I didn’t say the refuelling probe would be stealthy, all I said was, the only thing you can do is RAM coat it as you can’t exclude metal from its composition.
Of course this was before the conversation turned “anal”. (HAHA)

I’ll ask you again, Kiwinopal, why was the F-16XL such a big improvement over the F-16? According to you, LERX+wing+tailplane is superior in terms of lift/drag than canard+delta, so it should be way superior to an unstable compound delta. Yet the F-16XL carried a larger load for a greater distance and supercruised.
And canards are not a 70s fad to improve deltas. The Wright flier 0f 1905 was a canard !!!

Kiwinopal, no offence meant, but what you DON’t know about canard or taiplane stability and control could fill a book. I recommend you read a good elementary one such as the one by Whitford on Fighter Aircraft Design which was briefly serialized in Air International a few years back (Idon’t have it handy so not sure about author’s name or title). Stop reading internet sites that talk about ‘vortex bursting’ as those people know even less.

Kiwinopal, you took some time to try to explain your version of what happens at the crest of the cobra maneuver , ie. at 120 degrees. Now let me tell you why I think you are wrong.
At a perpendicular angle of 90 degrees, before the apex of the maneuver is reached, the plane is moving through the air at several hundred miles per hour with its nose pointing straight up, any vortex produced by the LERXs will trail behind the plane, the vortex will NOT make a 90 degree turn downwards to be able to wash over the wing and stick the airflow to provide more lift.
Once it reaches the apex of 120 degrees its nose is pointing past the vertical to a position above and behind it, if we assume what you say is true and the vortex are sticking the airflow to the wing and providing more lift, then that lift will tend to pull the nose of the plane “up”, ie. onto its back. This is not what happens since the plane comes nose-down through the vertical position and back to level flight, so there must be another mechanism at work. or do you also believe in magic?

Oh, and your F-111 example is out of place, because even with its wings swept, it is not a delta and does not act like a delta.
But since you are so down on deltas, can you tell me if your vaunted F-15 can out-turn an Avro Vulcan at 50,000ft?
Look into it, I’m sure you’ll be very surprised.

What is the loiter time of an S-3? is it comparable or even close to the 18 hrs of an Atlantic II? Although it would be very unconfortable as there is no space for crew rest, but 8hrs should be acceptable for a sortie. Italy needs replacements for the Atlantic ( or is it using ATR-72 MR now) to patrol mainly the southern Mediterranean and Adriatic and Greece certainly needs to patrol its southern and eastern seaways ( and Cyprus area ). Would the S-3 make a suitable airframe for sensor carriage with processing and analysis done centrally by datalink? It would probably involve 30 to 50 airframes to make it cost effective. What do you think?

Lets go back to basics. Aerodynamic lift is produced because of a difference in speed of the airflow over the top and bottom of a wing. Faster air flow has less pressure and so lift is generated because the higher pressure on one side pushes toward the lower pressure on the other. The difference in airflow speed is generated by the curvature of the wing, ie. half of a venturi as per Bernoulli.
Now I assume you know all this, so then explain to me how a wing, moving perpendicular to the airflow, at 90 degrees, generates any kind of aerodynamic forces, other than that generated by a flat plate moving through the air, ie. DRAG!!!
Stop reading stuff in magazines or online ( such as ‘vortex bursting’ ) and placing any significance on them, classical, non-relativistic physics, is very common sense, and you can find ‘ballpark’ answers to a lot of problems by thought experiments, ie. think about it.
Oh, and having adegree in physics, the hysteresis I’m familiar with is magnetic, and I don’t see how the two are related. Don’t tell me to look it up, like some other members do, if you’re so familiar with it, explain it to me so I know you’re not just pulling it out of you a*s.

As for the Kfir, Viggen, the NG and Milan versions of the Mirage and even the Su-27 series, all are regular planform where the non-moving canard is added to generate some lift ahead of the CoG for various reasons. STO( for the Viggen ), tailplane offloading ( Su-27 variants ), and counteracting aft movement of CoL at supersonic speed which makes the plane even more ‘stable’ and more sluggish in pitch. None of these planes use the canard for actual trim and pitch change as substitute for tailplanes.
So, compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges, use the Typhoon, Rafale or even HIMAT in your comparisons and people who know something may actually consider your viewpoint and what you are saying.

Didn’ t know the US DoD was so mean spirited. It seems a shame about all those nice Viking airframes just rotting away, they’ve got to be worth something.