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Party Plane Jones posted:Sure, they could, it'd just be expensive as all hell. So outside of giant national assets like the B-2 you wouldn't see it done. No, you wouldn't see it done because the Air Force would have to admit they don't need the F-35. Even though it would be expensive, the unit cost wouldn't even come near the unit cost of a F-35. But it's not cutting edge, it's not "stealthy", it's not sexy. So it won't ever happen.
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Jul 8, 2014 07:54
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Cat Mattress posted: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.) That was my point exactly. Given the choice between spending x billion dollars on current gen planes vs the F-35, if you can build a poo poo-ton more current-gen planes and the F-35 isn't going to be any more protected against the kind of things the US would be facing down in the near future, might as well throw three dozen more Hornets at the problem. It's almost like the US has forgotten the lesson of Tiger tanks vs mass-produced Shermans, or Me-262s vs mass-produced B-17s (and P-51s)
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Jul 8, 2014 08:36
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Not to defend the F35 in particular, but aircraft aren't zerlings and throwing equipment and people at the enemy isn't such a good idea for many reasons. You can only fit so many aircraft on a carrier. More aircraft means higher supply chain requirements. More expensive pilots to train and keep, not to mention potentially get shot down and cause morale and PR issues. Etc.
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Jul 8, 2014 09:07
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I understand that, but relative to the F-35 in particular, the only way it's going to cut down on shoot-downs is because there's not enough flyable planes in the first place.
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Jul 8, 2014 10:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:It's almost like the US has forgotten the lesson of Tiger tanks vs mass-produced Shermans, or Me-262s vs mass-produced B-17s (and P-51s) The problem with that statement is that while the tanks were cheap to make, they were also relatively easy to take out. 5 Shermans vs 1 Tiger is worthwhile in a war of economic attrition, but if you lose 4 of those shermans you're losing ~ 15-20 men vs 3-5 in the Tiger (assuming some of the crews manage to get out some of the time), which we have no interest in repeating. On the other hand, the P-51 and B-17's were pretty tough, so yeah, the USA is dropping the ball.
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Jul 8, 2014 16:30
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Rorac posted:The problem with that statement is that while the tanks were cheap to make, they were also relatively easy to take out. 5 Shermans vs 1 Tiger is worthwhile in a war of economic attrition, but if you lose 4 of those shermans you're losing ~ 15-20 men vs 3-5 in the Tiger (assuming some of the crews manage to get out some of the time), which we have no interest in repeating. On the other hand, the P-51 and B-17's were pretty tough, so yeah, the USA is dropping the ball.
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Jul 8, 2014 17:52
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Then again the P-51 went from napkin drawing to flying prototype in four months and the production rate of the final type was measured in aircraft per hour. That kind of insanity just isn't possible any more. I get what you're trying to say and agree, but having spent some time working on 1930s aircraft as well as around their modern day equivalent I think this is a bit ridiculous.
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Jul 8, 2014 18:07
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Tsuru posted:Because a propeller driven WWII fighter built on rules of thumb from aluminium sheeting is comparable to a supersonic VTOL jet.
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Jul 8, 2014 18:21
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Uh we can have thousands of F-16s in a few years because they're in production. In fact the ones we're exporting are decent upgrades to the US's early models.
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Jul 8, 2014 18:26
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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.
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Jul 8, 2014 18:40
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hobbesmaster posted:Uh we can have thousands of F-16s in a few years because they're in production. In fact the ones we're exporting are decent upgrades to the US's early models. Not that I said anything about building thousands of F-16s in the post you quoted.
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Jul 8, 2014 18:42
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Who wants to be Harry Turtledove Jr. and crank out a bad book where technologically superior but complacent Bonus: a mid-book chapter where a third of the combined UNCOM air power is lost in one fight because the alien mothership flew over the international date line in a storm
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Jul 8, 2014 18:48
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mobby_6kl posted:Not to defend the F35 in particular, but aircraft aren't zerlings and throwing equipment and people at the enemy isn't such a good idea for many reasons. You can only fit so many aircraft on a carrier. More aircraft means higher supply chain requirements. More expensive pilots to train and keep, not to mention potentially get shot down and cause morale and PR issues. Etc. Egad, zerglings! That's what we need!
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Jul 8, 2014 19:12
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Huh? My point was that you can't retool a washing machine factory to crank out modern fighters in 2014 so comparing the F-35 to a P-51 is silly. It's a criticism of the "gently caress it, we don't need these so build F-16s" argument. You can no longer say "Oh poo poo we need a world-beating multirole fighter!" and then actually have thousands of said fighter like two years later. Development cycles for modern aircraft simply take too long. Granted they don't actually require 15+ years to develop an aircraft, either. It would help them if they had actually invented the parts they wanted on the plane before they started making them Just about all of the problems they are having could have been solved if they had had decided to only implement technology that was in a ready to fly state. Considering the features that the f35 wants to have and the technologies that are already flying in other planes they could have easily accomplished this without sacrificing anything, except for the B version They are just about reinventing the wheel here for no reason other than, one can assume, money. Or stupidity.
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Jul 8, 2014 21:07
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Torpor posted:They are just about reinventing the wheel here for no reason other than, one can assume, money. Or stupidity. Both. Apparently, postmodern societies reward stupidity with lots and lots of government contracts and a blank check from the defense fund.
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Jul 8, 2014 21:58
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http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28291924quote:The F-35 combat jet, due to be used on the UK's new aircraft carriers, will not make its UK debut on the opening day of the Farnborough Airshow. 
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Jul 14, 2014 18:12
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I want to know if it was because of the engine fire or because it was forecast to rain that day?
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Jul 14, 2014 18:53
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Adar posted:Who wants to be Harry Turtledove Jr. and crank out a bad book where technologically superior but complacent Someone should mod this in to X-Com: Enemy Unknown for interceptions in Asia. One way to reduce the constant "need" for top of the line planes would be, say, not having 11 supercarriers and 700 military bases outside the US.
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Jul 15, 2014 01:03
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Adar posted:Who wants to be Harry Turtledove Jr. and crank out a bad book where technologically superior but complacent 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.
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Jul 15, 2014 11:42
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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.
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Jul 15, 2014 13:10
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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. One high speed train made by the same company for Denmark that was years delayed turned up in Libya. It was apparently a gift for Gadaffi from Berlusconi.
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Jul 15, 2014 13:18
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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?
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Jul 15, 2014 13:30
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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. Oh hey that's the company that Gothenburg bought trams from (Sirio model). They were delivered years late and turned out to be absolutely terrible. Right now half of them are out of service because they're rusting into pieces. So really it's a very appropriate choice.
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Jul 15, 2014 13:39
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http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/revealed-plane-heart-aircraft-carrier-3849441 The UK launched a new carrier recently, complete with a fiberglass F-35. I remember people making fun of Iran for almost exactly the same thing. 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?
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Jul 15, 2014 13:40
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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. I don't understand. Those same trains worked out really well for Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook.
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Jul 15, 2014 13:56
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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.
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Jul 15, 2014 14:16
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Cat Mattress posted:TL;DR: other bits of NATO got suckered into it because they do the US' bidding or else. There was not just the stick, but also the carrot of billions in "compensation orders": part of the construction process would be placed with their aerospace industry. For the Netherlands, the total worth of those orders currently stands at about €1 billion, according to some newspaper article I read recently. This is a tad lower than the $8 billion that our optimistic government used in its calculations 
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Jul 15, 2014 14:49
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Cat Mattress posted:TL;DR: other bits of NATO got suckered into it because they do the US' bidding or else. Now I want to F35 to fail even harder. And cost more.
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Jul 15, 2014 15:18
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CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:Now I want to F35 to fail even harder. And cost more. Like, what can you even do at this point? The plane has an autopilot which you cannot turn off which automatically makes it fly against the tallest allied building within your fuel radius?
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Jul 15, 2014 15:26
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Spakstik posted:I don't understand. Those same trains worked out really well for Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook.  I think that whole episode is now a good metaphor for this.
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Jul 15, 2014 17:49
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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. No,no, no. 20 protagonists. All of whom have one defining quirk or characteristic, which is pointed out every time they appear in a new chapter. Plus it should be at least 5 books.
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Jul 15, 2014 18:12
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Deptfordx posted:No,no, no. 20 protagonists. All of whom have one defining quirk or characteristic, which is pointed out every time they appear in a new chapter. Plus it should be at least 5 books. dont forget the creepy sexual assault arc for at least one female protagonist per book
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Jul 15, 2014 18:56
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This is what can be done if you actually work with what you have instead of what might be possible in the future. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28260781 Of course, it is a cheapo low tier plane for poor countries, but it still went from drawing board to full prototype in 23 months. I could only imagine what kind of monster that could be built if you had a tenth of the resources that was thrown at the F35.
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Jul 15, 2014 19:04
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Zudgemud posted:This is what can be done if you actually work with what you have instead of what might be possible in the future. Who would actually want to build this aircraft? Not only is it wildly insufficient to fulfill its primary role of bilking the taxpayers out of 1.5 trillion dollars, not a single aircraft was sold before real-world prototypes demonstrated basic airworthiness. It doesn't even have a remote control for its surround-sound HDTV system! Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Jul 15, 2014 |
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Jul 15, 2014 19:32
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Liquid Communism posted:Serious question, has the US had more than a half-dozen actual uses of fighter-on-fighter combat in the last twenty years? Literally, I blame Top Gun for this.
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Jul 15, 2014 19:33
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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? Up here in Canada our government has spent the past few years boasting about these rooskie-killing super-jets and assuring us there aren't actually any other jets our there*. They recently back-peddled a bit and are now stuck in a slap fight with the bureaucracy over whose fault this all is even though we are almost certainly sticking with the F-35s. I suppose I just want to know if this is lie number 8402 or semi-truth number 3. *-Ideally we would be buying jets that can patrol the arctic to protect our sovereignty. I'm sure you can all imagine how well these bad-boys Cocaine Bear fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jul 15, 2014 |
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Jul 15, 2014 19:34
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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?
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Jul 15, 2014 19:59
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JoelJoel posted:*-Ideally we would be buying jets that can patrol the arctic to protect our sovereignty. I'm sure you can all imagine how well these bad-boys Peter Mackay said the engine won't fail. Don't you believe him? What are you, some kind of prostitute?
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Jul 15, 2014 20:21
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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
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Jul 15, 2014 20:33
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This problem wouldn't happen if you just merged the military branches into one and completely drown out the independent thoughts of Marines and fighter pilots that are stuck in the past.
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Jul 15, 2014 20:47
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