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"Pentagon in shock": China's next-gen stealth drones are now leagues ahead of DARPA's, says explosive new study
(www.sustainability-times.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Drones have a pretty big advantage over piloted aircraft in stealth terms because of their small size, the whole next generation of aircraft will be built around them.
Honestly it seems like the countries that skipped fifth gen fighters got the best deal here. Even China's newest ones are probably going to have a very short life cycle, and lmao rip the f-35 is going to cost two or more trillion dollars and accomplish nothing.
Hey now, they could still decapitate a couple more pilots
I'm surprised militaries are still working on piloted aircraft. It seems to me the era of dogfights between aces is over. Missile technology has gotten advanced to the point where having a pilot inside aircraft is a liability. Drones can carry larger payloads while being smaller, faster, and cheaper.
If the current war in Ukraine is any indication, most aircraft are being shot down by surface to air missiles or by drones. There are still fighters being downed by other fighters, but this seems to be the minority.
Aircraft aren't being shot down by drones in Ukraine, at most one way attack drones have taken out a few helicopters in flight. Fighters fly to high or fast to be taken out by drones. Drones and loitering munitions take out fighter aircraft that are parked on the ground. Fighter aircraft are still very important, a big part of the reason why Ukraine's air force can't operate freely, even at high altitude beyond the range of Russian ground based air defence, is Russian fighters lobbing air to air missiles at them from 200km away. At one stage, Russia was firing 6-8 R-37M missiles a day at Ukrainian aircraft. This capability led to attrition of the Ukrainian Air Force to the point F-16 deliveries were necessary. Yeah there aren't that many, if any, dogfights anymore with this kind of BVR capabilitiy.
Ground based air defence is playing the biggest part in area denial to enemy fighters. Russian aircraft are reduced to lobbing standoff weapons like glide bombs from high altitude outside of the range of Ukrainian ground based air defence. Ukrainian fighters can't even do that due to the Russian Air Force, they have to perform low altitude, terrain masking flights to fire munitions at Russian ground positions. Fighters still play an important role and can't be replaced by drones yet. Iran has a massive drone and missile arsenal, yet they still want modern fighter jets.
They can also be more manoeuvrable since the pilot tends to be the limiting factor given that human body can't sustain high gs.
Are military aircraft size determined by the pilot? I figured it would be proportional to the ordinance they're carrying.
Not having to accommodate a pilot necessarily means it can be smaller.
the cockpit on modern fighter jets is so tiny though
You don't need to accommodate for stuff like the pilot passing out from g forces if there's just a computer flying the thing. This can also extend the operational window past however long a human can stay awake, so you can get aircraft that are more maneuverable, faster, with longer ranges.
To add, the weight of the human isn't much, but the weight of the chair; safety equipment for the human; the extra metal needed to make space for the human, the chair, and the safety equipment; the extra distance for equipment to steer/handle from the pilots seat as opposed to a distributed system all add up to sooooo much space and weight.
Also you can put fuel in the center (you usually don't cuz a human is sitting there) and that changes so much about the mechanics of the wings and the control system capabilities. The limiting factor was humans, but the next limiting factor disappears with the humans in the form of limited distribution patterns of fuel weight/less room to shift fuel during flight phases for different manoeuvres