Surely, if we’re using car analogies, we should think of something that was designed to meet a wide variety of needs while being relatively affordable.

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Here’s the thing, VN.

All airplane production rates are, by the standards of manufacturing economics, low. The world’s highest-rate aircraft production lines are approximately an order of magnitude lower-rate than Lamborghini or Rolls.

F-35s, F-18s, Rafales and Gripens alike are another order of magnitude below that. If and when the F-35 gets to its highest contemplated rate* it will still be one-third of the fastest-moving aircraft lines.

Consequently, all fighter production lines work the same way. The jets are hand-assembled. Some of the pieces arriving at the final assembly line may come from a dedicated facility or the prime’s own metal shop, but many of them come from a supply chain that feeds all the fighter lines. The supplier’s price can be beaten down somewhat with negotiating power, if you can show solid future orders, but there’s only so much that can be done to costs.

Result: high production rates alone are not the end of the economic argument. It’s actually more important to keep your processes (supply and assembly) lean, and keep your overhead down.

* which it won’t

Also. Hops – An F-8 had the same basic engine (small thrust increase) as an F-100 or F4D and fell between the two in empty weight, the primary difference being aerodynamics. Which resulted in an “incremental” speed difference of 50-60 per cent. I do understand why F-35 fans don’t like to think about supersonic aerodynamics, because it would depress them severely if they did.

FBW – See my comment further up. To compare a delta-canard with an F-16 or F-18 in the supersonic regime is like comparing a Sabre and an Me262. “Explain the difference”? Here goes.

Rafale has higher wing sweep and lower T/C ratio.
Without the mid-fuselage short-chord wing, the Rafale has better area-ruling (in the sense of CS area increasing smoothly from front to rear).
The external tanks are designed for supersonic speed, with sharp conical noses and a more tapered front section. Like a miniature B-58 tank.
From an area-ruling standpoint, most of the tank volume is longitudinally separated from most of the wing mass and the weapons (see photo)
With the aft-located wing and the canard, Rafale suffers much less from increasing trim drag as the CP moves aft at supersonic speeds.
It is entirely possible and quite likely that the M88, being a later design than the F100/110/404, maintains a higher percentage of dry thrust to higher speeds.

As for the fansite source, the document submitted to the show organizers is interesting. You don’t tell performance porkies to your own aviation community. And if you can do 1.4 supercruise with one tank I find it credible that you can do 1.5 with three. A little bit faster, but otherwise using 10000 lb more thrust to propel two gas tanks.

Rapellons-nous, as the Froggies say, that the Rafale is a later design than the F-16/18 and for Dassault was a second-generation FBW aircraft. And like the Typhoon, there was an unwritten requirement to deliver capabilities that the in-service Teens did not.
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We don’t have an equivalent chart for the Rafale, but the same basic principals apply.

Why? The Rafale is very different from the Super H, with greater wing sweep, lower T/C ratio, better area ruling (without a short-chord wing sticking out of its midriff region) and more thrust compared with empty weight. The supersonic tanks are (shocker) designed for supersonic speed, unlike standard US tanks, and most of their bulk is in front of at least 75 per cent of the wing (area ruling).

History: the F-16 and F-18 deliberately sacrificed supersonic performance for transonic agility. An unstable delta-canard, by contrast, is designed to combine high agility with the classic delta virtues of low supersonic drag and structural efficiency. One of the basically silly aspects of the “Gen4” definition is that comparing a delta-canard to a 16 or 18 is like comparing a Sabre to an Me262.

I will agree that the F-35 will reach Mach 1.6 with lots of internal fuel capacity. How much of that capacity will be actually filled with fuel is another question, given its known deficiency in acceleration.

Ironic that the Hopster posts one comment bragging about the F-35 becoming “operational” next year and then another about its air-policing capabilities – when of course next year’s operational jet, and the AF’s 3I that follows it, have no such capability. Not only do they have neither a gun nor a SRAAM but they are limited to 40 kft altitude, which many modern civil aircraft can exceed easily.

“Looks like momentum continues to build”

You’re confusing “momentum” with “propelled by $80 billion to date”. And I’m sure “production is not behind schedule” is good news in JSF land, but it’s routine everywhere else.

F-15SMTD was a dead-end for a reason: the thrust reversers were incredibly heavy. The Swedes’ 800-meter, narrow runway is a pretty good compromise as long as you also have an aircraft that is designed for effective dispersal (not an insanely complex Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with three different major power systems).