>production is being ramped up, possibly to double>US SOC have halved their order>there are no other known customers>a UA news channel favoured for official announcements is publishing teaser footage of (acknowledged) OK ANG 137th birds
Surprised they'd buy these over the A-29. I guess they must have gotten a good deal.
>>65113494Why wouldn't the Ukrainians just order a bunch of Super Tucanos?
>>65113512>Why wouldn't the Ukrainians just order a bunch of Super Tucanos?I don't think Brazil is selling to them.Also, they have to get someone to pay for them and Skyraiders should be available under the PURL program, Tacos probably not.
Man, I wonder when these will end up in War Thunder.
>>65113494Why two flir ?
>>65113494The actual skyraider mogs this tarted up farm equipment so fucking hard. This is a flying lawn tractor with a couple rockets strapped on and zero gun at all. Obsolete before it was even conceptualized.
>>65113589>Why two flir ?Probably combined with a laser and so that they can continue painting a target while flying away from it and potentially scoping out or lasing a second target while they do so.
>>65113494Current speculation is production is ramping up to produce "white tail" planes for an as yet unnamed FMS customer in the middle east/Africa. And while the deal isn't inked yet, L3Harris wants airframes ready to ship when the order is placed.SOCOM OA-1K orders are largely being replaced with drone orders. The FY26 request was cut from 12 to 6, and the FY27 budget only authorizes 2 airframes.
Aren’t they insanely overpriced?
>>65113704Like $25-35M each.Not exactly a shock for a super limited production military aircraft.For reference, the MQ-9 reaper drone in FY27 budget costs around $40M just for the airframe, when you include the ISR/targeting pod, hardened data links, and ground support equipment, it's closer to $100M each.
>>65113511Look into the program, A-29 won every competition, but the GOP stonewalled acquisition in favor of the AT-6. AFSOC spited them and chose the Air Tractor with the intent to not use them anymore.>>65113512Ukraine asks for someone to augment anti-shahed missions. Brazil won't sell them because of BRICS shit.
>>65113512These are for boosting cruise missiles to launch speeds and altitudes. 2 centerline hard points I wonder if one of them could manage a Taurus. It allows things like rough field concealed launch/aircraft in poor or contested airfield situations. Near borders.
>>65113494WhatAnUglyPieceOf ShitThe og skyraider was by no means an elegant design, but it had a charm to it. This is like a cheap chibi Tonka Toy knockoff made by a Chinese company in Burma.
>>65113511Nope, the tucano is already way overpriced at 20m per unit. The airtractor is at minimum 40m per unit. And this was before the fancy shit they now want to put on. This is just corruption.
>>65113829>The airtractor is at minimum 40m per unit. And this was before the fancy shit they now want to put onLol no.Budget documents show they're generally ~$25-30M each, tho sometimes more, it depends on how many they buy that year.
>>65113829>the tucano is already way overpriced at 20m per unitthat includes everything like training and mx packages, not just the airframe
>>65113494
>>65113844While the A-29 (EMB-314) often carries a sticker price around $18M–$20M for foreign partners, that is for a relatively "slick" airframe.The A-29s you see sold to Nigeria or Lebanon are essentially light attack trainers. For SOCOM to use them, they would require the "Sky Warden" suite (or equivalent), which is what drives the OA-1K's cost.They want high-end WESCAM MX-15D or MX-20 turrets. Integrating these into the A-29’s airframe and glass cockpit architecture requires expensive structural and software modifications.Standard export A-29s lack the secure, encrypted US-only tactical data links and SATCOM suites required for special ops coordination. Adding these is a multimillion-dollar per-unit upgrade.Finally US contract law requires the airframes to be built in the US, which means it wouldn't be Embraer building them, it would've been Sierra Nevada Corporation building them, which would've added a US labor premium bringing the ACTUAL floor price right up to ~$35-45M where the OA-1K is already at (or below).
>>65113494>have perfect COIN/low intensity warfare plane literally meant for this shit since the 60s>literally built to be cheap, simple to mass produce, easy to fly, capable of doing several jobs>retire it>pay for an juiced up air tractor instead
>>65113857The OV-10G+ planes from the 2010s were one-offs using donated airframes. And it still costs millions per airframe to bring them into combat ready status, and it would've been impossible to scale that effort up further without reviving the entire production line, which would've cost hundreds of millions.
>>65113880that's still peanuts for the cost of the overall program of making the fucking air tractor a modern weapons platform
>>65113884No it's not.L3Harris didn't have to build a factory to make the wings or the fuselage. Air Tractor already produces ~70 of these airframes a year. The "NRE" for the OA-1K was strictly about integration of sensors, armor, and hardening.For the OV-10 you would have to re-establish the entire tier-two and tier-three supplier network. Every landing gear strut, every canopy hinge, and every specialized bolt would be a custom order because the original factories either changed tooling or went out of business decades ago.Militarizing the Air Tractor cost roughly $170M in initial R&D/NRE. Re-starting a dead line like the OV-10 from scratch has been estimated by RAND and the GAO for similar platforms (like the S-3 Viking) to start at $1B+ before the first new airframe even rolls out.So far the ENTIRE OA-1K program to date has spent ~$1.35B including the 10-12 planes already delivered, and another 45 units funded.You're either bad at math, or just willfully ignoring it because you want a "cooler" plane.
>>65113903You're acting like simply making things from scratch is always necessarily a huge expensive process but this is a plane that already used plenty of common parts and cheap manufacture, the original Bronco prototype was built in a single garage. It's not a fighter yet, it doesn't need highly specific tools to make high performance alloys and parts, whole fucking thing can be fiberglass and carbon fibers.
>>65113913Anon, the only operators of OV-10s today is a Calfire. And they don't even maintain them, they just lease them, and even those are expected to be replaced in time.
>>65113913You're a delusional moron who still thinks it's the 1960s/70s.That's not how modern aerospace procurement works; we have laws around how this gets done and you don't get to ignore that law. Your idea is moronic, if you can't understand how/why, you don't belong in the conversation.The 1960s Bronco used "common parts" from an era when mechanical linkages and analog gauges were standard. A modern OA-1K or A-29 uses a digital backbone. Every flight control, sensor, and weapon station has to be integrated into a secure software environment. Writing the code so the pilot can fire a Hellfire while the MX-20 sensor tracks a target is the most expensive part of the plane. You can't "garage build" a MIL-SPEC fire control system.Also your fiberglass/carbon idea is fucking moronic for a plane that is meant to be able to land and be serviced by a bush mechanic with some hand tools. If your wing has a bullet hole, with aluminum you just patch it. With carbon/fiberglass you have to replace the whole fucking thing, or have to do clean-room level inspections to determine if a fix is even possible without ruining the structural integreity of the entire piece.You have no idea what you're talking about and need to stop.
>>65113928How is it that the US military has managed to shit out dozens and dozens of iterations of drones without a massive scale production line opening up and shutting down for each? Exactly what would a COIN plane do that would make it massively more complicated than a reaper drone with a cockpit?
>>65113944Name a drone of similar size/scope and i'll tell you how much it costs and why you're wrong for making the comparison.
>>65113944>Exactly what would a COIN plane do that would make it massively more complicated than a reaper drone with a cockpit?It's cheaper and requires a lot less infrastructure for the aircraft. There's a reason why third world countries choose aircraft like the A-29 over a drone.
>>65113944Do you have any idea how much a reaper drone costs...?Lmaowhat the fuck are you even talking about?And man rating a reaper drone would cost even more than the drone version, which is already more expensive than the OA-1K.
>>65113850I love happy airframes
>>65113958That's about what we're talking about here>>65113949(insert any MALE drone here)
>>65113968>That's about what we're talking about hereNopeThat's a naked Reaper price.The OA-1K includes the cockpit and all the flight control gear.A Reaper requires a $15-25M ground station to control it. Also when the airforce buys Reapers, they don't buy 1, they buy 4 of them and then buy a ground control station along with them, that TOTAL purchase is ~$150-160M, which is around $40M per airframe when you divide it up that way. Also Reapers cost ~$4-5k/hr to fly, the OA-1K is less than $2000/hr.And that's before we even get into the absurdity of adding a cockpit and all the shit required to man-rate a reaper. > (insert any MALE drone here)If you still believe this, you're just proving to the rest of the thread, even more than you already have, that you have no place in this conversation, and you have no idea what you're talking about.
>>65113589As someone who has played flight sims, I have no idea why the sky warden needs 2 sensor balls. I have never, ever needed two cameras. Not even during the most intense base defense missions.
>>65113494>fixed gearI know they idea is to be cheap but this is too cheap.
>>65114215>I have never, ever needed two camerasIt *is* a two-seater.
>>65113511>In December 2011, the Air Force selected the Embraer A-29 Super Tucano over Beechcraft's AT-6B Wolverine.[6] Congressional opposition, spearheaded by allies of the Kansas-based Beechcraft, repeatedly blocked initial purchasing attempts, and despite several encouraging experiments, the program failed to regain its momentum.[7] The Air Force ultimately canceled the program in early 2020.
>>65114427And when SOCOM started their version in 2021 they let Beechcraft enter, but everyone kinda knew their submission was never getting picked after the congressional bullshit they pulled on the LAAR contract. It sucks that Sierra Nevada Corp said fuck off to the A-29 in the 2021 SOCOM bid. Sierra Nevada corp would end up submitting the MC-145B instead. Which left the A-29 with no US builder and thus it didn't make it to the prototype stage of the SOCOM contract.
>>65114445>It sucks that Sierra Nevada Corp said fuck off to the A-29I thought they just saw the writing on the wall. If the A-29 got submitted again, the same thing would've happened.
>>65114462It was a totally different group of people making the decision, and the fact they snubbed the beechcraft entry should already tell you the program WASN'T the same and didn't end up at the same results.
There's a few different varieties of armed Air Tractors. I've seen pictures of them somewhere in Africa with .50 and 7.62 gatlings mounted. I also thought someone was making a cannon pod specifically for them but I can't remember the specifics. Strafing faggots in an armed crop duster sounds like a good time either way.They're also much, much bigger than you'd think.
>>65115544Here's one with a pair of .50s mounted. The space used for the chemical tank in the ag version is used to store ammo for the guns.
>>65113614>This is a flying lawn tractor with a couple rockets strapped onThey have nearly equal payloads. The only major difference is the original Skyraider has a higher top speed, but thats from shoving a massive 2,800hp radial in it
Can't they just refurbish those old F-4 phantom? Put some civilian small jet engines.
>>65115789In my ideal world the word "just" being used inappropriately causes someone's testicles to explode
