221–230 of 267 posts
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It's seriously inferior in most ways.
Like what? Not knowledgeable at all, so just curious to hear in what ways!
That said, it's kinematically and aerodynamically superior, but that's not very important nowadays.
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The F-35 is the Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) player of war machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA Perfect for the era development started in, but useless for the era when it was finally shippable.
The F-35 was never about actual combat I do not believe for a second the F-35 was ever designed to be an actual combat jet, I think is was all just a giant smoke screen to serve several political goals on both the domestic and Foreign fronts. It is simultaneously a prime example of a Jet designed by committee, a 1 Trillion + dollar program that will never serve the purpose it was sold to the taxpayers for...
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MANPADS are not the end of the A-10. The A-10 was designed with them in mind. Note how the strange tail wraps around the engine exhaust. That is a tiny bit of stealth, blocking the IR seekers from seeing the engines from most angles. Other factors also reduce vulnerability. MANPADS are essentially never radar-seeking for reasons of physics; they do not have a large enough diameter to carry a proper forward-looking an…
I said "Vastly superior for providing CAS in uncontested airspace against enemies that struggle to acquire MANPADS", which I thought implied "enemies that have MANPADS in limited quantities". Yes, the A-10 does "fine" in that situation. It does not do anything approaching "fine" against modern air-defense emplacements. Or against air-to-air missiles, whether radar guided or infrared. (those engine-hiding undulations…
In hostile airspace, the EA-18G Growler brings the AGM-88 HARM, assuming those modern air-defense emplacements haven't already been hit by cruise missiles.
Plans for war get ruined upon contact with the enemy. Pessimists will assume that friendly plans get ruined, while optimists will assume that enemy plans get ruined. Asset diversity helps everything except logistics. Success or failure of a reasonable weapon system (the A-10, not knights on horseback) is far from certain. All sorts of unexpected factors come into play.
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I said "Vastly superior for providing CAS in uncontested airspace against enemies that struggle to acquire MANPADS", which I thought implied "enemies that have MANPADS in limited quantities". Yes, the A-10 does "fine" in that situation. It does not do anything approaching "fine" against modern air-defense emplacements. Or against air-to-air missiles, whether radar guided or infrared. (those engine-hiding undulations…
There is no need for the A-10, or any other weapon system, to be used all by itself. In hostile airspace, the EA-18G Growler brings the AGM-88 HARM, assuming those modern air-defense emplacements haven't already been hit by cruise missiles. Plans for war get ruined upon contact with the enemy. Pessimists will assume that friendly plans get ruined, while optimists will assume that enemy plans get ruined. Asset diversi…
Not to mention "this plane works fine if we get the Navy to do the hard part first" is going to go over well with a rather limited subset of Air Force personel. (The Air Force has wild weasels too - generally F-16s though I believe the F-35 is planned for that role in the future)
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The F-35/s future role is as a sensor platform and networking hub for a group of lighter-weight, cheaper, and more expendable drones. Eventually the F-35 will also be unmanned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie
That thing should be called Valkryie II. The Valkyrie was a much more impressive aircraft, an almost legend that is too often forgotten. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie
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The F-35/s future role is as a sensor platform and networking hub for a group of lighter-weight, cheaper, and more expendable drones. Eventually the F-35 will also be unmanned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie
That's what Lockheed-Martin has been saying, but I'm pretty sure the F-35 is still deployed along-side an AWACS. And with more and better satellite imagery & communication. I just don't see why we need this extremely capable and expensive flying network router.
And for the space discussion, nothing is as real time as a fighter's sensors airborne, it's pretty bad how long some data can take to reach a platform that can use that data. The military has a problem right now with distributing data real time, they are working to solve that problem. You can find a lot of articles on the ABMS. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2336618/adva...
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And the f-35 is neither. It is the complement to the f-22, not its replacement. There are more effective air superiority fighters out there for far less money.
Except we stopped F-22 production to focus on replacing it with the F-35
The F-22 was cancelled because the military thought that they didn't needed to spend the money on air superiority fighters and wanted to use the money elsewhere (drones and bombers). I don't think the F-35 was in the discussion that much... they fired the top leaders of the Air Force at this time.
Robert Gates killed the F-22 and fired the chief of staff of the Air Force Moseley and secretary Wynne. Since then we knew it was a mistake and tried to restart the F-22 line. It didn't make sense for cost.
Gates has his own book Duty which references this quite a bit and is a great political read https://www.amazon.com/Duty-Memoirs-Secretary-at-War/dp/0307...
And there is another book that argues it was a bad idea. https://www.amazon.com/Air-Power-Abandoned-Betrayal-Americas...
Also:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20472/retired-general-...
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/05/10...
This one is funny because they talk about the increased costs of the B-2 due to cutting it early..... as they cut the F-22.
https://www.airforcemag.com/schwartz-in-memoir-says-f-22-was...
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They'll just keep upgrading the F-18 design, new avionics, better engines, airframe tweaks. Way cheaper than the F-35. The B-52's are still in service after 60+ years, with pretty much everything upgraded several times over.
You can't make the F-18 a stealth fighter. But those planes will still be used for a long time. The F-15 may even be making a small comeback: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a26413900...
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The F-35 is the Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) player of war machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA Perfect for the era development started in, but useless for the era when it was finally shippable.
The F-35 was never about actual combat I do not believe for a second the F-35 was ever designed to be an actual combat jet, I think is was all just a giant smoke screen to serve several political goals on both the domestic and Foreign fronts. It is simultaneously a prime example of a Jet designed by committee, a 1 Trillion + dollar program that will never serve the purpose it was sold to the taxpayers for...
Do you really think that an aircraft not meant to do something would be fielded by those nations and used to do that very thing?
And of course the program has political goals, every defense acquisition program does, to pretend otherwise would be silly.
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> How many decades will it be before we see an F35 used in film? Rounded to the closest whole decade, -1; the first movie to use actual, not CGI/model/etc., F-35s on film was Man of Steel (2013).
I’m pretty sure there was also a couple of B’s in Die Hard 4
Real F-35Bs don't have an internal gun, and if they did, the guns wouldn't fire from the intakes, and if the aircraft took a large chunk of concrete directly into the LiftFan it wouldn't shudder and slowly fall out of the sky, it would be a catastrophic and near instantaneous loss of aircraft and likely aircrew life.