Hi John.

I heard about Britain having very little forest left. This is pretty sad but with your very high population density I guess it would be hard to increase the forests significantly.

In France we still have a significant amount of forest left, fortunately, but I don’t know the exact the percentage.

We won’t enter in an endless discussion about global warming, but anyways this Eden program is a big success. In the last 6 months they have planted 17 million trees.

Hiring very poor people to plant trees is a simple and effective idea. And their program has little overhead.

I said in my first post that NGOs are often politicized, but it is true that many are still good. In the US for instance they have the Nature Conservancy which has a good reputation.

I’m sure the allied generals dismissed the idea of concentrated tank formations out of hand. the Germans didn’t, the rest is history

seems the Chinese have a similar idea

in a BVR air battle over the straight of Taiwan this would be formidable weapon, like a cheap MALD, it would give the Chinese a screen to hide behind, something to deplete the US’s and Taiwan’s missile reserves. certainly the US fighters train to engage at maximum range, but as soon as they run out of missiles they’ll have to fall back or start dogfighting with more numerous and manouverable Chinese fighters. it reminds of the battle of Kursk, where superior German tanks lost to numbers at short range

They could indeed try to do something like that, and even the F-35s might be unable to identify the targets at long range. The F-35 carries a limited number of missied so their weapon magazine would be quickly depleted.

a QF-16 could balance such a situation, it can fly at the front, carry a large number of missiles to engage at maximum range, while flying extreme manoeuvres to dodge incoming attacks, depleting the opposing missile reserves. then it could fly back to re-arm, or fly on and act as a forward observer

It might be a good idea, simulations would have to be made to see how to best use these F-16 UCAVs. At least A QF-16 would be cheap and expendable compared to a new build stealthy UCAV. Even if the QF-16 is shot down, the enemy would have expended a few missiles against it. This would compensate for the missile number inferiority that the USAF fighters would have.

unfortunally no company has ever built anything close to a dogfighting/missile platform UCAV, so we have no real example of how effective this would be

The technology is probably there to remote control an a2a UCAV from another fighter. The QF-16 could be used as a bomb truck too.

The F-22 is light grey below and has 2 shades of grey on top. Google for images with both the F-35 and the F-22 ( there are many ), the F-35 is somewhat darker on top ( roughly the same color as the dark grey tone of the F-22 ) and significantly darker below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDupbNrpEfE

Significant difference in the picures here.

The F-18 is hard to see visually with its light grey paint. I saw one a couple years ago fly overhead, and I really noticed that it was hard to keep track of.

I don’t understand why they made the F-35 is so much darker. Is it because they expect it to operate mainly at night and stay in BVR? Even the F-22 is light grey…

Then they are not making sense. The UCLASS is an ISR+Light strike platform, where the strike capability can move up or down depending upon the ultimate RFP that is expected early next year.

The FA-XX AOA would not even have been completed when the UCLASS RFP is issued. The requirement for the FA-XX is in the “2030’s” while the UCLASS is supposed to be on the carrier deck by 2022-23.

There is no reason why a UCLASS should be asked to possess capabilities and qualities, to conduct a mission that they themselves have not defined yet (AOA, FA-XX). Talk about setting oneself up for failure!

They are only now studying potential capabilities and timeframes for the FA-XX.

They’ll try to get a revolutionary capability, they have a lot of analysis work to do about the future capabilities of unmanned systems.

With processing power increasing exponentially, the F/A-XX might evolve during its service life from a manned fighter with limited secondary a/g and a/a capabilities in UCAV mode, to a full UCAV. The saving in operational costs would be enormous.

We do not know what the current UCLASS carries. The Current UCLASS also doesn’t have to be an air to air missile carrier. They aren’t going to develop everything from an ISR assets, to strike and now air to air for $2.5 Billion over 5 years.

Its not a case of either F-35 or UCLASS. He was speaking of the future. Think 2030 and beyond, not the early 2020’s when the UCLASS in its first iteration is likely to appear.

They still don’t know what they want apparently. Some like the idea of a stealthy bomb truck, others would prefer small bays and more range with more focus on ISR.

It seems they are more inclined towards the second alternative now. If they chose that path, it won’t be possible to enlarge the bays later and turn it to a bomb/missile truck.

He is not talking about the UCLASS conducting intercepts, he is talking of cooperative engagements, something that the current F-35’s already are capable of. Instead of launching a weapon and having your wingman update it for example, you can get in closer, and target the drone a few nm back to launch the weapon while you are at altitude and out of harm’s way for the update. Also it allows aircrafts with mixed loads to stay in the fight longer. Of course the CONOPS would be evaluated as to what is the best way to do these sorts of cooperative engagements, but there has been some thought put into this by the various authorities including the ACC.

This sort of thing is precisely what the ADI was to look at.

I see well, but a2a engagements are very reactive and dynamic. The subsonic UCLASS could become a burden for the fast planes.

Also a problem is that the missile’s flight time from the UCLASS would be much longer than from the F-35s which would be closer to the targets. If the UCLASS stays dozens of km behind, the extra flight time would be in the order of 30 seconds or more, which is very long. Or the UCLASS would have to be armed with a very fast missile, which would cost more.

However, the UCLASS could be used to guide the missiles launched from the F-35s. The UCLASS would stay like 100km behind and would use its AESAs ( possibly side arrays ) to give the F-35s an excellent 360 degrees SA. The F-35s could launch accurately, and disengage immediately because the UCLASS would guide the missiles with its powerfull radar.

Another usage would be to use the fighters to intercept the incoming planes before they launch their ASM missiles, and use the UCLASS to intercept the missiles with its AMRAAMs. An AMRAAM being much less expensive than a long range SAM like the SM-6, that would be cost effective. And this way the UCLASS wouldn’t take much risk.

First of all there is no indication of the cost being $150 Million for the UCAS (That cost came from the RFI which sought ORBITS that were to cost $150 Million or less. One orbit would usually mean multiple vehicles). But lets assume a cost at parity with the F-35C. Even then the LCC cost is next to nothing. The UCLASS does not need to fly 300 hours (for a few decades) a year to maintain proficiency, nor does it need to be an 8000 airframe hour vehicle (think 15-20K).

Be realistic, it is going to be much larger than the F-35C ( possibly up to twice as big ) , will have a very sophisticated sensor suite, and will be built in much lower numbers. It would be surprising if it didn’t cost significantly more. Its operating cost would be much less, especially its cost per flying hour of course.

Ripple fire was a tactic western fighter (NATO) pilots trained in with as well, especially with the fire and forget AMRAAM.

It seems, from the informations that have come out, that the F-35’s software is done in such a way that one target is not attacked be 2 missiles at the same time. The F-35 doesn’t carry many missiles, so they want to spare them, which may not be such a good idea. If it had more missiles, it could do double shots at like 10 seconds intervals to keep the target attacked constantly until it is shot down. Ripple firing would deny the enemy the ability to take his own missile shot.

i dont know whether DAS can triangulated or not, but at least it give pilot some warning when enemy fighter coming from behind or if some AA gun fire at F-35, by contrast, for other fighters that is not equipped with similar system to DAS, if enemy some how silently get behind them, then they will be shot down very easy ( by cannon)

No doubt that the DAS combined with the HMD is a very good system, but other next generation planes are likely to get similar ones.