Well said, MC – although it should be furthermore noted that it’s not the “enthusiast community” that has a problem, it’s a couple of dozen individuals, often writing under differnt pseudonyms on different boards, and with apparently unlimited time on their hands.

I’m afraid it’s just the french sitting like a shag on a rock, squealing like a stuck pig

More a case of the sacred cows coming home to roost, I’d say.

Define “buyer”.

Yes, you can hang weapons on a P-8 and drop them on land targets.

On the other hand, it’s a very expensive, permissive-airspace platform with loads of permanently installed stuff that you don’t need for land attack, such as acoustic processing and sonobuoy stowage/launch systems, operator workstations and accommodation, a complex and unique radar that is sub-optimized for overland use (not many periscopes there) and a beefed-up structure for low-altitude ops.

Boeing has depicted the AGS version with the AAS radar as carrying AGMs, but the primary mission is ISR and the AGMs are there for targets of opportunity. Operationally, I question whether you’d really do that because it would eat into time-on-station; and the weight and cost issues are still there. (The USAF and the Israelis have pretty much concluded that a big bizjet is better for AGS.)

So basically you could assign P-8s to a bomber mission, but you’d be a complete and utter idiot to do it routinely, and speaking of which this thread was started by a JSF troll. Figures.

I know, it’s so fanboyish to appreciate the merits of a procurement system that repeatedly delivers kit that does what it says on the tin, on time and under fixed-price contracts.

a small, supercruising fighter using passive avionics

Serious IRST, check. Good ESM (third revision since 1990s IOC), check. Experience with using radar in passive modes, check. Multi-platform fusion based on operational experience, check. Supercruise, check. F-16A size, check.

Despite heavy jamming from the SR-71,

I was looking at the antennas on the SR at the NASM the other day.

Air Vice Marshal Osley: And so the strength of the joint strike fighter—and I use this as an example—is that it {the F-35} has the ability to have up to 650 parameters by which it will identify a potential threat out there. Other aircraft, such as the F22 have about a third of that and fourth-generation aircraft have perhaps half a dozen. So if you are in an F18 or in some of the other Soviet aircraft

WAT

you only have a very limited understanding of what the threat is and being able to identify it at a distance. If we are able to do as we plan with the F35, and that is to have good access to the software and to be able to program it appropriately with mission data, it will have the ability to identify hostile aircraft at quite a considerable distance. Then decisions will be made within the formation, it will play to its strengths and it will defeat it, but not by going within visual range.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CACPu39fgBg

I am not being entirely flippant here. I have no idea what the 650 parameters are and the number doesn’t make a lot of sense. Spectra? Wavebands? Details in the radar image? Also, the more parameters there are, the more complicated it gets to fuse them and ID the target.

Finally, it comes down to physics. All I’ve got in BVR is two fuzzballs, one thermal and one of scattered RF, the latter being combined with convincing DRFM jamming, and I have to pick the fuzzballs apart and see if they tell me anything useful. You may also have some adversary emissions depending on how he’s playing the game, but they probably don’t come from the closest target. Meanwhile, both RCS reduction measures and jamming take away some of my classic NCTR tools and I have to use new ones… bearing in mind that if I am relying on stealth to survive I have to be parsimonious with my own emissions.

So if you tell me you have NCTR in the bag while remaining LPI/LPD, permit me to be sceptical.

To the special snowflakes with the funny pictures:

Before there was an Internet, there were stealth airplanes. They were kept deadly secret – something that cost time and money, impeded integration into the rest of the force, and possibly contributed to a couple of fatal mishaps – so that nobody among the great unwashed and uncleared would take a photograph of them (by the way, that’s something that contains the same information as an “internet photo”).

That was because the outer mold line of an aircraft (or anything else) is the first and most powerful determinant of its RCS (if you’re a JSF fan, that’s an article of faith, remember?). Indeed, the ability to make a reasonably accurate estimate of RCS from OML alone was what the 1970s breakthroughs in stealth were all about.

And all the Internetz in the world have not changed the laws of electromagnetic scattering, Maxwell’s equations or Ufimtsev’s work. Instead, what computing has done is make those mathematical models accessible to more people.