Alpha-3 Fighter

The **Alpha-3 Fighter**, also known as the **Elpacio 3 Fighter**, is the premiere air-superiority fighter of the Holy Milishial Empire. Its main purpose is air-to-air combat and bomber escort. Though it does possess many innovative features, it has proven to be severely lacking in comparison to even the Antares as well as the Mitsubishi F-15J in many aspects.

## Description

Design wise, the Alpha-3 bears resembles to some of the early jet fighters seen on Earth, most notably the American P-59 Airacomet manufactured by Bell Aircraft. The Alpha-3 utilizes a monoplane design, with an oval cross-section, straight wings, tricycle landing gear, single-seat enclosed cockpit and tapered vertical and horizontal stabilizers. Oddly, while the wings of the Alpha-3 are straight edged, the horizontal and vertical stabilizers are slightly swept backwards.

The primary armaments of the Alpha-3 are 4 wing-mounted magic autocannons, they function by discharging light magic based projectiles at their targets, creating a scene similar to how mechanical autocannons fire tracer rounds.

Unlike the propeller driven Marin, or the turbojet powered Airacomet, the Alpha-3 is driven by a Chant Powered, Light Magic-Compressed Air Discharge Engine. Instead of relying on chemical reactions, the Light Discharge Engine uses a combination of Tears of the Wind God to draw in air and purified red magical gems to generate massive amounts of heat and thrust. The principle behind this powerplant is similar to that of a primitive pulse jet, making the Alpha-3 more similar to experimental designs such as the German Messerschmitt Me 328.

The Alpha-3 is said to be able to reach speeds greater than 400 km/h (249 mph), which makes it faster than the V-1 flying bomb but is still remarkably slow for a jet powered aircraft. In fact, the Alpha-3 has a lower top speed even compared to the Heinkel He 178, the first aircraft to fly via thrust produced from a turbojet. The fighter itself was based on the ancient technology of the Ravernal Empire. However, unlike the Ravernal Empire's fighters, the Alpha-3 is incapable of reaching supersonic speeds. This might explain why the wings of the Alpha-3 remain straight, as the aircraft is likely too underpowered to support swept wings.

While the Light Discharge Engine is overall less sophisticated than the hard science afterburning turbofans used by Japanese fighters, it suffers a multitude of drawbacks as well. While the utilization of Tears somewhat mitigated the pulsejet's drawback of not being able to draw in compressed air, it's not as effective as modern day turbines, resulting in the aircraft having limited acceleration and higher stall speeds, as well as reduced fuel efficiency due to lower compression ratio. Due to the engine's intermittent "pulsing" operation, it cannot produce thrust as consistently compared to turbofans/jets, hence why the Alpha-3 being unable to break the sound barrier.

The airframe is not free from faults either, the straight wings may offer better stability than swept ones, but produces a lot more drag in return, as the engineers of the Holy Milishial Empire have only begun to theorize the feasibility of swept wings during supersonic flight. The tricycle landing gears are grouped extremely close to each other, and despite being cleared for carrier operations, no variant of the Alpha 3 are even equipped with arrestor hooks. The two aforementioned elements combined make landings on Rodeus-Class Aircraft Carriers an extremely treacherous experience.

Having their own fair share of experience designing and manufacturing supersonic jet aircraft, the Japanese flight engineers found the design of the Alpha-3 less than impressive. While certain parts of the Alpha-3's fuselage seems partially advanced for its time, but the elementary aerodynamics of the fighter appear to be self-taught. The airfoil or cross-section of the wings is considered to be old-fashioned and seemed to be a carbon copy of the original Ravernal fighter's design. For the Milishial engineers, supersonic flight is a distant dream at best since their jet engines lack the power to achieve such speeds. The plane is a mixture of "ancient" and modern feature from a Japanese perspective. The nose is similar to the 1st-generation jet aircraft P-59 Airacomet of the United States of America but the intake is similar to the 4.5-gen F-16 Falcon.

Despite its innovations, the Alpha-3 fighter suffers from poor acceleration, rate of climb, range, thrust-to-weight ratio, and especially maneuverability, when compared to Japan's jets and even the Gra Valkas Empire's seemingly less advanced propeller driven aircraft.

## Specification

* Type: Air Superiority Fighter
* Crew: 1
* Top speed: 510 kph
* Armaments: 4 x light magic cannons
* Powerplant: 1 x Chant Powered, Light Magic-Compressed Air Discharge Engine

## Operational History

The Alpha-3 fighters were deployed to escort the Beta-2 bombers during the Battle of Baltica Offshore. They were easily outmatched by the Gra Valkas Empire pilots, despite the Antares fighters being propeller-driven. The Antares planes were able to outperform the Alpha-3 jets in every engagement with greater speed and maneuverability. Despite being jet-propelled, the Milishial fighters couldn't out-climb or out-turn their opponents. As a result, virtually all the Alpha-3 jets were shot down.

## Trivia

* The name of the aircraft in the light novel is Elpacio 3.