I don't think you're getting my argument that the simple act of any airplane or missile turning will cause that object to lose speed. The harder you turn, the more speed you lose. The faster you go, the more speed you lose while turning.
Of course - and as state-of-the-art interceptors reach 9g, no missile can hurt them - as they reach 16 just at ignition... Roll Eyes
Of course, the Phoenix can turn around at 16g.
I did point out that in the final stage of a missile's flight, it will probably pull over 50g to try to hit its target. (I'm not so sure about the Phoenix - it's a big, heavy, missile designed to hit cruise missiles and bombers. Smaller missiles like the Sidewinder definitely pull more G's.)
Also, longer range missiles like the Phoenix and AMRAAM, unless fired from closer range, run out of fuel long before they reach their targets. That 16g acceleration, which increases as it runs out of fuel, is used to get the missile to a high altitude at high speed. They have to coast to the target after that. For quite a bit of their range, if your target simply makes a 1.5g bank and turns the other way, they'll outrun your missile.
Do you really believe that?
G-suits are no modern invention - even the pilots of the F100 Super Sabre had them - 1954 (in contrast to the MIG-pilots). Also the F4 Phantom hat G-Suits, but the plane could only stand 6g.
No plane of WW2 could stand 9g.
I'm fairly certain I remember watching a Dogfights! episode about a Divebomber in the Pacific facing up to a few Japanese Zeros, and surviving because he repeatedly pulled high G turns in order to meet each one head-on. You're right it might not have been 9 g, but I'm very sure it was 6g or more, and his rear gunner kept passing out from the turns.
I'm also sure the F-4 could survive more than a 6g turn, but I can't find anything except a snippet claiming a very brief 11g jink to evade a SAM.
The Global Hawk is an aircraft for long-term surveillance - and not designed for high velocities. And for this mission, this shape and dimensions of the wings are optimal.
Yes, the shape is that of a high-altitude glider (very long, thin wings), and isn't all that much smaller than another high-altitude, long range reconnaissance aircraft, the U-2. Its wingspan is actually longer than the U-2.
Further: The size has no meaning and AI pilots save a lot of stuff inside the aircraft (pressurized cabin, live support system).
Actually, that's just about all you'll save by removing the pilot. You still need the engines, control surfaces, landing gear, internal gun magazine, hydraulics, computers, radar, fuel tanks, backup generator, and probably more. If you want the airplane to carry missiles, it needs a powerful enough engine in order to actually carry the weight. If you want to download live TV feed from the sensors, you need an antenna of a certain size and power. The longer you want to be able to fly it, the more fuel you need.
Absurd. You cannot 'wish' the stiletto to be the super-interceptor. It is the oldest interceptor from human's arsenal - and no use against bigger and faster UFOs. There's no way to upgrade the stiletto to the level of the Dragon interceptor - which will replace it.
Where did this come from? I never said anything about the Stiletto being a superior design. My point was that the Saracen is a human design for human needs - so it is not a throw-away fighter by any means. The Stiletto is designed in the 2020's as a very maneuverable fighter to combat a completely unknown alien force. Neither were expected to have a mission life of 5 missions. Personally, if I were looking at lifetimes like that, I'd just use SAM batteries.
Today, at a speed of mach 2 you cannot simply alter your course - as even slight turns cause high g-forces. The production of g-forces is always the result of speed and turnaround. And at mach 4, it is much worse. There's nearly no chance to avoid missiles.
Yes, at higher speeds you get more acceleration at lower degrees-per-second turns. This is one reason turns at high speeds are wider and take longer to complete. However, you also get a lot more drag at high speed. That's another reason turning at high speed is tricky - if you turn too hard, you'd point the other way very quickly, but now you're travelling very slowly.
And what do you mean by no chance to avoid missiles? If I'm going mach 4, and you're going mach 4, and we both have a similar compliment of long range mach 6 missiles, then I'll simply launch my missile before you do and turn the other way. Now I'm heading away, probably at mach 3 because I lost a little speed in the turn. If I shot my missile and turned away from a far enough distance, any missile you launch will run out of fuel and crash before it reaches me. If you chase me to get in range of your own missiles, my missile will kill you first. Of course, if you simply turn away, then my own missile will run out of fuel before it hits you. In that case, we start all over again.
Of course, that's just one scenario. Maybe you have a wingman and I don't, in which case I'd probably just run away because no amount of agility will help me survive if you're playing smart. An AI-controlled plane pulling 12g's might survive one missile, but definitely not a second missile. Maybe I have a wingman, in which case I can try to lead you into a situation where he can shoot you with a missile, but you can't shoot either of us. Maybe I'd try to play chicken, getting into the range where I'm guaranteed a missile kill (but conversely, any missile you launch also kills me). Maybe I'd try to lead you into a friendly SAM battery. There are plenty of tactics I can use that give me an advantage without needing the extreme endurance a human pilot can't cope with.
Of course, as soon as you're controlling an antimatter-propelled UFO with advanced ECM and ECCM, firing hypersonic antimatter missiles at my little terran fighter with short-range TV-imaging missiles, then the game changes. In which case, if I were the commander, I should be shot if I keep trying to face your UFOs head-on with my little fighters. I need to use better strategies and tactics than you to get the upper hand.
And BTW: If you need a computer for combat - an AI pilot - why use a human pilot at all?
I'd use the computer for the things it's best at - calculating bomb release times, computing gun sight vectors, and missile hit probabilities. It's not so good for luring opponents into traps, reacting to unusual situations, and making tactical decisions.
The alien materials are not that advanced in UFO:AI. The Gallileo probe entered the atmosphere at an altitude where the atmosphere is much less dense than on earth (at an altitude of 10-20 km). Further: The probe was made to 2/3 of heat shield and one millimeter away from its course and the probe gets destroyed.
The Galileo probe entered the atmosphere at interplanetary speed - 47.4km/s. On Earth, the speed of sound at sea level is 0.34029 km/s, so that makes the probe travelling around Mach 140. The Jovian atmosphere is mostly hydrogen, though, so it'd be travelling at a lower Mach number than that. The fastest atmospheric speed alien materials can expect are reentry speeds - about 7.7km/s if entering from LEO, or about 11km/s if entering directly from Lunar orbit. That's Mach 23 and Mach 32, respectively. Well, actually the alien's engines let them slow down more before entering the atmosphere, so their limit could very well be lower than that.
Pure speculation. There's nearly no use for your flexibility. It's simply that way: 'Go to these coordinates and intercept the enemy'.
What if the enemy isn't exactly where those coordinates say it is? How does it determine which of the radar contacts it has actually is the enemy? Which strategy does it use to engage the enemy? What if the enemy behaves differently from what the AI and its programmers expected? There's a lot more to fighter combat than simply trucking missiles out to a point and launching them at any radar contact that comes near.
Any kinetic impact would comletely detroy any human aircraft. Plus, the rest of the antimatter will react with normal material and detonate - with several kilotonnes TNT. This additional effekt of the alien antimatter rocket-launcher is described in the UFO-wiki.
The missile simply does not contain enough antimatter to make that large an explosion. The wiki says nothing about that - the closest it gets to is saying "even a proximity detonation of the antimatter fuel is enough to take out a fighter jet," which leaves wide interpretations on how close this proximity detonation is. What's likely is that most of the fuel has been expended by the time the missile reaches its target, leaving just enough to turn the casing into hot shrapnel.
There's very little difference between this hot shrapnel and modern missile shrapnel, except that modern is probably Mach 4 and alien is twice that. That's only four times the kinetic energy, assuming the same mass of shrapnel.
Furthermore - no human will survive a dropout at mach 4 at an altitude of 10,000 meters. Even today no one survies a dropout at mach 2.
Then jettison the entire cockpit. The B-1, a supersonic bomber, already does that.