Gerfaut was a Denel system, was it not?

Not sure how it would compare to JHMCS but if I remember rightly they were similar in design capabilities. JHMCS is much the same as a later DASH helmet in capability, but designed to US usability specs (and it has a removable module rather than being an integrated helmet design).

The EF helmet is designed to do more because it has provision for night-vision on the sides of the helmet – but it does look clunky that way.

It was Pprune and alles andere is unsinn, to quote the guy again. LO’s favoured suggestion was a name evocative of a critical asset for desert operations…. a fighter with a huge piece of spinning metal in the front… used by the precursors of the RN, the RAF and the USAF…

The CAMEL!

Didn’t catch on for some reason.

But Pprune is as responsible for Dave as Mike “Mike knows the answer” Hough is responsible for F-35.

Are you sure that the management of vortices is there to generate additional lift, or to break down the vortices so that they don’t hammer the verticals off? An issue with all twin-tail fighters.
Sure, you can have body lift, lower pressure over the body, at high alpha, but the concomitant drag factor (the energy that actually PRODUCES the vortices) will, sustained-turn-wise, devour your midday meal.

While everyone is getting excited, a couple of factual points.

Essentially, the sensors on JSF are as follows:
DAS is new, and has some interesting potential, but it remains to be seen how well it performs at long range. It’s not a 360-degree IRST for ye-canna-change-the-laws-of-physics-Captain reasons.
EW should be good, and will be equivalent to other state-of-the-art ESM – it just costs more because of the apertures.
Prediction: Radar hardware is going to become generic, the main discriminator being aperture size, see laws of physics comment above. F-35 is in mid-range in that sense.
The IR targeting system uses the same hardware as the Sniper XR pod.

Stealth. It’s great, but some limitations are to be considered. One of these is that the level of stealth you design with is pretty much what you get for the rest of the life-cycle. Unfortunately, radar is not so constrained. It can be upgraded by improvements to manufacturing, design and processing technology, and made more operationally useful by networking, and detection techniques that were in the realm of fantasy in 1980 or 1990 are now being put into practical use.

Another problem is that stealth is not readily compatible with external stores, and the reason that fighters have been so successful as weapons over the years is that you can hang a lot of crap on them – bombs, extra fuel, beer kegs, recce pods, AAMs, cruise missiles, buckets of instant sunshine… You can do this with a JSF but where’s your jamming system? Your towed decoy?

Cockpit displays… The JSF helmet is a truly amazing piece of optical and electronic engineering. But are you mission-killed if it goes BSOD on you, and is that more or less likely than it is with a HUD?

Very early days yet – and didn’t the TSR.2 do exactly the same thing with the Lightning?
This is what we can expect.
The F-35 will not be as fast as the F-22, whether in acceleration or military power, not by a long shot.
The F-35A will probably outrun the F-16, Typhoon or what-have-you when the rules favour it – that is, with 2 x 2K bombs, two AMRAAMs and a .40 fuel fraction – because it will be clean and the others will not.
It’s not going to turn very well, because it’s marginally (if that) unstable and the wing is smaller than you think.
The F-35C will be a bit slower than that, and the B will probably not be faster than other jets carrying the equivalent of its internal load (0.30 fuel, 2 X 1K bombs).
Any F-35 will start to lose ground in performance comparisons as soon as external loads are added in.
Alles andere ist Unsinn, as some guy once said.