In the 1980s NATO air forces included no small number of visual range only fighters armed with IR-guided missiles.

Yes, in the ’80s most of the fighter force in both NATO and Warsaw Pact was limited to WVR weapons and radars (and some didn’t even have proper radars), weak combat avionics, little or no counter-measures. In those circumstances, using Hawk class trainers as point defence fighters was not at all far-fetched idea. It is why Finnish Air Force purchased ~60 Hawks – as many trainers as they had combat a/c!

However, USAF had (and has) so many actual combat a/c and combined with US geographical advantages, that for them, it is most cost-effective just to let trainers be trainers.

This is the only potential reference to what you are claiming,

If noterskab means ownership then the paragraph clearly indicates that the Danes are liable for a spares pool, just a smaller holding than would ordinarily be the case.

Yes, it means ownership and clearly states exactly what I was saying. “Customer owns only the actual aircraft”. This is also abundantly clear from Danish’ report acquisition cost. There is simply no room in the money allocated to F-35 acquisition to contain any meaningful number of spares.

Even if we said that the F-35 price would increase by 25% or even 50% per frame with an initial spares load, which would be an exorbitant sum for an initial spares load, that doesn’t significantly change the cost equation.

Completely wrong. And 50% per frame cost is not that far off, it is more or less what was calculated in Danish report for Super Hornet, and what RAAF paid.

You are not comparing like numbers. For a start, you do not know the URF price as table 4.4 is clearly blacked out in the document.

No I don’t. But I do know that URF for Super Hornet is lower than for F-35, because the report stated so on page 79: “Målt alene på URF-prisen pr. fly er Super Hornet billigere end Joint Strike Fighter.” Hence, the cost difference is all spares. Your arguing about SAR price variations and whatnot is pointless.

Add FMS fees, a small production run on a low rate line and it becomes far more realistic that the Danes would pay above what the RAAF paid.

Yes, because RAAF paid for spares.

Except as we know it doesn’t cost significantly more but 19% more as I have already posted here previously. Given the F-35 flies more than 19% further, carries more than 119% of the payload of the F-16 and is an all aspect stealth airframe with a host of additional sensors the USAF themselves are happy with the slight increased cost.

However, if we are to believe Danish report, operating cost of F-35 would be signifantly LOWER than for F-16. After all, Super Hornet is stated to have operating cost almost identical to legacy Hornet, which in turn is in same ballpark than F-16. So who do we believe, Danish or the USAF?

And 19% increase is what I call ‘signifant’. It means 5000 to 7500 USD increase per flight hour. Translated to fleet of similar scale than Danish – 30 fighters flying ca. 150 hours per year. Using the lower estimate it means that for Danes, F-35 would cost $22.5M per year more than F-16 type fighter. That is far from trivial.

That makes zero sense. Why would providing comparisons against the single seat model and reversing hours allow them to cook the books?

Remember that the RoI came first and the report was only made afterwards. Likely they wanted to make sure that the “cheap” option (Super Hornet) wouldn’t appear so cheap and requesting twin-seater was one of the easiest way to make SHornet appear more expensive.

That is all internal armoring though isn’t it, the actual hull is just steel like any other ship, and hence would be vulnerable to any serious gunfire. Granted a few 6 inch rounds probably would not make much of an impression on such a large and subdivided ship, but they would certainly be hitting something.

That level of armour would be pretty close to your average WW2 era cruiser though, sans the belt armour (and not all of them had it). Hypothethically, 70 to 100mm armour would be able to resist 6″ gunfire from almost all ranges, and 8″ inch gunfire from long range. 70mm roof armour would be able to deflect battleship calibre gunfire from short ranges.

Of course, there would still be many vulnerable areas – fuel, aviation fuel, torpedoes, smaller missile magazines etc.

What is the hull material and thickness of project Orlan and Atlant ships? Could they withstand any hits from pre-missile era guns like B-38?

Hull plating’s probably like 20 to 25mm at max., high-tensile steel. Not meant to be an armour, nor would it deflect shells except from extreme ranges.

Any reason why 29KUB a twin seater variant of 29K would have better serviceability , are they used more for pilot conversion and hence better maintained or simply a lesser number of KUB would translate to better uptimes.

Number of KUBs is small (half a dozen?), in such a small sample mere random variability can produce different result.

The target ship in the video is a 4000 ton accommodation ship, 111 metres long. About a size of a frigate.

Iowas had the same scheme as the S Dakota class, true. The last two Iowas had thicker belt and turret face armor. Most experts concur the S. Dakota and Iowa had the most effective armor schemes for their displacements. The mix of class A and B armor at a 19* angle with 1.5″ of STS to decap AP shells.

Outer armour was not intended for decapping AP shells and probably would have been quite ineffective in it.
Only Littorio-class had outer armour designed for decapping, it was 70mm, ie. twice the thickness in Iowas. This Italians had calculated as minimum necessary to decap 15″ shells.
However the space between outer and inner belt was quite small, and it might have been too small to allow effective decapping.

Inclined belt had its disadvantages: it was heavier, often required outer plating to maintain hull profile and encouraged shells to ricochet downwards, under the ship.
HMS Hood had 12″ inclined belt, just like Iowas…

I once did some thoughtwork about shooting anti-ship missiles at a battleship. Your typical ASM has roughly same explosive power as WW2 torpedoes, which often did bad things to battleships even when they hit the armour belt, so it would be far from guaranteed that the missiles would bounce off from armour. A complication is that missile warheads are designed against unarmoured target ships, delayed warhead hitting thick armour might disintegrate before detonation, thus reducing explosive power.
A large, supersonic ASM has many times kinetic energy of a 16 inch shell and would probably just smash the armour in. Against a diving missile attack, it would be much much worse. A supersonic diving missile like Kh-22 would easily penetrate the deck armour, ignite the magazines and blow the ship up.

But even assuming that missiles can’t penetrate armour, and all belt, barbette and turret armour is invulnerable to anti-ship missiles: so what? Take a look at this diagram about Iowa’s armour scheme:

Grey line is the waterline. Note how something like 80% of the ship over waterline is unarmoured or protected by just very thin armour. Say you fire 8 Exocets at a battleship, two would strike armour and be ineffective, that leaves six missiles hitting unarmoured parts of the ship. Many of the comms and radars and fire control systems would be probably knocked out, signifantly reducing ships combat capability. Worse, they would start major fires. We know from experience that one Exocet hit is generally mission kill to 4000-5000 ton ship. Six missiles would likely be more than enough to make sure that any ship is hors de combat, even if she doesn’t actually sink.