What matters more when it comes to military aircraft: Quantity

Quality.

A single F-22 can shoot down 5 F-15s, no problem. A single B-2 can slip past a major IADS network and deliver munitions.

>>32221028

It's always been about quality.

But who knows what the future holds, when it comes to things like spamming relatively cheap drones.

>>32221108
It will probably only matter if they can make more cheap drones than expensive aircraft can carry munitions, and still have those drones able to destroy the aircraft.

>>32221253

Well, yeah. Missiles and missile trucks are extremely expensive. Seems like it'll be an economic form of warfare. If you can make a drone that's cheap and effective, and spam it I could see it changing things. But until then I would think quality would reign supreme.

But I'm not really informed on the issue, just guessing.

Quality is more important now, though I think that from the 20s-40s quantity was a form of quality.

>>32221280
The big difficulty will be making something that's cheap but still able to catch and engage things that are expensive. I expect they'd have better use offensively than defensively, when they could more easily force an enemy to engage them while they were massed.

I can buy a lot of Honda Civics for the price of a Lamborghini, but I'm still not winning a race with them, you know what I mean?

>>32221306

Not really.

Look at the Eastern Front's air war.

>me 262 appears and outperforms anything allies have
>Allies just send a spare squadron of planes to loiter their airfields and shoot them down while landing

File: American Monster.jpg (12KB, 260x194px) Image search: [Google]

12KB, 260x194px

>>32221028
Milspec, obviously. A very few countries can afford a real Milspec in their military.

Being number one is a major feat, something you can't just solve by spying and then thinking "Ni hao, I spyed".

It takes a bit more.

>>32221426

Never understood this. Why were German aircraft ever able to get off the ground if Allied aircraft could stalk them as they landed?

>>32221426
Except it didn't outperform anything the allies had. It may have had a fast horizontal speed, but it climbed worse than many prop engined planes, and dived worse. And it turned worse certainly. And was poorly constructed.

>>32221028
Quantity and the ability to mass that quantity.

>>32222235
Yeah that worked so great for the Japs at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.

PO-2 takes out P-80.
Take that, Quality. Russian Biplane Traktor Fighter beat Capitalist Jet.