The Beautiful New Planes!
By 
Interesting rundown of what we’re looking at when we’re thinking about “Sixth Generation Fighters,” including a quote from the great Bill Sweetman:
Put all this together and you get planes that look like old-fashioned bombers. Mr Sweetman compares the hulking J-36, with massive wings and cavernous weapon bays, to an “airborne cruiser”, optimised for range, stealth and carrying capacity over dogfighting agility. The single most important requirement for the Tempest is the ability to carry a lot of weapons, says Group Captain Bill, noting that it will have roughly double the payload of the beefiest F-35. That makes sense: if you can deliver more firepower per sortie, you can destroy a target with fewer risky flights into enemy airspace. “The same answers tend to pop up for all,” says Mike Pryce, who has advised Britain’s defence ministry on combat air design. “Stand off, don’t be seen, shoot first, don’t get into a knife fight.”
As the planes get bigger, their insides are also evolving into what are essentially “flying supercomputers”, says Roberto Cingolani, the CEO of Leonardo, an Italian company that is developing the wider Tempest programme along with Britain’s BAE Systems and Japan’s Mitsubishi. Leonardo says that the Tempest will be able to “suck up” a medium-sized city’s worth of data in one second, according to Tim Robinson of the Royal Aeronautical Society. That could include anything from radio traffic to the emissions of air-defence radars. The point is to share that data with friendly forces, including tanks and ships, says Mr Cingolani, perhaps via satellite, with a “central artificial intelligence” making decisions—presumably which targets should be attacked, by what, and when. Some might suggest “that’s science fiction,” he says. “No, that’s a vision.”
Right now we’re looking at the F-47, the British/Italian/Japanese/Swedish Tempest, and the Chinese J-36, plus possibly whatever the Navy is trying to come up with. And yes, pretty much all of those countries are also buying or building fifth generation fighters, which is standard operating procedure for keeping an air force modern.
Photo Credit: By Swadim – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82612604