I love the idea of a stealth A-10 because it flies in undetected but is immediately detected the second it starts firing because of the GAU-8 Avenger… because knowing us we’d keep it on the stealth fighter so it can still rain down depleted uranium freedom rounds for whatever necessary purposes and the pilot can’t help but use the big ol’ freedom gun because it’s just there, begging to be used
A random Chinese/Russian/North Korean soldier watching a stealth A-10 fly past their defenses undetected and turn everyone around them into red mist and craters.
Why... Why would you make an A-10 stealth? Its the A-10. Its loud and proud, with the most iconic sound in existence... Its not meant to be quiet and sneaky... That defeats the entire purpose...
If you ignore the ammo cost and the recoil, this could be a "decent" video idea. Using the recoil from some artillery, create a flying wing with rear facing cannons, instead of using more "conventional" means of flight.
Regarding the Boeing Pelican that's not really an airplane, giant ekranoplans are officially classified as ships and not aircraft regardless of what they look like because they are ground effect vehicles. The soviets built a number of them, the KM and then the Lun class.
Interwar aircraft were ridiculously small. I went to the Southampton aviation museum many years ago and the Supermarine racing float plane was disassembled on the floor as they needed to reposition it in the museum. My god, me as a teenager would never have fitted into the cockpit, it was absolutely tiny, and so sparse. I thought it was a 1/2 scale model at the time but learning it was the real thing peaked my interest in interwar aviation.
Your take in the A-10 is completely flawed, because the aircraft would only opwrate oncr air superiority is established. That goes for ANY close air support missions, in fact. There will be ZERO CAS from ANYTHING unless air superiority has been achieved in that AO.
I would have imagined a future A-10S (Stealth Warthog) would have more of a diamond-wing shape rather than the single-shape horizontal wings. A diamond shape would also allow the wings to be reversed, like the original straight wings were.
the ECOfly Smart M160 uses a smart roadster engine which is only 0.7l. id say that way more efficient then a prius. pretty awesome tho that flyout lets you do this kinda stuff
I did a little bit of analysis to determine the cost feasibility of a stealth A-10. Changing its metal components to composite appeared to be cost feasible. Then coating the composites with a radar absorbent material would not prove to be a problem. However, as you brought it up here, the challenge would be hiding the giant turbofans. I wondered how that would affect RCS, and it turns out that's probably the main limiting factor that would keep an inexpensive rebuild from happening, as the propulsion system would have to be completely redesigned to keep that part of it better hidden. The angled redesign of the A-10 that is popular is not 100% unrealistic, as the idea is to specularly reflect the radar in a direction other than its source (that's how the F-117 works). However, simply adding angled cowling to the turbines would not keep the blades from lighting up like radar disco balls as they end up sweeping through a wide range of angles and reflecting a significant amount of radar waves back at the detectors presumably near the radar source.
Which would you consider to be more famous/celebrated, the Avenger or the Garand? maybe the AK-47? I'll probably get some biased answers from an aviation community but I'm still curious
