USAF Thunderbirds A-10 "Thunderbrrrt"

[sideshowbob9]

....why wouldn't they?....

Since you asked: because it would cost a load of money unnecessarily. It really, couldn't possibly save money. I honestly don't know how anyone can think designing and certifying what is essentially a new aircraft could save any money, especially when a perfectly good, bought-and-paid-for alternative is sitting on the pan.

Put another way, would you go out and spend money on a 3-pronged fork set to eat dinner because all you have is 4-pronged forks in the kitchen and that last prong is just unnecessary? I'd go with the forks I have, myself. Better things to spend money on.

That said, if you want to do an A-10 without the gun, go for it. Waaaaay more out-there what-ifs on this site.

[TheChronicOne]

Sorry, but that's just not how it works. Saving a ton of money by not putting all the un necessary equipment in would not cost more, it would cost less. There would be LESS to check and certify so the cost to do that, even, would be less.

The idea that making a thing vastly more complicated and full of expensive systems would somehow make it cost less is, frankly, downright silly.

Trust me, no one building aircraft sets out to make them cheaper by cramming them full of superfluous equipment and systems. Certifying a far simpler aircraft would cost less than certifying a complicated one and no amount of mental gymnastics will change this. Look at cars, even.... the vehicles that have all the fancy stuff like heated seats, power windows, de-fogging mirrors, etc etc etc cost more to make, more to certify, and more to buy. Up is not down, down is not up. I don't know where the idea came from that the more complicated a thing is that it becomes cheaper to manufacture and certify but it's just plane wrong (see what I did there.)     Like I said, there's well over a centuries worth of real world experience backing me up and absolutely zero evidence presented so far that proves that a more complicated aircraft is magically cheaper to make and certify. I may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night. 

Say you have two options for making a fork. You can make one with four prongs and nothing else, or you can make one with 12 prongs, a radio built in, side mirrors, and a plug in to plug it into the wall. None of these are necessary and I guarantee you the simple 4 prong fork would be cheaper to make and cheaper to certify safe than the 12 prong fork crammed full of things that aren't necessary.

EDIT: ok, a little more free time now and am in modelling mode and have looked at some of the costs of these things..... two systmes alone, the Avenger and the RWR together are ~$300,000 alone. Not to add all the other things from chaff dispenser to the targeting sensors, etc. I find it very hard to believe that a few structural supports, some weight, and certification would exceed even that amount......  Even if the re-cert cost a quarter of a million dollars, we're still going to be saving hundreds of thousands more. 

[TheChronicOne]

Pity, it sounded a rather splendid idea
I was just going to suggest you could keep the BFG and use it to fire pretty flares,
And maybe party poppers at the crowd....

Regards
Keith

Well, she ain't dead yet...  I'll get back to it at some point but the idea of getting this finished within the next week or two went out the window when I learned I would have to make an entire set of home-made masks. I could easily eat up two weeks of real world time finagling that mess and suddenly I was faced with an overly-complicated build and that's what I'm trying to avoid! 

[TheChronicOne]

You should build exactly whatever you want and write your backstory to suit.

Remember Kit's 2nd Law of Whiffing, 'The backstory can always be modified to suit the model'

True enough! This time around I was shooting for "as close to real world" as possible and I was simply following along with all the other aircraft in existence. I've yet to see a single instance of an aircraft becoming cheaper after being loaded down with a plethora of systems and equipment it doesn't need. It boggles the mind. Even with an added cost of having to re-certify it the savings from not installing all this expensive equipment would more than make up for it. The Avenger alone, price adjusted, is over $150,000 so even if it cost a ridiculous amount, say, $100,000 even, to certify a much simpler aircraft the absence alone of the GAU-8 has already saved $50,000. How much is the whole penny pave system and other targeting systems? How much is a RWR system? NOT having these things would make for a less expensive aircraft, not the opposite.

[ChernayaAkula]

<....> I've yet to see a single instance of an aircraft becoming cheaper after being loaded down with a plethora of systems and equipment it doesn't need. <...>

But... that's not what you're suggesting. The way I understand it, you want to take a tested and approved design that carries a plethora of systems and equipment - because that's what it was designed for -, take out a whole lot of stuff and buy a limited number for a demo team. I've yet to see that resulting in a cheaper aircraft. See the Typhoon's gun saga.

<...>
Say you have two options for making a fork. You can make one with four prongs and nothing else, or you can make one with 12 prongs, a radio built in, side mirrors, and a plug in to plug it into the wall. None of these are necessary and I guarantee you the simple 4 prong fork would be cheaper to make and cheaper to certify safe than the 12 prong fork crammed full of things that aren't necessary.

Sure, designing a 4 prong fork from the start is cheaper than the 12-prong-plus-bells-and-whistles-version.  But the way I understand your plan, you're basically going from the 12-prong version (which the Air Force funded, developed, certified and ordered 700+ copies of) and want to rebuild a dozen (+/-) into 4-prong versions. You're not gonna save a single penny. Certifying how the plane can be flown in what configurations costs a lot of money. 100,000$ is ridiculous? Flight-testing just some scenarios for that new thing will burn more money in fuel than that. That's without research and development costs, man hours and whatnot.
Pave Penny you can leave off at will anyway, but once you get into throwing out armour and the huge gun, you're talking about flight testing and certifying a totally new plane. And once you have re-certified your new aircraft that is only outwardly an A-10, you need specialized crews. Training for the crews. Training syllabi for the crews. Dedicated ground support equipment for a limited fleet. Spare parts for a limited fleet. And so on... Sure, much of it may be interchangeable, but since you're inwardly redesigning the aircraft, a lot of it won't be.
And at 150,000$, the gun isn't even that expensive. That's about 25 flight hours worth of $$$ per aircraft. Buy a dozen Thunderbrrrts (cool name, BTW! ) and that's a whopping 1.8million $. That's... dirt-cheap compared to what re-certification would cost.

Just flying the bog-standard A-10, the Thunderbirds would have commonality with 700+ other A-10s. You could swap them out as needed for maintenance, attrition replacements, flight hour limitations, whathaveyou. With an orphan fleet of 12 Thunderbrrrrrrts, you're stuck with those 12.
I suppose that's why the Blue Angels went for the Super Hornet. With the Legacy Hornet being all but gone from the Navy, it's just a whole lot cheaper to fly and support Super Hornets.

[TheChronicOne]

<....> I've yet to see a single instance of an aircraft becoming cheaper after being loaded down with a plethora of systems and equipment it doesn't need. <...>

But... that's not what you're suggesting.

It's exactly what I'm suggesting. (bear with me)    It wouldn't all have to be done from the ground up.  Omitting these things isn't suddenly going to make the aircraft start from scratch and have to be flight tested and all the other rig a marole. Simply not putting a box of electronics and antennas on it and removing the gun isn't going to be some huge costly ordeal.... In fact, the gun is the easy part.. it would be simple to replicate the weight, weight distribution, and structural properties out of common materials and certifying it would be a matter of simplicity as well.. since nothing, absolutely nothing about the airframe, power plant, aerodynamics, etc. would be changed there wouldn't be any need for some rigourous ground-up testing, etc. There seems to be an envisioning of some major surgery that totally alters the entire plane but I'm telling you, with the gun issue so easily solves that not having an RWR, not having chaff dispenser, and not having a sensor pod aren't remotely going to cause all this drama. 


Oh, I forgot about the fork analogy. OK, so the fork is built in steps... long before they add the 8 prongs and radios, they already perfected the 4 prong so even you're already making 12 prong forks, simply NOT adding the 8 prongs isn't going to make the price go up. You don't have to re-design and re-test it because you know it already works.......  If you change absolutely nothing that concerns what actually makes it fly... then you're doing next to nothing that would require testing. It would be like taking a CD player out of your Cessna 172. Completely re-testing and doing all sorts of ridiculous things because you don't put in the RWR just isn't going to happen... no one is going to say, "Darn, we no longer have the RWR, the whole thing is trash now!" 

[ChernayaAkula]

If the CD player made up a seventh of the Cessna's weight (gun/ammo + bathtub on A-10), then it totally would make a huge difference.
Deleting a seventh of your normal loaded weight is going to cause major drama. Major shift of centre of gravity. It would be a totally different aircraft. Necessitating testing from ground to certify that it's safe to fly.

<...> Omitting these things isn't suddenly going to make the aircraft start from scratch and have to be flight tested and all the other rig a marole. Simply not putting a box of electronics and antennas on it and removing the gun isn't going to be some huge costly ordeal.... <...>

These things have to be flight-tested. That's just how it works. If it isn't tested, it won't be considered safe to fly. End of.
And testing is costly.
Just have a look at the Technical Order for the A-10. Look at the weapon options. Lots of fine print that states which weapon option can go where when sitting next to another weapon option and which can't. While some things would technically fit, they aren't allowed to be used because they haven't been tested. Basically, if it isn't in the book, it's not allowed.
On the F-16, some stores shouldn't be flown at certain speeds so as to not put undue stress on the wings. Some stores can't be flown at all on certain pylons because of wing flex issues. Weapons on Sea Kings have to be dropped in a certain order or the change of centre of gravity will make it crash. Look at the toed-out pylons on the Super Hornet that cause lots of drag. Necessary because of store separation issues. This stuff isn't trivial. The list goes on and on. If it isn't tested, it won't be flown.

<....> In fact, the gun is the easy part.. it would be simple to replicate the weight, weight distribution, and structural properties out of common materials and certifying it would be a matter of simplicity as well..  <...>

No, it wouldn't be simple. It has been tried and it wasn't simple. See the Brit MoD Typhoon gun saga. They tried saving money by deleting the gun and swapping it for a weight (because of centre of gravity). After spending entirely too much money they found out the cheapest solution was to just buy the damn guns and install them as originally planned. And that was a compact 100kg gun on a 15.500kg aircraft, not a 1.800kg system stretched across the forward third/half of a 14.900kg aircraft.

Why not just dish out the 1.8 million $ for 12 guns? Giving you 12 sets of guns that could be used in operational A-10s as attrition replacements. You wouldn't have to buy a totally unnecessary and useless piece of weight. You think you're gonna get a contract for twelve sets of weights that specifically replicate the weight and weight distribution of a GAU-8 for less than 2 million $? No way.
And even if you could get them made, you'd still have to test-fly them (costing mucho $$$). Because that's how it's done to make sure they're safe to fly.

[TheChronicOne]

Never said the CD player weiged 1/7th of anything, in fact, the opposite is my entire point: removing such a thing wouldn't suddenly wreck an airplane and cause it to have to undergo ground-up testing. I spoke about the gun completely separately from that point, which was part of the larger picture, so I'm not sure why they are suddenly being combined.... 

Also, I never said they wouldn't be flight tested... I never said testing wasn't costly. I'm just saying some hugely rigorous testing regime of an airplane that is absolutely unchanged as far as flight performance is concerned would be unwarranted. They would flight test it, sure, but the idea that it would be some huge expensive undertaking is ridiculous as the aircraft performance is unchanged. What would they expect to learn after the first flight or two?   "Well, the specs are identical and it flies exactly the same, I guess it's back to the drawing board!"         If the MoD engineers somehow failed to replicate the same weight and distrubution of components that are entirely internal then.... well.... bless their hearts.   

[sideshowbob9]

Sorry, but that's just not how it works. Saving a ton of money by not putting all the un necessary equipment in would not cost more, it would cost less. There would be LESS to check and certify so the cost to do that, even, would be less.

With all the respect I can muster, I don't think you can tell me how it works or doesn't.

There would be a lot less to certify would there? Just the whole flight envelope of the aircraft, again. Leaving the gun in but inhibited could conceivably cost as little as zero as it could more than likely be done on the flight line! So that's an entire flight testing and certification budget (that you have already done once) vs. essentially zero. Once again, leaving aside things like commonality, maintenance having already been budgeted for the foreseeable so retaining systems not costing any more than not, plus the whole loss of combat assets thing, which could be the biggest aside I've ever encountered given the raison d'être of the USAF.

Another point that may have already been covered but is worth re-iterating, the whole purpose of the Thunderbirds is to demonstrate front-line types. The exception of the T-38 years is easily explained by the '73 oil crisis & the general post-Vietnam draw down. If you want to display with something cheaper to run than an A-10 my advice would be don't use an A-10 of any stripe! Use a T-34 Mentor or somesuch.

With that, I will bow out, somewhat gracelessly. The argument is getting decidedly cyclical and probably passed futile some time ago. 

[zenrat]

Of course, in another reality a gunless Warthog would have been developed in parallel with the version from OTL.  The gunless one being for sale to those countries friendly enough to have weapons sold to them but not to be trusted with the big boys toys.  It would still have twenty million hardpoints under the wings but no brrrrrrrrrrrttttttt.

[PR19_Kit]

  It would still have twenty million hardpoints under the wings but no brrrrrrrrrrrttttttt.

But it could have bits of cardboard taped just in front of the engine fans so they went 'Brrrrrrrrrt' as it dived onto its target.

Just like you did with your bike's front wheel when you were a kid. 

[Old Wombat]

  It would still have twenty million hardpoints under the wings but no brrrrrrrrrrrttttttt.

But it could have bits of cardboard taped just in front of the engine fans so they went 'Brrrrrrrrrt' as it dived onto its target.

Just like you did with your bike's front wheel when you were a kid. 

That got an actual laugh!

[TheChronicOne]

Sorry, but that's just not how it works. Saving a ton of money by not putting all the un necessary equipment in would not cost more, it would cost less. There would be LESS to check and certify so the cost to do that, even, would be less.

With all the respect I can muster, I don't think you can tell me how it works or doesn't.

There would be a lot less to certify would there? Just the whole flight envelope of the aircraft, again. Leaving the gun in but inhibited could conceivably cost as little as zero as it could more than likely be done on the flight line! So that's an entire flight testing and certification budget (that you have already done once) vs. essentially zero. Once again, leaving aside things like commonality, maintenance having already been budgeted for the foreseeable so retaining systems not costing any more than not, plus the whole loss of combat assets thing, which could be the biggest aside I've ever encountered given the raison d'être of the USAF.

Another point that may have already been covered but is worth re-iterating, the whole purpose of the Thunderbirds is to demonstrate front-line types. The exception of the T-38 years is easily explained by the '73 oil crisis & the general post-Vietnam draw down. If you want to display with something cheaper to run than an A-10 my advice would be don't use an A-10 of any stripe! Use a T-34 Mentor or somesuch.

With that, I will bow out, somewhat gracelessly. The argument is getting decidedly cyclical and probably passed futile some time ago. 

When you sit there and tell me that over 100 years of precedent is wrong, I sure can tell you how it works. In one corner we have thousands of scientists and engineers and in another corner we have you, claiming the opposite of all of them.

Yes, there would be less to certify. If you have an aircraft with 20 systems and an aircraft with 10 systems, yet they both FLY identically, it's going to be cheaper and quicker to certify the one with 10 systems. Even with a re-cert, the cost saving by not having tons of useless expensive equipment installed would more than cover a couple test flights. A more rigerous testing wouldn't be required because nothing about the flight characteristics has changed.

"The whole flight envelope?"  lmao... nothing about the flight envelope has changed.... Not sure what I can do with that. I've already repeated about 20 times that nothing done to the thing would alter the flight characteristics. Why this is repeatedly ignored is baffling. The only thing that would do that is the gun but replacing that would be a simple matter of switching out highly expensinve and complicated dead weight with simple and cheap dead weight. And yes, when it's not firing, the gun is dead weight. If it's just sitting there not moving or doing anything... it's not going to alter anything and we already know the Thunderbolt II has no problems flying when not firing the gun. None of the parts being removed are external so once again it doesn't change a single thing about how the plane flies. Once again, since nothing has changed about the flight characteristics, no rigorous testing would be required.

Another thing being ignored is operating cost. Not having to maintain all that equipment being omitted will decrease everything from cost of replacements, maintenance hours, to fuel. In the long run the operating costs will more than make up for the cost of one or two test flights. Also, using all that equipment in combat vehicles instead of wasting it all in something that will never use it will sit well with bean counters.

But yes, I'm wrong, all these demo teams out there are flying aircraft crammed full of weapons systems, sensors, guns, pylons, and all manner of other things they don't need and I'm wrong! Yes, making things vastly cheaper and simpler causes the cost to skyrocket and I'm wrong. No one ever takes an aircraft and removes things from it that do nothing and alter nothing about the flight characteritics; after all, dead weight is exactly what you want in an aircraft. lmao   

[zenrat]

  It would still have twenty million hardpoints under the wings but no brrrrrrrrrrrttttttt.

But it could have bits of cardboard taped just in front of the engine fans so they went 'Brrrrrrrrrt' as it dived onto its target.

Just like you did with your bike's front wheel when you were a kid. 

That got an actual laugh!

I was forced to remove the bits of card from the forks of my pushie by my school because "they might cause the wheel to jam and you to fall off".

Killjoys!

[kerick]

IIRC the prototype A-10 carried a 20mm gun for a while before the GAU-8 was ready. Might make a good export whiff.