[foxyv]

Higher Gs isn't a significant advantage anymore. Sidewinder missiles hit 60-70Gs and no plane you can make will out pull one. Modern dogfights often last for a single turn or even less. It's often a matter of who sees the other first. Israel's new Python-5 is able to attack jets in a 360 degree sphere and has lock after launch. Countermeasure rejection has gotten so good a merge is essentially a death sentence.

The real reason we are working on autonomous fighters is that we can build jets faster than we can raise and train pilots. It takes 4 years and $5 million dollars to train a pilot, and they will take decades to become seasoned. You can make an F-16 in a few months for $30 million.

[maxglute]

High G can significantly reduce no-escape zone of AA missiles with limit fuel for final maneuvering. A performant unmanned fighter with more endurance to play the energetics game can make anti air very expensive, and possibly impracticable depending on context.

[foxyv]

High Gs in a BVR engagement aren't that great either. You lose too much energy engaging in that much acceleration. The killer feature of BVR is the trade. If your loyal wingman will happily fly well into minimum abort range and launch high PK shots, against manned targets you can almost guarantee a kill.

[maxglute]

>against manned target

Against manned targets sure, US air power can stomp most manned adversaries already. But drive behind autonmous fighters is really about versus against autonomous platforms of peer powers, and really that's PRC, who has AI pilot program of their own. So future scenario that what we'll probably see is a bunch of attritable, high performance loyal wingmans designed to draw as much expensive interceptors as they can against each other, i.e. engagements becomes a unmanned platform attrition / IAMDs magazine depth equation. Question is, who wins in that numbers game? I would say land aviation with better logistics vs carrier aviation with limited magazine depth.

Then what does that mean when this tech proliferates, especially local vs outside power projection - because autonmous piloting removes expensive intitution building layer and will enable many shit-mid tier powers to now have airpower. Maybe even very competent air power depending on training data.

[foxyv]

Personally I think it will be more like a bunch of slow, high altitude, cheap drones with high performance BVR missiles and datalink. The missiles have just gotten too dang good in the last 20 years. When the MAR is over 50 miles on the deck, energy fighting just doesn't matter anymore.

[topspin]

This is absolutely correct. The air-to-air game is very complex and high-G is still a thing.

And yet, this is small ball stuff. When I think of all the possible ways autonomous combat aircraft will revolutionize air combat it's a bit overwhelming. We're talking about unlimited, fatigue-less, highly effective, fearless piloting of aircraft that can assume designs that don't have to accommodate or risk a human.

If it isn't yet an arms race, it will be when some conflict sees someone punch way above their weight because they have the supersonic robots and the other guy doesn't.

[maxglute]

>they have the supersonic robots and the other guy doesn't

Should also consider what happens when more actors have supersonic robots if/when this tech proliferates. AI pilots is going to lower barrier for _real_ airpower for small/medium size powers. Not just US is training relevant models. And AI pilots = accepting future is going to be full of attritable platforms, whose going to be making/selling all the cheap disposable defense hardware. Just like drones, commoditizing theatre level air power is going to be gamechanging.