Before anyone read it, please notice that you made a slight error here. The F1 were interim planes build for the Fr navy that was urgently in need at the time of a new plane capable to replace the Crusader they were still flying*. It has always been planed to rebuilt those plane (I am not sure – maybe Hallow would confirm that point)

Basically those 10 planes were devoid of any real sophistication like you see today. At the beginning they didn’t have any serious A2G capabilities. This last upgrade is in fact a rebuild to standards with extensive structural modification.

Don’t forget that Dassault at the time didn’t took the time to setup a real production line like you see with the 35 or even the Typhoon (as Sintra pointed out). See them more like hand-crafted products. The standards were high (given the experience of the team) but the plane were basically built in a hangar in small lots.

So to stay focused on your slight mishap, the only critics that can be done on that story is that the fr Navy did pay 1.5 times for the same plane. But 30M$ is cheap if you look at the new cap that the upgrade will bring.

If you had to finger point something in the Raf program this was hardly the right thing (there are some negative points obviously that are becoming increasingly concerning as the time goes**).

*The Fr navy shld have bought the F18C and Dassault would probably have now the privilege to be the only one to propose the old 18 airframe with new avionics on the market and structural upgrade. A failure by any means.
** according to the obvious fact that the plane still lacks customers

You missed the point entirely. That wasn’t an attack on the Rafale program. (which certainly has had its share of issues) It was a simple example of the costs involved in performing an extensive upgrade to a modern jet. The point is that this stuff isn’t cheap.

(The cost of upgrading these ten Rafales is essentially the Rafale program equivalent to the F-35’s much discussed concurrency costs or the issues associated with the early production Typhoons. )

IIRC the SK Typhoon bid was also over budget. That combined with the 40 F-35s for LESS than the budget means that the Typhoon bid was NOT 60 for the price of 40 F-35s.

It also included the cost of a brand new satellite…

(Reuters) – Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) said it will buy a European-built military communications satellite for South Korea as part of a $7 billion deal to supply Seoul with 40 F-35 fighter jets, in what industry observers call among the most unusual “offset” agreements ever to accompany a major arms sale.

Lockheed, which builds its own satellites, declined to detail the cost of the new satellite or name its manufacturer, but said the spacecraft would provide a “state-of-the-art” system that met South Korea’s military requirements.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/26/us-lockheed-fighter-southkorea-idUSKCN0HL2FS20140926

My words, exactly. The mentioned capabilities, even if available, will have become some kind of burden. Imagine a country which has $2bil to spend on a decent helicopter force covering all roles, ASW, CSAR/SAR, CAS, down to simple hauling troops and cargo. The chief of staff decides to go for the best – 28x AW101 Merlin in full ASW config, each rated at $71mil.

What will be the outcome? For ASW the force will be utterly excessive, CSAR/SAR roles will be covered adequately, CAS will be ineffective and simple hauling will suffer greatly. The overly complex helicopters will spend much time in hangars, eating up budget that could be better spent for other acquisitions while any kind of flood or other nature disaster will result in relief ops completely stalled due to only few helos available for trivial tasks like transporting two tons of rice to a nearby camp.

Utter nonsense, you say. You better buy 4-5 Merlin HM1 to cover ASW role, 7-8 HC3s to cover ASW/CSAR/SAR and use the rest of the funds to buy ~60 Mi-171s and 30 EC135s to cover the rest. Unfortunately, the F-35 leaves you with no similar option, there is nothing cheaper which you could use when you have subscribed to US-made hardware (unless the F-16s stays updated and in production for another three decades).

They will become exactly what F-35 fans accuse Gripen users of being – token forces, with numbers barely adequate to defend the country’s airspace. Future Danish or Belgian F-35s will probably be perfectly able to interlink with USAF force multipliers for remote weapon launches, unfortunately, whenever some joint operation in a sandbox is required, this excellent capability will be superfluous as they will have to stay at home tasked with homeland defense.

If somebody wants a daylight only, visual range only fighter armed only with dumb bombs, rockets, its cannon, and some old AIM-9Ls then I am sure there are a number of manufacturers that could provide that at an affordable price. Shoot, the F-16 line is still open and the KAI F/A-50 would also come close to the mark…. just take all the modern avionics out and make it cheap cheap cheap.

Of course that isn’t what anyone seems to want. They all want something far more capable… and guess what… that costs money.

You got to compare whole force, not 1 vs 1 aircraft. Take an example of 24 F-35s replacing ~90 odd F-16s. That means three of four wings disbanded, number of active pilots reduced to ~30, active airbases reduced to one.. now consider 20% attrition, ca 70% readiness, say six aircraft reserved for QRA and you get.. seven active F-35s which you can really use for combat operations.

Now take 48-52 less capable aircraft costing roughly the same to procure and to operate (Gripen?). Using the same calculation gets you to 20-24 active Gripens at any given time – a serious force to depend upon, IMHO.

The Gripen will likely be cheaper to buy and operate than an F-35, but not nearly cheap enough that you could buy and operate twice as many of them.

I really don’t know why kiddies around here continue to throw out numbers like the above. Even if at the most basic level a Gripen cost 50% to fuel for an hour… that wouldn’t account for the additional pilots (and their training), maintenance, facilities, command/management, etc, that doubling the fleet size would require.

That is the fundamental problem the Gripen faces… it is probably the cheapest passably modern fighter to buy and operate today, but it is also one of the least capable. The only states that have purchased (or more often, leased) Gripens are operating within tiny budgets and want only a token force of fighters.

Buyers with resources tend to go for higher-end aircraft with greater capabilities. The Gripen NG is trying to move the basic Gripen design into a higher performance bracket, but costs will certainly rise. Higher empty weight, greater installed thrust, new more sophisticated avionics… all of these things will lead to higher procurement and operating costs.

This doesn’t even get into the issues associated with operating an sustaining a tiny fleet of fighters over their lifetime. To-date only roughly 100 Gripen NGs have been ordered. Over the next 30+ years every upgrade, every software update, every new weapon integration, every structural fix, every accident investigation, every spare part that needs to be returned to production, etc, will be the responsibility of two small poorly funded forces.

You are correct that stealth requires internal weapons (or some form of conformal carriage, at a different level). This involves a sacrifice of performance at a given size and cost level. Not hard to understand except for dimwit fans.

So if we are talking about the best aerodynamic approach absent consideration of actual combat effectiveness then the obvious solution would be to go without weapons at all, except maybe a gun… podded naturally.

Of course if you want something longer-ranged than a good old gun that would involve sacrifice of performance at a given size and cost level. Not hard to understand except for dimwit fans…

When you see the Russians stop building Su-35s and Su-34s, and the Chinese shut down J-10s and J-11s, give me a call.

What do three Su-27 derivatives and a Lavi derivative have to do with clean-slate fighter designs that have emerged in the last 20 years?

I think your thinking is flawed here. Most modern fighters have a CoP ahead of the CoG, so that in itself will be balancing out any fat kid on the nose and the tail is usually used to counter the moment caused by that forward CoP. The variation in drag over internal fuel use will be relatively small and there’s absolutely no chance in hell that two 426 gal drop tanks can quadruple fuel consumption.

His “thinking” (actually wishful thinking that the F-35 would have some kind of crippling deficiency) is most certainly “flawed.” All of this theorizing is just an elaborate way to try to find a way out of his original, false, assertion.

The drop tanks are mounted on the wings… which are near the center of gravity…they will certainly shift the F-35’s center of gravity somewhat, but since they are near the center of gravity to start with they aren’t going to have that huge an impact.

There is absolutely no chance carrying tanks would quadruple fuel consumption. The F-35 in the Norwegian materials is retaining the tanks through the entire mission, which was always the reasonable assumption because nobody is going to jettison tanks on a peacetime surveillance mission.

In fact, the clean and fully fuelled F-35A/C is nose-heavy and carries a lot of trim drag.

Source? :rolleyes:

Adding tanks makes the nose-heaviness worse. What the Norway data is telling us is that when you put the tanks on, the aircraft becomes both heavier and less aerodynamically efficient (tank drag, trim drag, wing at high loading = even more energetic vortex loss at the tips). This could also result in a lower initial cruise altitude (less efficient again) and there could be other factors (eg greater weight mandates more afterburner time).

It’s really simple: Stealth costs money and results in performance trades. Is it worth it? The answer is mission-dependent and, of course, dependent on the threat.

What this discussion is “telling us” is that you have no clue what you are talking about. You really think that if the F-35 were dropping those tanks when empty the increase in radius would be only 55 NM? Lets do some quick back of the envelope math.

Radius with 18,000lbs of fuel 673NM. (1346 NM round trip) 18,000/1346 = 13 lbs/NM flown

Radius increase on drop tank fuel, 55NM. (110NM increase round trip) Fuel in drop tanks, 852 gallons. (852 * 6.7 = 5708 lbs of fuel)

5708 /110 = 52 lbs/NM

Essentially your theory calls for the F-35 to burn literally four times as much fuel per NM traveled for the first 110NM of the mission, before the tanks are jettisoned.

Stop and think, seriously. Your theory requires two ~430gallon tanks to make a 50,000+lb aircraft consume four times as much fuel per mile traveled.

You are desperately searching for a way to make the F-35 sound bad, and so instead of accepting the obvious answer (that the tanks stay on), you are inventing idiotic theories about the F-35 having some terrible aerodynamic issue…. and afterburner time? On a surveillance mission? :stupid:

Besides, if your theory had any merit there would be little point in the Israelis pursuing 600 gallon tanks. If ~430 gallon tanks wrecked the F-35’s aerodynamics so badly imagine what a couple 600 gallon tanks would do. (or for that matter a few cruise missiles) Assuming your theory had merit, and that somehow the problem became no worse with larger tanks… then the increase in combat radius would go from 55NM to 77NM. :very_drunk: