Well, as has been mentioned before this has been planned all along, or at least for a considerable while.
We’ve seen many little changes over the course of this initial prototype program, that dorsal panel for example. Whatever the reason for that was, the solution to it needs to be incorporated in the production lines for serial airframes, and “stealthified” in terms of materials and what not. The same goes for other subtle changes.
On the topic of stealth, there’s probably a lot of “stealthification” involved in T-50-6 and onwards, both externally in terms of coatings and omissions of various minor protrusions, and internally in terms of structural details/materials et cetera, but the overall “shape” of the aircraft itself is probably not going to change.
The design process that led to the current bunch of prototypes has dealt thoroughly with shape for a long time and the current set of prototypes themselves (and various test beds) have evaluated the real life aerodynamics, shaping, integration of base avionics and controls, ejection system and so on and so forth. Call them ambitious wind tunnel models if you will.
We’ve been treated with little glimpses of closer-to-serial concepts (like T-50-6 models and what not), and as expected they’re visually different only in terms of stealthy things such as coatings. Now, such models aren’t necessarily very reliable sources for speculation but I think in this case that they pretty much nail it. We also know that some things have been developed and produced though yet to be installed, like the new canopy. That has to be tried out in situ as well, and a “KNS-2” fits like a glove over this scheme.
In light of all that’s known I myself highly doubt we’ll see a jump like T-10-1 to T-10S, or even the slightly less dramatic YF-22 to F-22. No, it’ll get cleaner, incorporate a bunch of refined components and all, but that’s it. As such, it won’t necessarily take years and years either until these things pop up. Surely it will take some time, but the slow, creaky start up phase is long gone and the experience, tooling, routines etc. are now all where they should be. That has to get it going faster. They’re probably already underway.
Thanks for this nice comment Drsnufflebug 🙂 But in my opinion because of their current production rate it takes at least one or two extra more years;)
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