Big Boys Toys

First there was this gun...

It was developed by General Electric, the "We bring good things to life" people.  
Someone said, "Let's put it in an airplane..better still, and lets build an airplane around it."


They made it so it was very good at flying low and slow.
But since it did fly low and slow, they made it bulletproof, or almost so. A lot of bad guys have found you can shoot an A10 with anything from a pistol to a 23mm Soviet cannon and it just keeps on flying and shooting.
When they got through, it looked like this...

It's not sleek and sexy like an F18 or the stealthy Raptors and such, but it's such a great airplane because it does what it does better than any other plane in the world.
It kills tanks.

See those engines. One of them alone will fly this puppy. The pilot sits in a very thick titanium alloy "bathtub."
They were smart enough to make every part the same whether mounted on the left side or right side of the plane, like landing gear, for instance.
Because the engines are mounted so high (away from ground debris) and the landing gear uses such low pressure tires, it can operate from a damaged airport, interstate highway, plowed field, or dirt road..
Everything is redundant. They have two of almost everything. Sometimes they have three of something. Like flight controls. There's triple redundancy of those,  and even if there is a total failure of the double hydraulic system, there is a set of manual flying controls.