Aetochoric/Arthuristan Dynamics Spitfire
| Spitfire | |
|---|---|
| File:Spitfire 6.png | |
| Seafire from 13th "Excalibur" Fighter Squadron, Commonwealth Navy Fleet Air Arm | |
| Role | Air superiority fighter |
| Manufacturer | Arthuristan Dynamics |
| First flight | 1990 |
| Introduction | 2003 |
| Status | In service |
| Primary users | Commonwealth Air Force (48, 48 on order) Commonwealth Navy (24, 24 on order) Eagleland Air Force (12, 40 on order) Eagleland Navy (12, 8 on order) Royal Afalian Air Force |
The Spitfire project is a model of 5th generation heavy tactical fighter, jointly developed by Arthurista and the Eagleland to create an aircraft possessing an overwhelming margin of superiority against cold-war -era designs and gradual supplanting legacy fighters in their respective inventories.
Construction and propulsion
The new fighter is first and foremost a carrier-adapted design. It combines high thrust engines, thrust-vectoring nozzles, movable leading-edge extension, canards, aerodynamic instability and advanced fly-by-fibreoptics flight-control system to achieve supermaneouverability. The variable-cycle turbofans are designed to produce sudden bursts of acceleration, giving the aircraft a significant advantage by allowing it to climb and gain altitude suddenly, or to dictate the tempo of a battle by being able to engage or disengage at will.
Like all Arthuristan fighter designs, the Spifire is designed for shortfield performance in mind, featuring engines capable of reverse thrust to rapidly bring the aircraft to a halt, aided by a drag-chute which can be deployed in the rear.
The Spitfire has a combat radius of 1,480km with internal fuel. With two conformal drop tanks, combat radius is increased to 2,000km at some cost to increased weight, allowing the navalised Seafire variant to escort attack bombers to nearly the limits of its range. The conformal drop tanks are fitted to the pair of 'wet' hardpoints located on wingroots. They are coated with radar-absorbent materiel and shaped so that when attached to the aircraft they conform to the shape of the external hull and thus presents minimal increase in RCS. Nevertheless, unlike conformal fuel tanks (CFTs), they are disposable, allowing the fighter to fight with optimised aerodynamics characteristics when necessary, a strategy deemed costly but viable by planners.
Aside from its shaping, the aircrafts' stealth characteristics are further enhanced by its fibre-matte radar-absorbent coating, which is far less maintenance intensive than the old style metallic stealth coating of the F-117 era.
Unlike typically-fragile last generation stealth aircrafts, the Spitfire 2 can withstand a significant degree of punishment in combat due to its multiple-redundancy design. For core systems, there may be up to three to four layers of redundancy. If the aircraft is damaged, the aircraft's Self-Repairing Flight Control System allows it to automatically detect failures in its flight control surfaces and compensate using its other control surfaces or thrust-vectoring, enabling a far greater degree of resiliency in combat than many other fighters in the market.
When flying at cruising speed, the fighter's FCS automatically adjusts the canards in a way which minimises the aircraft's front-aspect RCS.
Seafire variant
The navalised Seafire variant features several modifications, including a strengthened undercarriage for the additional structural stress caused by carrier take-offs and landings. The engines' ability to use reverse thrust is uprated for more effective braking on landing. All these features incur a measurable cost in weight, leading to slightly reduced maximum speed, although the increased wing size of the Seafire means that it is roughly as maneouverable as its land-based variant.
Avionics
Spitfire 2s are equipped with the Mark 2.5 agile beam LPI AESA radar and the Silver Bow IR Array. The former has a publicly declared A2A detection range 300km for a 1m2 target, although it is an open secret that the real figure is more than 350km (400 km with narrow, focused beams) and very difficult to jam due to its wide frequency spread. It is also complemented by L-Band emitters on the wingtips, which are optimised for the stealthy 5th-gens (although unable to present accurate targeting data) and a tail X-band, providing all round radar coverage.
The Silver Bow system features six IR sensors located around the body of the aircraft, enabling all-round, spherical coverage. This is complemented by the long range Advanced Electral-Optical Targeting System (AEOTS), an IRST suite dedicated to A2A tracking and target-cueing. The aircraft's IR sensors are capable of detecting non-afterburning aircrafts from up to 150km away and has demonstrated the ability to track ballistic missile launches from a distance of 2,200km. The Silver Bow has been further upgraded with Quantum Well Imaging Photodetectors ("QWIP") technology, able to simultaneously image in multiple wavebands, including very long wavebands emitted by cool surfaces, significantly enhancing its ability to detect aircrafts designed with IR stealth in mind. It is thus far superior in terms of performance to most contemporary airborne IRST systems. In A2A it is used defensively as a way to detect hostile missile launches and offensively to cue missiles independently of the radar. It also doubles as a FLIR for day/night navigation and in air to ground mode.
The Hydra Receiver Array is composed of a network of radar-warning receivers and Infrared-warning receivers placed around the airframe. While primarily intended as a defensive suite, its ability to detect low-powered beams from LPI AESA radars also allows it to be used as a powerful passive sensor with all-round, spherical coverage. They can also be linked to the aircraft's main radar. Together with the IR arrays, it allows the cueing of AAMs using passive sensors alone. The avionics’ ‘data fusion’ capability allows for the presentation of the high volume and complex load of information from all these sensors as a single, easy to use picture projected into the TopSight Helmet Mounted Display, allowing for maximum combat effectiveness and minimal workload for the pilot. The combination of the helmet mounted display and spherical, all-round coverage sensors also allows the pilot to make maximum use of the capability of high off-boresight weapons in close WVR air to air combat. Pilots enjoy the benefits of data fusion in helping him or her process and make use of the data gathered by the plane's sensors. His reaction speed is also significantly increased with the use of the cockpit's adaptive direct voice control system.
Electronic Warfare
The aircraft’s EW ability is derived from two systems. The first is simply using the powerful Mark 2.5 AESA radar in electronic attack mode to cause physical damage to enemy radars using high powered emissions. The second is the aircraft’s ERIS EW suite. While conventional EW systems can detect, track and jam radar signals, the ERIS is capable of ‘Active Cancellation’ by sampling and analysing incoming radar, then transmitting the signal to the enemy’s radar slightly out of phase, thereby cancelling out the returning radar signal.
Complementing the EW suite are more mundane countermeasures: flares, chaffs and the like, working with the stealth design to make the aircraft very difficult to track and hit.
Networking
The new fighter is able to network with the three battlenets of the Arthuristan services (ARTEMIS of the People’s Air Force, ATHENA of the Navy and ARES of the People’s Army) via three methods. The first is simply using the ubiquitous Link 16. The second, a stealthier option: secure data-linking with other stealthy aircrafts via frequency-hopping and anti-jamming technology. The third is to use the aircraft’s radar as something akin to a WIFI, able to broadcast and receive data at a far faster rate than the Link 16 system. These three mechanisms not only allows the Spitfire 2s/Seafire 2s to share information with other units, but also enable the aircrafts to share tracking, targeting and other data over the battlenet, allowing them to warn each other of potential dangers immediately after detection by one platform and guide each others' weapons towards their targets.
Armaments
The Spitfire features a pair of internal weapons bays, each fitted with eight hardpoints. Four additional hardpoints are located in the central recessed well of the fuselage's centre-line, allowing for the carriage of small AAMs in a semi-conformal manner which minimises their RCS. More weapons may be mounted on the wing hardpoints if stealth is not a consideration.
Its primary weapons in Arthuristan service are the Emmerian AIM-145C Medusa and AIM-160 Golden Eagle. At short range, it is compatible with a wide-range of heatseakers such as the ASRAAM, IRIS-T, Python-5 and Vympel R-73, backed up by a cannon. Despite being designed primarily as an air superiority fighter, it possesses some ground attack capability. Common A2G munitions such as JDAMs, JSOWs can be carried internally, while larger ordnances such as anti-ship missiles can be attached to external hard points at some expense to stealth.
Specifications
- Crew: 1 (2-seaters available)
- Length: 21m
- Wingspan: 14.5m
- Height: 6.05m
- Empty Weight: 21 tonnes
- Loaded Weight: 30 tonnes
- Propulsion: 2 x Arthuristan Dynamics E-21A variable cycle thrust vectoring turbofans (170+kn with afterburners)
- Maximum Speed: 2,800 kph at altitude
- Supercruise Speed: 1,700-2200 kph at altitude
- Service ceiling: 22,000m
- Combat Radius: 1,480km on internal fuel, 2,000km with conformal drop tanks
- RCS (optimised flight profile): 0.0001m2
- Armament: 1 × 27mm cannon, 8 x internal hardpoints, 4 x recessed semi-conformal hardpoints, 6 x external hardpoints under the wings for A2A or A2G munitions
- Sensors: Mark 2.5 agile beam LPI AESA radar (120 degrees Azimuth, 16kw), wingtip L-band and tail x-band emitters, Silver Bow DAS system, Advanced Electral-Optical Targeting System (AEOTS) IRST, Hydra Receiver Array
- Countermeasures: ERIS EW suite, chaff/flare launchers
See also
- Aircraft of comparable role, configuration and era