Pay me to be a Data Analyst, writer and developer… i will accommodate… Otherwise… i am good thanks, people can accommodate their own desires.
Until then… BAe EAP is factually a more developed aircraft than the Yak-141.
Bit like Yak-141’s wooden ballast it used in it’s much fewer flights and even crashes!?
im trying to be a realist here. Gaijin wont accept the EAP cause they say its only a tech demo with no intentions of being a combat aircraft. if you look at my older comments i explained why they chose the yak141 and its basically down to the lead devs being Russian and liking the plane
Though, what I find kinda funny about this now, is that they’ve denied the EAP because its a tech demo, but added the tech demo Challenger 3 without its turret spall liner which was only removed because its a tech demo. The actual Challenger 3 would obviously have spall liner in the turret.
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Not really. It is a long running precedent that unfinished prototype aircraft can be given their “final form” with their planned armament; there are plenty of examples from all nations (XP-50, J7W1, Sea Meteor, S.O.8000 to name a few off the top of my head). That’s why the Yak-141 got added with it’s planned weapons and systems.
The problem is that the evidence at the moment points to the planned final form of the EAP being that of an unarmed technology demonstrator. I’ve been looking into it, but so far I’ve not found anything confirming plans to arm the EAP. They certainly paid some attention to making the EAP representative of a practical fighter aircraft. But it seems likely that any armed version would be a distinct aircraft (I.e. the BAe P.120).
I think the difference between the Challenger 3 Tech Demonstrator and the EAP boils down to the CR3 TD can shoot stuff while the EAP can’t.
As for the lack of a spall liner Gaijin gave chosen to implement it as the tech demonstrator currently is. We will probably see the CR3 Prototype and CR3 itself added at a later date with spall liners to help differentiate them.
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So the yak141s prototypes never resulted in an actual production plane.
The EAP was a prototype which did result in the production of the eurofighter.
EAP looks a lot like the Eurofighter, but they are separate programmes. EAP did not becomes the Eurofighter.
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EAP was a technical demonstrator for the ACA, agile combat aircraft program, which is what evolved into the Eurofighter Typhoon once the continental Europeans had stopped messing about.
BAE EAP was canceled in favour of the Typhoon programme. But if that had never happened, then it would likely have been developed into a full 4th gen fighter the BAE ACA program if I’m not mistaken.
That whole era of European aircraft design is a bit of a mess. After Germany dropped out of ACA the EAP was considered a solely British project to let BAe gain experience in canard-delta aircraft designs. It certainly provided a lot of data which was used in the Eurofighter, but those working on it at the time very much saw it as a separate entity.
It was a technology demonstrator for a class of aircraft, not a direct prototype of the Typhoon.
Had the Eurofighter programme fallen through the UK would have probably ended up with something along the lines of the BAe P.110 or P.120, assuming we didn’t just give up and buy something American, as usually happens with advanced UK-only defence programmes.
It’s just a shame we didn’t get any of these over the past year. We were left DOA at top tier for an entire year because “it’s only Britain”
From what I can tell they were planning on going with the P.110/EAP/ACA/P.120 solution, they weren’t sure the Germans and Italians would invest. I don’t think they would have gone American simply because the EAP had been designed with weapons implementation in-mind, the conversion would have been relatively cheap although they might have changed some of the off the shelf products to new ones.
But there is no ruling out of the American solution its just a god-send that they didn’t.
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Unfortunately, when the UK imbarks on a complex defence project itself, we all to often end up giving up and buying American. See:
- TSR.2
- Blue Streak / Black Arrow
- Nimrod MRA.4
- P.1154 (that’s how we got the Phantom)
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There needs to be some sort of law against cancelling these sorts of finished or significantly developed projects I know that most of those flew or had engines constructed etc.
For a laugh here’s a letter I found in the national Archives from the Royal Aircraft establishment, where they give a rather brutal assessment of the planned ACA design, and MBB’s engineering competence:
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Yeah the book mentions they really hated the supermaneuverability requirements particularly as the aircraft was slated to be more than maneuverable enough without those features and hence the P.110 was significantly more favoured supposedly even by the AIT engineers.
The EAP was not a prototype.
It was a Prototype-Demonstrator. Not an actual weapons platform prototype. And they have multiple times on this forum mentioned it will never come.