Unproven 🙂

Air dominance provided by a platform which can’t match the opposition in terms of raw performance?

The F35 missile launch parameters are likely to be less favourable then the opposition simply due to the performance gap; even accepting that the F35 may get a shot away prior to detection it has then advertised it’s presence and will become the subject of rather intense hunting, how this can be interpeted as dominance is interesting 🙂

As a strike platform with self defence capability the F35 will be sufficient. To believe that the aircraft is anything other than that is delusional.

this have been answer like a millions times before , f-35 have lower RCS , good SA ,AESA jamming , DIRCM ,,,etc so it have first look , first shot , defense good against enemy missiles ..etc, raw performance mean nothing if you have no idea where the enemy , where to shot , even the super rafale or su-35 can’t out maneuver a missile in NEZ
and to be honest how agile rafale is compared to f-35 if it have to carry weapon external while f-35 have weapon internal ( i mean in air dominance mission )

@ Moon_light ,

F-35 can take up to 18,000 lb (8,100 kg) of payload , Rafale up to 21,000 lb (9,500 kg) .
F-35 empty weight : 29,300 lb (13,300 kg)
Rafale empty weight : 21,500 lb (9,770 kg)

Rafale is smaller than F-35 , lighter , still it carries more payload further away than F-35 and probably faster too .
How do you explain that ? :diablo:

Cheers .

the important thing is not just about how heavy it can carry , but also the number of hard point for weapon 😉 , for example you can only have 1 HARM or 4 gbu-53/B per hard point even through they not quite heavy , my point is the total number of weapon that f-35 can carry when full load is more than what rafale can do
rafale

ef-2000

gripen

f-18 e/f

f-35

Even today , I am amazed to see so many F-35 ‘s customers not understanding that the F-35 is a US CONCEPT build for the US needs .

-Interceptor ? No says uncle Sam , we have the F-22 .
-CAS ? No says uncle Sam , we have the SH and the Viper .
-Deep penetration ? No says uncle Sam , we have cruise missiles and the Strike eagle .
-So , what is it for ? To go not too far away undetected , drop two bombs and come back . It can do CAPs as well says uncle Sam .
-How much it cost ? An harm , a leg and your balls says uncle Sam .
-Ok ! I want some !

:confused:

The F-35 is the mirror of the way the US see how War should be conducted : clean with zero casualtie , the pilot and its machine must come back alive at all cost even he can ‘t do much damage in the process . If you can ‘t hit it from far away , go in but make sure to come back .
In fact , the F-35 is the newer F-117 with plenty of gizmos and it flies better . With its internal weapon load , it can kill a couple of targets on the ground and can defend itself just enough , depending on the load .
It is an aircraft designed to work within a strong workframe and bigger the framework is , better it fits .
And that ‘s the problem .
Within a small to medium work Force , maybe working alone with AWACs , it is going to be a very difficult aircraft to manage , task wise . Its punch power over contested airspace is minimal if you fly with internals only , which means that you will need a lot of time and a lot of raids to archive anything meaningful , unles to have a lot of F-35s at hand .
As an exemple , the French took some risk during the first days over Libya by going deep to open the way to military airfields but 2 Rafales had the firepower of 6 F-35s and with better weapons that the F-35 . Thanks to the combo Rafale/Spectra/AASM , the SEAD/DEAD work was done swiftly with no loss , opening the way for the Rafales/M2000s with SCALP .

To do that with some F-35s , it would have taken us ages , a fortune in fuel and in maintenance .

Cheers .

the situation when rafale can carry weapon external , then f-35 can do the same too , and if it carry weapon by external hard point as well as internal f-35 actually carry more missiles , bomb ..etc than rafale
but when enemy have very good air defense => rafale cannot even survive while F-35 can still carry weapon internal and use stealth to defeat enemy
in CAS and SEAD mission F-35 can have 8 Spear or GBU-53/b , or it can have 6 brimstone internal so not too bad , still have space for defensive AA missiles
F-35 can provide air dominance mission if necessary because of stealth , however Intercept is not quite the mission for F-35 through as it too slow ,gun gun dogfight also another problem due to low sustain turn
but i think depth penetration problem can be solve by JSOW-ER and JASSM-ER may be ?:confused:

Rafale and Gripen have lower drag, burn less fuel and are smaller when you just go by the metrics.

This means smaller trail och hot exchaust gases and smaller fuselage to track = smaller IR signature.

lower drag clean yes , with all weapon , pod may be ,but they are supercruise aren’t they so they be hotter => easier to detect from far , and rafale , su-35 , f-22 , EF-2000 all have 2 engine so tend to give more ir signature i think
and a little bigger target dont give you that much improve in range , i mean how much is the f-35 bigger than rafale ? 10 % ? 20 % ?
last f-35 is designed to work in transonic region , so it’s drag in that region may be not as high as people think ,

F35A with external fuel tanks (plural) can deliver bombs (like JDAMs) as far away as ~1250km, Gripen can do it over 1550km away and Rafale can do it over 1850 km away.

Thats the maximum ranges for all of them. F35C can reach as far away as ~1320 km.

I wasnt the one who brought up external payload, Spudman did. With that it is as unimpressive as it gets.

are you sure with those number :confused: , i have check but even with internal fuel it reached combat radius of about 1100 km :confused:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II

Intercepting a Mig-35 flying at mach 2.2, from a distance of 50km?

mig-35 in real life actually in disadvantage as
1- it carry less missiles than f-35 if both carry missiles externally ( assume the situation f-35 dont care about stealth )
2-in WVR it dont have DICRM , r-74 have smaller cover angle compared to western dogfight missiles
3- both of them can’t do supercruise

Where are you getting your info about AARGM??

It’s a VERY good SEAD/DEAD weapon.

Brimstore is short-ranged (10nm max-ish) and Spear3 & Brimstore are active seekers, no passive homing and both suffer from smallish warheads.

http://www.atk.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/DES-AARGM.pdf

http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2008gun_missile/MillerAustin.pdf

the problem is that , if you put AARGM on f-35 , then it will no longer be stealth , understood ? , there no point doing that while you can put AARGM on f-16 , f-18 , ef-2000 , tornado ..etc that why the AARGM is not a good weapon for f-35
and the speed of AARGM is not enough to stop SAM from shot it down + one f-35 can only have 2 AARGM external compared to at least 8 SPEAR internal :confused: , if we have NGM it could be much much better