It seems to me they should have used the same kind of acquisition practice on the JSF. The main technologies were already available from the F-22, so they could have reused most of it ( by say reusing the APG-77 with a smaller antenna, making a smaller variant of the F-22 cockpit with roughly the same software, MLD combined with a JHMCS, plus the EOTS derived from the sniper XR). Such a plane would have been way superior to anything out there in around 2010. The cost KPP could have been around 65 million. The F-22 however, was a real breakthrough in so many technologies that it was impossible to do that.

There is hope for the LRS-B meeting its target if they have de-risked all the technologies. A critical part of meeting the cost goal will be to re-use systems that are mass produced from other planes. If they re-use the sensors of the F-35, those will be built at a rate of 200 per year in the mid 2020’s so the cost will go down a lot. Same for the engine and for the landing gear, they can come from other mass produced planes. Also the systems have to be designed to be easily upgradable, not like the B-2 which is so expensive to upgrade.

Do you know if NG could reuse the F-35 software? Does it belong to LM or the government? Could the DoD force NG to re-use that software?

The problem With F-16 exeeding the 25AoA limit has to do With its inherent relaxed stability.
If you exceed it, then it will depart from flight.
And the F-16 is a bitch to recover from certain situation, as the test flight has showed us.

Of course if it would recieve a all new FBW system like the F-15SA, well then the AoA might be improved upon, but not up to 32 degrees as you suggest here.
The aredynamics still apply, even With a better FBW.

Mmh maybe it wouldn’t be possible but anyways going from 25 degrees to 32 wouldn’t really be a game changer. What would be a real game changer would be to fuse the F-16’s JHMCS with data coming from the stealth planes. Ideally there should always be a stealth plane behind the legacy planes to feed the data via link-16 and the position of the targets should be displayed on the JHMCS, so the F-16 pilots has a very good SA.

this classic design would also work 🙂

well the question is how do they compare in usefuleness and cost to manned attack helicopters and armed UAVs

they seem interesting compared to armed Army UAVs (Shadow, Grey Eagle) mostly because they don’t need a runway
meaning you can launch them from forward positions, from inside of buildings or vehicles
so if there’s a sudden engagement, you can flip open a nearby bunker/building/truck roof and send one of these out to give immediate fire support and an eye in the sky. they could get there in minutes
and they wouldn’t have to carry much fuel either, as they’d just have to fly over, shoot their weapons, maybe stay a while for other UAVs to take over, and then fly home
or just land nearby and wait for a unit to pick them up, they don’t necesairily need to fly back home, so that’s another fuel saving
and if it’s light enough and empty of fuel and ammo, a few soldiers could load it onto a truck or jeep manually and bring it back to base

the big advantage compared to manned helicopters would be cost and expendability
meaning they can act as forward scouts, relaying target data, forward shooters using targetting data provided by attack helicopters or any other assets, they could laser up a target allowing the manned assets to shoot from a safe distance…
hell, you could even deploy these from a transport aircraft or helicopter (if you can figure out how, with the rotors and all)

I might not be a bad idea against insurgents. Especially with laser guided rockets.

ANother idea would be something even much smaller, like a small quadrotor UAV with an M32 grenade launcher. The problem is to get enough accuracy. Maybe it would be possble to make a long barrel variant of the M32 for more precision, and to find a way to calculate the trajectory of the round and have a software control the UAV for the launch.

The problem with UAVs with wings is that they can’t fly nap or the earth, so they’re particularily vulnerable. I would make a stealthy helicopter UAV, as light and small as possible, with the ability to fly NOE. It wouldn’t even need weapons. Weapons would increase its RCS and would make it heavier and more expensive. It would be datalinked with long range artillery systems and could designate targets with a laser. If it is armed and if it fires a missile itself, it risks being detected.

But how do you have a helicopter UAV fly NOE just above the trees. That sounds kind of hard to do.

I also think a DAS-like system would be very usefull to detect the enemy fire, like tanks, artillery, etc… The apache E has such a system on its wingtips, it could eventually be adapted on the mini UAV.

I try to be open minded too on several subjects, like UFOs for instance. All too often people mistake having ‘a healthy dose of skepticism’ with being stubborn and close minded. Also some people are so convinced that certain things are impossible that they will just debunk the subject instead having ‘a healthy dose of skepticism’. These people unfortunately are taken seriously by a portion of the population, who are lead to believe there is nothing interesting in those subjects.

In the past 20 years there’s been several discoveries in paleo-anthropology that have surprised scientists. It turns out there are more subspecies of homonids than previously thought. It is also likely that some branches of the evolutionary tree have not been discovered, and even possibly never will. So even if we don’t know the origin of Bigfoot, its existence cannot be ruled out.

Also, it is very common that species of a particular family or subfamily come in a wide variety of sizes. Think felides for instance, bears, etc… Concerning humans, homo floresiensis was very small compared to other humans.

LB1’s height has been estimated at about 1.06 m (3 ft 6 in). The height of a second skeleton, LB8, has been estimated at 1.09 m (3 ft 7 in) based on measurements of its tibia.[2] These estimates are outside the range of normal modern human height and considerably shorter than the average adult height of even the smallest modern humans, such as the Mbenga and Mbuti (< 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in)),[25] Twa, Semang (1.37 m (4 ft 6 in) for adult women) of the Malay Peninsula,[26] or the Andamanese (1.37 m (4 ft 6 in) for adult women).[27]

By body mass, differences between modern pygmies and Homo floresiensis are even greater. LB1’s body mass has been estimated at 25 kg (55 lb). This is smaller than that of not only modern H. sapiens, but also H. erectus, which Brown and colleagues have suggested is the immediate ancestor of H. floresiensis. LB1 and LB8 are also somewhat smaller than the australopithecines from three million years ago, not previously thought to have expanded beyond Africa. Thus, LB1 and LB8 may be the shortest and smallest members of the extended human family discovered thus far.[citation needed]

Apes come in all kinds of sizes too, so why not a giant one. Gigantopithecus is the proof that it is possible. The Sasquatch might be gigantopithecus, but even if it’s not, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that it could be something else.

Not long ago I was involved in interviewing people who claimed to have seen big cats in Britain; this was the non-native, non-domestic big cat, not your standard fat lap cat.
Whilst the witnesses were quite convinced that they had seen something out of the ordinary, not next doors old black tom prowling in the undergrowth or a stray dog by a gate post, the facts just didn’t support the idea of a large, wild cat in the wilds of rural Britain.
A zoological contact, with experience of tracking African cats, said that there just wasn’t the means to support even ‘small’ big cats without their presence being noticed: things like savaged sheep and cattle, or chicken farm break ins would be constant indicators – a single cat needs a lot of food to stay healthy, a colony would need a hell of a lot more – but the overriding thing for him was the absence of scat and lack of territorial spray markers. If you’ve ever had a stray tomcat pay your garden an unwanted visit then you’ll know what that means, but the bigger the cat the more there is, the worse it smells. Yet there was never anything to show that there were any predators around other than the usual foxes.

It is the same with sasquatch, bigfoot, yowie, the yeti and all those other humanoid bipeds that apparently inhabit the worlds less populated areas. A few blurry videos, the odd grainy photograph, lots of witness reports from one or two people (never big groups), yet never any really good, hard evidence that might prove once and for all of their existence.
Of course, it is easy to hide something – or for something to hide – in dense forest where it is extremely likely that there is no human presence within a hundred miles or more nor had there been for several dozens of years, but the beasts that have recently been discovered or whose existence has been proven are small, the size of mice and smaller; there are animals thought to be larger that are only known due to the witnessing of decomposing copses, or aboriginal hunters dismembering an animal being photographed by an observer who later tried to identify it. As it stands currently, the vast majority of unknown creatures will be invertebrates.
Now, had the concept for an (as yet) undiscovered, larger creature been from the sea…that would have been much more understandable.

There is still a lot of wild wooded areas in North America with rempote places where people rarely go. It is not comparable to the UK. California alone is almost twice as large as the UK, or British Columbia is like 4 times larger. The fact that there cannot be a large unknown predator in the UK doesn’t mean there couldn’t be one in North America.

A swamp cat was knocked down in Hayling Island in 1988, marginally bigger than a large domestic cat but hardly comparable with the usual statements from eyewitnesses – they will insist they saw something ‘lion-sized’ yet would not be able to describe just how big a lion is.

Meanwhile, all those Americans wandering around with guns and they still haven’t managed to shoot a bigfoot…!

It has happened that apparently some bigfoots have been shot at. There are also a few stories of sasquatches getting killed.

It does happen that hunters have encounters with the creature. Most of the time the witness is extremely scared, his brain suddenly is in survival mode and doesn’t react as you would expect. For instance people don’t think of taking pictures, or even shooting at it. Hunters say there is no way their hunting rifle could kill such a big animal, so they prefer not to shoot. Injuring one would only result in getting killed a few seconds later, either by the one that has been injured, or another one around.

Hunters and witnesses in general prefer not to talk about their encounters. They learn very quickly that they will be ridiculed. Also many hunters say they stopped going into the woods after, because they’re too scared. Some people finally, after a few years usually, return into the woods, but not alone, and armed.

Seing a sasquatch is quite a traumatizing experience, and witnesses have noone to turn to usually because nobody would take them seriously. That makes the experience even harder to deal with.