How’s this for a design concept.
An autonomous drone, built on the cheap, carrying a single high speed heat or radar seeking missile. The drone is launched in the general direction of the enemy, where it will loiter while the missile seeks a target. Once a target passes in front of the seeker head of the missile, it fires, and the drone falls to the ground.
The entire system should be engineered to be as inexpensive as possible. Since it is entirely disposable, it should be possible to keep the cost down to $5K a copy. For the cost of one JSF, South Korea could deploy 60,000 fire-and-forget drones.
5K? Holding one design review will cost more than that just
for the room rental and donuts.
The cheapest hand launched drones for ground troop use are
20-50K not counting ground stations and dev costs.
Nothing worth buying is going to be cheap, and anything that
isn’t stealthy is going to be worth buying.
“How’s this for a design concept.
An autonomous drone, built on the cheap, carrying a single high speed heat or radar seeking missile.”
This concept would only work with heat seeking missiles. Radar guided (longer range) missiles rely on the much more powerful aircraft radar for initial targeting and long range detection. It’s only in the terminal phase of the missile’s flight that the missile’s own radar seeker becomes active. With the advent of more and more stealth aircraft designs, radar guidance is looking problematic long term regardless. Millimeter wave sensors solve most of these problems but (naturally enough) have their own large set of challenges.
“The drone is launched in the general direction of the enemy, where it will loiter while the missile seeks a target. Once a target passes in front of the seeker head of the missile, it fires, and the drone falls to the ground.”
This ignores one of the most important aspects of air-to-air warfare, IFF (Identification Friend or Foe). Your concept would shoot down anything in the sky, including friendly forces and civilian aircraft.
“The entire system should be engineered to be as inexpensive as possible. Since it is entirely disposable, it should be possible to keep the cost down to $5K a copy. For the cost of one JSF, South Korea could deploy 60,000 fire-and-forget drones.”
This is ridiculous on a few different levels. 99% of these would never see a target, and would be lost for no gain (the enemy could simply launch an apparent attack, then turn around and land after all the “fire and forget drones” launch. Just the IR missile would run over $50,000 (the US Aim-9X costs $85,000 per copy). IR missiles can’t see through clouds, so these would be totally ineffective if the enemy struck during cloudy conditions. Without supersonic capability, the drone would never get close enough to the enemy fighter to fire. A supersonic drone big enough to carry a Sidewinder type missile would cost in the hundreds of thousands - you might as well at least add a “return to base and land” capability - as well as radar, more big dollars.
I personally believe autonomous fighter aircraft drones will largely replace manned fighters over the next few decades due to performance and cost reasons, but they’ll have to be fairly close in size to the current multirole fighters in order to carry enough fuel and weapons. They won’t cost a whole lot less - I’ll be shocked if they’re more than 50% cheaper than the manned fighters.