F-35 Lightning II: News thread

Regular wrote:Well fast food in UK is more expensive than food You can make yourself.
If You are skint You can go and eat at chippy but it will be more expensive in the end of the day.
I used spend only £40 per week for myself for like 2 months because I saved money to rent bigger house. And I'm not small guy either.

4 pack of beans can be found for £1.
Chicken Kiev 500 grams - 1 pound.
6 tomatoes for £1 too.
John West canned salmon 300 g - £1.
Uncle Benz Rice pouches 2 for £2.
Not the healthiest food but not as poisonous than horse burgers from Tesco.

1 Turkish kebab will cost me more than 6 quid. It takes two of them to feed me for at least 6 hours.
Making food is always cheaper than buying fast food

Haha, brings me back

I used to raid the Tesco, etc... clearance section whenever I could; you can usually find some cheap packaged meals there.

Favorite staple was spaghetti & pesto sauce (sometimes with some chicken breast too), as well as tuna rice (with mayo and pepper).
When I was truly skint I could buy a whole bag of frozen chicken legs; boil them, roast them... they would last for quite a while. And rice, spaghetti is dirt cheap so those were always the staples of my student diet.

One of my housemates worked in a Thai restaurant; every day he would bring back chicken & rice (while I supplied the tobacco); it was spicy as fuck but I just had to endure it.
Another few friends worked at fish & chips stands/shops; so I usually well supplied when out & about too.

flamming_python wrote:

Regular wrote:Well fast food in UK is more expensive than food You can make yourself.
If You are skint You can go and eat at chippy but it will be more expensive in the end of the day.
I used spend only £40 per week for myself for like 2 months because I saved money to rent bigger house. And I'm not small guy either.

4 pack of beans can be found for £1.
Chicken Kiev 500 grams - 1 pound.
6 tomatoes for £1 too.
John West canned salmon 300 g - £1.
Uncle Benz Rice pouches 2 for £2.
Not the healthiest food but not as poisonous than horse burgers from Tesco.

1 Turkish kebab will cost me more than 6 quid. It takes two of them to feed me for at least 6 hours.
Making food is always cheaper than buying fast food

Haha, brings me back

I used to raid the Tesco, etc... clearance section whenever I could; you can usually find some cheap packaged meals there.

Favorite staple was spaghetti & pesto sauce (sometimes with some chicken breast too), as well as tuna rice (with mayo and pepper).
When I was truly skint I could buy a whole bag of frozen chicken legs; boil them, roast them... they would last for quite a while. And rice, spaghetti is dirt cheap so those were always the staples of my student diet.

One of my housemates worked in a Thai restaurant; every day he would bring back chicken & rice (while I supplied the tobacco); it was spicy as fuck but I just had to endure it.
Another few friends worked at fish & chips stands/shops; so I usually well supplied when out & about too.

Fish and Chips? By the sound of it did you go to college...err I mean university in the UK? Here in America the common staple student diets revolve around Ramen instant-noodles, Kraft mac & cheese, oatmeal, hot and cold cereal, ham and cheese sandwiches...things that can be made within 30 minutes before class.

Simply there can be no better solution for Russia and China and perhaps even India than the situation where F-35 development is finished successfully and the plane is rushed in the production. Why? Because:

- it will cost like hell
- its maintenance will cost like hell
- its the slowest plane in the world
- it can not supercruise
- its stealth is not so great (if at all)
- its internal weapon compartment is too small to matter
- its maneuverability is non-existant
- it has lowest flight altitude
- it has only one engine
- it has small range
- no TVC
- it will occupy US fighter slots in thousands for extremly long period of time with its inferior characteristics to much capable fighters that would be designed instead
- etc

because it will represent a real big, juicy and fat targets for Russian and China SAMs  

The F-35 does not have small range at all. It's range is quite good actually.

The F-35 will be equipped with the very latest of American sensors, radars and missiles so already there is a big danger there just from that.

But yeah, it's a big lemon alright.

TR1 wrote:The F-35 does not have small range at all. It's range is quite good actually.

A and C variant have sommewhat better range than F-18 but not much and not nearly what PAk-FA/Su-30/35/34/MIG-35, J-20 will have or already has.

Viktor wrote:

TR1 wrote:The F-35 does not have small range at all. It's range is quite good actually.

A and C variant have sommewhat better range than F-18 but not much and not nearly what PAk-FA/Su-30/35/34/MIG-35, J-20 will have or already has.

Most of those are much larger airframes, too, with more fuel.  The F-35 does have IFR, and can carry external tanks for more range at the expense of LO.

That being said, yes, the F-35 is a waste of time.  The sensor and EW capability and fusion is pretty ridiculous, but it's not survivable in a modern IADS (neither are the F-22, J-20, or T-50) and can't compete with something more tailored for the A/A role like an F-22 or T-50.

Also, saying something has better range than an F-18 really isn't a compliment  

Not as much range as MiG-35? You sure?

I would think the opposite is true.

Nuff said   

Chief of the U.S. Air Force, Air Command Command Gen. Michael Hostage wrote:“If I do not keep that F-22 fleet viable, the F-35 fleet frankly will be irrelevant. The F-35 is not built as an air superiority platform. It needs the F-22,”

LINK

The jet that ate the Pentagon

The core problem with the F-35 is that it is trying to be too many different aircraft at one time.

The fact that they wanted a 5th gen F-16 to fly with the 5th gen F-15 (ie the F-22) makes a lot of sense, but trying to make the 5th gen F-16 (F-35) perform even better than the F-22 is at the primary core of their mistake.

The other obvious error is trying to make a 5th gen F-16 into an AV-8 as well.

What they should have done was split it into two separate but related programs where one is a light F-16 5th gen that will have good but not spectacular performance and will have full fighter and ground attack capability. They then should have redesigned the basic aircraft into a VSTOL aircraft to replace the Marines Harrier and anyone elses Harrier on land and on small aircraft carriers.

Their current force structure has air to air only F-15C, air to ground F-15E, and air to air and air to ground medium F-16.

In the near future they could have had the F-22 as the F-15C, whose job is to clear the skies of enemy air power and keep them down, while the F-35 is the numbers aircraft that can pound the enemy air defences to dust and start hunting down ground forces.

By making the F-35 design VSTOL capable they got a fat overweight compromised design that is not ideal for simple light stealthy fighter, nor is it ideal as a VSTOL aircraft for the tiny percentage of users that even wanted that feature...

For the foreign users the problem is compounded.

The British had an awesome light strike aircraft called the Buccaneer... it wasn't super fast, it wasn't super manouverable, but it could carry two nuclear bombs at low level faster and further than the F-16 of the time could. It could also operate from land and from aircraft carriers.

The F-35 should have been a 5th gen Buccaneer and it would have been a much better aircraft.

Hahahahaha... lobby groups, rotating door policies... fancy terms for corruption... but when you call murder a purge it suddenly stops being murder...

Not really. Much worse. They tried to replace f16, f18, A10 and Harrier simultaneously! And this was only the beginning of their shortages.
They also got this obsession with stealth and with the idea of a platform to carry weapons instead of a fighting machine concept.
They also stuck with a one engine concept which is ridiculous because despite this they planned a program to be on purpose over cost
to involve all states and almost all of their puppets.
All this at the time that USA suffered the greatest industrial decline in human history. From 1995 to 2005 USA lost pretty much about 50%
of it's industrial capabilities. F35 is a mega fail, but is far from being the only one. After B2 every single mega project of US army ended in total disaster.
They failed with Asprey's, helicopters, two fifth generation fighters, a whole family of missiles, zumwalt frigates, postponed ballistic submarines and many more.
It is unique in human history. In the early 90s Russia had the ability but no money, with USA is different. They seem that they broke the industrial sequence.

Thx to all for these precious informations.

Nevertheless, I ignored this shit -F-35- was in fact inspired from the Yak 141.
What a pity, Yeltsin did to Russia. Again I'am amazed, even for their high tech hardwares US rely on Russia.

He didn't do anything. The F-35 borrowed some basic ideas from the Yak, and practically nothing more.

The F-35 would have existed without Yak-141, and Russia didn't really lose anything.

look on the bright side... if it werent for them borrowing some elements of yak-141 design F-35B wouldnt be possible and more
importantly serve as base for all the other F-35 models. The fat clumsy F-35 design that we all love to hate would have been
two wholely difeerent aircraft: current design VTOL F-35 and a sleeker more agile stealth F-16- which could pose a thrreat.

Lockheed Martin bought the technology of the seals/joints of the engine in the parts that turn while the engine is in full afterburner.

They probably could have developed something, but it was quicker and cheaper to buy Soviet expertise which was available at the time.

If they couldn't perfect a vectored thrust nozzle to take 20+ tons of thrust they might have gone with a conventional take off model only and ignored the Marine requirement for VSTOL... the F-35 probably would have been a much better aircraft.

GarryB wrote:Lockheed Martin bought the technology of the seals/joints of the engine in the parts that turn while the engine is in full afterburner.

They probably could have developed something, but it was quicker and cheaper to buy Soviet expertise which was available at the time.

If they couldn't perfect a vectored thrust nozzle to take 20+ tons of thrust they might have gone with a conventional take off model only and ignored the Marine requirement for VSTOL... the F-35 probably would have been a much better aircraft.

No wonder there were so many Soviet/Russian chess champions/grand masters, always thinking several steps ahead, and now they successfully sabotaged the U.S. Air Force by......*Drum Roll*......"STEALTH"!!!

Yes, i think Mig should develop the F-35-would-have-been. It would be export only- a joint venture with the marginalized F-35 customers and then some like indonesia, turkey, japan, sk. Mig would make the airframe then adapt it to the needs of its partners. Also have locally produced and tech sharing agreements since this is an export only stealth plane. This should keep Mig busy now that Sukhoi will focus on the Pak-Fa and a UCAV Pak-Fa.

Why don't they just build the yak-43 as an export competitor to the F-35? That aircraft design just looks so cool.

Because that would economically be a terrible idea.

It would be a catastroph on economics if you would built an Yak-43 to compete with an already shitty competitor that has already the same self produced hyped image like Apple hardware.
Bad hardware but put an apple logo on it and hipsters going crazy about junk and you can demand more money for that nonsense.

If you can't establishe a cult of zombies around a product that is unnecassary you should stay away from such attempts.

that is why you dont build another F-35B to compete with F-35B. the marines and the brits are the only ones who loved the F-35B anyway, if the others had their way they would have wanted a dedicated airframe. This is where Mig could step in with their LMFS program. Heck the chicoms too want a share of the light stealth fighter pie and they dont even have an engine for the J-20   . Same for the Japanese and the Koreans, if the LMFS can compete with their native designs they maybe swayed to buy LMFS instead.

I strongly suspect the light 5th gen fighter will be stealthy but also cheaper and as such be very appealing on the international market.

However I strongly suspect that current F-35 operators will not make such a political statement as to change from a US fighter to a Russian one... no matter how much it costs them.

The primary benefit of a VSTOL aircraft is to be able to get away with smaller cheaper carriers, but the cost in performance means those smaller carriers are rather less effective than slightly larger fixed wing carriers.

To be honest I think it would be more cost effective to build slightly larger carriers with EM cats that allow heavier AWACS aircraft to operate and the light 5th gen fighter too... far better bang for only slightly more buck. ...as cool as the Yak-43 was there is little benefit to reviving it.