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?
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In addition to the comments here, there is also a marked difference in how you want these types of planes to be. Fighters need to be inherently unstable in order to be able to make rapid directional changes to aid their engagement patterns, whereas bombers will prioritise stability for better weapons (i.e. bomb) deployment. The 2 design requirements are diametrically opposed and deliberately so.
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.
Most planes are unarmored these days due to relying on speed and altitude. In WW2, armoring certain areas on planes was fairly common. Planes were never armored like you’d imagine a tank or ship being armored though. Typically it was just a relatively thin plate of armor protecting either the pilot or the engine. They typically also wouldn’t stop much beyond a rifle-caliber bullet.
The Soviet IL-2 was one of, if not the first plane to feature an armored “tub” to protect the pilot from ground fire. This is now famous for being a feature on the A-10 today.
Typically however the main reason bombers are so much less fast or maneuverable is due to the bomb load itself, and the increased fuel needed for higher ranges and to feed an increased number of engines. Armor plays little into that.
In the US arsenal, the aircraft with the heaviest armor is the A-10. It has a Titanium tub to protect the cockpit, its engines are outside of the fuselage to prevent them from destroying it if compromised, it has significant redundancy, and has safely landed with a large portion of the aircraft damaged. By comparison, a fighter like an F-35 or F-16 can be taken down by hitting a single bird. The B-52 has redundancy in its 8 engines, back-up systems, and multiple engines can literally fall off and the aircraft can land safely. B-1 and B-2 aircraft do not have these resilient features. No bombers have special armor.
The aircraft mentioned are post-WWII. In WWII self-sealing fuel tanks allowed the success of bombers and fighters alike. Gunners on bombers allowed them to be formidable, but the small amount of armor left crews more vulnerable than if the aircraft were maneuverable like a fighter. As a result, bomber aircrew members from the 8th Air Force alone accounted for half the U.S. Army Air Core KIA from all of WWII.
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