basically look like a straigth line

Watch carefully and note the size of the ship itself relative to the zig-zag and the slow motion. That missile could be shifting about 50m left then right in about a second or less.

Their fusing may need some work depending on how wide the target was.

wanting to benefit yes, but being tied to others even when they’d like to do something by themselves is what I’m talking about.

imagine for a second a country among these F-35 partners, that has a friendly nation they have a treaty with, asking for help (may be an ex-colony or something similar). You are supposed to get there and help them, except that you have no projection capability to speak of as your air force is only usable as a small fraction of a coalition where you’ll need the US to bring everything that makes your handful of aircraft usable. What do you do?

You’ll need to be more specific about the scenario.

says who ? You ? How do you know? Who told you that this is or would have been the case? You are implying that the only way forward was a plane with similar costs to the F-35? Then you are being contradicted by the LM people who a few years back had completely different ideas of the cost and performance of the same plane you are defending now.

Factor in inflation, market fluctuation and exchange rate variation and there’s no way of predicting the cost of a 15 year military project accurately even if everything went perfectly. Clean slate projects cost money and you can’t justify that for the aircraft you’re describing. If the Typhoon project had began 15 years later would we have been designing the same aircraft? Would we hell.

How can you quantify the cost of making a plane which would have fulfilled the F-16 role at a similar price point without ever having been part of such a procedure? I am not saying I can, but surely you cannot either. Such a competition never materialised so no one knows. Filling the same shoes doesn’t mean it would have to be like the F-16 physically or even come from the same lineage. It could have been a completely different design, meeting the same requirements. The F-16 and the MiG-29 came about trying to meet pretty much the same requirements, they don’t look alike do they?

We can look at the Rafale and Typhoon and infer that such a project would still be expensive, even minus an engine. You won’t get as many more fighters for a given sum as you think you’ll get.

You are forgetting that taking something from LO to VLO can mean the cost of tens of millions on the final price. However the benefits of going from LO to VLO may not be what is working to your best interests if you are trying to make a decent front line fighter.

Does it? Getting stealth technology in the first place no doubt costs $billions but once you have it and have experience of using it, does applying it to a new design really increase price that much at all?

and that is the point you are missing. The F-35 was NOT meant to be a front line fighter, even during the initial stages of design, the idea circulated with various degrees of veracity was that it would supplement the F-22 and enjoy a free reign after the F-22 has achieved air superiority that is not a front line fighter that you can take to a war of attrition, that is a plane for a very specific role. NO other country besides the US has the F-22, what are the rest to do ?

It’s not a dedicated air superiority fighter, but neither was the F-16 or F-18, doesn’t mean they’re useless at air combat though. The whole idea of stealth is that the ‘attrition’ is avoided for the most part.

You are forgetting that stealth is a two edge sword, you enemy can’t see you so you see them first and you shoot. Fine by me matey, but what if they have stealth too? maybe not as good as yours but stealth non the less, what are you gonna do now? Every argument you have ever put forward about stealth now applies to them too.. and what if they are a bigger country than you and they could afford 48 of their slightly worst stealthy planes but you could only afford 24 of your super dupper wow F-35s .. they have you at 2-1 and you can’t do anything about it because you can’t see them and they can’t see you and you ended up having half as many planes as they do and they conduct twice as many sorties day as you do and they shoot down twice as many planes as you do from the conventional 4gen fleets.

If their plane is less stealthy than yours, you will still see them first. Even if radar misses them, EODAS will pick them up. You also know that you’ve spent about a decade testing your latest BVR missile and ECM against each other. You also know that you’re using 5th generation SRAAMs with full 360deg coverage, LOAL and the best IIR seekers, whereas they’re using 4th generation SRAAMs with a +/-60deg coverage and primitive seekers. So we see a combination of technologies coming together.

Do you begin to see the problem now? In WWII, the russian tanks werent’ the best, certainly not better than the German ones.. but they were so god damn many that the german tanks run out of shells blowing them up and they were still coming.. Do you catch my drift ?

So… what… we should build 5,000 Spitfires instead of the F-35. Your ability to ignore all other factors affecting your given point is astounding. Germany had spread itself out across the whole of Europe and the Middle East, essentially fighting on 3 fronts simultaneously, but that couldn’t possibly have been a factor… no. Germany didn’t introduce a war economy until 1942 but ignore that. Germany had a far smaller workforce than the USSR but ignore that. The comparison is just dumb. I mean the USAF has more F-22s than the RAF has Typhoons, does that mean they’re easier to build and maintain?

What you seem to be advocating is ZERG Rush tactics, as perhaps best demonstrated at Imjin River. The losses there even forced China to think twice, now try explaining similarly unnecessary losses to the citizens of a more democratic country. People used to think a lot of infantry would solve any problem, but then came machine guns and modern artillery. Then people thought a lot of tanks would solve any problem, but then came attack helicopters and cluster bombs. Then people thought lots of planes would solve any problem and along came stealth and BVRAAMs. Nobody really wants a replay of WWI tactics but thanks for your time.

Dear voters, if you elect me as Prime Minister of this great nation, I will employ a military strategy that focuses on throwing people and vehicles into the path of enemy munitions until they run out. I trust I can rely on your vote.

What I find idiotic is putting forward arguments along the lines of “who would have thought a replacement for the F-16 would be lighter and cost less”!!!

What kind of reasoning is that? Do you understand the concept of operational requirements? Do you understand the concept of same weight class? Who ever mentioned a better plane than the F-16? The F-16 is today a pretty damn good plane, with very good systems as well and pretty hard nut to crack.

Perhaps the only thing needed would have been a plane that filled the F-16 shoes and was more survivable, perhaps incorporating LO and VLO characteristics. That thing would sell like a hot cake.

It didn’t have to be twin engine like the Rafale or the Typhoon, it didn’t need to have EOTAS, it didn’t need to have all digital cockpit nor a latest generation of helmet queuing system. Any off the shelf components would have worked fine. A different design other than that fat brick would have allowed for better flight characteristics and more importantly it would not have allowed the program to balloon to these proportions.

Single engine, LO (not even VLO) , a decent AESA, agile design and presto .. you have the new F-16.. what more does NATO need?

And why should NATO potential customers pay for the development phase of versions they are not going to use?

that is idiotic…

The plane you’ve just described would be an F-16H not a new fighter. It would be idiotic to design a completely new fighter so similar to an F-16 that you could have just used different LO skin and better avionics and made an upgraded variant. Or were you trying to flog NATO a Gripen NG perhaps?

I guess people just see stealth and SA as the primary factors in air combat, indeed lengthy studies were conducted following the Vietnam War that came to the exact same conclusion. I guess it’s a shame for the Russians that nobody recognised the genius of Pyotr Ufimtsev’s work 15 years before the US even started thinking about stealth.

Maybe so but only if it ever enters service. With the way things are staggering from one delay to another that is far from certain.

First flight was 2006, it’s not unusual for 1st flight to in-service to take at least 10 years.

That is the point. There are no alternatives and a bunch of air forces are screwed, because even if the F-35 is as good as you think or even better than any other plane out there, its price forbids the numbers necessary to make an Air Force.

Not necessarily. When you factor in development costs for another aircraft, it probably works out to more than the F-35 unit cost and kill ratio matters more than numbers. Mission planning also mean that a 4th generation fighter needs more supporting aircraft, there’s a nice diagram around somewhere on that matter.

That is about the essence of it, and btw, who seriously thought that any successor to the F-16 would actually be cheaper and lighter in weight than an F-16?

Exactly, it’s not like a Rafale or Typhoon is and I can guarantee that a Gripen NG won’t be either. It’s like believing that an F-15SE would be as stealthy as an F-22, have the same performance and cost less than an F-15E. If you believe that, don’t blame others for your idiocy.

What’s amusing is that wikipedia says a PAK-FA will be cheaper than an Su-35.

What are the alternatives? Ignore stealth, build an easily detected fighter that manoeuvres and accelerates slightly better than legacy aircraft and then find that it can still be easily detected and shot down BVR. Get involved in a war of attrition, lose pilots, pay out to grieving widows, pay to train new pilots at short notice etc.

You yourself are no stranger to dubious, unsubstantiated and sweeping generalisations. You are not privy to wave drag and shockwave/BL interaction data for the F-35. Perhaps pondering the evidence would be the order of the day.

Please, enlighten me.

Do you think flight envelope downgrades for all three versions of the F-35 (including the shocker for the ‘C’) is indicative of a *good* baseline design?……or do you think slapping on “at least 43 seconds”* for the transonic acceleration of the larger- winged ‘C’ is evidence of more fundamental [design] problems? (having exhausted all other options such as sealing the LE flap gaps, VGs, spoilers, software patches etc.).

Not really that bad considering the comparison is with a clean and functionally useless F-16.

Problems with the ‘C’, I might add, date back to at least 2003 when both the USN and LM made corrective static tester studies focusing on trans & supersonic regimes under AWS & CBSTAT programmes respectively.

Your blind faith in LM is astounding given that all the aerospace techies in the USN couldn’t resolve these issues for over a decade and had to resign themselves to the ’43 second rule’. Still think F-35+EFT performance will be ‘straightforward’?

Ironically, they appear to have area-ruled the F-35 EFTs for trans & supersonic flight- so I guess they got something right, huh?

*http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/pentagon-lowers-f-35-performance-bar-381031/

Only the C model was down on a clean F-16’s transonic acceleration by 43 seconds. Basically you’re comparing a functionally useless, short range dart to a fully equipped combat aircraft.