The rise of a great power: starting with military industry

Chapter 822 Characteristics of French aviation weapons - expensive
9 month.

The Farnborough Air Show is well and truly in the countdown to its opening ceremony.

Various aerospace companies came to Farnborough to participate in the air show.

The Chinese aircraft exhibiting at the exhibition had already arrived at Farnborough, and there were more than a dozen of them.

But at this time, Yang Ming and Huang Yi came to the French exhibition area.

Dassault exhibition area. Dassault also invested a lot of effort in this Farnborough Air Show.

Dassault is the second largest aircraft manufacturer in France and one of the world's major military aircraft manufacturers. It has the ability to independently develop military and civilian aircraft.

"French planes are so expensive!" Huang Yi couldn't help but say.

"Nothing French is cheap." Yang Ming smiled.

France's aviation weapons and equipment are all developed by itself. If the equipment is too small, the price will be very expensive. Therefore, French aircraft have always been known for being expensive, more expensive than American aircraft.

This time, Huang Yi and Yang Ming saw fighter jets such as F1 and F2000.

In the past, the French had tried to sell the Mirage 2000 fighter jet to China. After test flights, Chinese pilots believed that the Mirage 2000 fighter jet had excellent performance and that the J-7 and J-8 fighter jets had no chance at all against it.

The Mirage 2000 fighter is indeed a fighter with good performance, but the French fighter jets are famous for their high prices.

The price the French are asking for is enough for China to purchase American aircraft.

So far, China has not introduced French fighter jets.

Now that China has successfully developed its own J-10 and J-11 third-generation fighter jets, it is naturally impossible to introduce the Mirage 2000 fighter jets.

As for the Mirage F1 and Mirage F3 fighter jets, China now even looks down on them.

The Mirage F1 fighter is one of the few fighters with a conventional layout design by Dassault. The performance of the Mirage F1 fighter is very suitable for ground support missions at low altitude and low speed. It was developed by Dassault in the s and s to replace the Mirage III.

In the 1s, the French Air Force asked Dassault to develop a new generation of aircraft models. At that time, Dassault came up with three plans, namely the conventional layout Mirage F2, the two-seat F3 and F1, and even a Mirage G, which was a variable-sweep wing fighter. It was precisely to prevent the Mirage G from being cancelled that Dassault developed the Mirage F.

Later in 1965, the development of the Mirage G variable-sweep wing fighter, equipped with a Pratt & Whitney/Snecma TF306 turbofan engine, began.

But in the end, the Mirage G was cancelled. In that era when variable-sweep wings were popular, the French's first variable-sweep-wing fighter was not mass-produced, but some test flight subjects were completed.

Later, the French Air Force decided to purchase the Mirage F1 fighter to replace the Mirage III fighter. This conventional layout fighter is also a single-engine, single-seat light fighter with a length of 15.2 meters, a wingspan of 8.4 meters, a height of 4.5 meters, a wing area of ​​25 square meters, an empty weight of 7.4 tons, a maximum take-off weight of 16.2 tons, a maximum flight speed of 2.2 Mach (high altitude), a service ceiling of 2 meters, a range of 3300km, a climb rate of 213m/s, and a wing loading of 456kg/m2.

Mirage F1 fighter jets have seen action in the Middle East battlefields, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Gulf War.

Although the Mirage F1 fighter has good performance, it is still a second-generation fighter, similar to the J-7 and J-8 fighters. However, you should know that the latest improved versions of the J-7 and J-8 are already second-generation and a half fighters.

Huang Yi and Yang Ming were not interested in the Mirage F1 fighter jet. Their eyes were on the Mirage 2000 fighter jet.

The Mirage 2000 fighter is a single-engine light fighter. It is the third generation fighter developed by the French Dassault Company in the 1s after the Mirage III and Mirage F80 fighters. It is a multi-purpose fighter and began to serve in the French Air Force in 1984.

The Mirage 2000 fighter jet is technologically advanced and is one of the few fighter jets in the world that is not completely "inherited" from Soviet and American technology.

The Mirage 2000 re-uses the tailless delta wing aerodynamic layout of the Mirage III to give full play to the advantages of the delta wing, such as low supersonic drag, light structural weight, good rigidity, small flutter at large angles of attack, low wing load, large internal space, and large fuel storage. However, under the conditions of technological development, some limitations of the tailless layout have been solved. The main measures are the use of advanced technologies such as fly-by-wire control, relaxation of static stability, and composite materials to make up for the limitations of the layout. There are small side strips near the leading edge of the wing next to the air inlet, and the side strips have a significant upward angle.

Compared with Mirage III, Mirage 2000 has a 10% lower wing load, a 15% larger wing area, a 20% lower approach speed, and a climb rate that is twice that of Mirage III. Due to the extensive use of carbon fiber and boron fiber composite materials, the weight of structural components is reduced by 15-20%. New technologies such as fly-by-wire control, relaxed static stability, and composite materials are used to improve aerodynamic characteristics and flight performance, and new engines are used to increase endurance.

Of course, the French are now hyping a concept - medium-sized fighter.

In the past, fighter jets were mainly divided into heavy fighters and light fighters.

However, in recent years, because the take-off weights of fighter jets vary greatly, there have been more and more references to medium-sized fighter jets. Although there have been references to medium-sized fighter jets in the past, they were not mainstream.

According to the current concept of medium fighter jets, the so-called medium fighter jets refer to fighter jets whose take-off weight is between that of light fighter jets and heavy fighter jets.

The outstanding features of light fighters are low cost, easy maintenance, and mass production, but their performance is often not ideal.

The outstanding feature of heavy fighter jets is their excellent or even "all-round" performance, but they are expensive and complex to maintain, making them difficult to deploy on a large scale.

Medium fighters are between light fighters and heavy fighters. Under ideal conditions, the cost of medium fighters should be much lower than that of heavy fighters, but the restrictions on take-off weight and body capacity are much fewer than those of light fighters. It should be a medium fighter with "performance close to that of heavy fighters and cost close to that of light fighters."

Then according to the current classification, the third-generation fighters in the world are either medium fighters or heavy fighters.

比如F14‘熊猫’战斗机、F15战斗机、F18舰载机、苏27战斗机、米格31战斗机、歼11战斗机属于重型战斗机。

As for the other third-generation fighter jets currently available, such as the F16, J-10, MiG-29, Mirage 2000, etc., they are all medium-sized fighter jets.

Look, that's bullshit.

For example, the F16 fighter jet was previously classified as a third-generation light fighter jet, but now some professional military magazines have begun to classify the F16 fighter jet as a third-generation medium fighter jet.

But no matter what, the Mirage 2000 is a third-generation fighter and has its advantages.

However, when you think about the fact that the price of a Mirage 2000 fighter is now as high as 5000 to 6000 million US dollars per unit, you can't help but smile bitterly.

(End of this chapter)