Comments by "Titanium Rain" (@ChucksSEADnDEAD) on "Are conventional Anti-Aircraft guns obsolete in modern warfare?" video.

Still not realy armored otherwise they wouldn't even take off.
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Oh boy you sure watched some History Channel documentaries. How about you tell us how many gun kills were scored with the internal gun after it's introduction?
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The wall of lead is typically radar guided.
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Modern production F-16s cost around 100 million. You're not getting 20 million dollar F-16s unless you buy heavily used ones.
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@heinrichnitschke5485 What are the sources? Are they describing 1990's prices? The Royal Bahraini Air Force will be getting 16 F-16s for 1,12 bil which amounts to 70 mil per aircraft. Taiwan's F-16 deal including 66 aircraft and 75 engines amounted to 8 bil which is roughly 120 mil per aircraft + extra engine. Morocco wants to buy 25 F-16 Block 72s plus pods and weapons for 3.787 bil. If we subtract the cost of the 40 AIM-120s and 60 GBU-39s, that's around 31 million, leaving the cost of the F-16 plus pods and other equipment as 150 million. The upgrade of older F-16s to V will cost 42 million per aircraft. Slovakia will be getting a 2.91 billion aircraft for 14 Block 70/72s, 16 engines and an assortment of weapons. I'm straight up just adding up the cost of the weapons, ignoring that some are just guidance kits, so worst case scenario it's 41.6 million for 30 AIM-120s, 100 AIM-9Xs JDAM and Paveway kits plus 400 bombs. The F-16s plus pods, equipment and extra engine will be roughly 200 million. Let's take it back a good while - in 2009 the Block 50 sale to Turkey was a 797 million contract for 14 aircraft. That's 50 million per plane. It's perfectly reasonable that a decade later, a better capable F-16 costs 70-90 million per aircraft, with contracts reaching over 100 million because of spare parts and equipment. Do you think a modern F-16, with the capabilities you expect from a modern F-16, can be obtained for the prices of the previous variants? When you buy a F-16, you're not just buying the aircraft. You're buying the entire assortment of pods and extra equipment that act as force multipliers. Not to mention that the radar you get today is more advanced than the radars you got in the past. You need to buy all the bells and whistles that the F-35 already carries internally.
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Even if you fitted railguns on the battleship it would still need to go inside the range of missile defenses and land-based aircraft to target the coast.
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The F-4 didn't need a gun because it's job was defending the fleet and getting in gun range gave the opponent the time the sink the ship you're going to need to land on later. It was pressed into a fighter and even multirole job that it wasn't designed for, and still succeeded at it. The Navy didn't use internal-gun armed variants, and the USAF scored about 90 percent of their kills with missile.
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The F-4 was made without a cannon because if you wasted time getting into guns firing position, the Soviets would have already sunk the carrier you're supposed to land on. In essence, it did not need it because if it did, it had already failed its job and the aircraft would have to be ditched into the ocean. The USAF losses against MiGs were a result of terrible situational awareness leading to slow flying F-4s escorting strike packages getting struck by hit and run attacks where having a gun wouldn't have made a lick of difference because the Americans could not speed up and catch up the fleeing MiGs. These ambushes were partially countered with MIGCAP and in 1972 fully countered with Teaball. Navy F-4s had situational awareness provided by ships and thus had a good kill ratio from flying more offensive missions with no easy way to flank around them. https://www.historynet.com/great-kill-ratio-debate.htm The F-4 swatted plenty of MiGs over Vietnam, 90 percent by missile.
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@steffennilsen2132 And the Navy flew F-4 Phantoms with no guns too.
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And it got a whopping 6 kills out of over a hundred missile kills by USAF F-4s during Vietnam, negatively impacted flight performance and forced the use of a smaller radar. Meanwhile the Navy never adopted internal guns. Hmmmm. Also, the F-4 was a naval interceptor and it definitely did not need a gun because you want the interceptor to meet the attacker and fire a missile at range. You won't have the time for the getting into gun position nonsense or else the carrier you're supposed to protect will eat a few anti-ship missiles.
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@apiece_ And exactly how does that counter anything I have said?
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@LupusAries "Missiles can fail to hit as the most recent US kill has shown, both Niner-X Sidewinders failed to hit and a third shot with the AMRAAM was needed." - The missile failed because of flares - which it should have rejected, but that's another argument and there's theories why that happened. The radar guided missile didn't. So in the end, the problem was still solved by the missile. "Imagine that being a Fulcrum that tries to fight it out instead of running" - If the AMRAAM missed, having a gun wouldn't have determined the outcome.
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@LupusAries "How so?" - Any plans on a gun that fires backwards? If your argument hinges on the defending aircraft reversing on the attacker due to both IR and radar missiles failing, I think that the fight was already lost. "And it's another case of the situation being perfect for the US fighter, it had the iniative" - I don't have the real statistic with me but I'm pretty sure it's widely known that most aircraft shot down were unaware they were being attacked, so having the initiative is the goal to score the kill. "Yes the missile should reject the flares, but then whole point of Flares is to confuse missile" - You're making my argument for me, yeah no shit the IR missile missed, it was fooled with countermeasures intended to fool it. The problem is that the 9X should have an imaging sensor capable of determining that a flare doesn't look like an aircraft. Even pseudo-imager seekers had some degree of flare rejection. So yeah, we're paying for tech that should work but it isn't. "You can't expect countermeasure designers to sit around with twiddling their thumbs doing nothing...." - The problem is, the seeker was outwitted by something that probably did not have the amount of design you seem to be implying. Look at footage seen by the 9X seeker. It can see the fuselage, the wings, etc. If your job is designing a canister that burns how exactly are you going to make it look like an aircraft? https://youtu.be/myuZUxS3Uww?t=243 This stuff was available in the 90s, if a hockey puck can determine what kind of SAM site it's looking at its outline against the ground clutter how exactly can we fool an AIM-9X with a burning tube? Raytheon better come up with a good excuse.
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A cluster munition can be dropped from aircraft and glide until release, after which the drones fly under their own power.
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@limedickandrew6016 the JSOW can glide for like 70 miles, and 20 minutes is plenty of time if the cluster is dispersed right on top of the targets/if the drones are allowed to descend and glide individually to greater ranges without using power. The aircraft dropping those cluster munitions would be obviously escorted by EW and SEAD aircraft.
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@limedickandrew6016 What makes you think the JSOW isn't a decoy meant to get the defenses to turn the radars on so that they can get tagged by HARMs?
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@limedickandrew6016 Huh... you can't decoy a radar emission, it needs to be real or else the missile won't pick it up. If the enemy is willing to waste money building functional radars to soak up HARM those decoy radars are not actually protecting them from the drone payload so in the end it was all fruitless.
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@Marinealver It wasn't shot down by AA.
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