The landing speed of a M2k is significantly higher than that of the Rafale. Making it a naval aircraft would require a full redesign of it.

The whole argument here is based on a nonsense of imagining you could skip a stage in development… The Mirage 2000 was to enter service in early 1990´s, the Rafale about 10 years later, which was the normal pace at the time (cold war). There’s no question about being “right or wrong to develop this or that generation”. There are requirements, when you finish one type, you set up requirements you want to have with the next one. The Rafale fulfills the requirements the French had: period. It was the aircraft they needed next…

all the 5th gen hype is pushed forward by LM and company in order to sell their stuff. Today, the Rafale does its job perfectly and until it can’t do it anymore (proven by facts, not manufacturers/fanboys claims) you can hardly say “it’s inapropriate”

The M2000 would have been different from the beginning. The fuselage would have been reinforced for carrier landing. I don’t think the top speed of Mach2.3 was really usefull, even the variable intakes. It could have had a lower sweep angle for lower landing speed, with possibly wingtip pylons.

This being said, could they have used the canard in a fixed position for the first 10 years or so, the time to perfect the closed coupled canard after I don’t know, maybe.

Stealth is usefull in many scenarios, but France didn’t have much experience building stealth planes. I take it we could have built an AESA radar with LPI modes. For a directional datalink, it could have used the MADL for interconnectivity with other NATO planes. The RAM would have been hard to develop, especially one as advanced as the F-35’s. It would have been hard to develop with the kind of budget available for sure.

Thank you. So, why not to start from the F-22A and add all those things like side-looking radars, IRST and carve out a wild weasel version of it?

If they restart the F-22, it could be cost effective to modify the airframe for more range in particular.

I wonder even if using the F100-PW-232 could not be an idea to increase the subsonic range. It should be able to fit inside the F119 bay. The F119 is a hog in subsonic and modifying the plane for the F135 would be a lot of work. The 232 uses technology from the F119 and produces almost as much thrust. Also thrust vectoring is not really needed if the plane has a HMS. Mach 1.8 supercruise is not needed either, mach 1.4-1.5 would be good enough.

The wing could be replaced by a delta for more fuel while keeping the stock fuselage.

I take it the engine change + the extra fuel would increase the subsonic range a lot. Combined with F-35 avionics, it could be a relatively simple and short term alternative.

no, the only thing you demonstrated was a disconnect from reality, or wishful thinking, if there is any difference,
DAS doesnt have 40 times better angular accuracy than any other MAWS.
if you got a degree scale and a paper with scale, or any equivalent computer program,
you can make a similar but accurate drawing, suggested assumptions are 1 degree angular accuracy and a formation flying 1 km apart

The DAS is supposed to provide about the same resolution as human vision, so that should be much better than 0.5 degrees accuracy. If your eyes had 0.5 degree resolution you wouldn’t see much. And I think that if they want to locate missile launches at long range you’d want to spread your F-35s more.

J-20 looks like heavy tactical bomber/Long Range Interceptor , If Visual Appeal is any thing to go by this thing looks as stealthy as F-22 or any thing Low RCS out there.

Congratulations to the Chinese Engineers

I don’t think it is a heavy tactical bomber/long range interceptor. It doesn’t seem to be that big. The chinese AAMs are probably larger than the AMRAAM so the bays have to be larger. It can probably carry larger a2g weapons than the 1000lbs bomb but if they want to keep 1 BVR missile in each bay that would reduce the size of the weapon. Maybe something the size of the JASSM would fit with 1 missile next to it.

The plane is probably very stealthy. They could have done a copy of the wing/tail design of the F-22 ( like they copied the F-35 for the J-31) but they preferred the delta canard. If the canard was a problem for stealth, they would not have chosen that configuration.

If they can make the loyal wingman concept work on the F-16, that can be an argument for selling F-35s.

I even wonder if the software cannot be made sufficiently configurable so that any 4th gen FBW aircraft can be reused as a UCAV with the proper interface.

The shooting team has to satisfy the rules for engagement through IFF or by giving the shooter sufficient data to allow a match against the NCTR library. It is also advantageous to provide the shooter with the target’s ECM state for end game support.

I thought you were talking about the missile. You fire the missile because you know the target is enemy, so after that, does the missile need more data than the position and the velocity vector? Beyond 30-40km one update every 10 seconds might be enough, at closer range you can send a small package on the network with higher frequency.

Link 16 has two major weaknesses.

First, it is omnidirectional. Anyone transmitting Link 16 data is known to everyone, friend and foe alike, who is within 350 km.

Second, Link 16, because it works like a text message, doesn’t have the bandwidth to stream highly dynamic targeting data to a shooter. If it did, there would be no need for Talon Hate.

But do you need a high bandwith for midcourse updates? You can send an update every 10 seconds or so. Also you don’t need to send a lot of data, what do you need instead of the position of the target and its velocity vector?