Oh .. Who cares?

I mean this type of discussion had some merit a couple of years ago. Not so much now. The plane has been produced in sufficient numbers and people from all over the world are beginning to train on it.

Soon Air forces will begin receiving their “training” F-35s .. We will then know.

You can also bet your **s the Turks are going to take that baby out for a spin and try and intimidate Greeks and Syrians and Russians, as soon as they get their hands on it.

So in the next few months we will know if it is what people say it is.. it is pointless to argue like this so late in the show …

I know that plenty of you folks are digging it… So this is like, just my opinion, man. Over and out.

Personally, I don’t “digg it” .. I think all russian airplanes would -aesthetically- look 100x better with western style paint jobs.

PAK-TA is a real project (it is loooooooong way off though) but that video or that design has absolutely nothing to do with the real thing. This is just some students design nothing more, not even worthy of a thread.

It may be worthy of a thread, I mean the guy did a good job!

Ejected, probably sideways.

Won’t the missile need to acquire target first?

Well yeah, 15 years is really the absolute minimum time you’d need to wait before an in-service date. Whatever the alternative, the project would basically have to start roughly where F/A-XX is now, meaning that instead of having a capability that some fringe characters dislike, you’d have either zero capability, or a grossly outdated capability for the next 15-20 years.

Zero capability? Well that comes in odds with all the chest beaters who swear by the capabilities of the western aircraft and how much superior they are to Russian made aircraft.
It also comes in odds to everyone who says Russian and Chinese industries are nowhere near good enough to produce viable VLO adversaries and in good numbers. Both of these have been expressed in various forms at various opportunities.

If the above are true what kind of zero capability you go on about? If the above are not true why should we believe anything else that comes from similar sources?

Oh yeah our 4th gen planes are much better than anything else out there
The other side is pretty much not capable of producing anything worthwhile in the VLO area

Oh and by the way WE ABSOLUTELY NEED -ALL OF US- to buy this new hyper expensive plane that will save us from the opponent’s planes that we could already beat anyway and the ones that the opponent doesn’t have the capability to build to a standard that we would consider a threat!

How does that logic sound when spelled out?

I’d say you need to revise your arguments because no side can have the pie and eat it too!

Yes, the F-35 is fat and slow and nothing you have shown here has indicated otherwise. The max speed of M1.6 (or 1.67 if you wish) alone is nothing stellar, the acceleration to that speed is painful, the range at that speed is almost zero.. What is it good for, then?

It brings unprecedented SA for the pilot and VLO characteristics to increase survivability and lethality supposedly.

However the point I was trying to make was that all the above is true only if the F-35 goes up against non-VLO targets. Every advantage this plane supposedly has evaporates when it is facing VLO adversaries / assets.

Something that LM I guess didn’t count on other countries acquiring for a very long time. It seems that is not going to be true.

No, it was the USG that set the requirements and LM offered up a proposal to meet those requirements.

Note that the X-32 costs were similar to the X-35 bid.

But also the latter ones ballooned out of proportion. After what point do we stop putting delays and cost overruns up to normal development cycles?

My personal opinion is that the JSF experiment should have been declared a failure several cost revisions ago and another design should have been put forward.

You cannot build a fighter with the capabilities & mfg standards of the F-35 any cheaper than the F-35, especially when you throw in the new SDD costs.

Why are you so sure about that?