. In December 2018, the CBO forecast that the first of 414 PCA aircraft would enter service in 2030, costing an average of about $300 million each. Overall procurement spending for PCA could total $130 billion between 2028 and 2050, CBO reported in January 2020.

The CBO’s cost estimates for PCA appear to be based on a concept of a monolithic weapon system, such as the Lockheed F-22 and F-35. Both of those aircraft are equipped with all the sensors and weapons necessary for the aircraft to perform any mission within its operating role by itself, although they also possess a limited ability to collaborate with other aircraft types in stealth mode.

During the same period, however, the Air Force’s approach to the NGAD program significantly changed. As Goldfein noted, in 2019, the conventional understanding of a PCA aircraft as a monolithic system able to perform a wide set of missions by itself no longer applies. A glimpse into the internal debate that led to the transformation of the NGAD into its current form first appeared in September 2018. Roper had assumed control of Air Force acquisition seven months earlier and spearheaded a dramatic reimagining of the concept.

“I would say [NGAD now] looks more like a portfolio than a single initiative,” Roper told reporters during a September 2018 press conference.

The transition to a federated architecture for the NGAD program carried significant budget implications. Four months later, the Air Force released a spending plan for fiscal 2020-24. The NGAD budget over the five-year period amounted to $6.1 billion. Only a year before, the Air Force had planned to spend $13.2 billion during the same five-year period on NGAD. Air Force officials justified the 50% five-year reduction for one of the service’s most high-profile weapon systems, saying any trace of a traditional monolithic fighter had been eliminated.

“Instead, NGAD is investing in technologies and prototypes that have produced results and demonstrated promise,” the Air Force said in a statement released to Aviation Week in June 2019 (AW&ST June 17-30, 2019, p. 92).

At the same time, Roper introduced a new element of the NGAD strategy. The goal was no longer merely to revolutionize air warfare technology. The NGAD is a critical element of the Air Force’s strategy to disrupt the traditional business model for developing, fielding, modernizing and sustaining combat aircraft. The Digital Century Series effort kicked off in October 2019, seeking to use a new set of digital engineering tools to break the traditional model.

In his indefatigable style, Roper has proselytized his vision for a “digital trinity” of engineering systems that unite the digital models for flight performance, production and sustainment into the same database. In his vision, this approach would allow designers to immediately realize the full impact of even a minor design tweak on the life cycle of a new aircraft, including the effect on the cost of production and the service life of the part.

Moreover, the Air Force—not the prime contractor—would own the underlying design rights and source code for the operating system. The aircraft designer would deliver a set of digital blueprints, but the production, modernization and sustainment of the aircraft could be opened to competition by any company.

Although the concept invokes the Century Series of six fighters that entered service in the 1950s, Gen. Mark Kelly, the newly appointed head of Air Combat Command, says the concept more closely resembles elements of the F-117 program. Lockheed produced only 59 F-117s over the life of the program, a remarkably short production run. The F-117 also ushered a transformational capability into combat in 1991 by introducing an airframe configuration with a very low radar cross-section. Despite the F-117’s record, the Air Force unsentimentally retired the fleet from regular service less than two decades later, although a handful of aircraft continue to be sighted flying on test ranges.

“It was a bleeding-edge technology that was a unique, game-changing product in the field, which we fielded and operated for a specific amount of time and then moved on to another rapidly emerging technology that we just couldn’t adapt to that exact same platform,” Kelly says.

The Air Force’s approach to the NGAD program will be similar. Leveraging the five key technologies referenced by Goldfein a year ago, multiple types of aircraft will be developed and fielded simultaneously in small production runs, then retired within 15 years, Roper said. If realized, his vision poses severe implications for the defense industry. Defense companies are now oriented to capture winner-take-all contracts for major new weapons systems, then wield a monopoly power based on rights to the underlying intellectual property to sustain the platform over a life cycle that can last a half century or longer.

But the success of the Digital Century Series approach hinges on Roper’s “digital trinity” vision. For such a dramatic departure from the traditional system, there seems little evidence that such an approach could be successful. Boeing embraced the digital engineering philosophy for the T-X program. In partnership with Saab, Boeing delivered the first T-7A prototypes within three years of launching the self-funded program during the competition for the contract. But the first production version of the T-7A has not yet flown, and the type is still four years away from the scheduled initial operational capability milestone.

By unveiling the flight demonstrator for the NGAD program now, Roper delivered a message to any critics of his approach in the industry, in Congress or, indeed, within the Air Force. As a digitally engineered aircraft fully reflecting the “digital trinity” philosophy, the NGAD flight demonstrator offered the proof his approach could deliver the next generation of combat aircraft faster and more cheaply than the traditional approach.

As proof, however, the newly revealed NGAD flight demonstrator suffers from some drawbacks. The knowledge of DARPA’s AII program dating back to fiscal 2015 suggests an NGAD prototype could have been developed and flown two or three years ago. All schedule, design and performance details of the flight demonstrator remain classified, so there is no way to verify how close the concept validated Roper’s vision for the NGAD program.

Although Roper declined to elaborate, the suggestion that the flight demonstrator has already “broken a lot of records” may be significant. In a traditional program, the assumption would be that he was referring to performance records, such as an average speed flown between two cities or the amount of time required to climb to a certain altitude. The spirit of Roper’s vision for NGAD suggests the broken records are more likely related to production schedules, development costs and upgrade options.

Even the term “flight demonstrator” appears intentionally vague. It has been loosely applied to full-scale, competitive prototypes, such as the Lockheed YF-22, but the term was also used for the F-16A Advanced Fighter Technology Integration aircraft that played a role as an early testbed in the Advanced Tactical Fighter and Joint Strike Fighter programs.

The budget documents released by the Air Force this year contained another surprise about the NGAD program. For the first time, the Air Force revealed that the Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) program is scheduled to deliver a certified engine in fiscal 2025. Not all members of the NGAD family of systems may need an adaptive-cycle propulsion system, but the timing of the NGAP program suggests that an application for such an engine is likely to enter flight testing as early as fiscal 2026 and not merely as a flight demonstrator. At that point, Roper’s vision will be put to the next test.

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Ron5 wrote:the role of the PCA as targeting and engaging other aircraft by itself as well as using the data from its sensors to feed targeting information to standoff aircraft carrying long-range missiles.
Federated architectures, orchestrated assets and actions
... read: B-52s will be flying in 2060
Ever-lasting truths: Multi-year budgets/ planning by necessity have to address the painful questions; more often than not the Either-Or prevails over Both-And.
If everyone is thinking the same, then someone is not thinking (attributed to Patton)

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

Post by inch »

If tempest makes it to fruition and I'm not 100% yet ,it will never be in the same league as the new American offering just by the huge sums of money and tech advancement lead the USA built up ,but luckily tempest doesn't have to compete with it just our russian/Chinese future offerings which hopefully be alot less tech than future USA offering

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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inch wrote:but luckily tempest doesn't have to compete with it just our russian/Chinese future offerings which hopefully be alot less tech than future USA offering
Anyone hoping for the US to retain a technology lead over the Chinese really isn't paying attention at the moment..

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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We are seeing nice presentations to the media and the resultant articles, but we are not going to see what is really going on with TEMPEST until we actually see hardware being either fitted to existing platforms as upgrades, or an actual flying prototype of the 6th Gen platform.

At present the programme seems to be heading in the right direction with the novel and realistic approach being taken. The three nations currently involved all have centres of excellence in all the areas being researched and developed. As long as the money flows we will at least see upgrades that could be installed in the Typhoon and Gripen in the late 2020s, as well as new ordonnance.

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Lord Jim wrote: upgrades that could be installed in the Typhoon and Gripen in the late 2020s
It is difficult to put any number (in years) on the upgrade cycle as far as the Typhoon is concerned - as the upgrades have been so incremental - but as for Gripen :
- it was the first with Meteor
- it will achieve A2G this year
- so the next major upgrade - whatever it might be - in less than 10 yrs... pretty good going?
Ever-lasting truths: Multi-year budgets/ planning by necessity have to address the painful questions; more often than not the Either-Or prevails over Both-And.
If everyone is thinking the same, then someone is not thinking (attributed to Patton)

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Lord Jim wrote:We are seeing nice presentations to the media and the resultant articles, but we are not going to see what is really going on with TEMPEST until we actually see hardware being either fitted to existing platforms as upgrades, or an actual flying prototype of the 6th Gen platform.

At present the programme seems to be heading in the right direction with the novel and realistic approach being taken. The three nations currently involved all have centres of excellence in all the areas being researched and developed. As long as the money flows we will at least see upgrades that could be installed in the Typhoon and Gripen in the late 2020s, as well as new ordonnance.
The new radar must be a part of this and it's good to see it under developmental contract.

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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Yes, hopefully the new Typhoon radar will be bolted straight onto Tempest saving a whole load of heart ache. Now they need to do the same for the engines and computer and they'll be in a very good position to just focus on a high performance airframe that's easy to build.
@LandSharkUK

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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shark bait wrote:Yes, hopefully the new Typhoon radar will be bolted straight onto Tempest saving a whole load of heart ache. Now they need to do the same for the engines and computer and they'll be in a very good position to just focus on a high performance airframe that's easy to build.
They're gonna need a new engine for many reasons.

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

Post by ArmChairCivvy »

Ron5 wrote:They're gonna need a new engine
Howabout the F136 that was being developed by General Electric and Rolls-Royce plc for the F-35 Lightning II, the two offering to finish the development with $ 2bn of their own funds... but the pork-barrelling within Congress killed it anyway
Ever-lasting truths: Multi-year budgets/ planning by necessity have to address the painful questions; more often than not the Either-Or prevails over Both-And.
If everyone is thinking the same, then someone is not thinking (attributed to Patton)

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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

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ArmChairCivvy wrote:
Ron5 wrote:They're gonna need a new engine
Howabout the F136 that was being developed by General Electric and Rolls-Royce plc for the F-35 Lightning II, the two offering to finish the development with $ 2bn of their own funds... but the pork-barrelling within Congress killed it anyway
It was the cost that killed it in an F-35 program that was severely over budget. Pork barrel my ass, the engine would have been built in the US.

inch
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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

Post by inch »

Wasn't the engine more powerful if I remember right , could be wrong tho . anyway mute point it didn't happen

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Jensy
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Re: Future UK Combat Aircraft (Project Tempest)

Post by Jensy »

ArmChairCivvy wrote:
Ron5 wrote:They're gonna need a new engine
Howabout the F136 that was being developed by General Electric and Rolls-Royce plc for the F-35 Lightning II, the two offering to finish the development with $ 2bn of their own funds... but the pork-barrelling within Congress killed it anyway
Ah the unloved child from the first marriage...

Flight Global at the time suggested the remaining development costs were in the low billions. Of course that was with their teams in place and facilities optimised.

Probably need to double if not triple those expected costs to get F-136 fully developed and integrated with Tempest. Even with substantial help from GE,which may not be easy if they see a future role for the engine in NGAD/F-xx projects and don't wish to share, it's a substantial undertaking. Yet there's the advantage of potentially using the same powerplant in any F-35 MLU and potential sales to other F-35 nations. We do however run the risk of a US veto or other "tricks' with overseas Tempest sales, if the engine is overly dependent on US IP.

Now if we were to go it alone (as Team Tempest), there's considerable capability within the partner nations but of course a massively increased cost to the UK taxpayer.

GKN swallowed up the majority of Volvo Aero and it's facilities in Sweden. Avio might be a shadow of its former self, with most of their civilian products taken over by GE, but they still have some very unique experience with the ESA's Ariane space programme, which could offer expertise that neither the UK or Sweden have had in half a century. Finally we have RR, for all its many flaws, still the second largest engine manufacturer on the planet.

Whether technologies from the F136 and EJ200 (which has plenty of latent capability still unused) can be brought together by RR for a truly cutting edge product depends a lot of how much risk they're willing to take on. Let's not forget RR has been 'burnt' by such lofty ambitions before...

Maybe we should name the future powerplant 'Icarus'?

This ties into some of the discussion a few pages back over whether we're actually building/selling 'an aircraft' or (sorry) a 'system of systems', of which the engine could be a highly valuable export product for other aircraft. Considering how poorly EJ200 sold outside Eurofighter, might give us an indication of its marketability.

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