Stardate 20020715.1350

(Captain's log): With respect to my whimsical comments about jet fighters against dragons, Quentin writes:

As for aerial combat, you might want to look up how the British Harrier beat the cream of America. Speed and distance aren't everything.

In the game of baseball, there's a saying: On any given day, any team can beat any other team. Not even the Yankees win every game, and the worst team in the league can beat the best team. There's a strong element of skill and talent in the game, but there's also an element of chance, and sometimes it can more than even things out, for one game.

But it doesn't do so over the course of a season; in the long run the statistical process evens out the luck, and skill and talent will come through, which is why the (damned) Yankees end up in the playoffs every year.

By the same token, there is also an element of luck in air combat. Also, pilot skill is a major factor. In the 1980's, when the US Air Force was switching over from its VietNam era jets to the F-15 (and later the F-16) there was a period when the Air National Guard still had its older F4's and F105's. In practice dogfights between Air Force units with F-15's and ANG units with older jets, the ANG won a lot more than it lost.

That's because the ANG pilots are retired Air Force pilots, who go into the ANG because they love to fly high performance jets. The ANG recruits the best pilots who retire from the Air Force, and they're older, more experienced and have a lot more air time. Also, they had been flying those older jets for years and understood them quite well.

Which is not to say that the Air Force wasted its money upgrading to the F-15, and later the ANG also upgraded. But air combat isn't what most people think of, because most of them think of dogfighting, and that's uncommon. Even as late as Korea, fighter jets were exclusively armed with machine guns and cannons, and they had to dogfight to knock enemy fighter jets down.

With the Viet Nam era, the newer jets introduced by the US relied on missiles. For a while, they didn't even carry guns, but it was soon realized that this was a mistake, and guns were reintroduced in later models. However, in modern air combat, nearly all kills are made by missiles, and a lot of those are made at fairly long range.

It's still possible to dogfight, but a modern dogfight bears no resemblance to the ones you see in the WWII movies because the jets are faster but corner less well (because they're faster).

Dogfighting is subsonic, and the limiting factor on it is how fast a jet can turn. For the last thirty years, the limiting factor on that has been the ability of the pilot to handle G-forces, because at high G's the pilot will black out, after which the plane will crash soon thereafter. G-suits were introduced extremely early to help with this. They're plugged into the jet, and when the jet pulls high G's, equipment in it will pressurize the lower part of the suit and squeeze the pilots body, forcing blood up to his brain. They've also learned voluntary techniques which help this. (The pilot holds his breath and squeezes his diaphragm hard, as if straining on the toilet; this also pushes blood up into the head, as you've experienced.)

With all of that, the limit seems to be 8-10 G's (although the real number is probably classified). We can actually make aircraft which can pull far more G's than that, but no-one can fly them that way. (Which is one of the reasons they're thinking about remote-controlled jets; not only would they be smaller but they might well be more maneuverable because they could corner faster.) The modern master of cornering is the F-16, and the reason is really straightforward: In every other jet, the pilot sits straight upwards. In the F-16, he's partially reclined. That means that G's don't pull blood away from his brain as readily.

Still, when dogfighting takes place, it's subsonic, and to get back to Quentin, it's entirely possible that on one or two occasions that RAF Harriers did manage to beat USAF pilots in practice dogfights. ("On any given day...") A lot would depend on pilot skill, for instance.

But speed and range have advantages. One is control: if I'm faster than you, then I get to decide when we fight and when we don't. If I don't want to fight you, I can run away and you can't catch me. If I do want to fight you and you don't want to, you can't run away from me because I'm faster. So it means that I can pick my fights for cases where I have the advantage, which means that my side will kill more than die overall.

It's always extremely important to be able to control the pace of combat; it's a major advantage on the campaign level, though it would not be obvious at the level of individual dogfights (especially practice ones). In WWII in the Pacific (something I've studied very closely and have mentioned here many times) the A6M Zero was greatly feared. As a design it was an odd one; it was flat-out offense. There may not have been a more maneuverable warplane in the world at the time, and when combat was low or slow, the Zero had the advantage over any American plane before the F6F Hellcat was introduced.

By that point, the P-38 Lightning had been fighting against the Zero for a couple of years, and its pilots had learned what it did bette