What even IS a 6th gen fighter, anyway?

There's been lots of talk about 6th generation fighters lately... but what exactly is required for the title?

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[SmoochyRoo]

Heck, propeller planes have evolved and become so advanced between the first flight and the end of world war two that they alone can be divided into 6 or 7 generations based on how the powerplant, construction techniques, weapons, and aerodynamics have changed and/or been implemented.

[EricJW]

Okay, I'll be that guy. Technically, all planes are capable of suborbital flight. The term you want is suborbital spaceflight.

[SWATOPRR]

"Siri, fire missile"
Siri: "confirmed, washing machine purchased"

[GlassGardenband]

a lot of people talking about 6th gen aircraft that don't even know the differences between the 5th and 6th thanks for the info as always

[jameslind]

Hopefully this starts to turn into something that makes sense, rather then pure marketing, like the jump between prop planes to jet or other major shifts, rather then something more iterative like rivets becoming smooth rivets, or radar upgrades, changes in stealth.

[Liam-fxir]

“Some science fiction fans even argue that sixth-generation fighters should be capable of sub-orbital flight, but I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.”

Was that a pun?

[AzovAzza]

Glad you’re feeling better, AH! Thanks for constant, badass content!

[PeterWhite-qk]

Alex, thank you for this! A voice of reason must come forward and you have, again. This is why I am a subscriber. You and very few others defy Mark Twain's famous quote, "If you don't read the newspapers (he wrote this in the 1800s) you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."

[johnmcdonald-]

Definitely AI generated channels declaring the US has lost its crown of air dominance. 😂

[paulgemperlein]

Maybe the real 6th generation fighters are the friends we made along the way

[Sultan-cfwf]

6th Gen fighter? J-36??? AAAAH! It’s too scary! $500 billion in R&D to Lockheed Martin now!

[korana]

Good video overall as I've personally listed all of those points myself. i. e. Full 6th gen jet:
1 No tails.
2 Ability to control swarms of drones/ other crafts.
3 Improved radar, improved engine, improved stealth, improved missiles etc.
That's the basic criteria for the 6th gen. Everything else is debatable.

[TRAjim]

There was a recent video with Justin Bronk where he described what China was looking for in its “5th/6th Gen” fighters/bombers. He said their goal is to be able to reach out and destroy US tankers. China’s overwhelming cruise/hypersonic/ballistic missile force, can neutralize the local island chain/Japanese bases. So they weren’t looking to exceed or equal the stealth or EW capabilities the US fighter force has, but good enough to let them get close enough (and far enough) to destroy US tanker aircraft. He said the Achilles heal of the F22 and F35 (in stealth config), is range. If China can reach out and destroy the tankers, they can blunt any U.S. offense across the Pacific.

[Alphacrow]

At the end of the video. I think you actually inadvertently discovered exactly what the criteria for the next 6 gen fighters should be. They should be able to enter the battle space out numbered in orders of magnitude by the enemy’s current generation of aircraft and win. It should be able to defeat all currently known air to air targets at scale. It should have available solutions that are ready to defeat low cost “depth of magazine” attacks against itself and/or friendly assets. In other words, to even put up a meaningful resistance to the aircraft, our adversaries would need to develop new air fighting capabilities that require a significant qualitative leap in multiple technologies that only when effectively fielded together can compete with our 6th gen fighter.

[NNICKKK]

Music was a bit distracting. Felt like I was in a 9 minute supercut montage of me selecting and loading dozens of weapons before going into battle.

[theldun]

kinda like 2G, 3G, 4G, 4Glte, 5G none of the criteria was ever met for any of them but that didn't stop them from using the terms in marketing.

[Meower]

There was a time when the F-16 was testing something akin to open software architecture (OSA). At one point, I recall reading an article about how an F-16 had been modded such the various systems on it were using a system called CORBA (you can look that up on wikipedia). Basically, you have standardized data formats for passing stuff around and a large number of different software processes running, able to query data from other processes, send data to other processes and trigger remote processes. The various processes don't have to be written in the same language, nor do they have to be running on the same hardware. This is important because Ada (the usual language for DoD-related stuff) stores data differently from Java, Perl or Python and an ARM processor stores data differently from an x86. So far as I'm aware, the effort went nowhere, beyond a couple proof-of-concept flights (yeah, we can do it, but it's not as easy as we hoped and it doesn't seem to provide benefits so scrap it). CORBA, unfortunately, is rather burdensome in its implementation so it likely wasn't the best approach; it was the cool new software tech, at the time, and one of the few which promised that kind of distributed processing capability. Modern web services, with JSON, are much more efficient.

[Istandby]

In the early 90's they were developing voice augmentation to control an aircraft by voice only.
They used an aircraft that can hover and use thrusters to push the aircraft sideways(yaw).
I actually watched the demonstration.
All of this while using Commodore 64 technology.
Just imagine what they have today.

[TheAdequateMedia]

Such a good topic to augment the media literacy for folks actively being propagandized by the CCPs shenennigans

[natgenesis]

Direct energy and shape as you mentioned