I am not judging the drag of the F-35 by its looks rather than the published acceleration times up to M1.2 and its inability to supercruise..

ability to supercruise has alot to do with dynamic thrust of the engine which is dependent on the ability to recover pressure of the air intakes and the engine design so drag isn’t the only factor, nor it is the most important .

I might throw that same ball of confusion back to you here..?? are you now claiming Mig-25 and Mig-31 is severly hampered by drag.. by comparison to what??

you said drag can’t be overcome by huge jet engine, reality is there are various massive jet that can fly much faster than small jet, all have to do with their intake and engine design.

Not even sure if the Mig-31 has a favorable T/W ratio.. so what gives?

neither mig-31 or Mig-25 have favorable T/W ratio

even if they both are quite large vs most other jet fighter, the Mig-25/31 airfoil tickness, sweeptback angle, shape, size, nose/cockpit design is favorable.Much more vs F-35.

You keep talking about air foil thickness and what not, so how thick is Mig-31 wing? how thick is F-35 wing? exact number please
if cockpit and wing sweep angle were the main factors then Mirage 2000 would easily beat Mig-31 in a contest of speed, reality is very different though

beside sheer thrust, the engine operative efficiency => Turbofan and air intake design.

exactly

.
IMO, F-35 is a short stubby, fat design,

again, you keep saying that it is fat, stubby design but compared to what? frontal cross section of f-35 is smaller than su-27, F-15, PAk-FA and similar to rafale, f-18, Typhoon, Mig-35 and the like, so i don’t see from where did you get the conclusion that F-35 has much higher drag because it fatter

even its wings are unfavorable drag related.

the catch is at what speed?

You didn’t read my post it would seem..
For a F-35 to stay on mach 08-09, its right in the bitchy transonic speed regime where drag coifficent is quite high.. Good luck staying there without usage of AB.. one small course change or nose up and it have to plug in the blowers.. PakFa should just as easily stay at mach 1.2 without any AB.
That is F-35 with AB, PakFa without AB. Which has higher IR-signature?

According to official information F-35 can maintain speed of mach 1.2 for 150 miles without the use of afterburner but somehow you come up with the conclusion that F-35 need afterburner to maintain mach 0.8-0.9

.AB => negative IR-signature.

Fly supersonic => negative IR signature too
if at mil thrust, F-35 can only fly subsonic and while fighters such as PAk-FA can fly at supersonic speed, that mean F-35 will have to spend majority of its time subsonic while PAk-FA can enjoy cruising at supersonic, PAk-FA will enjoy better kinematics for missiles, but that also mean PAk-FA will have higher IR signature majority of the time too, due to simple fact that it flying faster. You cant have your cake and eat it too

When ever i see someone trying to downplay drag issue, i get slightly upset.. :/
Drag is a physical law that can’t be bypassed by a huge jet engine..

Mig-25 , Mig-31 disagree

if F-35 has more drag from thicker wing foil and a fat airframe, then it will start getting higer IR signal.

this is rather confusing , F-35 have thick airfoil and fat airframe compared to what ? Mig-35 ? F-22 ? PAK-FA ? Su-35 ? F-15 ? or F-18 ?
or do you want to compared it to EF-2000 , Rafale ?
If you say F-35 have fatter airframe than the one like F-5 or Mig-21 then sure , but compare it to modern fighter then not really ( well may be apart from the gripen C )

You want F-35 to fly supersonic, then say goodbye to low IR signatur all together..

this is the same for all aircraft , if you fly at supersonic speed , your IR signature increase significantly , supercruise or not , an EF-2000 or Rafale or PAK-FA supercruising will surely have higher IR signature than an F-35 cruise at mach 0.8-0.9

Yes the F-35 has lots of dry thrust, note the F-35 still can’t cross transonic speed without AB( well it might, but it will take forever and is not a clever thing to do from a fuel fraction point of view.Do you see my point?

actually i dont quite get yor point here

Agreed completely.. Nothing to argue about here..

Here we disagree.. There are absolutely zero indications about the F-35 having lower IR signature than others.. Not even LockMart claims that, so where do you take it from? Mk1 thermal eyeballing?

Here we disagree, again, how do they know that? Mk1 RCS eyeballing?

It’s exactly these completely unsubstantiated claims which create all those tensions regd. the F-35 vs. the rest of the world

I dont understand your way of thinking at all , so how do you know Mig-35 have lower RCS than f-4 or B-52 ? is it not of it’s smaller size and feature such as saw tooth , RAM ? while f-4 and b-52 have none ? ( or by your own word MK1 eye ball ) , why the same logic not applied to F-35 when it’s have various IR reduction feature while most others fighters have none ?

Exactly.. And similarly with the F-35, it wasn’t intentional..

TBH , i couldnt careless if it was intentional or not , if it works then it works ,irrelevance whether it was considered by engineers at the start or not. However, if you want people to take you seriously , you need something to support your point , you cant just say IR reduction wasnt considered on F-35 at all without any evidence

That’s a gross oversimplification.. If you reduce temperature of a leading edge by say 100deg, you might have reduced the IR radiation from that specific part by half, but that alone means preciously little, you might not have reduced the overall radiation by more than a fraction of %..

the leading edge isnt the only part that have heat exchanger , and the topcoat covered the whole airframe too , and designers arenot retarded , obviously they will focus on the part that give off heat the most.

That’s obvious.. except reduction of skin temp is of little practical use when you have a 1500+ Kelvin hot nozzle attached right behind it..

From front the view to the nozzle is blocked from most angle , even from the side the view is blocked due to the stabilizer

Don’t say… and how exactly have you reached that conclusion?

because you said this : “The heat reduction paints have been developed decades ago, nothing new here either, but even a reduction to half is not very significant against sensors with << 0.1K resolution, let alone reduction for some wavelengths only” .

, whatever that means… “special coatings” meaning what exactly? Maybe a paint capable of miraculously dissipating energy while staying cold…

the ToPcoat paint has very good heat dissipation capability , on f-22 it was able to reduce IR signature of airframe skin in long infrared wavelength by more than haft.

and to be fair , aerodynamic heating is not that high especially at subsonic speed

The techniques described in your link are pretty primitive, sorry to say that.. What exactly are we dealing with here? “advanced cooling system”
Or “mixing the exhaust with cold air” which basically translates to turbofan instead of turbojet… Is that it?

F-35 use fuel as heat sink for leading edge , it also have various open vens to cool down the fuel and avionics using ambient air ,engine bypass air also used to cool down avionics

Heat is there and it can’t be simply dissipated without a notice.. If you concentrate on deletion of thermal hot spots, then you get a larger warmer object. What have you achieved? What can an IR missile detect first? A 0.1 sqm area of 1000K or a 3sqm of 250K?

material with good heat dissipation capability will have lower temperature when subjected to similar heating time , also because IR sensor finding target through contrasting of target temperature with the environment , a bigger target with similar temperature with environment will be often harder to find than a smaller but hotter target. The temperature of the background is very important . For example : Infrared photo bellow show 2 C-130 fly in 2 very different background