3 ms·

> will result in flow separation With thrust vectoring and a TWR > 1 this is less of a concern.

• stouset 6y ago
  No, this is ridiculous. It's absolutely a concern. Having attitude control at stall speeds makes for impressive air shows but doesn't help even slightly against an oncoming missile. Sure you can point the nose wherever you feel like, but from the missile's perspective all you've done is given up your ability to make abrupt changes in direction and made its job of predicting your future location easier. Without lift under the wings, you're spinning the plane around on its axis but you're not actually changing the plane's motion vector as much as if you'd made a coordinated turn. And on top of all this, a missile doesn't actually have to hit you directly to kill you. Missiles are proximity fuzed, so simply blow up next to you. Even a fancy 10G maneuver (a maneuver with thrust-vectoring while stalled, by the way, is ~0-1G since you're mostly just a ballistic object) isn't going to help much against a missile at Mach 4 that can pull 50G.