Would Standing Pilot Arranged Jet Fighter Aircraft Ever Be a Thing?

[Spacescifi]

I was thinking about how we handle g-force better lying down on our backs, and how it probably would hurt a pilot's lower back in the sitting position when they pull a bunch of gees in a tight turn all of a sudden.

Typically there is no reason to pull off such tight turns, but who knows? Maybe super manuverable jet fighterd will be made one day that can do that casually.

 

Anyways... any merit in making standing seat jet fighters today or would the miltary industry just laugh at the idea if anyone presented it to them?

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

 

 

[Nuke]

you also want to keep the cross sectional area of the aircraft down. you could always go back to the og prone configuration implemented by the wright brothers. though i cant imagine that being all that great for acceleration, but when doing climbs and dives maybe. a traditional seat still seems like it gives you the most stable position from which to control the aircraft.

Edited April 6, 2024 by Nuke

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Even Cylons sit 

[Codraroll]

 

[snip]

lying down on a gimballed couch, like in The Expanse, is something that vaguely resembles what you're looking for. That way, the pilot always gets the G forces front-to-back. It probably is no good arrangement for a fighter craft, though, as it requires a lot of space.

Edited April 29, 2024 by Vanamonde

[StrandedonEarth]

Let me think about that for a second... Um, no. Do you want to try standing while pulling 6 gees, and still control the aircraft? I don.t, not even if it's fly-by-brainwaves.

[Exploro]

Quick reading of the wiki page on human tolerances to g-forces, having a pilot standing will not enhance resistance to g-forces. In fact, it would do the opposite in that the body would be aligned with the aircraft's vertical axis, along which most of the g-forces a pilot sustains occurs along. If the aim is to improve the magnitude and duration of g-forces a pilot endures, ideally you would want the pilot to be laying down, perpendicular to the axis of the g-forces.

Of course, that is not a practical orientation. As a trade off, many fighter planes use seats that recline to reduce the effects of g-forces on the pilot. An Aircraft Stack Exchange post puts the angle around 13-15 degrees. The post indicated the F-16 seat has an unusually large reclining angle of 20 degrees.

Edited April 8, 2024 by Exploro

[magnemoe]

12 hours ago, Exploro said:

Quick reading of the wiki page on human tolerances to g-forces, having a pilot standing will not enhance resistance to g-forces. In fact, it would do the opposite in that the body would be aligned with the aircraft's vertical axis, along which most of the g-forces a pilot sustains occurs along. If the aim is to improve the magnitude and duration of g-forces a pilot endures, ideally you would want the pilot to be laying down, perpendicular to the axis of the g-forces.

Of course, that is not a practical orientation. As a trade off, many fighter planes use seats that recline to reduce the effects of g-forces on the pilot. An Aircraft Stack Exchange post puts the angle around 13-15 degrees. The post indicated the F-16 seat has an unusually large reclining angle of 20 degrees.

Yes fighter pilots don't have problem because the planes acceleration who is maximum around 2 g but sharp turns pushing them down into the seat, here the only limit is how much the plane and pilot can handle. 

[monophonic]

15 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Yes fighter pilots don't have problem because the planes acceleration who is maximum around 2 g but sharp turns pushing them down into the seat, here the only limit is how much the plane and pilot can handle. 

Practical experience tells that, for squishy meatbags i.e. humans, the limit is 9g and even that only for a very limited duration. Meanwhile smaller non-squishy things are turning in excess of 60g and functioning like a machine, i.e. what those missiles in fact are. If it wasn't far more efficient to have the light weapon do the turning instead of the heavy launcher, manned aircraft would have been replaced with drones in air combat long ago.

[K^2]

10 hours ago, monophonic said:

If it wasn't far more efficient to have the light weapon do the turning instead of the heavy launcher, manned aircraft would have been replaced with drones in air combat long ago.

Eh, you say that, and it's not wrong, but there are a couple of counterpoints to consider that make things spicy. First, there's modern BVR combat, where aircraft need to get into their weapons range, hopefully undetected, launch, risking revealing themselves, and bolt. That last part is crucial, because firing the weapons is when you're most likely to revel yourself, and if the enemy gets even an approximate fix on you, they can fire their stand-off munitions and let them acquire once they're a lot closer to you. And per the g-factors point, your odds of outmaneuvering a missile that got a firm lock on you are not good. Of course, you have a variety of coutnermeasures, but by far best option is to simply not be in range of the missile heading towards you. You're firing your weapon in the direction you're heading, extending its range, and the enemy is, hopefully, not as lucky, and you can put some extra distance by flying fast in the opposite direction. If you're in a 160km range of a modern AIM-120D that will streak towards its target at mach 4, if the enemy returns fire with a similar weapon, and you've been running at mach 2 the whole time, you'd be around 240km away by the time it catches up to you, which means it probably won't. The risk you're running is any aircraft or ground launchers that are concealed from you and are closer than the intended target. If that concealed enemy's missile is still in that 160km / mach 4 ballpark, you need to be more than 105km from a potential counter-launch to be confident you'll outrun it. And that means you have a 55km margin of advantage. Not bad.

The problem is apparent once you start doing the math on the turning around and bolting part. At mach 2, pulling 5g the whole time, your turning radius is about 10km, and doing 180 takes about a minute and a half. By the time you finish your turn, you're basically the same distance from whatever could have answered, and their mach4 missile has advanced by 30km. Now, it's 30km out of its max range, but you have less time to run. The net effect is that it costs you about a third of that, 10km, in your margin. It's "only" 20%, and you still take it, because you still have a 45km advantage, but oh, how you wish you could turn faster. And maybe you do, take the risk, and pull the stick a little harder. After all, you could take a sustained turn at 6-7g in training, and even push into 8-9g in bursts. But is that something you can do in combat conditions? Sometimes pilots find out that they can't the hard way. Anything we could do to push that limit further out, is going to give your pilots an enormous edge and safety margin in modern air combat.

 

So that brings us to the second point. Drones. A drone operator is more likely to stay cool in combat, performing as well as they have in training, the drone can in theory take higher g load, and losing it isn't as bad as losing a plane and its pilot. It can still be expensive, but now you can play with the balance of cost-to-build vs survivability with both fewer moral conflicts and without running a risk of burning through your pilots too fast if the conflict gets hot. And we're seeing examples of all of this in practice, ranging from drones meant to perform the same functions as a jet fighter, to lighter drones performing CAS missions or serving as loitering munitions. And it sounds like we should just dump the piloted aircraft and go with drones for everything, but we're already seeing major limitations in real combat conditions. Communications in the battlefield can be spotty. We see a lot of effective uses of electronic countermeasures, particularly effective against long range drones. We've seen everything from unreliable contractors cutting coms, to jammers ranging from ECM trucks to portable devices. A lot of this stuff has been largely theoretical until now, and the battlefield evolves really rapidly, but we're already seeing ECM measures around Moscow, for example, being very effective against long range drones that have no problems striking targets at that range in other parts of Russia. We're also seeing a bullseye painted on any control centers. They become priority targets for enemy strikes. If all of your trained pilots are sitting in one truck, even if they're far away from the combat, they are far easier to hit than if they're spread between multiple aircraft moving in the sky. If you have a reliable satellite link, maybe you can put your pilots far enough away, but even that depends on the nature of the conflict, and in practice, you often have to balance that against response times. As a result, the long range and marine drones are being controlled from central locations, but CAS and loitering munition drones are usually operated with the infantry or artillery units they're attached to, and so they're set up with their command, making them juicy targets for artillery and even ballistic missile strikes.

We're still shifting more and more focus towards drones, but I don't think we're going to replace piloted aircraft any time soon, and so the ability to pull high g turns to get out of harm's way is still going to be very much desired. Anything we can do to improve that, people are going to be trying.

On 4/5/2024 at 7:50 PM, Spacescifi said:

I was thinking about how we handle g-force better lying down on our backs, and how it probably would hurt a pilot's lower back in the sitting position when they pull a bunch of gees in a tight turn all of a sudden.

It really would be lying down for a plane, as its lift can push much harder than its thrust. But that's kind of part of the problem. For a turn, you want to lie down. Lets say we fix the problem of seeing from that position with displays. Engines on afterburner are still capable of more than 2gs. That's basically a guaranteed brown-out if you're flying feet first. Well, what if you fly head first? Now you have all sorts of safety issues while landing... And overall, just the fact that you might be accelerating or decelerating at a few g while also performing a high g turn means the angle has to adjust. Putting a full tilt bed in the plane sounds like a nightmare.

Where I can see this working is space. Main rocket pushes you forward, and that's the thrust you get. It does give you that "standing" position. And we see it recognized in sci-fi. The example I'd use is Starfuries in Babylon 5. Whoever designed these, put a lot of thought into it. They have four main thrusters with a smaller reverse attached to each. They are placed in X-configuration on "wings" (really just structural pilons), with more span horizontally than vertically. Why? Because just like with linear acceleration, rotation generates g forces on your body, and you can be spun around your vertical axis a lot faster than around any horizontal axis. So if you need to make a rapid turn, that's the direction you're going to go. That's where the realism in the show ends, as you're seeing these things engage in dogfights using projectile weapons. That is a lot more cinematic, of course, but we'd still be dealing with BVR combat in space, if it ever becomes a thing, and you'd have all of the considerations from the first part of this post coming up. The difference is that now you don't have air to play against. You can go as fast as you want, but you better have fuel left to slow down afterwards. And that's the same fuel you'll be burning doing any sharp turns. So now it's really a game of how fast you want to be trying to get out of a missile's range, and how hard you're prepared to maneuver once it catches up to you. How much is it keeping in reserves while "playing dead" coasting towards you?

I hope we'll never find out. As much as wars suck, wars in space are going to suck more. All the worst of unpredictability of air combat, fear of being marooned on a sub, and being on the wrong end of a bombing raid rolled into one. And all of it goes not only for soldiers, but for any civilians in the crossfire.

[kerbiloid]

Btw. Classics.
 

Spoiler

Idk if the forum rules allow the title of this highly artistic movie, thus only a screenshot.

 

[Spacescifi]

5 hours ago, K^2 said:

Eh, you say that, and it's not wrong, but there are a couple of counterpoints to consider that make things spicy. First, there's modern BVR combat, where aircraft need to get into their weapons range, hopefully undetected, launch, risking revealing themselves, and bolt. That last part is crucial, because firing the weapons is when you're most likely to revel yourself, and if the enemy gets even an approximate fix on you, they can fire their stand-off munitions and let them acquire once they're a lot closer to you. And per the g-factors point, your odds of outmaneuvering a missile that got a firm lock on you are not good. Of course, you have a variety of coutnermeasures, but by far best option is to simply not be in range of the missile heading towards you. You're firing your weapon in the direction you're heading, extending its range, and the enemy is, hopefully, not as lucky, and you can put some extra distance by flying fast in the opposite direction. If you're in a 160km range of a modern AIM-120D that will streak towards its target at mach 4, if the enemy returns fire with a similar weapon, and you've been running at mach 2 the whole time, you'd be around 240km away by the time it catches up to you, which means it probably won't. The risk you're running is any aircraft or ground launchers that are concealed from you and are closer than the intended target. If that concealed enemy's missile is still in that 160km / mach 4 ballpark, you need to be more than 105km from a potential counter-launch to be confident you'll outrun it. And that means you have a 55km margin of advantage. Not bad.

The problem is apparent once you start doing the math on the turning around and bolting part. At mach 2, pulling 5g the whole time, your turning radius is about 10km, and doing 180 takes about a minute and a half. By the time you finish your turn, you're basically the same distance from whatever could have answered, and their mach4 missile has advanced by 30km. Now, it's 30km out of its max range, but you have less time to run. The net effect is that it costs you about a third of that, 10km, in your margin. It's "only" 20%, and you still take it, because you still have a 45km advantage, but oh, how you wish you could turn faster. And maybe you do, take the risk, and pull the stick a little harder. After all, you could take a sustained turn at 6-7g in training, and even push into 8-9g in bursts. But is that something you can do in combat conditions? Sometimes pilots find out that they can't the hard way. Anything we could do to push that limit further out, is going to give your pilots an enormous edge and safety margin in modern air combat.

 

So that brings us to the second point. Drones. A drone operator is more likely to stay cool in combat, performing as well as they have in training, the drone can in theory take higher g load, and losing it isn't as bad as losing a plane and its pilot. It can still be expensive, but now you can play with the balance of cost-to-build vs survivability with both fewer moral conflicts and without running a risk of burning through your pilots too fast if the conflict gets hot. And we're seeing examples of all of this in practice, ranging from drones meant to perform the same functions as a jet fighter, to lighter drones performing CAS missions or serving as loitering munitions. And it sounds like we should just dump the piloted aircraft and go with drones for everything, but we're already seeing major limitations in real combat conditions. Communications in the battlefield can be spotty. We see a lot of effective uses of electronic countermeasures, particularly effective against long range drones. We've seen everything from unreliable contractors cutting coms, to jammers ranging from ECM trucks to portable devices. A lot of this stuff has been largely theoretical until now, and the battlefield evolves really rapidly, but we're already seeing ECM measures around Moscow, for example, being very effective against long range drones that have no problems striking targets at that range in other parts of Russia. We're also seeing a bullseye painted on any control centers. They become priority targets for enemy strikes. If all of your trained pilots are sitting in one truck, even if they're far away from the combat, they are far easier to hit than if they're spread between multiple aircraft moving in the sky. If you have a reliable satellite link, maybe you can put your pilots far enough away, but even that depends on the nature of the conflict, and in practice, you often have to balance that against response times. As a result, the long range and marine drones are being controlled from central locations, but CAS and loitering munition drones are usually operated with the infantry or artillery units they're attached to, and so they're set up with their command, making them juicy targets for artillery and even ballistic missile strikes.

We're still shifting more and more focus towards drones, but I don't think we're going to replace piloted aircraft any time soon, and so the ability to pull high g turns to get out of harm's way is still going to be very much desired. Anything we can do to improve that, people are going to be trying.

It really would be lying down for a plane, as its lift can push much harder than its thrust. But that's kind of part of the problem. For a turn, you want to lie down. Lets say we fix the problem of seeing from that position with displays. Engines on afterburner are still capable of more than 2gs. That's basically a guaranteed brown-out if you're flying feet first. Well, what if you fly head first? Now you have all sorts of safety issues while landing... And overall, just the fact that you might be accelerating or decelerating at a few g while also performing a high g turn means the angle has to adjust. Putting a full tilt bed in the plane sounds like a nightmare.

Where I can see this working is space. Main rocket pushes you forward, and that's the thrust you get. It does give you that "standing" position. And we see it recognized in sci-fi. The example I'd use is Starfuries in Babylon 5. Whoever designed these, put a lot of thought into it. They have four main thrusters with a smaller reverse attached to each. They are placed in X-configuration on "wings" (really just structural pilons), with more span horizontally than vertically. Why? Because just like with linear acceleration, rotation generates g forces on your body, and you can be spun around your vertical axis a lot faster than around any horizontal axis. So if you need to make a rapid turn, that's the direction you're going to go. That's where the realism in the show ends, as you're seeing these things engage in dogfights using projectile weapons. That is a lot more cinematic, of course, but we'd still be dealing with BVR combat in space, if it ever becomes a thing, and you'd have all of the considerations from the first part of this post coming up. The difference is that now you don't have air to play against. You can go as fast as you want, but you better have fuel left to slow down afterwards. And that's the same fuel you'll be burning doing any sharp turns. So now it's really a game of how fast you want to be trying to get out of a missile's range, and how hard you're prepared to maneuver once it catches up to you. How much is it keeping in reserves while "playing dead" coasting towards you?

I hope we'll never find out. As much as wars suck, wars in space are going to suck more. All the worst of unpredictability of air combat, fear of being marooned on a sub, and being on the wrong end of a bombing raid rolled into one. And all of it goes not only for soldiers, but for any civilians in the crossfire.

Oh I know... real life is like the classic old videogame asteroids... only in 3D and with all the real life physics installed for additional difficulty.

 

I once played Oolite (based off the original Elite with a lot more mods), and even though it is essentially airplanes in space, there is a "dark laser" laser mod I installed where laser beams are invisible as they should be in vacuum.

I can tell you space combat became much harder as I could no longer gauge where to fly to totally dodge the laser beams.

At best I could dodge and pray.... worse yet was when I was tailing an enemy ship and I get hit by laser fire.

I had a hard time knowing who shot me (ships often have both fore and rear lasers), as I did'nt know if the one I was chasing zapped me with rear lasers or if his "friends" came to his aid.

[Vanamonde]

Some comments removed. If a question annoys you, please just skip to the next thread rather than make fun of the person asking the question. We were all born knowing nothing and asking questions is one way to learn.