>>65605256
>Is Europe finally starting to catch up to
rofl
>or even push past the USA in air supremacy?
roflmao

>>65605259
Europe is really stepping up, increases to military spending all around, a 200 billion dollar funding grant to Ukraine, talks of increasing conscriptions all around, etc. It's not unreasonable to assume Europe is closing the former military gap rapidly

>>65605256
GCAP, FCAS, and? FCAS is dead btw so you're at 1

>>65605256
Europe has one serious sixth generation effort that might produce something this side of 2040, but is still in the concept phase. That’s about where the NGAD program was in 2016. Every other program is very aspirational to put it politely. So no they’re not surpassing anything when no program has even gotten as far as a flying demonstrator when the US is actively moving designs into production.

>>65605256
>GCAP - Nearly fell apart because of the UKs retardation and was only saved because of Japan hard demanding that the UK actually take their responsibilities seriously. Expected to first fly next year
>FCAS - Fell apart and France can't go at it alone unless they whore themselves out to a sugar daddy.
>KFS (Swedes) - Hasn't left concept stage. Expected to first fly in 2030 or 2031
>>65605263
Swedes are working on their own 6th gen at the moment. So in reality Europe only has 2 but neither of them won't enter service until the same time as the F-47 and F/A-XX

>>65605272
GCAP is not flying next year. A completely British demonstrator called CAFD is flying in 2028 after a schedule slip. GCAP isn’t even all that close to a design freeze, let alone a flying prototype.

>>65605256
>the EU has 3 committees looking into drafting whitepapers for looking into sixth-generation fighter projects compared to the USA's 2 sixth-generation fighter projects
fixed

>>65605272
>>KFS (Swedes)
ive got a bridge to sell you

>>65605281
I'm only repeating what the Swedes are saying. Do I believe them? Not until they have a demonstrator flying while orders for a low rate production have been placed down
>>65605275
I was referring to its demonstrator which is allegedly the CAFD

>>65605288
CAFD technically predates GCAP, as the contract was awarded when the program was still Tempest. I’m sure it will be a useful test asset, but I also think it’s a bit of a misrepresentation to call it a flying GCAP when it predates the program and 2/3 of the major partners are not involved in the effort.

>>65605256
>3
The only european 6th gen program is the GCAP

There is only 1 european 6th gen program.

GCAP


FCAS is dead as of a few months ago and the french answer is "Super rafale" (just iterating/upgrading Rafale again), and paired with a stealth UCAV. Their current plan calls for a 6th gen demonstrator in the mid 2030s, but it's almost assuredly going to be unmanned, not manned.

Team Gen 6 (Germany/Spain/Sweden(?)) is similarly almost certainly going to produce a UCAV if anything, they don't have the money or the industrial capability to produce a manned 6th gen fighter. And even if they go the UCAV route, they're still stuck buying EJ200 or F414 engines from UK/US since they don't have a domestic engine to pull from.

So yeah, that leaves GCAP as the only game in town.

>>65605275
>GCAP isn’t even all that close to a design freeze
Design freeze is scheduled for the end of 2027, that's ~14-15 months? What reality do you live in where that "isn't even all that close"?

>>65605305
Yeah, it's fully funded by british money, italy and japan aren't paying a dime into it.

Further, japan already did this with the X-2 shinshin. This is just BAE's way to prove they can also build a manned stealth demonstrator.

Since it isn't a 1:1 to GCAP anyway, it has minimal direct contribution to GCAP. The only thing it really has going for it is that the S-ducts are apparently the same from GCAP, so they'll get flight testing data on that. But it uses EJ200, which won't be used in GCAP, it's smaller than GCAP will be, and isn't using the same manufacturing techniques for the airframe that will be used on the final GCAP airframe.

>>65605256
One would be enough if it actually worked.

>>65605275
>A completely British demonstrator called CAFD is flying in 2028 after a schedule slip
I think officially they're still saying late 2027.

>>65606900
At Farnborough this year a BAE exec said they’re now targeting early 2028. Didn’t get much attention though.
https://breakingdefense.com/2026/07/what-we-learned-about-gcap-at-the-farnborough-airshow/

>>65605272
>Hasn't left concept stage. Expected to first fly in 2030 or 2031
wat

>>65605256
Don't they keep abandoning development of these things once they find out how much they cost?

>>65605259
fpbp

>>65605482
I think we are likely to see a split between true 6th gen (US, China, possibly GCAP (maybe not) and 4.5++++ with 6th gen features, ie drone integration, that lack stealth from the likes of the rest of Europe, Korea etc.

>>65606991
China is at least 20 years away from 6th gen.

J-36 uses 3 engines because they don't have the engines capable of providing the electrical power needed for true 6th gen sensors/compute, that 3rd engine gives them extra electrical power, but at a MASSIVE penalty in weight/space/thermals, and they still are likely barely breaking 200kW.

Compared to F-47 which is likely targeting nearly 1000kW, or GCAP which is likely targeting in the 500kW range.

And we know china isn't 10-15 years away from a new engine because if they were they wouldn't bother spending billions developing a tri-engine airframe. They'd just develop a twin engine airframe and wait for the new engines to get built. So the fact the J-36 exists at all is proof china is at LEAST a full airframe generation away from a 6th gen equivalent engine.

>>65606991
>china
lol

>All US 6’th Gen aircraft to be designed by Boeing
I’ll take the euro slop

>>65607004
I think you are massively underrating how much power can be extracted from modifying existing engines. GE extracted 1MW from an F110 all the way back in 2017 with the engine continuing to produce thrust.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20170011631/downloads/20170011631.pdf

>>65607153
China has never shown anything but traditional mechanical gear driven power extraction.

Also, generating that power on the ground outside of an airframe on a test stand is totally different from generation that power in a flying airframe, the hardest part isn't necessarily generating the power, but dissipating the heat for continuous operation during long range flight.


If a design forces you into a three-engine configuration to meet electrical, thrust, and thermal demands, that’s an engineering compromise driven by propulsion maturity limitations, not an optimal 6th-gen design choice.

>>65607166
Chinese aerospace has never been in a particular hurry to show off the inner workings of anything they’re doing. All we knew about their sixth generation programs were rumors that they’d probably been working on something, up to the point they started flying multiple airframes publicly. Only one of which has three engines, with the other clearly being something that doesn’t fit into current conventional fighter doctrine. Additionally, at this point there’s very little reason to believe they can’t manage to put together a functioning PTMS on an airframe that size. Are their engines as good as the cutting edge western ones? No, but I don’t see a reason as to why they’d be incapable of extracting the equivalent of a few hundred horsepower from each engine on a trijet, or fail to provide cooling air on a platform with such large intakes. I’m inclined to take what they’re doing very seriously when there’s a good chance my country could be fighting them inside the next decade.

>>65607215
Then you're retarded.

You see "very little reason to believe they can't manage to put together a functioning PTMS" that can handle MULTIPLE hundreds of kilowatts? Something the US has been attempting for 15+ years and still hasn't shown working yet?

Just admit you don't know what you're talking about, or you're a chink shill lmao.

Why the fuck should I even believe they can build something to match the F-35's PTMS? Let alone something in GCAP/F-47's tier of performance.

>>65607222
They penetrated F-35 so deeply that they were comfortable building a damn clone of the thing. That they’re so damn good at squirreling their way into secret databases is probably the reason I barely get to know what my country is working on before it enters operational testing. Your insistence that they can’t possibly know how to generate electricity, presumably because it’s the only thing your favorite program has going for it, isn’t something I’m going to put much stock in when if they can get their platforms to IOC around 2030 and manage a production rate of at least 2/month for each airframe means there will be hundreds of the damn things flying around by 2035. They are a much more significant threat than the Russians have managed to be in living memory, and I want my damn Congress to pass budgets that allow us to procure sufficient weapons to maintain deterrence, which they are so far failing to do.

>>65605256
The EU has more people than the USA and in reality vastly more wealth. It's also run by [people who reject the idea of war between democracies and hope that the US can be one again instead of having a kremlin dictator decuide who is in the whitehouse before it is too late. Europe knows war. Americans mainly just read about it and daydream. One minute you're a great empire or nation and feeling all mighty and the next thing is you are a drunk bitch in the gutter with her knickers around her ankles. There is nothing exceptional about the USA theer either, war is a fickle mistress . People think men control war but it's like plague or storms or hurricanes and it controls men and comes when it wants and smiles on and favors no one it dances with.

23.10.2026
Tanks — 12439
Armored fighting vehicle — 25597 (+3)
Artillery systems — 51501 (+54)
MLRS — 2230 (+1)
Anti-aircraft warfare — 1720 (+1)
Planes — 449
Helicopters — 356
Ground robotic systems — 3003 (+6)
UAV — 577209 (+2067)
Cruise missiles — 5138
Ships (boats) — 35
Submarines — 2
Cars and cisterns — 166088 (+447)
Special equipment — 4851 (+5)
Military personnel — aprx. 1574620 people (+1830)

>>65607403
>People think men control war but it's like plague or storms or hurricanes and it controls men and comes when it wants and smiles on and favors no one it dances with.
No, that's simply the stance that your overblown Yuro ego demands

>>65607417
I shit on you jingoboy. The only re4aosn Americans like you ahve delusions about your warfighting capacity is you managed to arrive late and stasy out of most of the fighting in WW1 and WW2. The US war of Independence barely rates as a bar room brawl in Europe. The only decent war you ever had was your civil war and even that was an amateur hour joke you needed immigrants scrapionghs from europe to fight for your shit. You're on your knees for KGB dicatiors the same ones who killed your men in Vietnam and Korea. You're weak as piss. Strenght comes form inside a nation, it's unity and will and America is so divided and easily manipulated the kremlin decides who is president for you. You have no hope in a conflict with Europe, none starnge that it's teh Europeans weho are doi9ng all they can to avoid war and jingoism while you bray like a mule thing war favours you in some magical thinking way. You'd be better off doing as your ancestors did, show up late towards the end and try and take all the credit, as a nation you are not cut out for war. especially now since the op of your goverment is decided by foreign dictators, you just daydream about it like some fucking teenager with delusions.

>>65607281
>They penetrated F-35 so deeply that they were comfortable building a damn clone of the thing
A dual engine cargo cult copy with similar appearances isn't a clone. Try harder, chinkshill.

>>65607428
>Strenght comes form inside a nation, it's unity and will
Meanwhile France is on fire kek.

>>65607403
Euro seething detected. Your country is brown

>>65607428
Why are euros such pussies?

>>65607431
I don’t give a shit how well it turned out. They still went and made the damn thing, benefiting from a lot of r&d my tax dollars paid for, and with better stealth than what they had before. It doesn’t need to be as stealthy as an F-35, if it’s good enough just to shoot first against an F-15 it will present a massive fucking problem when you look at the composition of US and allied forces in the region.

>>65607456
>if it’s good enough just to shoot first against an F-15
thats a big if though

>>65607439
Yeah the whole world noticed how the US giovernment seemed to celebrate the Russian controlled subersion efforts lined right uip with their mass immigration as hybrid warfare shit (worked for them in the USA allowed them to take over the top posts in the goverment without firing a shot. Like I say

>>65607428
>You're on your knees for KGB dicatiors the same ones who killed your men in Vietnam and Korea.

You'll sit and watch w2hile your president strokes off the kgb who slaughted your own soldiers for decades in sideshow wars and ran the border immigrati0on convoys that destablised your politics and insitgated your BLM riots and your own move will be to clap slowly as you paroot moscows propaganda sheets. America can't fight a fuck wart, look at the state of you, take a look in the fucking mirror. Ther kremlin is in the whitehouse, and controls the FBI Xi has every single detail of American military secrets in the Pacific via Mscow and your defnse secretary took a dump on the graves of every nation that fought beside you in Iraq and Afghanistan. You have no warfighting allies left, they are gone. . Then there is (you). People like you are exactly how the USA lost the next big war already before the first shot.

>>65607466
Holy ESL Saar

>>65607465
I mean they did their best attempt at copying the external geometry of an F-35, and that is going to count for a lot. RAM helps but shaping is overall still king, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing such a big push towards tailless. We did most of their homework for them there and if nothing else they’ve got a couple thousand years experience cheating at school

>>65607474
enjoy you cloud spellchecker that logs your every post here retard. I already knew you were as thick as dried shit. I'm sure your moscow jeet FBI enjoys reading them.

>>65607403
>23.10.2026
>Tanks — 12439
>Armored fighting vehicle — 25597 (+3)
>Artillery systems — 51501 (+54)
>MLRS — 2230 (+1)
>Anti-aircraft warfare — 1720 (+1)
>Planes — 449
>Helicopters — 356
>Ground robotic systems — 3003 (+6)
>UAV — 577209 (+2067)
>Cruise missiles — 5138
>Ships (boats) — 35
>Submarines — 2
>Cars and cisterns — 166088 (+447)
>Special equipment — 4851 (+5)
>Military personnel — aprx. 1574620 people (+1830)
No fucking visual proofs.

>>65607428
>so mad he's typoing
LOL

>>65605256
>the eu has

no the compartimentalization should be

>whatever germany is involved with it most surely will fly years later from anything that germany ISNT involved with

>>65607403
i just love how after budanov said that ukraine needs 30.000 men per month to fight suddenly ukraine started killing more than 2000 people per day

>>65607476
>I mean they did their best attempt at copying the external geometry of an F-35
You don't need to "penetrate an F-35 deeply" to copy the external geometry of an F-35 anon. Just boot up the latest Ace Combat and the "external geometry" is right there to copy. It's all the parts that aren't external that are the problem.

>>65607447
Because even the chinks are laughing at them and calling their countries glorified museums.

>>65607619
You can quite easily look it up right now, China stole massive amounts of data from the program in at least the 2007-8 timeframe, and has hit at least suppliers at multiple points since then. Frank Kendall testified before Congress that yes what they got was absolutely sensitive enough that it sped up the development of their own programs significantly. It’s a matter of public record, they got away with a lot. I just can’t comment on their internal systems because they’ve not exactly given us a clear look at them. External geometry is self evident and much easier to point to.

>>65607628
Knowledge and execution are completely different problems. This isn't WW2, it's not merely enough to know the "how" anymore, engineering itself is a serious challenge. The fact that the J-35 is a twin engine design illustrates that concept perfectly.

>>65607630
It doesn’t illustrate that at all. F-35 is a single engine in large part because it would introduce undue mechanical complexity to connect two engines to a lift fan, and they intended all variants be common. They intend to use it off their carriers, and it’s no secret that twin engine designs are preferred over single engines for carrier aircraft. I’d confidently say the USN would prefer a twin engine design, because every program they came up with in the 90s before they were told they’re part of JSF now had that feature.

>>65607633
I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here for shits and giggles, but you know as well as I do that they simply don't have an engine that can put out the required thrust. It's really that simple.

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395 KB JPG

>>65607639
It has been party line out of the Pentagon for well over a decade that yes, they compromised a lot of F-35 data, they put what they learned to use in their own programs, and it was of major benefit to them. I don’t give a damn what benefit you think you’re giving me, it’s a matter of Congressional record.

>>65607644
>Quickly changes the subject
Chinkshill, you being able to compromise F-35 data does not mean that the J-35 isn't anything more than a cargo cult copy that does little more than superficially resemble the F-35 in appearance.

>>65607646
Right. Former USAF acquisition chief is shilling for China too apparently when he’s says it’s bad to let them walk off with the blueprints. Good shit here man.

>>65607650
Yeah no shit, China being able to access classified data is a serious problem. None of that has anything to do with the J-35 and F-35 having little in common besides a similar exterior shape.

>>65605256
>european 6th gen fighter projects crashing out from disagreements between the working-together phase
>US 6th gen fighter already awarded to Boeing, now waiting for them to make the fighter

Right, euro supremacy.

>>65607653
What can you back that up with? Do you know what’s going on inside the thing? They have a history of making a pretty decent copy here, and they had plenty of stolen information to work with. They’ve done it before, look how hard they ripped off the H-60 and C-17. If they weren’t worried they could get anything out of it NGAD development would’ve looked like ATF and JSF, where John Q Public got to look behind the curtain a little. Instead we’ve got a handful of censored renders and possibly a sanctioned leak of the demonstrator to youtube ghost hunters who happened to have spent a couple days by Groom with a camera. Keeping it that far under wraps costs money, they wouldn’t spend it if there was little to lose from exposure.

>>65607668
>They have a history of making a pretty decent copy here
They have a history of aping the easiest parts to ape, i.e. the fucking shape. Look how long it took for them to master the ball point pen, let alone make an engine comparable to the F135 or the F-35's PTMS which you were insinuating earlier. An easy way to tell whether something is indeed "high-tech" or not is to see how much China struggles with copying it. Clearly, manufacturing shapes isn't it.

>>65605256
>Weren't even able to develop their own 5th gen fighters
>Suddenly expect them to be competent enough to develop a 6th gen

>>65607669
They don’t just do the easy shit anymore. For fucks sake they have at least two different likely supersonic tailless aircraft flying around right now, and a handful of tailless drones as well. That’s been the white whale of stealth fighter technology since at least the mid 90s when the major primes started researching next generation stealth. There’s not a single non classified fully tailless supersonic aircraft you can point to anywhere else in the world. It’s likely the NGAD demonstrators had to show that off, but again good luck finding if and when that happened.

>>65607682
>. For fucks sake they have at least two different likely supersonic tailless aircraft flying around right now
Shapes are the easy part, chinkshill. It's telling that chink engines have hardly evolved past Russian junk despite having the entire fucking engine in front of them to study for decades on end.

>>65607684
Yes it’s all shapes. Flight control laws are just that simple, a kid could do them. It’s absolutely not a massive problem to maintain stability and maneuverability at supersonic speeds without tail surfaces. FATE and ICE were really just a hobby not serious studies.

>>65607688
>Flight control laws are just that simple, a kid could do them
Yes, they're kiddie level compared to making engines comparable to the F135. Anything else you want to add or are you still going to go on ad infinitum about shapes?

>>65607692
Jesus Christ you Euros are fucking retarded. They’re a credible threat and I want them taken seriously so we don’t show our ass if we end up fighting them. Has the last half decade not managed to teach you all that ignoring the problem didn’t make it go away?

>>65607694
>you Euros
Lmao.
>I want them taken seriously so we don’t show our ass if we end up fighting them
Yes, our tech should be decades ahead so we can dunk on them as hard as we dunked on Saddam. Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with the chinks lacking the capability to copy the actual high tech parts like engines and the PTMS.
So I'll repeat myself, anything else you want to add?

>>65607698
Unfortunately insisting it’s just better doesn’t do anything but instill complacency. They aren’t Saddam, they spent 35 years after having watched. Saddam making damn sure of it. All resting on laurels does is ensure the USAF never Saddams anyone again, which is absolutely what listening to you and yours ends with. The only reason that sort of overmatch existed to begin with was because we spent decades planning against not just what they claimed they had now, exaggerated or not, but by extrapolating what those claimed capabilities might look like ten or fifteen years down the road.

>>65607700
>Still dodging the issue of chink copying capabilities
It's ok to admit that you're wrong, anon. No one's gonna laugh.

>>65607702
I’m not dodging anything I just think you’re a retard. They have high tech shit. I take it seriously. The USAF takes it seriously. The USN takes it seriously. They don’t need to be perfect copies. If they’ve managed 80% capability it’s a gigantic problem. Looking at new procurement they’ve motivated I highly doubt it’s any lower.

>>65607705
>If they’ve managed 80% capability it’s a gigantic problem. Looking at new procurement they’ve motivated I highly doubt it’s any lower.
Motivation = capability? Looks like we have an actual retard.

>>65607707
Motivated in the US jackass. They’ve directly caused at least three new A2A missile procurement programs, with presumably at least one USAF one still in the black. We know their missiles are at least decent, they’ve demonstrated very long range kills proving that moving to counter them was a good idea.

>>65607709
The USN and USAF have long running histories of overselling enemy capabilities to keep the senile fucks in Congress from cutting their funding dating back to the USSR; if they were to state the realistic assessment that China is a threat but not a peer, some retard elected by another bunch of retards might interpret that as an excuse to stop funding the things that allow the US military to stay as far ahead of the rest of the world as it is.

>>65607709
No one's arguing that all military procurement and development should stop and we should wait for the chinks to catch up. The issue in question is that you made the following extremely retarded points
> Additionally, at this point there’s very little reason to believe they can’t manage to put together a functioning PTMS on an airframe that size
This is really fucking hard and chinks have demonstrably struggled with replicating things with far less complexity.
> Are their engines as good as the cutting edge western ones? No
They're barely at parity with Russian ones which have essentially stood at a standstill for 2 decades, which are themselves a far cry from Western ones, and that's with multiple copies of the engine in front of them to study and copy precisely.
Need another example? They took apart a DUV machine to try to copy it and had no idea how to put it back together. We know exactly what their limits are when it comes to copying. Anything that the US struggles with is something the chinks would have problems even approaching.

>>65607715
They are an uncomfortably near peer at this point. We just had to announce we’ve weaponized satellites because of how hard they’ve been fucking around in space. The Navy just had its worst logistical disruption since probably WWII in no small part because their imaging satellites were used to give targeting information to Iran. I don’t think they necessarily win the fight, but I think they stand to give us a much bloodier nose than I’d like. I don’t really like having to say that either.

>>65607716
When I look at the size of the radome and IR optics on the front of J-36 I just don’t think they can be that limited by power or cooling. I believe that third engine is likely there mostly for power generation and cooling air, and while it isn’t an ideal solution it is very probably a good enough solution, which is an issue when there are likely to be over a hundred of them flying around by the middle of next decade. I don’t believe they would be able to keep a trijet with a large radar flying if they did not have a PTMS solution that exceeds the the ~40kW Honeywell claims they can squeeze out of the current system. If Collins’ claims are at all true it’s not a particularly cutting edge system at this point, as they claim they can hit ~80kW with their EPACS in the same footprint.

>>65607717
>The Navy just had its worst logistical disruption since probably WWII in no small part because their imaging satellites were used to give targeting information to Iran
We're talking about fuckhuge, stationary bases anon. Any random person with access to even a commercial imaging satellite can give Iran that level of "targeting information". The main learning point from that experience is that fuckhuge, stationary bases are sitting ducks, not that China is somehow a near peer because they tell Iran where some fuckhuge, stationary base is.
>I don’t believe they would be able to keep a trijet with a large radar flying if they did not have a PTMS solution that exceeds the the ~40kW Honeywell claims they can squeeze out of the current system.
Of course they can. They'll just lie about the actual capabilities. Wouldn't be the first time and certainly wouldn't be the last. Meanwhile the USAF will look at this, assume the worst and develop some alien-tier bullshit to deal with this and anyone who didn't already understand this will start wondering what the fuck we were all worried about when the 2 clash in some hypothetical future war.

File: Silbervogel_Entwurf_von_E(...).png (1.73 MB, 1338x880)

1.73 MB PNG

>>65605256
Don't even bother with the mid-war upgrades, go straight for the Sänger Amerikabomber.

>>65607730
Those giant stationary bases are the load bearing columns that the joint force would collapse without, and at present we don’t have a good replacement for, if one is even possible. We’ve never before fought with an adversary that can pair ballistic missiles with real time or near real time targeting and battle damage assessment capabilities, which is something China can do and is not something we are used to fighting.

I am just generally against the idea of downplaying adversary capabilities, because that is very much the poison pill. I’m not anyone important, but what if I was and you’d convinced me? I always advocate for taking the other guy at his word and figuring out how to kill the him that lives in his head. That’s not shilling I think it’s best practice.

>>65605256
the EU has so many different programmes because its disunited as fuck. its a symptom, a bug, not a feature. and because EU countries on their own are all small, weak little shits, these standalone projects always end up being subpar compromises that cant compete with the products of large nations that are actually united.

imagine california and texas coming up with their own fighter jet projects and the dixie states argueing about their own cooperation for another 6th gen jet for 20 years while pensylvania and ohio go for a cooperation with japan and italy for their own project and maine being full of chuds that want to buy a russian plane and attack vermont to liberate the mainers that are being oppressed in vermont and also to settle some historic dispute from 100 years ago. thats the EU

>>65607743
>We’ve never before fought with an adversary that can pair ballistic missiles with real time or near real time targeting
There's no reason to believe that the targeting was "real-time" when the target hasn't moved since it was built. Notice how much more poorly they fared against the actual naval ships, which would require actual real time targeting capabilities.
>That’s not shilling I think it’s best practice.
Best practice is to understand the facts and learn the right lessons. The correct lesson to learn is that defending fuckhuge bases against high numbers of cheap weapons with the requisite range and accuracy to do real damage is difficult, and even non-state organizations are quickly gaining access to such weapons. None of this is related to China.

>>65607747
That’s poor phrasing on my part. I do not believe they shared that level of intelligence with the Iranians. I do believe that the Chinese are capable of it however. The number of satellites they have in orbit at this point is significant.

There is no other adversary that exemplifies that threat more clearly than China. They have the most numerous and capable weapons that we are likely to face, and are who we need to plan against.

>>65607751
>I do believe that the Chinese are capable of it however
In their backyard, it's definitely a given considering that it's a commercial capability at this point. How capable those satellites are are another issue entirely. The fact that they bothered flying balloons over the US continent in the first place is somewhat telling in that regard.
>and are who we need to plan against.
As with every war the US has fought since WW2, the limiting factor has always been political will, not strategy and capability. Iran has turned into a shitshow for that very reason. China will be no different in that regard and they know this very well, which is why they keep testing the limits and seeing how far they can go. Not too different from Russia in that aspect.

>>65607759
I wouldn’t count them out because of the balloons, if anything that seems to have provoked more US military interest in them. Within the last week or two I believe seeing one of the online military focused rags running an article on iirc the Army looking into them heavily again.

As for the second part I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said here. In any event it’s 3am and I’m going to sleep want to or not.

>>65607746
>the EU has so many different programmes because its disunited as fuck. its a symptom, a bug, not a feature.
On the contrary.

>>65605256
>USA 6th gen projects will enter in service before Euro programs reach prototype phase
>Europe will decide to cancel their 6th gen programs and skip straight to 7th gen

If all fairness European security only requires giving Ukraine enough toys that they can continue murdering Russians till the heat death of the universe.

The real challenge is getting the cost of missile defence down to the point that US doesn't bankrupt itself day 1 of the war.

>>65605256
>The EU has 3 sixth-generation fighter projects falling apart in real time compared to the USA's 2 projects that are at best severely behind schedule
A good question.

>>65607768
>The real challenge is getting the cost of missile defence down to the point that US doesn't bankrupt itself day 1 of the war.
Missile defense was never intended to provide long-term area protection while the rest of the military sit on their asses and did nothing to take out the launchers. In a full on clash where political constraints are no longer a limiting factor this would not be an issue.
Of course, it would be really fucking cool if you could make a bunch of really cheap and capable interceptor missiles.

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>>65605256
>has an entire continent caught up to 1 country?

>>65605256
A finely crafted bait my good sir

>>65607764
>if anything that seems to have provoked more US military interest in them
As a battlefield surveillance asset. That's quite different from a spy balloon.

>>65605256
I don't get why it's necessary to spend trillions on these fancy projects in the age of nukes unless you have ambitions of attacking lesser powers who don't have nuclear weapons. Just build an arsenal of 5000 nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them and make it crystal clear to everyone else that any attack is game over for them if they don't have nuclear weapons, and game over for both sides if they do.
Why wouldn't this work?

>>65607959
Because you can't wake up one day and automagically find 5000 nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them. Just see how well that's working out for Iran at the moment.

>>65607968
Where did I say that you can do this in a day? I'm saying invest in a nuclear arsenal once and then reduce military spending to 0.5% of GDP or something forever.

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>>65605262
>Europe is really stepping up

>>65607974
>I'm saying invest in a nuclear arsenal once
And I'm saying you're going to get Iran'd the moment you start doing that. If you want to speedrun national suicide, that's probably a great plan.

>>65607976
France and the UK already have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. What the fuck are you talking about? The EU could easily build a giant nuclear arsenal and nobody could stop them.

>>65607979
Yes, they "already have" nuclear weapons. That's different from a new country suddenly obtaining nuclear capability. If let's say, Poland starts building nukes and the US withdraws its nuclear umbrella, you really think Russia would sit by and do absolutely nothing?

>>65607986
Russia has its hands full with Ukraine, but yes, they probably might try something. My suggestion to any country without nukes that's trying to build them is to keep its program secret at all costs until they pass the point of no return.

>>65607996
It's 2026, good luck keeping a nuclear program secret even from your own citizens, let alone intelligence agencies.

>>65605256
>The EU has 3 sixth-generation fighter projects compared to the USA's 2 projects
Lets break the projects down
>GCAP
Designed by Brits, Itals, and Japs. The most likely to come to fruition
>ACF
Frances do it alone project. Will probably just give up and market a body kit rafale as 4.9gen+++ until 2060
>U N N A M E D
Germany, Sweden, and Spain all arguing about what to even call it before setting down funding. This will never leave the committee room, let alone the design room

>>65607682
>There’s not a single non classified fully tailless supersonic aircraft you can point to anywhere else in the world.
Where's your evidence that one exists in China?

>>65607724
You just contradicted your own premise. Stating that "the third engine is likely there mostly for power generation and cooling air" is the literal definition of being power and thermal limited. If your engine core architecture can handle the electrical and thermal loads, you don't accept the massive structural, weight, fuel, and IR penalties of dragging an entire third engine around.

A few key issues with your argument:

Having room for a massive AESA array is easy; running it at 100% duty cycle alongside high-power EW without thermal throttling T/R modules is the actual hurdle. Without a mature thermal sink, a giant radar just gets throttled back during sustained combat ops. Having one installed doesn't prove they have the power/cooling to run it.

Bringing up Collins EPACS (~80 kW) completely misses the 6th-gen power scale. EPACS is a retrofitted band-aid for a single-engine 5th-gen jet designed 20 years ago. 6th-gen MUM-T, continuous broad-spectrum EW, and high-power radar require hundreds of kilowatts to megawatt-class capacity. If they need a whole extra jet engine just to break past F-35-tier ~80 kW cooling, that proves their primary engines lack the power-density and bleed extraction capability required.

You can't just dump heat into cooling air off large intakes at high speeds. Ram air at Mach 1.5+ is adiabatically heated by compression, drastically cutting heat exchanger delta-T. Plus, dumping thermal loads into air streams creates huge momentum drag penalties and ruins IR stealth.

Calling a trijet "a good enough solution" admits it's a brute-force engineering compromise forced by propulsion and PTMS limitations, not an optimal 6th-gen design.

>>65605256
European next gen fighter programs are like African children. Make sure to have one that you need so that in 2 decades hopefully one will have survived.

>>65609158
They have two flying manned designs. One a more conventional fighter and the other seemingly being an attempt at the giant “battlecruiser” concept people had spent the last half decade speculating about. I do not see a reason to believe they are massively limited in electrical generation when they’ve produced a conventional 6th generation design alongside the heavily experimental one that completely breaks with conventional fighter doctrine.

Again you’re just insisting it can’t possibly work with no evidence beyond you’d like it not to. They have rapidly iterated on this design since it was first revealed, clearly a lot of resources are flowing through it, more so than their other platform. I’m inclined to believe it’s not a problematic dead end for them.

The argument I was replying to was that they can’t possibly have matched the PTMS capacity of F-35, which is a fairly abysmal 32kW currently. I was outlining that no, it is not a particularly cutting edge system. They have built a trijet with massive intakes, it’s stupid to think they would not be able to exceed the cooling capacity of a single engine jet that has a notoriously underpowered PTMS system and no spare room in the airframe to upgrade it.

All supersonic aircraft spend very little time actually breaking the sound barrier. Most time is spent subsonic, both in cruise and combat, with the occasional supersonic dash. I’ve not seen anything to suggest they’re about to break with this idea

>>65607579
It's been steadily climbing every single month tbqh, it hillariously aligns with thw front becoming more automated.

>>65605256
Of course. 500 million people with an industrial base compared to a 300 million consumption zone that wastes 30 years on the middle-east. You do the math.

>>65607959
Because you open yourself up to nuclear brinkmanship where you'll be dared to commit collective nuclear suicide with another nuclear armed nation on your border over a minor border skirmish, which you could have otherwise deterred or handled by simply having a convincingly capable conventional military to tackle it.

>>65609158
>>65609196
In your opinions, what's most likely to happen first.
The british make a 6th gen or the chinese make a 6th gen.

>>65605256
GCAP is Japanese now.

>>65609498
Always has been, just look at the actual hardware development history towards the program from each nation

Japan has been building the foundation since ~2005 when they got snubbed on the F-22. The UK only started in the mid 2010s in response to france starting a program and not wanting to be left out.

>>65609487
Well, we’ve seen the Chinese iterate very quickly on their J-36 design, going from caret inlets and trough exhausts to DSI with thrust vectoring. It’s difficult to say exactly how close they consider it to IOC, as that’s a very major airframe change, but I would be surprised if they consider it operational at a date much later than ~2032, as historically they’ve been willing to accept quite a few interim components on in service designs. You can see this well with J-20, where it’s only really starting to get the engines they’d wanted for it a decade into its service life. It’s also very possible they call it good enough for IOC sometime between 2028-30, even if it doesn’t really come into its own systems wise until the back half of the 2030s. The issue here being GCAP isn’t targeted to enter service before 2035, at which point it’s likely to be having the teething issues inherent to all new platforms assuming everything remains smooth sailing with the GCAP program. They have a lot of urgency to get it into service, but the issue is unexpected delays and issues aren’t something any program sets out to have. Now we can be as pedantic as we like about what constitutes a 6th generation fighter, but the way things stand now it’s likely China could have over 100 of these tailless platforms operational by the time a GCAP partner stands up their first squadron. GCAP unfortunately has a lot of catchup to play as they only began in late 2022, while China clearly was pacing itself against NGAD which began in earnest around 2015

>>65609487
Development is always faster when you don't have to hash out details with partners. It's also useful to point out that the chinks have something flying while we don't even have much of a clue what GCAP is supposed to look like.

>>65609530
>GCAP unfortunately has a lot of catchup to play as they only began in late 2022
GCAP has largely adopted a lot of the Japanese F-X program requirements and R&D, which itself grew from the ATD-X (X-2 ShinShin) program from the 2010s.

GCAP is based on ~20-25 years of R&D trajectory, largely coming from Japan.

Even if you want to cut out the early development efforts, you're still looking at a starting date of ~2017, not 2022.

>>65609487
Random retard here,
My experience with aircraft is that i have played some of the ace combat games
Neither will make a functional sixth Gen higher, ultimately for economic reasons

>>65609664
Which was a fifth generation program. That now has to be amalgamated with whatever the UK and Italy had going so everyone can get their piece of the work share pie. To my knowledge there’s still no joint demonstrator under construction, only the UK specific one that looks like it will take 5-6 years from contract award to first flight. Building on an existing tech base isn’t a unique advantage, we have to look at when contracts were signed. Boeing is building on McDonnell’s tailless research going back to the 90s. The demonstrator contract there was issued sometime in the 2015-16 timeframe, with first flight in 2019 and EMD award in 2025. Granted there was a lot of time loss there between Covid, Biden era budgets, and having to reconsider exactly what they wanted to build as CCAs became a thing. These things take a tone of time and money, and GCAP is undeniably behind and chasing much larger spenders.

CCAs are going to largely be a meme.
You can't have stealth aircraft be stealthy if they're surrounded by cheap $30m drones. With the price of stealth, range, speed and payload, you're better off just making another F47, and lowering the overall unit price.
CCAs will be useful for close air support, but as a "superiority fighter", they're a waste. Especially for carriers. Just fly another F47 instead of wasting hanger/runway space.

CCAs are tech ultimately useful for bombing houthis, not fighting china.

>>65609719
>You can't have stealth aircraft be stealthy if they're surrounded by cheap $30m drones
Did everyone play too much Ace Combat or something? CCAs aren't meant to "surround" the F-47 like funnels from Gundam or something. They're attritable range extenders you send ahead of the F-47.

>>65609726
>Did everyone play too much Ace Combat or something? CCAs aren't meant to "surround" the F-47 like funnels from Gundam or something.
lol not even ace combat portrays them like that but thats guaranteed what that anon is thinking

>>65609897
Putting that aside there are multiple ongoing stealth CCA projects in advanced development stages so I'm not even sure what that attempt at a gotcha was about.

>>65609265
>its climbing
>because it becomes more automated

yeah if we take what ukraine says at face value that is
then they only have 55.000 casualties lol

>US deploys 5th gen fighters en masse
>European country makes accounting allocations and PR announcement

Yeah you’re right on our heels.

>>65605256
>3 sixth-generation fighter projects
economies of scale generally mean you want fewer projects. of course that doesn't work if you're herding cats due to politics.

>>65605262
Increasing spending doesn't mean stepping up. Suddenly buying 500 shitboxes instead of 200 doesn't mean that you'll get stronger, you just have more shitboxes.

>>65610194
>Europe
actual 6th gen program with stuff being built
>US
CGI renders full of fog.

>>65607644
>Party line
The veil drops

>>65605256
>the more projects the better
Italians began WW2 with thirty different aircraft R&D programs, more than anyone else, they must have had the best aircraft eh

>>65612444
No one in the thread besides OP is equating number of programs to the capability of those programs.

ITT Euros and Chinese compete to see who is more assblasted about US military superiority.

>>65610777
>actual 6th gen program with stuff being built
may I see it?

>>65607004
J36 isn't 6th gen. It's a long-range interceptor designed to sling very large, very long-range AAMs at refuelers and AWACS.

>>65614175
Yep.

Which is why I said china is 20 years away from a 6th gen fighter.

>>65614175
What do you define a sixth generation fighter as?

Nth generation fighters don't exist until the USA makes one.
USA NUMBER ONE BABY

>>65614208
Not him, but the only thing that makes sense as a differentiator from 5th gen is local compute capability, and enough electrical power to run that compute so it can do MUM-T to control multiple complex drones (4-6 drones, not the F-35 MUM-T which is only really capable of handling 1-2 simple/medium complex drones).


In my eyes that means ~350kW+ electrical power (roughly double the F-35's). And enough cooling and high-end compute to handle complex heavy complex drone control on top of local sensors/EW/etc.

4.5th gen is non-stealth and needs ~50-140kW

5th gen is flying stealth and needs ~120-200kW

6th gen is flying stealth datacenter and needs 350kW+ (though GCAP and NGAD are likely targeting 500-1000kW or more). This usually requires highly advanced engines that currently only ~3 nations in the world can even attempt. And highly advanced cooling/thermal management systems, which is also incredibly difficult when dealing with multiple hundreds of kilowatts of electrical generation.


Directed energy weapons might become a 6th gen feature, but it depends how quickly they can be miniaturized into an airframe. At the moment they're not there yet.
If you could upgrade an F-35 to do hundreds of kilowatts of cooling and power generation while also upgrading the compute to handle large complex drone swarms, then I would also call it 6th gen. But the current planned upgrades for the F-35 program fall quite a bit short of that level of performance.

>>65614239
>defines generations based on electrical power generation
HURR DURR slap some fucking stealth coating on the Hoover Dam and we got us a fuckin 10th gen fighter

>>65614248
Lmao if you're functionally retarded sure.


Obviously i'm not going to write a fucking dissertation for you, obviously there ARE other metrics that need to be met, i'm simply boiling down the differences between the generations into the 3 main defining factors that are the bottleneck for 6th gen.

If you wanna get detailed 4.5th gen needs fly by wire, AESA radar, and modern datalinks

5th gen requires sensor fusion along with stealth.


etc, etc.


I'm just saying the difference between 5th and 6th gen is power, cooling, and compute, and I was using those 3 metrics to show how the generations have evolved specifically for those metrics. Not that those are the ONLY metrics that define 6th gen fighters.

>>65614239
That seems a bit reductive when most programs are also targeting massive increases in range, very large improvements in low observability, and seemingly carriage of more and/or larger weapons than current platforms. Comparing to an F-22 as the first fifth generation, I don’t think it’s unfair to say there been a generational leap if the new fighters can fly twice as far, launch weapons with twice the range, while being just as fast and significantly stealthier.

>>65614263
That's just what the current operational programs are targeting.

If you make a 6th gen that has less range, a smaller airframe, minimal IWB payload space, it would still be 6th gen as long as it has the power/compute/cooling/stealth.

it's just all of those things are a LOT easier to do (execpt stealth) on larger airframes, all the current programs also are operationally driven by a desire for longer range/endurance, and longer range internal weapons carriage.

Aircraft generations are defined by technological capability increases, not basic differences in size/range/IWB size, as that's far more dictated by intended role, not the fighter generation alone.

>>65614277
If you make something that is cutting in all those areas you are ending up with an aircraft that is at best as capable as the current first generation of CCAs. Improving on those areas while keeping a similarly sized airframe however does take a significant increase in technology, as does shifting to a tailless airframe. F/A-XX for example can’t be a heavier aircraft than F-22, it would not be able to take off from or land on a carrier. Yet in that same weight budget it will need to carry a higher fuel fraction as they’ve said they are not planning on buying NGAP, while also fitting much larger weapon bays and reinforcing the structure enough to survive carrier landings. To manage all that is a generational leap in airframe construction technologies, it is not something that would have been possible even twenty years ago. There is a lot more that goes into this than just electrical capacity.

>>65605259
Europe is already vastly ahead in land warfare as Ukraine is part of Europe and will be part of NATO 2.0.

>>65614414
the cope continues

>>65614414
>NATO 2.0.
Never.Going. to Happen. Pigger.

>>65605262
Europe didn't even has AESA radars on 4th gen planes until the mid 2010s.

The USA has the F-22, F35, B-21. Experimentally, the X-47B, RQ-180. And equipped AESA radars on its 4th gen fighters (F-18 2000, F-16 2010s, F15 2000) more than 25 years ago. The USA also has 3 active long range strategic bombers, one of which is stealth, which the B-21 will completely replace eventually.

The 30+ year old F-22 AN/APG-77 is still the most powerful AESA fighter radar on Earth, even though the F-35 radar upgrades come close to it and are more efficient they aren't as powerful.

>>65610381
The US is locked into last generation warfare and wasting money on LLMs. YOu had better pray that Europe does not finally react to the hostilioty displayed by 1/3rd of the US population and its' kremlin installed and orchestrated administration because if it does and stops trading commodities in dollars, you will be living in a failed state that looks something likethe USSR in 1991. Luckkily for you Europe is better lead and the European po[pulation better educated than you and knows most Americans are not actually retared jungoistic spastics with heads full of kremlin piss. The US does not run the worlds technology as you assume, teh most advanced and sophisticated equipment for making everything from ball bearings to cutting edge silicon and chips is made in Europe and Europe really no longer has a use for alliances with people like you. Fortunately you are a vocal and worthless minority that will soon discover what your gfellow Americans think of you and your behavior.

rememebr the European nations can switch off the US economy and currency like a lightswich if they choose to and there is absolutely nothing you can do to retaliate that would change that outcome.

>>65614430
It's a;ready happening and it is as inevitable as the military and economic erasure of the faiiled state known as Russia. Neither am I Ukranian.

>>65614443
Also the USA F has about 800 cargo and refueling aircraft, including hundreds of strategic lifters. Allowing deployments massive all over the world.

>>65614451
And the USA has been the global technology leader in advanced electronics since their inception, and still is, and also has $10 trillion USD in manufacturing production and processing investment in recent years (mostly from the USA and Asia).

And most importantly, the USA is energy and resource secure.

>>65614451
A lot of good that will do you if the Europeans do get fed up and just stop trading commodities in dollars. Remeber the USSR had vastly greater stockpuiles of weaponry when it collapsed? What good did they do them.

>>65614464
The world banking system is run out of the USA and its shadow corps. The Euro is artificially propped up by USD and US-based assets. The Euro was also created by the USA.

>>65614461
>And the USA has been the global technology leader in advanced electronics since their inception,
Wrong. In fact not a single advanced piece of silicon suich as teh GPUs driving LLms can be made unless the equipment is bought from ASML a European company. If you don't know what you are talking about try and shut the fuck up and polish your stars and strpes lapel pin or put gel in your hair Where do you think tech like CDs or DVDs came from? Europe and Japan. Where do you think your mobile phone and mobile data came from? It came from Ericsoon and Nokia and the European Technical Standards Insitute. Primitives like you need to learn to shut the fuck up online if you want the USA to have any allies or future because the harm people like you have done to the USA (and Europe and Canada is already immense).

>>65614477
The USA prior to the $10 trillion USD investment since 2022, had 9-10$ of global fabrication capacity and 45-50% of global market share.

Every single reality in Europe since WW2, is made in America or vitally dependent upon America.

>>65614471
>The Euro is artificially propped up by USD and US-based assets
Demonstrably fase In fact the US is largely fionanced by European states who are its biggest lenders. If the direction of the current US/Kremlin administration in washington does not change course you will find ourt exactly what your own role in utterkly ruining the USA and reducing it's vast prosperity and power to zero was. What an inept clueless failures you have been to the USA, what a disaster.

>>65614482
*9-10% global fabrication

>>65614482
The USA can't manufacture a single chip without the machine made in Europe. How stupid are you?

>>65614485
Lookup the history of the EU and the Euro and who pushed for and provided outlines and funding and strategic cooperation for their creation. Europe is a hedge market for the USA that is used to funnel USD assets and ensure USD dominant market dependencies.

Europe also suffers from terminal strategic resource and energy scarcity, and is only 60% energy secure in 2025+.

>>65614491
The USA has made all of its advanced fab equipment either on its own or from Asia, not Europe. USA custom tooling and factory manufacturing depends more on some European equipment but still makes the majority of its tooling and parts custom in house or in the USA.

>>65614493
Well if you were correct which you are not as you have a bizzarely distorted and skewed and jungoistic take that would mean the USA is effectyively over NOW. That's because the USAs biggest lender is Europe, the also by a large margin single biggest investor in the USA. So what you are saying is that the USA is basically over? Or are you trying to speedrun that by durr hurring over allied dead in afghanistan, threatening greenland and appeasing a Russian dictaior to see what happens to your neighborhood if the Europeans stop trading commodities in dollars?

You're a moron and you are destoying the USA but that is exactly what the jingoistic kremlin brewed piss you are spewing from your piss fillled brain was intened to do. There is hope for the US though retards like you brigaded by moscow are only 1/3 of the population and lets face it not the smartest part either. What's next are you going to revert to braying for civil war and murdering your fellow Americans because a few kremlin hacks put up some youtube videos telling you you are a based rebel soverign prepper and to abolish the fed?

https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfhhis01.txt

how many times can france trick germany into collaborating. stealing secrets then quitting?

>>65614503
>The USA has made all of its advanced fab equipment either on its own or from Asia, not Europe.
The US cannmot and does not manufacture any equivalent to the machines made by ASML for fabricating silicon chips. You're a stupid clown. like all your type.

The simple analpoghy is you are using the spanners sold to you by Europe and boasting about how many spanners you have. You are stupid. The biggest problem the US has and has had now for 20 years or so is the collapse of public education.

>>65614532
The entire Euro market is literally 30% owned by the United States of America. While only 8% of the USA market is owned by Europe. WHO DO YOU THINK CREATED THE European Union and the Euro? The USA.

>>65614544
The USA literally manufactures advanced lithography scanners in the USA, half of ASML's assets are in the USA, and the USA also has its own companies under the new $10 trillion USD investment scheme and also companies from elsewhere in Europe and Asia as hard assets on USA soil. And the USA literally manufactures around half of its most fabrication equipment in the USA, higher for different kinds of manufacturing.

>>65614553
There is no discussion wth someone as stupid as you and no futuire for the USA if people like you contiinue to influence the elctionm of its leaders. It really is that simple.

ASML is a European company and has a global monopoly on euipment for manufacturing silicon chips. There is nothing more to that conversation unles syou are sugegstingh that the US intends to seize a European companies assets inw hich case you can watch the US collapse as Europe stops trading commodities in teh dolalr. You must know at some level you are dense and an educational and intellectual flea why the fuck did people like you become the dominat voice in a nation that produced leaders like Reagan and Truman. I am not britissh but yoour defnse srary jusst mocked the men they lost in your misadventure in Afghanistan. If they or the European dump the US bonds they hold you will be living in a fucking tent and collecting rainwater.

>65614566
The USA is literally the global kingpin in every single energy, resource, advanced technology, and manufacturing categories. Everything that Europe has is a subsidiary/massive dependency upon the United States of America. Europe will never make up with Russia and vice versa not in this century. And Europe has always lacked the military power to throw its weight in the middle east like America has.

30% of the entire European market is owned by the United States of America, because it was entirely created by American investors/bankers/corpo heads to create a terminally dependent hedge market with dependency upon the USA. Do not even get me started on Canada, they are literally sucking the cock of America while flipping them off, because Canada IS the USA, the USA OWNS Canada.

And manufacturing technologies in the USA are already at the stage of replacing 1/3rd of the workforce with automation and still doubling output.

The European manufacturing and investment market depends far more on the USA than vice versa, by design and geography.

>>65609719
>CCAs are tech ultimately useful for bombing houthis, not fighting china.
That seems to fit our needs for the current and foreseeable future, then

>>65614443
i wonder if you have enough self awareness to see how much like a butthurt zigger you sound

>>65614248
If the hoover dam starts flying and shooting missiles then why the fuck not

Europe will raise its eyebrow and America will understand everything

>>65605259
Europe are you even trying?
>No, Europe is not catching up to or pushing past the United States in air supremacy. The assumption that Europe possesses three distinct 6th-generation projects compared to America's two stems from a misinterpretation of recent program developments.
>In reality, the European 6th-generation landscape is facing massive consolidation and industrial disarray, while the United States has steadily transitioned its concrete concepts directly into full-scale aerospace development

True 6th-generation capability relies on the "Combat Cloud" (networked AI architectures) and Collaborative Combat Aircraft (loyal wingman drones). The U.S. is already actively flight-testing and manufacturing these autonomous systems at scale, whereas Europe’s fragmented industrial landscape is still attempting to standardize its digital backbones.

Massive Generational Lead: The U.S. has been mass-producing and operating 5th-generation stealth fleets (F-22 and F-35) for decades. Most European nations skipped the 5th generation entirely to wait for 6th-gen, leaving their domestic industries with a massive technological and material science gap to overcome.

While Europe is debating workshares, the U.S. is moving toward hardware:

1. USAF F-47 (formerly NGAD)
2. US Navy F/A-XX

Both programs are actively funded with multibillion-dollar prime development contracts officially awarded to Boeing. Flying demonstrators are expected by 2028.

>>65614443
it is going to be unbelievably satisfying to finally exterminate you from the planet

>>65614617
Stop using AI to do your thinking for you. It’s probably smarter than you but it’s still fucking retarded. Demonstrators flew starting in 2019, the second starting in 2022. The demonstrator program is concluded.

>>65605256
The EU needs as many as it can get to hedge its bets against one or more of its member states being a twat.

>>65614570
>ASML is a European company
That the US has significant control over

>>65605272
>Swedes are working on their own 6th gen at the moment

This is like when you look at one of those country tier lists that include India and you just know the author was a jeet.

>>65614208
>What do you define a sixth generation fighter as?

The capabilities the F-47 has, as the first sixth gen, that previous fighters did not.

>>65614443
>thinks AI is just chatbots

Meanwhile China shit bricks over how America used AI in the Iran war.

>>65614570
Does this anon really think ASML is only located in Europe? Hell just their EUV stuff is all done in California.

whoa lads they only started production of Gcap prototypes this week.

chill out.
germany wants to buy in as well. and french ofc are on their own after being too fussy.

will they catch up to the usa. yes. but i don't think they will enter service before the americans.
Gcap already has flight simulater and training manauls.

its just the actual plane now that needs to be built

the amercians already have the F47 protoype but the FA/XX is still on the drawing board.

so idk i think Gcap is going to be good since they are using the brand new british raders and the brits are better at making radars than americans
and italians are better at engines
eletronics is likely japan since they already know how to make 5th gen warfare suite.

it will be a huge upgrade over their current fighters.
lets hope everything goes well.
they should be able tpo turn them out faster then the yanks as they have more skilled staff and more factories.

but like i said i think the americans will have a few produced models by say end of 2028-2029

i don't think anything will be made before 2029 if i am being realistic.

>>65614583
>The USA is literally the global kingpin in every single energy, resource, advanced technology, and manufacturing categories

Since we're starting a list of things nobody ever says:

>I wish my car was american made
>I wish my tools were american made
>I wish my company would switch to american made machines
>I wish my employees were as skilled as americans
>can't we send our kids to be schooled in america?
>let's buy american solar panels or import their LNG
>>65614758
>Americas control over ASML: we own patents, have license agreements and do what we say or we sue you
>Europe's control over ASML: We are the only ones capable of making the EUV parts and mirrors that make the machine work.

One of these is a resilient form of control.

>>65615219
>One of these is a resilient form of control.
If the other isn’t resilient then by all means start using the frozen Russian assets already.

>>65615219
>Since we're starting a list of things nobody ever says:
>I wish my car was american made
euros say that lol, most popular EV is still tesla

>>65614630
>Stop using AI it's not reliable enough yet. I would agree with you this time last year but not now.

Let's see what it says and check, it's only takes two seconds:

Boeing has secured a historic monopoly on America's future sixth-generation tactical air power, officially capturing prime full-scale development contracts for both the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) initiatives.

Here is the current status of both multi-billion-dollar programs:

1. USAF F-47 (Formerly NGAD Manned Component)
• The Contract: Officially awarded to Boeing in March 2025 for an initial engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase valued at approximately $20 billion.
• Designation: Formally designated as the F-47 upon its selection. It will replace the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor.
• Current Status: Pre-production hardware is currently being manufactured in St. Louis, Missouri. In October 2026, the Air Force initiated a $1.05 billion test campus expansion at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, specifically tailored to support the jet.
• Expected First Flight: 2028, with full operational deployment targeted for the early 2030s.

>>65615369
2. US Navy F/A-XX
• The Contract: Officially awarded to Boeing on September 29, 2026, for a full-scale development phase worth more than $20 billion. Boeing defeated Northrop Grumman for the award after Lockheed Martin was eliminated earlier in the competition.
• Role: The carrier-based strike fighter will begin replacing the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler fleets in the 2030s, flying alongside the F-35C.
• Current Status: The contract funds multiple experimental and flight-test aircraft to undergo ground, airworthiness, and weapons integration testing.
• Industrial Impact: By pairing F/A-XX with the F-47, Boeing is utilizing a massive 1.1 million-square-foot digital manufacturing facility expansion in St. Louis to build both platforms concurrently.

System Commonalities
Both aircraft are being developed as the "quarterbacks" of networked ecosystems. They feature are designed from the ground up to command autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) wingmen.

>>65615369
>1. USAF F-47
Now you take another 2 seconds to ask more up on this

Flying Demonstrators & Timeline:• DARPA/industry risk-reduction X-plane demonstrators first flew in 2019 and 2022, logging several hundred flight hours.This is what peanut brain here is thinking about:
>>65614630

• The production/development contract was awarded to Boeing in March 2025.
• Full-scale manufacturing is underway with a target first flight planned for 2028 and operational status expected by 2029/2030.

>>65615375
>2. US Navy F/A-XX
And you take 2 more seconds to ask more about this one you get:

The U.S. Navy has not publicly disclosed the date of a first test flight for classified F/A-XX flying demonstrators, though competitive prototyping and secretive flight test beds have been part of the development process

• Contract Award: The U.S. Navy selected Boeing on September 29, 2026, for the full-scale development phase of the F/A-XX program, valued at more than $20 billion.
• Timeline: The F/A-XX is expected to begin flying and enter the fleet in the 2030s, succeeding the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler

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>>65615394
Me again, to add to this: Boeing (New York Stock Exchange/Wall Street) has lost a quarter its value over the last year, 10% today

Boeing is now headquartered right by the Pentagon
• Global Corporate Headquarters: Arlington, Virginia (moved from Chicago in 2022)

And the part building and designing the two 6th Gen Fighters is in St Louis
• Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS): St. Louis, Missouri (relocated back to St. Louis in early 2026)

They need to break off that part of the company so we can buy stock in just that. Murica

The 10% drop in value they had today is attributed to their global commercial jet airliner business:
• Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA): Renton / Seattle area, Washington
• Boeing Global Services (BGS): Plano, Texas (5905 Legacy Dr)

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>>65615583
See how on the bottom it says defense sales rise? They signed two minimum $20 billion dollar contracts with the US taxpayers recently, at least one in the last quarter? Mar 2025 and Sept 2026?

>FCAS
dead
>GCAP
India joined not too long ago so expect it to turn to shit
>KFS
I'm not even joking when i say that the fucking Su-75 has a higher chance of getting built than this thing

>>65615602
>India joined not too long ago so expect it to turn to shit
No they haven't.

There is basically no pathway for india to join GCAP as anything except a customer, and even that is suspect.

>>65605259
Fpbp

>>65614826
>but the FA/XX is still on the drawing board
Rumor mill was Boeing's NGAD prototype was actually already the right size/scale for the F/A-XX design, and the "real" NGAD is scaled up from that prototype.

So Boeing was able to knock out early design/flight laws for F/A-XX while doing NGAD prototyping.


Tldr; F/A-XX isn't still on the drawing board unless you just mean in the broadest terms.

>the EU has projects

That's the problem, the EU has only projects and no actual 5th gen fighter much less 6th gen. Anyway here's a breakdown of how those projects will inevitably go :
>spend 3 years arguing about who gets to do what and who has to fund it
>come up with a logistical nightmare where parts have to be manufactured into 4 different countries and assembled in another, each with different regulations and standards
>halfway through the project, France and Germany leave the program to do their own thing from scratch because they decided they won't cooperate with each other
>can't find anyone to sell the final product because every time you find a client one of the EU countries has banned exportations to this country
>the UK, Poland and half of the continent keeps buying US tech

>>65615668
France/Germany already killed their program in the summer

UK/Italy are working with Japan on GCAP and have a ratified trinational governmental organization (GIGO) setup to run the program that is isolated from any individual nation's politics since all 3 nations have to agree on any major changes to the program via that trinational organization (which was chartered/established in a similar manner as NATO, making it incredibly legally/politically binding). Further this program also has a trinational corporation (Edgewing) already established for the design/manufacturing of the airframes. Instead of each nation placing their own orders, all nations pay into the trinational organization, GIGO, then GIGO goes and contracts directly with the trinational corporation, Edgewing.

So instead of there being a contract for the UK for 30 jets, then another contract for Italy for 20 jets, and ANOTHER contract with Japan for 50 jets, there would be a single contract from GIGO to Edgewing for 90 airframes.


At least learn about the programs before making a post about them.

>>65605259
Fpbp
Europeans always start these pie in the sky projects that all underdeliver and lead to them just begging for shit from America.

>>65614477
ASML was selected by America to cut the Japanese out of IC chip manufacturing.
It relies on Sandia lab patents and instructions to function as a company.

>>65616288
I mean, you can't really cut japan out of IC chip manufacturing; they make most of the chemicals required to do silicon wafer manufacturing.

Maybe they were cutting japan out of a PORTION of the market, specifically the photolithography optics/light source side of things. But japan is still massively involved in IC chip manufacturing worldwide.

>>65616288
>this incredibly complex machine relying on hundreds of patents and inputs from suppliers uses these ones from x so clearly all the credit should really go to x
glhf trying to make it work without Zeiss ect.

>>65616308
The fear was that Japan was going to become Tawain.
They already broke the American car industry, so letting them take the IC chip industry was something American politicians wanted to prevent.

>>65615219
if you ever think that ASML would ever break US agreements, get sued into oblivion, and get all their shit legally seized and moved to the US, you're retarded

Does this mean the US will not sell the F-47 to its allies? The US probably told them "Go build your own 6th gen aircraft, losers"

>>65614826
>will they catch up to the usa. yes.

any basis for this opinion, vibes? astrology? tarot reading?

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Just based on the art here:
I like the idea of that German Iron Eagle reigning the Skys of Europe
Interesting US is in the no tails club

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DARPA was founded in 1958 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957

They are like federal agents that go around funding research projects on matters of federal importance like the COVID vaccination, the Internet, the computer mouse, GPS, Stealth Technology, and much more

Key medical innovations and programs developed or funded by DARPA include:
• Shelf-Stable Powdered & Synthetic Blood: Developed portable, storable powdered blood and synthetic red blood cell substitutes that eliminate the need for cold-chain storage in combat zones.
• Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCIs): Funded early research by Jacques Vidal at UCLA that laid the groundwork for modern neuroprosthetics and brain-machine interfaces.
• Tactical Biomedical Technologies & Autonomous Robots: Created emergency hemorrhage-control tools, portable battlefield drug-manufacturing systems (Bio-MOD), and robotic/AI-driven trauma systems like MASH to treat wounded soldiers.
• Biostasis: Researched chemical biology and protein engineering techniques to reversibly slow down biological activity and extend the "golden hour" for life-saving medical care after severe trauma.

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>>65617489
By 1960, it transferred civilian space efforts to NASA and military space operations to individual service branches, pivoting its core focus toward high-risk, high-reward defense science.

• High Tolerance for Failure: DARPA explicitly accepts a high failure rate (often around 80%) to pursue radical technological breakthroughs rather than incremental updates

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>>65617491
No Labs: DARPA does not own or operate its own physical research laboratories

• Project Managers: It operates with a lean staff of rotating program managers who fund short-term, cutting-edge research contracts with universities, private industry, and military labs.

All technical offices within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are located at its central headquarters in Arlington, Virginia (specifically in the Ballston neighborhood at 675 North Randolph St.).

DARPA does not have separate physical regional campuses for its technical offices; instead, its program managers work out of the main headquarters while contracting and partnering with universities, national laboratories, and military facilities across the United States

>>65617012
>get sued into oblivion, and get all their shit legally seized and moved to the US, you're retarded
and how would that go?
their factory is in the EU, their bank accounts are in the EU, their personnel is in the EU.
you can sue them in US courts until the cows come home all you want. you can't enforce any of that because they aren't in the US. so you'd depend on the Dutch and the rest of the EU to just go allong. we already know how they'd they'd react due to the sanctions against the ICC, they are building domestic alternatives to every service that the US forced to stop providing service. the Dutch are also refusing to do anything against the ICC despite US demands.

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>>65617492

In their March 2025 press release titled "DARPA X-planes paved the way for the F-47"

>“It is often only in future decades when DARPA’s disruptive impact can be unveiled – today, we’re proud to be able to share the 10-year DARPA research arc that has culminated in the (beginning of the) F-47 program, defining the next era of American air dominance," said DARPA Acting Director Rob McHenry.

The press release was issued in response to:

The March 2025 update coincided with the Department of the Air Force awarding Boeing the engineering and manufacturing development contract for the F-47.

Basically DARPA was flexing that for the last 10 years they've been funding a competition between

• The Boeing Demonstrator: First took flight in 2019.

• The Lockheed Martin Demonstrator: First took flight in 2022

the Boeing one won and was selected as the new F-47

https://www.darpa.mil/news/2025/darpa-f-47-plane

>>65613821
Sadly this is yet another thing the Chinks merely ape as a cargo cult. The yuro mind has obsessed over America and everything it encompasses since 1776 but it wasn't until the great war, both rounds 1 and 2, that modern yurop had its foundational moment and they will never forgive America for spoiling it and the insult of rebuilding them after it.

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>>65617601
Boeing has not held a public ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new F-47 Factory in St. Louis, as the new 1.2-million-square-foot multi-billion-dollar facility near St. Louis Lambert International Airport is still under construction and expected to open initial sections through 2026, with full completion projected by 2030.

Is this Skynet?
>The 1.1 million square foot F-47 Factory, with initial sections operational by 2026 and full completion by 2030, integrates AI, robotics, and automated assembly lines. These technologies aim to set new efficiency benchmarks in fighter jet manufacturing

• Testing Infrastructure: While production takes place in Missouri, the U.S. Air Force is building a $1.057 billion operational testing campus at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, slated for completion by early 2031.

>>65617688
What does "cargo cult" even mean in modern parlance, I only know the traditional definition of religious worship in exchange for material goods.

>>65617489
>>65617491
>>65617492
>>65617601
You're on 4chan, stop using • you fucking subhuman.

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>>65617696
Because Boeing constructed the advanced facilities in St. Louis for the Air Force's F-47, the U.S. Navy subsequently awarded Boeing an additional $20 billion contract in September 2026 to build its own sixth-generation carrier-based fighter, the F/A-XX, out of the exact same Missouri complex.

St. Louis has a decades-long legacy of producing military aviation mainstays like the F-15 Eagle and F/A-18 Super Hornet. The regional availability of specialized aerospace talent and organized union workforces gave the government high confidence that Missouri could successfully execute the highly classified program.


Current Programs in St. Louis

>F/A-18 Super Hornet: Production is slated to cease in 2027, though Boeing will continue manufacturing replacement and legacy parts as the U.S. Navy operates the jet through the 2040s. The F/A-18 Super Hornet is built at Boeing Defense, Space & Security (formerly McDonnell Douglas) facilities in St. Louis. Boeing is scheduled to wrap up local Super Hornet production and move service life modification (SLM) work out of St. Louis by 2027. The first F/A-18 Super Hornet (designated E1) was built at the McDonnell Douglas facility in St. Louis, Missouri in 1995

>F-15EX Eagle II: Active modern variant production continues at the St. Louis facility for the U.S. Air Force. The Boeing F-15EX Eagle II is manufactured at Boeing’s defense facility in St. Louis, Missouri, located at the historic McDonnell Douglas factory site, where the original F-15 was rolled out in 1972, adjacent to St. Louis Lambert International Airport.

The St. Louis bi-state area ranks 5th nationally in aerospace manufacturing employment, supporting over 18,000 direct manufacturing workers across 29 aerospace manufacturing businesses and 145+ aviation companies.

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>>65617949
>The St. Louis bi-state area ranks 5th nationally in aerospace manufacturing employment

#1 is Seattle
>Seattle routinely tops national lists with roughly double the aerospace employment of its closest competitors.

Seattle has the huge factory complex that builds the Boeing airliners 747, 767, 777, 787, etc. Production of the Boeing 737 MAX began in 2026.

It builds at least two military planes in Seattle based on those:

>The Boeing P-8A Poseidon (over 100 built so far)

>The Boeing KC-46A Pegasus refueling-plane (over 100 built so far). The main aircraft body (derived from the commercial Boeing 767 airframe) is assembled at the massive Everett Factory next to Paine Field. The aircraft's specialized military components, such as its fly-by-wire refueling boom, are manufactured at a dedicated Boom Assembly Center in Seattle. Completed planes are then flown to the Boeing Military Delivery Center at King County International Airport (Boeing Field) in south Seattle for final military testing, fueling integration, and customer delivery.

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>>65618053
But the apex aerial predator being built in Seattle is a AI-controlled stealth in a $200 million deal with the US Navy, who wants it to be able to launch directly from Navy destroyers, amphibious assault ships, and converted cargo vessels without traditional aircraft carriers

The Shield AI X-BAT, an autonomous, AI-piloted vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) strike fighter featuring stealth and low-observable capabilities, is being manufactured for the US Navy at a 420,000-square-foot facility known as X-Forge 3 located just south of Seattle and Sea-Tac Airport

Shield AI's X-BAT is the world's first AI-piloted, jet-powered vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) fighter aircraft. It can launch and recover vertically from non-traditional ships, small pads, or austere bases without a traditional flight deck.

Timeline: First flight scheduled for 2026, initial operational capability targeted by 2028, and full production planned for 2029.

Cost: Approximately $27 million per unit

Powered by Shield AI's Hivemind software

Payload: Equipped with internal bays and external hardpoints capable of carrying standard strike weapons and air-to-air missiles (such as AIM-120 and AIM-174).

Range: Over 2,000 nautical miles

Ceiling & Maneuverability: Over 50,000 feet altitude; greater than 4g maneuver load factor

Propulsion: GE Aerospace F110-GE-129 engine with an Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle (AVEN)

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>>65618082
Shield AI is an American defense and artificial intelligence technology company founded on May 28, 2015, in San Diego, California (where it is still headquartered)

Former Navy SEAL Officer Brandon Tseng co-founded the company alongside his brother, entrepreneur Ryan Tseng, and engineer Andrew Reiter. Brandon was inspired to start the company after experiencing a mission in Afghanistan's Uruzgan province where his unit suffered casualties due to poor reconnaissance inside hostile buildings

Early Days: The team launched with a $100,000 seed fund from family and friends, operating out of a small apartment while initially facing steep skepticism from venture capitalists.

They went on to:

>2021: Acquired Heron Systems (whose AI won DARPA's AlphaDogfight trials) and VTOL drone maker Martin UAV, crossing a $1 billion valuation.

>2022–2023: Achieved the first-ever AI flight of a combat jet (F-16) in 2022 and an AI versus human dogfight win in 2023.

Now they have two of their three "forges" working on the new X-BAT for the US Navy (and Marines)

>X-Forge 2 (Newton, Kansas - Newton City-County Airport): Serves as the flight-test, sustainment, maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) base, handling production acceptance testing for the X-BAT strike fighter

>X-Forge 3 (Des Moines, Washington): Designated as the primary high-rate production factory for the X-BAT (an AI-piloted vertical takeoff and landing strike fighter), with manufacturing scheduled to begin around 2029

>Core Technology (San Diego, California / Global): Develops Hivemind (the AI pilot and autonomy software powering their drones and aircraft) alongside simulation and synthetic reality tech.

>>65618082
>>65618053
>>65617949
>>65618131

Why do you keep replying to your own posts with an endless string of AIslop?

>>65618133
Why do you bother to waste precious time on earth caring? Because caring about what others post and how is a deep lifelong passion of yours that will leave you fulfilled on your deathbed?

>>65618182
Lmao, not even denying it. So what's your motivation for shitting up the board with off-topic sloptent?

>>65617455
That list is has been made by a jeet.

>>65618465
it also makes no sense since the F-X program merged with the Tempest program to form GCAP.

Sweden also isn't in GCAP, they left when it transitioned from Tempest to GCAP.

>>65618467
I didn't even go that far. Any list about accomplishments and/or rankings is made by a jeet if there is India on said list. Not only that, that "AMCA" plane stands out with an edgy coloring.