Do bombers usually have heavier armor than either fighters, attackers, or multirole aircraft?

Question

Because I frequently look up military aircraft a lot on Wikipedia, and time and time again, I keep hearing how bombers are slower and less maneuverable than either fighters, attackers, or multirole aircraft. So does that mean that bombers are more heavily armored than the other three types of military aircraft? If not, and armor just weighs down *any* plane, why are bombers the largest, slowest, and leave maneuverable of the military aircraft, anyway?

In: 258

Answer 1

Generally, NO on the armor question.

As for why bombers are less speedy and maneuverable (generally), it’s about mass. Let’s recall the old general physics texts. An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to remain in motion at the same velocity (velocity, unlike speed, has direction), until acted upon by a force. Also, force equals mass times acceleration.

So first, to achieve the same acceleration (change in velocity, which could include changing direction of travel without changing the speed), an object of greater mass needs more force than does one of less mass.

Get on a bicycle by yourself. Start pedaling. How hard do you need to pedal to get up to speed? Now do it again with your best friend sitting on the handlebars. You had to pedal a lot harder to get to the same speed.

Same holds for airplanes. It takes more to accelerate to speed, turn, or just maintain airspeed, in a heavier plane. It’s why a Cessna 150 operates on a single 4-cylinder engine and a Boeing 747 needs 4 bigass turbofans putting out over 200,000 pounds of thrust.

The bomber weighs more because it has to be bigger and have more weight available at takeoff in order to carry those bombs to target. That means a bigger wing to create more lift, bigger engines to create more thrust, and more fuel for the engines (which also means bigger wings). That all makes it weigh more, which means it needs even MORE of those things. Aero engineers have hard choices to make there.

But the extra weight makes bombers slower and less nimble. The need of bigger wings and engines and payloads, makes the bombers weigh more than fighters.