Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25142096-20140927184716/@comment-25467429-20140929043627

You have to consider the history a bit. Attackers are things of the past nowadays. You just don't see them that often anymore in the real world. Why? Because they were eseentially mini bombers. They were often laden with heavy bombs and therefore they had to be built to maneuver carrying huge payloads. That made them slow and not very good at dogfighting. That made them relativley easy targets for fighters.

As a consequence, the multirole took off. It still has bombing runs as part of its workload, but they diminished the demand on them for that because they had so many better actual bombers now. Plus with the power of fighters and aircraft carriers all over the place, you didn't need to have such heavily bomb-laden craft doing the job attackers used to. You could fly out something like the F/A-18 to handle some relativley light bombing duty, and if you needed something more than that, you called on the same F/A-18s to equip anti-air weapons and run a bomber escort mission instead.

Furthermore, you have more experimental designs as well - note how many multiroles actually use forward-swept wings or a delta-wing design rather than a more traditional setup. This is all done to improve payload, and increase maneuverablility while carrying heavier loads. This still doesn't allow a multirole to match a fighter head-to-head, but compared to attackers of old they're much better.

Fighters are always about air superiority. They receive more routine upgrades to everything to retain that role. As such, their weapons systems tend to be the most up-to-date. So, the basic missile they fire (not the specialized anti-air payloads) are likely to be more effective than an older attacker whose avionics and other systems haven't had those upgrades. Add to the fact that the manueverability of a craft designed for dogfighting means it has greater ability to position itself for an attack anyway.

The Su-47 is considered a multirole, but it doesn't carry a very large bomb payload compared to other multiroles, so I would argue it shies closer to a fighter than anything else. You could argue similarly for the F-35. From there it's a matter of what weapons each plane has available to it.