|
Molentik posted:The Netherlands have two of the drat things as well for testing, but we can't affort the engines for them. This is the funniest thing I've read about the F-35 yet.
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2014 00:24
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 5, 2024 03:49 |
|
|
ChaosSamusX posted:So, even if they fix all of the crippling defects, will the F-35 still just be an expensive bomb/missile truck? Well yes, but it's worth it because it's a fifth generation bomb truck. That means it's automatically better than everything else. The only way you could make a better plane would be by calling it a sixth generation plane. Also it has unique new features never seen before, such as in-flight refueling, link 16 integration, and the ability to be used alongside other types of planes. I know it sounds like science fiction, but these futuristic features are, according to the Australian Financial Review, one of the main reasons why the F-35 is the best choice available.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2014 15:46
|
|
|
hobbesmaster posted:Eritean-Ethiopian war had dogfights between jets in 2002. Eritrea and Ethiopia cannot afford F-35s, though. They probably couldn't afford to operate them even if you gave them for free. $32K per flight hour is a lot when your country's GDP is barely $4 billion (as is the case for Eritrea). There's a reason countries in Africa and South America choose the Gripen, and it's not because of its incredible performances. Even the Swiss, who aren't exactly short on money, chose the Gripen for its low operating cost, their Air Force would have preferred the Rafale but they went with the cheaper option and then the population voted not to buy anything after all. Which makes sense because they're not even using their air force for anything, so what's the point? FADEtoBLACK posted:He was talking about the F22, not the F35. There are youtube videos of the F22 being beat in short-range engagements by more agile fighters. It's designed to use superior sensors and weapons at long range and then GTFO. The thing is that it's generally much cheaper to retrofit superior sensors on a tried and true airframe.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2014 09:58
|
|
|
Close-in weapon systems need to be entirely automated because they need to open fire on the threat as soon as it's detected. Each fraction of a second counts.Wikipedia posted:This also makes the timeframe for interception relatively short; for supersonic missiles moving at 1500 m/s it is approximately one-third of a second. The up-side is that it's a defense system placed on specific military installations (warships) and programmed to attack things that look like missiles. That's a big difference with, say, some ED-209 police bot programmed to shoot criminals (criminals being identified as human beings not in police uniforms).
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2014 23:42
|
|
|
In cases like Iran Air Flight 655 or the lesser known Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870, an airliner is shoot down because it's confused with an enemy. There's also cases like Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 where the airliner is shot down because it deviated from its route too much and was thought to be a spy. Then you have things like this or that when an airliner is shot accidentally because there were military exercises in the same area. Then you have all the airliners shoot down by militants, like here or there. In none of these cases was the decision to fire a missile made autonomously by a computer.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2014 09:18
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Actually, yeah - if the US is rich enough to fund the F-35, does it really need a stealth capable next-gen fighter when a thousand F-16s would be able to take out any possible military threat anyway? Sure, the argument might be a stealthier craft might result in less casualties if the F-16s get shot down by SAMs or whatnot, but the F-35 is such a piece of poo poo I don't know if it's even going to save any lives (notwithstanding that you could replace a thousand F-16s with Tomahawks and get about the same effect with less loss of life) But the F-35 isn't stealthy to SAMs. It only has strong frontal stealth in the X-band range, so it's stealthy to incoming enemy aircraft that are right ahead and at the same altitude. (Unless this is full of poo poo.) The F-35, like the F-22, is built around the concept of using stealth to shoot the enemy beyond visual range, before you're detected. This is a fantasy. In recent conflicts, enemy air forces have been pitiful or nonexistent. Furthermore, rules of engagement have always been to identify the target before opening fire, which meant the fighters had to go within visual range even if they had a lock before. The only situation in which you could expect these rules of engagement not to apply would be in a total war situation -- meaning that the F-35 is a strike fighter meant to fight in World War 3, but not designed to be used in situations like the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc. Against IR-guided MANPADs, the F-35 has no defenses, except flying high enough (20000 ft. and above). This, of course, is true of every aircraft; but it shows that the F-35's vaunted stealth will not protect it against the primary threat. It just makes it more expensive, less maneuverable, and less capable of payload than older plane designs, without getting any real benefit in exchange. The protection it gives it is against an imaginary threat, that of enemy fighters coming right ahead and not equipped with any networking ability so they have to rely on their own radar. This scenario isn't going to happen. If the hypothetical enemy has a somewhat credible air force, the enemy fighters will be networked and they will get data from ground stations below or AEW above, and the F-35's stealth will be negated. If the hypothetical enemy doesn't have such things, the enemy fighters will be buried in hiding or sent to another country for safekeeping before the war even begins.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2014 22:30
|
|
|
Modern fighters are so expensive that they are modernized and upgraded several times until the airframe is too fatigued to hold anymore. Unless budget restrictions say to scrap/mothball the lot and effectively reduce the inventory size. Like how the UK will scrap its Tranche 1 Typhoons instead of updating them to Tranche 3A standard; because they need money to buy their precious F-35Bs that will replace the Harriers and eventually the Tornados.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2014 18:40
|
|
|
John Dough posted:The Dutch F35s will likely be assembled by the same Italian conglomerate that also built a bunch of high-speed trains for the Dutch Railways. These were so bad that pieces literally fell off during the first month of service, and after a legal battle, the issue was settled and the trains were returned in exchange for a ~75% refund. Same will happen to the F-35 and the Netherlands will have to buy Rafales instead.  iFederico posted:The protagonist can be a grizzled Air Force engineer whose dire warnings about the effect of defense cuts have gone unheeded, and who has since retired to civilian life and dedicated himself to home improvement with incredible results. Can he look like the Sim City guy?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2014 13:30
|
|
|
Alertrelic posted:I understand why this was adopted so broadly in the US, what with the importance of the industry and all those skilled jobs involved, but how did other bits of NATO get suckered into this? Did it just seem like a really good deal, or do the experts not know what they are talking about? Strong US political pressure and the end of the Cold War. With the "Peace Dividends", defense budgets were expected to go waaaay down, especially in the USA's vassal countries. US military aeronautic companies had already started merging all together to turn into just two big blobs too big to fail: Boeing and LockMart. But they still needed to get rid of competition, especially LockMart which doesn't have a huge civilian jetliner activity that can keep it afloat. This meant that it was imperative, to secure the place of Boeing and LockMart in the world as sole source of jet fighters outside of Russia and China, to get rid of the European competition, and especially of Dassault, which the USA have taken extremely seriously since 1973. The project of the Join Strike Fighter was born, in order to prevent Dassault from exporting its Rafale. It led to some funny business, like when the DIA denounced as agents of the KGB various Belgian journalists who wrote favorably about Belgium getting Rafale aircrafts, or when American officials chatted with Sultan of Brunei to explain that the French plane was "yesterday's technology", or the particularly hilarious Dutch competition where the F-35 scored just slightly better than the Rafale, except the F-35 note was based on paper specs only (it had yet to fly at that time), specs which have since been downgraded, while all other planes in the competition were rated according to their real characteristics based on real tests made with real planes that existed for real in the real world of the real reality. Also the use of "fifth generation" as if it actually meant something, but it just allows to dismiss other planes as intrinsically inferior because they're not designed according to terrible aerodynamics in order to gain some ultra-perishable stealth that doesn't work against ground radars and SAM sites. The F-35 has been described an an "industrial terror program" and that is what it is. The aim isn't to make a warplane. The aim is to give the USA supremacy over a shrinking but highly strategic niche. That's why the F-35 is built according to contradictory requirements and has been overhyped to make people believe that it would be a master of all trades, and that's why a scenario that corresponds to none of the ROE in the last twenty years has been hyped up as the air combat of the future. That's also why networking (link 16 isn't especially recent) and data fusion (which have existed for over 15 years in Saab and Dassault planes) are presented as radically new technologies that never existed before the F-35. Some even went as far as claiming that in-flight refueling was a new capability of the F-35! TL;DR: other bits of NATO got suckered into it because they do the US' bidding or else.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2014 14:16
|
|
|
JoelJoel posted:Quick semi-technical question for you dorks: Is there any validity to the claim that countries that do lots of joint exercises with the US and could potentially see combat alongside them need the F-35s so that their combat systems can integrate (or something)? Sounds like steamer to me but I don't know jack about combat systems or military exercises. Is it really that hard for the USAF to play nice with jets that weren't made by LockMart? It's definitely bullshit. The F-35 have Link 16, same as virtually every other fighter plane flown by a NATO country. The F-35 will also have MADL, but it's disingenuous to claim that it's really needed since the only other US plane with it is the B-2. No MADL on F-22, F/A-18, EA-18, etc. Rent-A-Cop posted:The British bought them because they need a STOVL fighter for the retarded babby carriers that they keep building in a frankly sad effort to pretend they still have a navy. The latest British carrier are especially stupid, considering that they are larger than the French carrier CDG or its predecessors (one of which is now the Brazilian Sao Paulo). And yet, they left no room for CATOBAR systems, which would have given them interoperability with both US Navy and French Navy. Heck, they even made an engagement to have at least one of their aircraft carriers interoperable with the French Navy and sent their Navy pilots to the French Navy to fly some Rafales so that they wouldn't lose their training during the many years between retirement of the Harriers and the delivery and IOC of the British F-35s... But no, neither of the CVFs will have CATOBAR, or even just STOBAR. It's stupid. And it makes this old sketch still extremely true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0jgZKV4N_A
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2014 20:33
|
|
|
"While not a capability used in combat, VTOs are required for repositioning of the STOVL in environments where a jet could not perform a short takeoff. In these cases, the jet, with a limited amount of fuel, would execute a VTO to travel a short distance." So no, it isn't. The F-35 cannot perform VTO with any sort of combat payload or more than the minimum amount of fuel required for the maneuver. Sanguine posted:Note that dirt and grass testing for the F-35 'is not complete yet'. quote:So, the question remains, why not land vertically at the shows? ”We want to showcase how we will operate this plane during combat operations,” Capt. Richard Ulsh, a spokesman for the Marine deputy commandant for aviation, told me today. During a combat operation or for expeditionary use the plane would perform rolling or short takeoffs and landings on land to conserve fuel, Ulsh said. The plane is undergoing testing for landings on concrete and grass and dirt. The tests for concrete are finished, Ulsh said, but those for grass and dirt takeoffs and landings are not complete. Organizers made available a dirt and grass area at Farnborough. The F-35B has performed more than 450 vertical landings, Ulsh said.  SEMPER FI, OORAH!Arglebargle III posted:It's helpful to remember that of all the VTOL strike fighters developed (and they did try back in the Cold War) only the Harrier was a success and even then it has a high accident rate and is very difficult to hover. The last part should be helped a lot by FBW and improved flight computers, so that the pilot doesn't need to control separately each nozzle vector according to plane position and wind. What doesn't help is that VTOL/STOVL is either a wrong solution to a real problem, or a real solution to a wrong problem. Reminds me of a joke strip where some amateur tinkerer explains to a friend he's working on a wood gas generator for his car to reduce fuel consumption, but it made his car far too slow to drive normally. So he tells his friend he's going to try to refine and improve his device. Some days later, the friend see the tinkerer's car zooming around like a rocket. "Hey, you actually made it work? How?" And the inventor replies "well, basically I turned the generator into a giant carburetor. The car's fuel tank only last an half-hour now, but I can go so fast!" And that's the same problem with VTOL. There is a problem (damaged/improved runways), a theoretical solution is devised (VTOL has no need for runways), issues arise during conception (downward exhaust blast cause lots of flying debris and is a massive source of FOD), these issues are solved by making the design incapable of solving the original problem (special landing pads). Heck I'm pretty sure a heat-resistant landing pad is a lot more vulnerable to bombs than a normal runway. Runway-destroying bombs require some clever engineering to cause serious damage that cannot be repaired in one hour with a shovel. A precision munition that shatters the heat-resistant pad, though, and you just need a new one to replace it because you cannot repair the special coating at all. Also in the process of making the plane STOVL-capable, you had to reduce weight however you could, by making its fuselage so thin it cannot resist small arms fire and by removing various safety devices meant to prevent the fuel tanks from exploding if the plane is struck by lightning (or, say, a bullet). And you still need runways anyway. Congratulations, you have designed a tough, rugged plane that is certainly fit for war against a peer power!
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2014 11:01
|
|
|
Speaking of successful ship designs from the Royal Navy, here's the Australian version. It's kind of on-topic because Tony Abbott wants to put F-35Bs on it.quote:CONSTRUCTION of the nation’s largest warship has been delayed by seven months as workers battle to fix more than 14,000 minor defects in a fresh setback for the troubled naval shipbuilding industry.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2014 13:33
|
|
|
on the left posted:If an F-35 landed on an island, would it even have a good chance of being able to take off again? Depends on whether you have some helicopter around to airlift it or not...
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2014 14:04
|
|
|
Freakazoid_ posted:So with F-35's being a piece of poo poo, what kind of aircraft would be better suited for the money? I like the Rafale.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 18, 2014 07:07
|
|
|
blowfish posted:For inexplicable reasons the EU fighter jets (Eurofighter, Gripen, Rafale) look the same anyway From the front, easiest way to distinguish them is by their intakes. EF Typhoon has boxy twinned intakes below the fuselage, Gripen has boxy intakes on either sides, Rafale has curvy conformal intakes which make the fuselage look a bit like a Y.    Intake position is harder to see from the side, but it's still distinctive enough.    From the top or the bottom, the position of the canards makes it easy to distinguish between Typhoon and the other two. The Gripen has only one engine, and is quite smaller than the other two.       And now, you too can be an expert in European warducks. Exercise: these two pictures are taken from the RAF's Typhoon homepage. Do you notice anything weird?   Yep, formation flight with a Typhoon and a Rafale.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 18, 2014 15:30
|
|
|
As far as most European countries are concerned, the USA are there to help in case of problem, and buying expensive useless planes is the way Washington wants its tribute paid. They don't buy weapons of war, they buy tokens that can be redeemed for Uncle Sam sending tanks and planes to keep the evil Russkies at bay. This found a particularly hilarious and pathetic illustration with this "news" "event" which was most certainly worth a triumphal press release: http://investor.northropgrumman.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=112386&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1996470 "Northrop Grumman Delivers First F-35 Center Fuselage to Norway" Send in the fanfare, folks. And the media! http://globenewswire.com/news-relea...5-Aircraft.html Wow. Let's see the reporting we get on such a tremendous milestone: quote:Royal Norwegian Air Force Col. Odd-Steiner Haugen, the Norwegian national deputy in the F-35 joint program office, signs the AM-1 center fuselage as part of the ceremonial delivery ceremony hosted Dec. 4 by Northrop Grumman. I hope they will have a festive fiesta for the successful delivery -- on time and on budget! -- of the landing gear tire.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2014 23:58
|
|
|
Cerebral Bore posted:So in conclusion white people seem to be the problem. Incidentally white people are also mainly responsible for the F-35. Coincidence? I'm glad to learn that slavery and genocide never existed anywhere in the entire history of mankind throughout the world except in places where white people went.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2014 00:26
|
|
|
Pornographic Memory posted:So what is the F-35? Like, the Aliens: Colonial Marines of aircraft? Daikatana.  I've posted this in AI and in GBS already, I figure it can go in D&D as well.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2014 01:47
|
|
|
Regarde Aduck posted:Does it matter how good the PAK-FA is? Russia is broke. I guess it could be an issue if they export it. PAK-FA is 50% funded by India.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2014 15:05
|
|
|
The Russians found a clever way to get their PAK-FA airborne, proving their superiority over American engineers: 
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2014 16:12
|
|
|
There's only one An-225 and it belongs to a company that is still Ukrainian at the moment.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2014 18:18
|
|
|
Jarmak posted:Actually the Marines are designed to be a fully self supporting expeditionary force, so yes not relying on other branches is actually important. The question becomes then, "why do the USA need a fully self-supporting expeditionary force instead of getting the army, navy, and air force to work together".
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2015 22:17
|
|
|
crabcakes66 posted:Then create a specialized division in the army for exactly this purpose instead of an entire branch? The Air Force? Pretty much all countries have the Air Force as its own branch, separate from army aviation and naval aviation.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2015 23:12
|
|
|
Mightypeon posted:IIRC the thing with A-10s was that they are comparibly cheap, and comparably quickly manufactured, and thus easier to replace. I do not know how much training time an A-10 pilot needs, but I would assume that flying a CAS-Fighter effecivly takes less training time then flying a high tech multirole fighter, meaning that A-10 pilots are also more replacable. Cheap planes are simple planes. Simple planes are not simple to use, because all the complexity of flight has to be handled by the pilots directly, instead of being handled by the avionics. On a modern fighter plane, the pilot does not control directly the ailerons, elevons, canards, rudders, spoilers, spoilerons, stabilators, decelerons, air brakes, and whatever other moving surface there might be. That's all handled by the flight computer. Pilot merely tells the plane to pitch up or roll left and the computer will handle all the moving parts accordingly. The A-10 isn't fly-by-wire, though. It's the difference between playing QWOP and playing a normal game. QWOP was a game that was cheap and simple to program, so obviously it's easier to train someone to play QWOP proficiently than it is to train someone to play the latest Modern Warfare, right? Modern Warfare is so much more expensive to develop, and it has so many more features... (I'd really like to see QWOP's take on the "Pay respect" scene.) For all its flaws, the F-35 will be a simpler, easier plane to fly than the A-10. That's not in question. blowfish posted:So they chose two. One for the Air Force, and one for the Navy. Navy planes have much stronger physical requirements because they need to take off and land from aircraft carriers. Although carriers are mightily impressive to see, and the largest military ships, they're still tiny compared to an air base on the ground. The aircraft doesn't have enough runway to accelerate to take off speed "normally", so instead it's accelerate to that speed by a catapult. The entire plane is yanked by its front landing gear and flinged out of the ship. An F-16 landing gear wouldn't resist. When landing, the deck is too short to let you lower softly and progressively, so you're basically crashing on the deck in a controlled manner, slamming the plane on the ship like a brute. Then you catch the arresting wire, and the plane is decelerated brutally by the tailhook. The structural strength required to make a plane that can handle such punishment means more weight, and less internal room. So it's natural that Air Forces don't like to use a Navy plane directly. So you get different planes altogether, or different variants of the same plane. The F-35A and F-35C are different beasts. Cat Mattress fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Jan 4, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2015 11:49
|
|
|
Here's the sequence leading to the jpg:   That said, they perfected the idea and managed to land on a stool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9tvdjDAr1U
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2015 15:17
|
|
|
Grunt is any sort of infantry. It sometimes extend to low-wage, unskilled workers outside of military context. Grunt is named after a guttural noise. Infantry, etymologically, means "unable to speak". The common trend here is that they are supposed to shut up and follow orders.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2015 21:10
|
|
|
El Scotch posted:I know we love trashing the F-35 shiftiest, but has there been any good reports on how it's in-service competitors [Rafale, Eurofighter, etc] have been doing (performance, issues, etc)? Eurofighter has been plagued by technical issues (cost overruns, delays, lack of spare parts, design changes between tranches big enough to prevent retrofitting the older models, etc.). The RAF is planning on scrapping or mothballing its Tranche 1 aircraft when they get their replacement. The Typhoon is barely starting to get the upgrades needed to use it in air-to-ground; it's still just an air dominance fighter/interceptor as of now; when they've been used to bomb some stuff in Libya, they had to be accompanied by Tornado that did the laser designation for them. Rafale's pretty good on that front. It has never been over budget, it was only delayed when the program was put on hold because of budget cuts, and the older airframe have been retrofitted to the latest standard without a hitch. It also has had its updates to make it fully multirole much sooner. On the stealth front, Rafale flew over Libyan air defense without being detected in Operation Harmattan, and was the only aircraft to successfully avoid detection by Slovakia's SA-10 in the MACE XIII exercises. The Gripen is a smaller, lighter single-engine fighter. It doesn't offer the raw performances of its "cousins", but it's cost-effective and more affordable for a small country with a small defense budget. Even then, most of the export customers have them on a lease, instead of buying them. blowfish posted:Don't a few countries already intend to trash a bunch of first tranche Eurofighters because of the upgrading thing? The UK does, because they can afford to replace them. Germany is trying to sell them instead, like they already sold 15 of them to Austria (thanks to bribes).
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2015 15:24
|
|
|
mlmp08 posted:It's worth noting that on day 1 of Operation Harmattan, the US launched over 100 cruise missiles, shredding Libyan air defenses. The French Air Force flew over Benghazi several hours before that.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2015 15:55
|
|
|
Disinterested posted:I don't know why nobody brings up the Tornado in this discussion, which was another plane made by international committee. The Panavia Tornado was a good plane; but it's an old swing-wing design which makes it more expensive to maintain. (Same reason the US got rid of the F-14.) If you like older planes, there's the SEPECAT Jaguar as well. It was quite successful, but it has been retired a few years ago by its primary operators. It's still flying in the Indian Air Force. The Tornado is supposed to be retired soon, but its operational existence has been prolonged because of the Eurofighter program's delays. (The "air defense variant", while newer than the original interdictor/strike version, has already been retired in Europe for this reason; Typhoon can handle air defense needs.) And of course, the most famous international plane isn't a warbird but a passenger liner: the Concorde.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2015 19:34
|
|
|
Dilkington posted:I watched From The Earth To The Moon recently, and the problems involved with the Apollo lander piqued my interest in project management. What characterizes a successful aerospace project? Is there any particular project you would consider an ideal model for aircraft development? iyaayas01 answered that much better than I could have. My very simple rule of thumb for a successful project would be one that's on time, on budget, meets planned performance characteristics, and either sell enough to amortize its R&D costs, or allow a significant breakthrough in aerospace technology that will be useful for other projects. Ghost of Mussolini posted:I don't know who "we" is, but none of these new planes have what would amount to "actual combat data". All they have done (the Rafale having done the most) is conducted fairly easy strike runs in permissible airspace facing practically no ground threat and no aerial threat. It's hardly a step up from just random exercises. So sustained deployment of an aircraft in real combat situations, even if they don't involve dogfights, are extremely revealing of the plane's qualities. Maybe you don't get to test the ECM and ECCM systems, but you get to see whether it's a workhorse or a hangar queen.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2015 19:41
|
|
|
Ghost of Mussolini posted:The most overseas that it gets is something like Al Dhafra for the current strikes against ISIS, which is a big base that has hosted lots of different coalition forces over the years and is situated in a country that is extremely cooperative when it comes to these arrangements. There's also the "Fort Lamy" air base at N'Djamena in Chad for Operation Barkhane. Rafales were also deployed at Kandahar.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2015 22:23
|
|
|
JP-5 is Navy fuel, it has a higher flash point so as to be less of a fire hazard on an aircraft carrier. (Because despite all the sea water around, fires are much worse news on a boat than on the ground.) But it does not contain antistatic agents. The static in antistatic is static electricity, they are meant to prevent buildup of static electricity that could randomly create a spark and ignite fuel vapors in the tank.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2015 19:35
|
|
|
Mr. Showtime posted:Wasn't there an incident with some Swiss evaluation stating that the Gripen was basically hot garbage getting leaked a while back? Not really. The Swiss Air Force evaluated the three eurocanards. The Rafale and the Eurofighter had better performances, while the Gripen was for most operations just below the threshold they had fixed. But when you take into account that most of the Swiss Air Force requirements were kind of absurd for the country (Switzerland is not going to be attacked; it's entirely surrounded by friendly NATO countries; and Switzerland is not going to attack, they pride themselves too much on their tradition of neutrality and pacifism for that), then it made sense to ignore the SAF's requirements and look into what they'd really do with their jets: air police for the occasional errant aircraft. The Gripen is already overkill for that.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2015 09:59
|
|
|
Sometimes, like in Australia, they need to cut healthcare and education so as to buy useless planes.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2015 15:13
|
|
|
Riso posted:Moscow by the way has an anti-nuclear air defense system. It probably wouldn't actually work. Hopefully, we'll never see it tested.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2015 20:49
|
|
|
hobbesmaster posted:Not even B-2s go in alone... Right. The F-35.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2015 16:31
|
|
|
I'd say the West (and by the West, I mean specifically US and UK) is a lot more hostile to South America than vice-versa.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2015 17:23
|
|
|
Dead Reckoning posted:That's like asking, "how many rooms should I have in my house?" "One VIP transport as the bedroom, an MRTT as the garage, two-seater for the guest room, tactical transport for the kitchen, spy plane for the study, helicopter for the living room, bomber for the bathroom, trainer for the attic, and a jump jet to have a separate toilet."
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2015 19:38
|
|
|
How accurate are this guys' highlights?quote:The real stand out in the 2015 DOT&E report is not so much in what is being reported, but how things are being reported. It would seem as if some numbers were being fudged to make for a more positive image. This was done three ways: quote:
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2015 16:06
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 5, 2024 03:49 |
|
|
 (Best cutaway diagram I could find was in Spanish. Those in English were either poor scans or far too small to be readable, sorry.) I don't think fitting a gigantic gun like the GAU 8 on an existing airframe design is that easy to do. It would add 300 kg of weight in front of the wings, unbalancing the aircraft. To compensate for the changed balance and the volume lost, you might want to make it longer, but this could also cause issues with fitting them inside cramped hangar decks. Max payload would be decreased unless you also go for stronger engines. Front landing gear would have to be redesigned, and most of the stuff currently in (or on) the nose, like the FLIR pod, radar, etc. would have to be moved or designed to accommodate for the space taken by the Avenger. The cargo hold and cockpit floor might also need to be raised a bit. The aerodynamics would be changed enough that you'd need to re-certify the aircraft. Given all that, you could as well redesign the entire airframe. The A-10 was designed around its gun; an AV-22 variant with a GAU 8 would have to be the same. iyaayas01 posted:Effortpost Really appreciate your insight. 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2015 15:00
|
|