Just as Toth was finishing his debut with perfection, an experiment was about to kick off at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

After William Stillman invented the magazine, John asked him to develop a sixth-generation fighter based on the "Black Widow" fighter.

The fifth-generation aircraft has just been put into the sky and has not yet been equipped with troops, and John began to develop the sixth-generation fighter, will it be a little rushed?

In fact, this is normal, although the speed of upgrading cutting-edge weapons is not as fast as that of electronic products, it is not slow, and what the United States pays attention to is that those that can be taken out and shown to others are not the most cutting-edge weapons, and the best weapons are always at the bottom of the arsenal.

Therefore, some people say that only war can let people know how much money the United States has.

It is true that many of the sophisticated weapons of the United States have either accumulated dust in the arsenal or have remained on the drawing paper, because there are too few countries that can make the United States take it seriously, and those small countries in the Middle East are not worthy of the United States to show their cards.

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The standards for the classification of fifth-generation aircraft in the United States are stealth, supersonic cruise, super maneuverability, and super information superiority, which together are referred to as 4S.

And William Stillman, as the chief engineer of the United States sixth-generation aircraft research and development, also formulated a set of sixth-generation aircraft generation standards.

In terms of the requirements of the fifth-generation aircraft, the sixth-generation aircraft must have artificial intelligence, hypersonic cruise, suborbital flight, directional laser weapons, ultra-long-distance combat radius, and realize the real integration of land, sea, air and space power grids.

William Stillman's criteria for delineation are very much in line with the thinking of American weapons development.

For example, the stealth capability of the fifth-generation aircraft of the United States has completely rendered the radar detection function in service in most countries completely or partially ineffective.

According to William Stillman's criteria for dividing sixth-generation fighters, once this fighter is successfully developed, all anti-aircraft missiles in the world will lose their effectiveness, and they will also achieve absolute crushing of fifth-generation aircraft.

The anti-aircraft missiles equipped by all countries cannot enter the suborbit, and the fifth-generation aircraft cannot enter the suborbital orbit, so even if you can detect it, you will not be able to reach that altitude and speed to catch up with it, and you can only watch it break through its own air defense system.

William Stillman's criteria for classifying sixth-generation aircraft are actually not aircraft in the traditional sense, and according to his standards, this is already an aerospace fighter.

The advantages of the aerospace fighter are very strong, once developed, it will definitely leave a strong mark in history, but it is never a simple thing to leave a name in the history books, even if you are a bad person, you must be so bad that no one has ever come before, otherwise you will not even be qualified to leave a stench for 10,000 years.

However, it is very difficult to develop this kind of cross-era fighter, not to mention the technology of artificial intelligence, the engine alone is a big problem.

According to William Stillman's definition, the sixth-generation aircraft must have hypersonic cruise, that is, the sixth-generation fighter must be able to cruise at speeds above Mach 6.

The most advanced F22 Raptor fighter in the United States, which has not yet been installed in the army, has a cruising speed of Mach 1.8 and a top speed of Mach 2.2. And William Stillman prescribed that the new generation of fighters would be 3 to 4 times faster.

And 3 to 4 times is not a problem that can be solved by equipping the F22 Raptor fighter with four engines.

When the turbojet engine has a speed of more than Mach 3.5, the performance will drop rapidly, and the superramjet engine can solve this problem, the superramjet engine can make the speed of the fighter reach Mach 6, but there is a new problem that the superramjet engine must work at a speed of more than Mach 3.5, otherwise it is useless.

In other words, the fighter must maintain a speed of Mach 3.5 at all times, including takeoff.

And this is unrealistic, a fighter must have an initial take-off, and this initial take-off, the speed will definitely not exceed Mach 3.5.

So this is a very contradictory thing, the turbojet engine speed can not reach Mach 3.5, and the speed of the superramjet engine cannot be lower than Mach 3.5, if you want to solve this problem, you must use a completely new engine, and the sixth-generation aircraft can fly into the blue sky.

Moreover, this is just a problem with the engine, when the speed of the fighter reaches Mach 6.5, it will also encounter the problem of thermal barriers, and the external temperature of the whole fighter will be as high as 1000 degrees, and when the fighter flies at full speed to Mach 8 to 9, this temperature will rise, which means that the materials on the general fighter, the sixth-generation aircraft cannot be used, and there must be materials that resist heat for a long time, especially the materials of the engine, which must resist thousands of degrees of high temperature for a long time.

And new materials are not so easy to develop, just like the blocking rope of an aircraft carrier, and there are not many countries in the world that can get it. Therefore, it is difficult to develop this material in a short period of time.

And the range of the fighter, the weapon...... None of these problems is easy to solve, so the research and development of a fighter must be a long time, and a cross-era product like a sixth-generation aircraft is even more long, and it is impossible to develop it overnight.

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William Stillman also knew that the development of the sixth-generation aircraft must be a long time, and all he had to do was to continue to overcome these technical problems until all the problems were solved.

The first problem he had to solve was the engine.

The engine is the most important part of the fighter, and it is also the most difficult part of the entire research and development, the industrial pearl is not called in vain, there are few countries in the world that can independently develop fighter engines, so it can be seen how difficult it is to build fighter engines.

But without it, all subsequent research and development will be meaningless. So the first problem that William Stillman had to solve was the engine.

It is a contradiction that the speed of the turbojet engine cannot be higher than Mach 3.5, and the superramjet engine can no longer work at Mach 3.5, but William Stillman fully studied the working principle and structure of these two engines, and tried to combine the principles and structures of these two engines to develop a new type of engine.

According to William Stillman's vision, this engine can work at low speeds below Mach 3.5 or above Mach 3.5, and William Stillman called this engine a superramjet composite jet.

But whether this new engine can be as William Stillman envisioned, no one knows, including William Stillman himself, who did not dare to pack the ticket, this requires experimentation, so William Stillman built a prototype to experiment.