S-9 – I don’t know that it is “unknown territory” but it seems to be trying to achieve an acceptable success rate with a hook/wire relationship that is off-nominal at best. As I understand it, the basic idea behind the original hook shape, or the Hornet hook, is for the wire to contact the hook above the apex of the hook tip, thereby trapping it in the throat.

And it is not to be forgotten that rolling tests are only the beginning. People will be crossing fingers, to some extent, to see if the modified hook will catch a trampled wire in a landing, and then on the carrier itself.

aussienscale – One tends to guess “signatures” (1) because the issue is classified (2) because many of the other aspects of the design – structure, aerodynamics, subsystems, display avionics – are covered openly and (3) because almost every other LO program has had issues with LO technology, whether in terms of performance, manufacturability or repairability.

I’d call it an educated guess.

F3 – “adding improved pilot orientation”

You mean, throwing away the HUD in favor of an HMD that doesn’t work?

“and maybe even the UCAS-D automatic landing software”

Which of course no other aircraft can use, because the testing on an F/A-18 was a fluke.

Fox – I didn’t actually say that LMT would prefer endless R&D to production – although in the defense world, unlike the commercial world, endless R&D and no production equals revenue and profit and is not a surefire way to destroy your company.

“Locking in” takes many forms. Canada has been led to believe that even opening a competition would jeopardize JSF partnership. All partners know that even muttering about alternatives will prompt nastygrams from the 2000x zip code. And no hard cost estimates – essential for such a decision – have been made available.

“Obviously aircraft other than JSF have demonstrated SA, and JSF’s magic-wizard-hat helmet does not work; and 25 years and close to $100 billion later, we don’t know that stealth can be made affordable in a tactical aircraft.”

Which of these statements can be controverted by proven, demonstrated fact?

F3 – In common with most JSF fans, you are adept at coming up with loaded responses (“precious, shock horror, crazy”) to points that haven’t been made.

The extinction of other fighter programs remains part of the business plan (most recently a presentation in Canada in October 2010). Anyone else’s capability to design a new aircraft is moot for the time being, since so much of the market has been locked in with the help of rosy predictions.

You also make the assertion that the “warfighter” wants “stealth and SA”. Obviously aircraft other than JSF have demonstrated SA, and JSF’s magic-wizard-hat helmet does not work; and 25 years and close to $100 billion later, we don’t know that stealth can be made affordable in a tactical aircraft. But in F-35 land, LockMart PowerPoint > competitor in combat.

And it’s funny to talk about Dassault getting social security when the JSF team is trousering $22 billion and counting in overruns alone. What’s that called? Poverty relief?

You get one point right: “Lockheed Martin is driven by one thing: shareholder return.” But production is not necessarily the goal: it’s 50 years of sole-source upgrade and support contracts.

JS – Since you are all over the “curious motivations” of critics, and their “less than accurate” predictions (and no “melting LHD deck” strawmen, please), maybe you can cite a critic being less accurate than this:

Mercurius –

The customer was deadly serious about affordability. When this started, the A-12 was a freshly smoking crater (the root cause being not only technology, but the attempt to develop on a fixed-price contract) and the F-22, although nobody was going to admit as much, was well on the way to taking its predicted place on the Augustine’s Law log scale.

The key to reducing cost was to seen as building the aircraft at commercial-airplane rates of around 200 aircraft per year. With post-Cold War force sizes, however, this was the maximum requirement of the entire US alliance community. Consequently, the aircraft would have to be tri-service (and that, as we have seen, meant that STOVL would drive the design) and the European fighter industry would have to be closed down.

There were also technical solutions aimed at reducing cost, including integrated ECS and secondary/emergency power, electrical actuation and large unitized structures, precisely none of which appear to have worked.

At some point, however, someone realized that the plan offered an alternative route to success, other than achieving affordability: which was, to promise low production and support costs long enough for the competition to shrivel away, thereby securing a monopoly in which the customer would be forced to pay the real price or exit the airpower game.

That has been the ruling strategy since 2003-04, at least.

It wasn’t called ASQ-239 then, at least in public.

The general tenor of the discussion was that the JSF suite was designed to deliver ALR-94 capabilities with less cost (which also meant fewer apertures) using more modern technology (FPGAs versus ASICs and so on), some of which would be “spun back” into F-22 upgrades.

I’m sure it’s all delivering on those promises, just like the rest of the program is doing.

F3 – Seems like everyone around here is attacking you.

Seriously – I think that the reason people are getting a little short with you is that your primary argument (that stealth and superior SA will compensate for unfavorable kinematics, lower missile load-out &c) has been aired over and over again. JSF critics don’t buy it, and you’re not presenting an iota of new evidence to suggest that it’s correct.

Instead you say things like: “If you have a flight performance disadvantage but adequate SA you can still survive to fight another day. If you have a flight performance disadvantage but superior SA you can use the later [sic] to control the engagement and get the kill.”

Both these things can be true, if the performance disadvantage is small enough and the SA large enough. But without that “if” you are uttering slogans.

And you might explain how JSF processing is unique in establishing a bigger SA bubble than anything else. And would that be the current processor, or the as-yet-untested processor that is needed for full combat capability?