Incidentally, Burt Rutan (the founder of Scaled Composites, who are making Virgin Galactic's space ships) almost made a prototype of exactly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_ARES

> 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.

For the record, I was being sarcastic.

And fancy shapes and materials resulted in the F-35 clusterfuck.

The AF is still running AC-130s, aren't they? Granted, that fills a role where air-superiority is a given, and it is reasonably safe to fly a bus loaded with auto-cannons in lazy circles, blasting the daylights out of anything that moves.

Those older planes can loiter like a teenager at a mall on Saturdays too.

They are, but ever since [1] they only do so at night.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khafji