The C-Crisis, also called the Knighting, was a formative event in the history of contemporary warplanes. Due to the proliferation of directed energy weapons in the context of other technological factors, the nature of aircraft armament and survivability had to be seriously reconsidered. While a great many options were considered, the ultimate victor of the C-Crisis was the now-dominant philosophy of relatively hard-skinned aircraft with an armament built around many shorter-range multi-purpose missiles.
Pre-C-Crisis Military Aerospace
The era before the C-Crisis was dominated by BVR, Beyond Visual Range, combat. The performance of missiles and the sensors necessary to guide them was, at this point, nigh oppressive. Many descriptions of this era of BVR combat are somewhat reductive- maneuvering was still a factor, but not in the sense that missiles could be reliably "dodged" as we like to think of it.
Stealth technology was seeing great technological leaps and bounds, first proving viable, then made less impactful on the kinematic performance of the aircraft, and by the time the C-Crisis had set in, highly affordable. Dramatically reducing the radar cross section of aircraft promised that excessively long-range shots could be avoided simply by going undetected, and this had drawn in the effective range of missiles considerably as it proliferated. However, they remained dominant in the form they had occupied for a long time- carried in small numbers, hard to avoid, and specialized towards particular targets. Moreover, as stealth technology's proliferation became increasingly symmetrical, it became apparent that it was going to go both ways- stealth craft would need to get close to targets to attack, as those targets were now also stealthy, which could potentially bring them into the range of massed ground fire. This increasingly drawn-in combat would prove to be important context for the decisions made in the following generations of post-C-Crisis aircraft, as the range at which combatants would likely spot each other dwindled from hundreds down to tens of kilometers.
Kinematically, aircraft were getting better and better. Hypersonic (Mach 5+) speeds were on the horizon, and a plethora of aerodynamic refinements to maximize maneuverability were well-employed. However, mixing these was problematic. First, in manned vehicles, the sheer accelerations caused by turning at speed would likely kill the pilot. Second, manned or not, the forces in these turns were immensely stressful to the airframe. The sheer kinematic potential of aircraft by this point was restrained by the fragility of their construction and their pilots.
Directed Energy Weapons and Concerns
DEWs had been hypothesized for a long time, and their inherent nature- using light as a weapon- had frightening implications for aircraft survivability. With effectively no delay between firing and impact, hitting aircraft would be trivially easy, and with negligible armor and vast quantities of combustible fuel, they were ideal targets. It was here that the C-Crisis took shape, as this new weapon type began rapidly proliferating.
Lasers, for a time, would be contained- low range and a tendency to face interference from certain weather patterns made them fairly reasonable to avoid through remaining at standoff range. However, there were two inevitable problems with this doctrine in the long run. The first was the theoretical threat of just larger lasers. Overcoming the limitations of range through sheer output was certainly possible in theory, albeit quite inconvenient. However, this would likely be a small price to pay to eliminate aircraft at extremely long ranges extremely reliably. The second was the extremely low cost of a given discharge from a laser, creating, essentially, a situation where the enemy could literally afford to fire the laser at basically everything- including incoming munitions. Single attacks from standoff range would be very easy to intercept on the way down, and massed attacks would only work if the sheer amount of munitions was enough to overcome the sustained firing rate of the laser and anything else supporting it- which in the case of a relatively lightweight aircraft versus either fixed or surface vehicle-based anti-aircraft networks, worked heavily in the favor of the laser.
Stealth was one solution, but the increasingly common state of affairs- stealth aircraft searching for other stealth vehicles and needing to get close to find them- made stealth alone dubious as adequate anti-laser survivability. Another option was just massed attack with UCAVs, but this led to issues not too dissimilar from those faced by the idea of saturation attacks, as the loss rates would be unacceptable even with the most expendable of drones.
The eventual solution that came of this was to simply armor military aircraft against laser attacks. Much of what was learned in protecting aircraft from radar was applied here- blocker plates in the exhaust, and intake designs that would not offer a straight shot to the engines. Ablative armor and Z-shielding were implemented in the hull, and the canopy was embedded to protect the pilot from direct hits. This came at an immense cost to weight and internal space, and thus posed a setback to top speed, with the only hypersonic aircraft to materialize being relatively specialized interceptor/interdictor types. Even with these measures, lasers remain a prominent weapon type, and when paired with other anti-air leaning secondary weapons on tanks, as primary weapons on anti-air, and as active protection, they provide an ever-increasing anti-air capacity to surface units, giving them increasing agency against harassing aircraft.
Knock-On Effects
While the armor focused on anti-laser (as well as anti-maser) performance, the added material proved to have other impacts. The armor served as additional structural reinforcement, allowing aircraft to maneuver harder than before without suffering damage, and led to increased efforts to improve pilot G-tolerance in manned aircraft to better utilize this. Research was put into neural interfaces, which became increasingly standard, with integrated capabilities to allow the pilot to effectively bypass GLOC. With further cybernetic modification, the risk of physical injury was also mitigated, and plugged into an enclosed cockpit, pilots could maneuver basically as well as unmanned aircraft could.
But more in line with armor, the ablative plating had sufficient ballistic protection to have serious impacts on what anti-aircraft weapons would be used from then on out. Much of what made missiles so hard to avoid was the fact that they would simply detonate into a shower of fragments if they were even vaguely close- but now, those fragments would be insufficient for a kill, and the same would go for concussion from the explosives themselves. While the armor was fairly marginal, it was sufficient to demand relatively directional damage to be overcome- either kinetic or shaped-charge weapons, and with them, a relative falloff of proximity-fused weapons.
While certainly able to be overcome, the fact that the damage they dealt was now directional had an additional effect on aircraft survivability against missiles and shells, in that they'd punch neat holes through the aircraft, but these, quite likely, would only take out a subsystem at a time. On average it takes a modern fighter two hits with average missiles to suffer enough damage to constitute at least a mission-kill. This resulted in an increased interest in maximizing aircraft payloads, which, in light of reduced weapon range (and often longer search times) due to the back and forth of stealth, manifested most often as lightweight, cheap missiles held in bays of about 25 each, two such bays per aircraft, launching one at a time. As these missiles would use directionalized warheads they would be omni-purpose, dealing damage to relatively hardened targets, further increasing the effective payload. These missiles would become the main armament, backed up by a fair helping of conventional missiles, lasers, and autocannons.
Post-C-Crisis Aircraft Design
The new generation of aircraft was heralded mostly by multirole fighters with reduced radar and infrared signatures, armor equivalent to some light surface vehicles, and an armament consisting of a vast quantity of short-range multipurpose missiles with a mix of more specialized, limited weapons to back them up, fighting at up to a few dozen kilometers away from each other with extreme maneuverability, speeds up to Mach 3, and a tendency to shrug off the first hit.
More specialized aircraft- bombers and transports- also had changes. Armor was nearly universally adopted, but armament varies with objective and would have to be addressed separately for each.
Named in retrospect for the constant representing the Speed of Light, the C-Crisis, or the Knighting in reference to its end result of heavily armored aircraft, the event would shape air combat up through contemporary designs and doctrines. BVR combat was restrained, but not replaced, and missiles remain the dominant weapon in a form, but the impact a given aircraft may have has been considerably increased, as has the ability for surface assets to combat it.
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