re: #414 thedopefishlives

Most of the value of a “new fighter” is upgrades to the avionics and weapons systems. All of which is also capable of being applied to just about any reasonably modern fighter design. Reduced radar visibility is nice, but I don’t know if it’s worth the teething issues of something entirely new when nobody has anything that has proven capable of touching what we have already.

The whole project is weird. Weird in that it started off as this combined services base model with the V/STOL for the Marines all built around the same design. Stranger though is how the USG become involved in what was supposed to be a global market for the F-35 which is shrinking by the day.

There seems to be this notion that the F-35 is invincible. That it’s invisible to radar. I’s not. It’s really supposed to be a fighter AC but are they now going to sell it as a bomber? Typically when we’re about to bomb a country we give advance warning so they’ll know we’re coming.

So in AA combat you can see an adversary well in advance. All well in good but then you have to fire off two long range radar guided missile and hope they hit the target. Sparrows or heat seekers won’t work at this distance. Let’s say they all miss. Then you have two Sparrows left and your guns. You’ve finally caught up with an Su-30 or Mig-29 which can out maneuver an F-35.

Max speeds:

F-18 - 1,190 mph
F-35 - 1,199 mph
Su-30 - 1,320 mph
Mig-29 - 1,490 mph
Su-35 - 1,490 mph
F-22 - 1,498 mph
Su-37 - 1,553 mph
F-15 - 1,650 mph

So really you’d want to face off in air-air with an F-22 and not an F-35. It’s nice to be able to escape from being chased in ACMs. Looks like the F-15 can blow all of their doors off. And look at the F-18 for half the price of an F-35 effectively having a top speed of that of an F-35.