The Germans weren’t very fond of it either...

Its “stealthy”, but the plane absolutely takes an RCS hit when carrying it.

And how many times with 1/3 the rpm? Maybe once? And that’s with the same same size round or slightly larger. You go much larger and that useful rpm drops to 1/5th.

Given current military equipment development cycle times, that IS recent! Lol

Look again, the F-35 B and C both do NOT have the internal 25mm cannon. They will have a removable external gun pod available. Only the A model has the internal cannon.

I agree with you there. A lot of it is marketing too...

The last US designs for frontline fighters that used singke barrel cannon were the F-5/F-20 talon/tigershark, each specced with a pair of rapid firing 20mm cannon.

The air force has a couple of external gun pods that they developed in the past, including a recent large caliber one for the F-16 in an attempt to make it a better A-10 replacement (hint: it was a failure, causing way too much vibration to be accurate and potentially damaging the airframe). The air force has tried…

Actually, the generally accepted demarcation between “gun” in the small caliber, potentially man-portable sense is around 15mm. Save for a certain few extra large hunting rifles used for downing cape buffalo, you won’t find much larger than the .55 boys anti-tank rifle and the various browning .50 rifles and…

Aside from having a good bit more range than the phalanx as well as having the ability to use proximity shells or a mix of those with ap to muscle through the armored noses of some russian ASMs that the 20mm phalanx can’t hurt, GK isn’t that much better. It also requires deck penetration, sturdy mounts, water lines,…

In every possible way, yes. However, it still fits most places a phalanx mount does...

Well, there is this little system call goalkeeper... but it’s got much more bbrrrrrrrrrpt!

While you have some very valid points and I can’t really argue against any of it, here are some of the reasons that I made the selections that I did...

While the nostalgia lover in me applauds the idea of bringing the old battle-wagons back, the realist in me thinks that it would be beyond prohibitively expensive and, in doing so, would ruin the character of the ships themselves. Please allow me to speculate for a minute:

Imagine that you’re driving your listed vehicles, but instead of the stick and clutch being on the driver’s side of the car, its on the passenger side. Now imagine that someone else is sitting over there trying to guess what you want the car to do and shifting like they think you want to. Now, imagine that they can…

Of course. I was intentionally oversimplifying the system for the sake of brevity. But you are, of course, correct.

Lots of the remaining “airworthy” p-3 orions are having serious wing fatigue issues. I’m aware of issues that DHS had flying theirs, leading to a retirement plan for their entire fleet. I’ll be shocked if we see many more p3 firefighting missions.

Still looks like most of an RCS test frame to me. The wrap probably hides a surface treatment.

That looks VERY familiar... when have I seen that configuration before...

Do not discount the performance of the “old fleet” Impala limited. They ALL come with the 3.6L DOHC VCT engine and 6AT now. I got one as a rental last year when I went to D.C. and it was VERY peppy. No instrumented performance numbers, but, it would accelerate very nicely onto the freeway both at part throttle and at…