Really, all this talk about fat and ugly is hardly support by fact.

Note: Drawings courtesy of dwightlooi @ f-16.net

Yes and this just proves Obligatorys point. F-35 crosssection is bigger than every fighter exept SH, which is about the same size.
Would i remind you that SH is in another weightclass?

Much of the costs of those operations are funded from the Overseas Contingency Operations budget, on which the USAF draws to fund specific exceptional costs that they would not have incurred otherwise.

For example, we find USAF procurement ledger entries such as:

and

The OCO is established and funded separately from the defense budgets.

The fact that the USAF does not have money to fund something as critical as fast-jet training isn’t entirely the result of overseas operations…!

Your totaly right, but so am i, in a sense. The separate budget comes as well from the US taxes. So they share the same “grand” budget, which in that sense gives more and less, depending on how much stuff they squeeze into it.

wouldnt it be better to rebalance the hole airplane with all new systems in an upgrade, and to lose some weight and wingloading?

Clearly the solution is to have F-35 serve as its own trainer with the power of next-gen software.

that would be great, why not with more EDE functional engine(less power), without RAM, weapon bays etc.

An F-35 D!

@ Moon_light ,

I was going to respond to you with regard to how LPI Aesa radars can be detected , classified and jammed but your knowledge on the matter is not good enough to understand even the basics . It would be nice if you could read a bit more on it beforehand , but let ‘s try .

First , an aircraft with a top of the range RWR (capable of -90dBmi or better) is going to detect a LPI signal way before to be detected . Keep it in mind , it is important . That means two things : 1) the aircraft has some time to decide what to do (change course , prepare an electronic response , etc) , 2) the RWR suite has plenty of time to “decipher” the LPI signal .

You said :

This is correct, the time taken is in the order of few milliseconds . But then , it is where DRFM comes into play . After the first few readings , most (if not all) of the characteristics of the LPI signal will be stored in memory , ready for real time use . What will be known and stored in memory are things like :
– LPI radar type (if already known)
– Processing gain of the LPI radar
– Carrier frequency
– Modulation bandwidth
– Modulation period
– Code period
– Time and angle of arrival
– received signals strenght
– received frequencies
– observed antenna scans
etc …

From there , a top of the range ECM suite can built automated responses (or not) to manipulate the LPI signal(s) in real time , as they arrive , as they bounce on the airframe .
In fact , the ECM suite decides when to start jamming according to the adverse LPI radar capabilities .

Because you don ‘t know what Digital Radio Frequency Memory is . DRFM allows some part of the signal (or all of it) to be manipulated to fool the adverse radar into thinking wrong about various parameters like , size , range , velocity , position , etc … It can also change the “signature” of the LPI signal which forces the LPI radar not to recognize its own signal .

You also said :

No . There is something you don ‘t know so let me ask you this : do you think that the electromagnetic waves are bouncing immediatly when they hit RAM ?
Answer : no .
In fact , the time it takes for the waves to travel through RAM (and to escape it) (few milliseconds , depending on the RAM) then to bounce back is enough for a top of the range ECM suite to respond “in real time” .

I have just highlighted few points to give you a better view on how radar waves behave . There are hundreds of links on the Web explaining the basics and I urge you to do a bit of homework . Do it , it ‘s very interesting Moon_light . 🙂

Another mistake :

No , it doesn ‘t work this way and it has been explained to you by another poster .

Also , when Rafale demonstrated a 180* kill with a MICA using Link-16 target datas from another Rafale in June 2007 , the target (C22 drone) was NOT in range to fire a “normal” IR missile . The Mica had to turn 180* and then had the legs to reach the drone . It was a 180* BVR shot Moon_light .

@ ActionJackson :

You do the same mistakes than Moon_light .
Also , you said :

This is not the case since Spectra covers a HUGE amount of frequencies and not only the X band .

This is irrelevant and only shows that you do not know much RWR , DRFM and ECM in general . Frequency agility has NOTHING to do when the original signal is known and recorded . Anyway , Spectra is an Aesa GaN ECM suite and can use a wide variety of radar bands .

Wrong .

Btw , the Rafale ‘s tail is mostly made of radar transparent material and its RCS is minimal .

Cheers .

Can we really talk of radar tranparancy and only look on the surface of an object?

And an easy, two click search on google got me to:
http://www.nsc.liu.se/

And there falls JSF solid proof of “Saab cant make state of the art products due to they never simulate stuff in a super computer” They have done it for 25 years!!!
The biggest cluster Triolith is in the top 100 in the world with its 350+ Tflops.

And now, to the capacity sukhoi seems to have a 1Tflop system based on russian made CPU.
http://www.network54.com/Forum/211833/thread/1270615406/Sukhoi+takes+delivery+of+first+new+Russian+made+mini-supercomputer

To summerize..

Saab have a 350Tflops system for there simulations
Sukhoi got 1Tflop.
For comparision
Lockheed seems to have a 103 TFLOPS
http://www.top500.org/site/48266

To to make a linear extrapolation of JSR argumantation. Saab makes 350 times better A/C than Sukhoi.
Hopefully the lots of you see the irony in that 😀

quit stating the obvious.. the Gripen is a 1980’s design, of course Russia has moved on.

If you move on, its because youre design at the moment isnt competent enough to be refined to fit the future requirements.

Gripen design based on similar concept to Lavi/J-10. there is nothing more in Gripen that cannot be in those designs. and those design is no longer pursued in Russia.

yes you can create it. see boeing technical research and boeing design center in russia. the largest outside US for Boeing. there is nothing innovative or special about Sweden.

Yes, you do your own Innovation rating and the rest of the world do theres.

SAAB materials is so advance that Boeing is using vsmpo avisma

Yes, solid titanium is a very good Russian 60:s tech. READ about it

you have to understand that any thing developed by commitee will slow down the upgrades and more likely to be compromised. for example French try to sell Meteor equiped fighter to India or some Arab countries. those customers will get indepth study of weopon system.
I have plenty of search Sweden has import dependence. it can develop some parts but whole system high doubt considering the budget limitation.

Yes sales are good for your economy. Russians should learn about that. Budget is about priority not competence.
READ about it in the posts above

when your production rate is low for few hand built aircraft. it is convenient to claim overbooked.

With sales of 2500M EUR per year its hard to say its a “a few handbuilt AC” , again READ about it

This is ur opinion not a fact. Every has to be tailored to specific purpose. Those used in Academic research are more likely to be different than industrial use

No thats not my opinion, what you refering to is optimising hardware to the application needs. This isnt necissary. Only if you got little HW and energy and lots of workforce You could juice out about 20-50% more from the same energy. Often this could be done without re-range the HW in a SW layer on a modern “Super” Computer. This means that project A use 54% of total capacity and project B uses 40% and rest idle or used for a lesser priority project.