If you built a new plane around a GAU-12 you'd get pound for pound more killing. Lighter smaller ammo means more of it, and trust me 25mm will kill anything you might plausibly be killing with 30mm in this century.
Don't worry though, I'm pretty sure the USAF is too arrogant to actually adopt a turboprop airplane, so the A-10 will likely be with us for the foreseeable future...
They can at least try to make it look more modern. Adopt pusher engines and a canard wing.
> The original layout was of a low wing canard configuration, aircraft powered by a pusher turboprop, and built around a 30 mm Gatling gun capable of destroying light armored vehicles
The actual prototype ended up with a turbofan. Still had a canard wing though. It also had a GAU-12 as the canon, just like GP wants.
It's also made out of fancy composites. It sounds like the perfect plane for the Hacker News Air Force.
And fancy shapes and materials resulted in the F-35 clusterfuck.
The GAU-8 can no longer kill top-line Russian armor? Source?
Everyone fawns over it, but the GAU-8 only had moderate penetrating abilities against T-62s, less against the T-64.
In order to "kill" a T-62, the A-10 had to approach it from very specific directions, at very specific angles of attack. The Soviets knew this so they co-located anti-aircraft artillery with their armor units and any A-10 making a gun run on a tank would have been flying through a hail of anti-aircraft fire.
In order to penetrate a thin sliver of armor on the sides of the T-62, an A-10 pilot HAD to fire from from the side of the tank at "1500 feet away, at 3 degrees of dive, at 320 knots". The Soviets knew this, too.
What direction do you think the barrels of the ZSU-23-4 self-propelled radar-guided anti-aircraft vehicles were pointed, when moving in formation with T-62s?
The PGU-14/B depleted-uranium armor piercing round, the most "anti-tank" bullet the GAU-8 fires, can penetrate 55mm of armor at 1,220 meters and 75mm at 300 meters. There are very few parts of the T-72 that have armor thinner than 75mm.
Also, those penetration figures are for steel. Very rapidly after the introduction of the A-10, the Soviet Union started outfitting all of its main battle tanks with composite armor and additional external armor.
So at best if you pepper a tank with a full magazine of PGU-14/B fired from a GAU-8 you're probably hoping to break its track, poke a hole in an external fuel tank, or puncture its main gun-- not destroy it.
Crews inside modern main battle tanks would probably hardly notice being hit by fire from a GAU-8.
Here is the "A-10 Coloring Book", written by cold war A-10 pilots as a training aid covering how to shoot at T-62. T-62s were only vulnerable from the rear, and thin (hard to hit) slivers along the sides.
https://imgur.com/gallery/fd4sK
The T-64 was harder to kill, and the T-72 almost impossible.
Due to anti-aircraft assets being closely-coupled to Soviet tank formations it was predicted that every single A-10 pilot would be dead two weeks into a hypothetical war with the Soviet Union, and this was 40 years ago.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Avenger#Specifications
These sort of numbers are a bit tricky since some anti-tank weapons are more effective against modern armor than others, meaning the armor will have a different RHA equivalency ratings against different kinds of weapons. For instance, per wikipedia, the M1A1HA's turrent is rated for 600mm / 800mm vs APFSDS (sabot), and 1,300mm vs HEAT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolled_homogeneous_armour#Curr...
Some people love it because it's a high capacity, high accuracy bomb truck. One A10 can provide a lot of close air support with just what's hanging from the wing.
We must go after the New and Shiny, and it costs billions.
Kind of like a lot in our society.
A simplistic solution would be to design weapons around common, proven components and, if possible, interchangeable ones - designing engines and weapons to have similar mount-points, avionics that can be used on multiple vehicles and be field-upgraded and build everything about as much incremental improvements as possible (yes, I know nothing will make an F-14 a stealth fighter so some big steps are needed, but if the follow-up plane could use similar engines, that'd make logistics much simpler)
I read military writers on Quora and the general sense is that it's going to be the Army and Marines that are going to form the backbone of power projection on land. The Marines are shifting their squad composition from 3 teams of four and a leader to four teams of three. One of these squad member's only job is to operate the proliferating tech tools that's becoming available to individuals.
So it's not even certain what capabilities CAS is going to need to have in the near future. Everyone's talking about loiter time, and certainly, that's really helpful, but what about the squad's soon-to-come drones? If that doesn't make the need for loiter obsolete I don't know what will.
A squad with a reconnaissance drone and portable mortars can do a hell of a lot without having to commit an aircraft. What will they need that aircraft for? Carrying weapons that the squad can't. Cue the fighter-bombers.
I can see why the Pentagon isn't chomping at the bit to spend boatloads of money on something they probably won't even need half of by the time they're done.
IMHO, it's like an All-in-One printer. You can have a machine that sucks at a bunch of things, or does one or two things really, really well. Not both.