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AreWeDrunkYet posted:If the skies are already clear, what can an F-35 do that a Reaper (at like 15% of the price of an F-35) can't? Seems like the only thing manned aircraft are still good for is shooting down other planes. The F35 has about 5 times the payload and had 4 times the maximum speed which is really important for CAS missions. None of this makes the F-35 stand out from the F-18, which I would argue its inferior to in a few ways (before accounting for the pricetag). But there's a huge difference for CAS or partially contested airspaces for strike fighters over drones. Bip Roberts fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Nov 1, 2015 |
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Nov 1, 2015 22:22
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:If the skies are already clear, what can an F-35 do that a Reaper (at like 15% of the price of an F-35) can't? Seems like the only thing manned aircraft are still good for is shooting down other planes. Drop more than one or two bombs per sortie, move from one place to another at faster than 170 kias, not being a giant bullseye for Russian double digit SAMs* that even random dictators in Africa have now. *depending on how good the stealth is
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Nov 1, 2015 22:22
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Dead Reckoning posted:Also, why should we design for the use case of "everything has already gone our way?" Because specialization often makes sense. The F-35 is designed to do a lot of things, but will likely mostly get used to ferry JDAMs to their destination when unmanned planes can do the job far cheaper. If we're trying to drop bombs in contested airspace, cruise missiles and B-2s make more sense than F-35s anyway. It seems to me that it's a lot more logical to use one plane (F-22) to clear the skies in case of an actual competitive shooting war, then just use drones after (or just start with drones in low intensity conflicts where there's no real air threat). Instead, the F-35 is a second ridiculously expensive airplane that doesn't do any one thing as well as a more specialized plane - except perhaps funneling a trillion and a half dollars to defense contractors.
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Nov 1, 2015 22:34
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How much do B-2s cost again? If you include R&D and adjust for inflation isn't it like $3-4B a piece.
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Nov 1, 2015 22:44
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crabcakes66 posted:How much do B-2s cost again? Also 21 were ever built and they can't practically be forward deployed. Because of their speed and the distance of their missions they can't necessarily be used for interdiction missions.
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Nov 1, 2015 22:46
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crabcakes66 posted:How much do B-2s cost again? The program cost 44billion which would be $2bil/air frame. The flyaway cost was $737million, which meant that until the line closed the USAF would have written a check for $737million for each additional one. The program was originally for 200 bombers which meant that it would have been less than $1bil/bomber if they went through that order. It might have even been less than the $177ish billion that flyaway implies because bomber 200 would definitely have been cheaper than bomber 1. Incidentally the flyaway for a F-22 was $150 million. It would have been cheaper to cancel the F-35A and just buy F-22s. hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Nov 1, 2015 |
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Nov 1, 2015 22:50
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crabcakes66 posted:How much do B-2s cost again? Nice thing about those is that the money is already spent and the planes are operational. hobbesmaster posted:Incidentally the flyaway for a F-22 was $150 million. It would have been cheaper to cancel the F-35A and just buy F-22s. The Air Force demanded that the tooling for those be kept around, right? What kind of costs would be involved in getting that production line rolling again? Seems like the only downside would be that the US Navy may not remain the world's second best air force. Surely bribing some countries around the world for airbases is cheaper than acquiring F-35s. And really, the F-35 seems like overkill for the Navy anyway. Russia and China, the only remotely realistic threats to US aviation, are more or less surrounded by bases F-22s can launch from. The Chinese don't even have an aircraft carrier. The Russians have one to our 10, and there's no reason to assume the (is it 90?) F-18s currently on even one of those carriers can't handle the 30 SU-33s on that Russian carrier. How is it not a massive waste of money to prepare for a battle that can't even happen without a at least a generation of massive build-up by a foreign military?
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Nov 2, 2015 01:21
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The F-22 was never going to be exported, so if the F-35 were dropped for the F-22 the USA couldn't bully their allies/client states into subsidising the US MIC.
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Nov 2, 2015 01:49
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Nice thing about those is that the money is already spent and the planes are operational. The Chinese currently have rebuilt a Soviet carrier last year (though it's officially a pilot project that isn't projecting power yet) and are about to build one of their own they could wave at any Arleigh Burkes that get too close to While three supercarriers instead of eleven would be enough to beat up any country given a few months of preparation, the US military is built not only to beat any other military on the planet, but to beat up a country on every continent at the same time. You kinda need a ridiculously large carrier and amphibious force to meet your ~global commitments~ in that case, especially since at least like a third of the fleet will be stuck in a dock at any time. Ten supercarriers that rate above most air forces in firepower plus a similar number of harrier carriers to mop up after them and/or burn third world shitholes aren't even particularly over the top at that point. The F-35 is still a really lovely plane to accomplish that though, it would have probably been better to buy like a thousand F-22s for the air force and some navalised plane for the Nimitzes/Fords, along with a couple hundred electronic warfare/anti air defense/whatever special snowflake planes, and put every remaining pilot in a cheap&cheerful bomb truck (only necessary to replace disintegrating strike eagles) to bomb tents and toyota hiluxes for a decade after the superplanes get done murdering the entire conventional military of any probable foe on day one. e: and a token harrier replacement because REMEMBER GUADALCANAL SEMPER FI, and because it's cool to still win the carrier dickwaving contest even after every second rate military gets a glorified helicopter carrier with a ski jump, too (lol royal navy lol). Mr Chips posted:The F-22 was never going to be exported, so if the F-35 were dropped for the F-22 the USA couldn't bully their allies/client states into subsidising the US MIC. Just sell a monkey model with slightly worse everything like the Soviets. It's not like anyone expects the Dutch air force (lol) to actually hold back the Kommunist horde. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Nov 2, 2015 |
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Nov 2, 2015 01:59
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Mr Chips posted:The F-22 was never going to be exported, so if the F-35 were dropped for the F-22 the USA couldn't bully their allies/client states into subsidising the US MIC.
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Nov 2, 2015 02:00
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blowfish posted:It's not like anyone expects the Dutch air force (lol) to actually hold back the Kommunist horde. No, but we do need cool planes to play with the big kids. So gently caress the F-35 and give us your A-10's instead please, so we can keep helping you guys with bombing brown people.
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Nov 2, 2015 09:17
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How much better is the F-22 compared to the F-35 that the former isn't supposed to be exported?
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Nov 2, 2015 10:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:How much better is the F-22 compared to the F-35 that the former isn't supposed to be exported? Well it's not better at taking off and landing vertically.
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Nov 2, 2015 10:32
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Vastly so. I mean, besides the fact that it doesn't spontaneously combust and can fly and fire it's drat gun (lol like it would need to), it's just straight up better in a dogfight. I think it's stealthier too?
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Nov 2, 2015 10:32
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gradenko_2000 posted:How much better is the F-22 compared to the F-35 that the former isn't supposed to be exported? Basically it's a functional modern fighter with actual maneuverability, actual stealth, and more internal missiles that would most likely kick every other fighter's rear end and still doesn't cost more than the F35.
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Nov 2, 2015 10:51
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gradenko_2000 posted:How much better is the F-22 compared to the F-35 that the former isn't supposed to be exported? Aside from some very public issues with it for the first few years of service (pilot asphyxiation, date line, rain) it's a very worthy successor to the F-15 which was easily the best fighter of it's generation by a sizable margin and up there with the greatest fighters of all time.
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Nov 2, 2015 17:47
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The Fulcrum and Flanker are pretty machines, Canada should buy those instead. 
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Nov 2, 2015 18:39
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El Scotch posted:The Fulcrum and Flanker are pretty machines, Canada should buy those instead. Except when they fall out of the sky randomly
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Nov 2, 2015 18:47
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El Scotch posted:The Fulcrum and Flanker are pretty machines, Canada should buy those instead. Have you seen the exhaust fumes on those? They're worse than Chinese factory smoke stacks.
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Nov 2, 2015 19:36
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LeoMarr posted:Except when they fall out of the sky randomly Ok, so they might have occasional rough landings. Still, pretty aircraft. Just replace the engines with US ones! It's like fusion cooking. 
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Nov 2, 2015 19:53
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El Scotch posted:Ok, so they might have occasional rough landings. Still, pretty aircraft. Ah yes Hybrid US/RUSSIAN Flankers
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Nov 2, 2015 19:58
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LeoMarr posted:Ah yes Hybrid US/RUSSIAN Flankers Actually that's not a terrible idea. The last time the US/Russia collaborated on a plane we got the SR-71. Of course, the Russians didn't know they were collaborating with us on that one.
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Nov 2, 2015 20:07
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A Winner is Jew posted:Actually that's not a terrible idea. Russia might unlease another bombing campaign on Sryia if we stole their airplane designs. So Win Win really.
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Nov 2, 2015 20:17
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Well the US also had to figure out how to rebuild and repair their captured Warsaw Pact aircraft kept at Area 51.
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Nov 2, 2015 20:17
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The Soviets/Russia had some of that going on as well and I think the Soviets got their hands on at least some F-5 Freedom Fighters, A-37, A-1 Skyraider, and maybe A-4 Skyhawks/F-4 Phantom (if from nothing else, put together by scratch from all the parts raining down over Vietnam  ), and whatever else that ended up captured in the Vietnam War. Possibly had a looksie at the Iranian F-14s at some point, and of course the Venezuelian F-16s (later though). They got their hands on parts of the F-111 and the A-7 too (on display in the Moscow Aviation Institute, including parts of Scott O'Grady's F-16). Probably got their hands of Mirages and British stuff too. Here's them test-flying the http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e52_1320882209 I came across it when looking for the Soviet equivalent of the Aggressor program (not a whole lot of information, sadly): https://thelexicans.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/soviet-aggressor-program/ (See the picture of the MiGs painted with shark-mouths to make them more authentic )The Center was located in Turkmenistan at an airbase called Maryy-1 (Maryy is pronounced “Marie). Located at this base is a unit known as the 1521st Airbase unit. e: Some cool pictures here, including a surprisingly intact F-4 (well, for having been shot down decades ago) https://acesflyinghigh.wordpress.com/2014/12/12/remnants-of-the-vietnam-war-wrecks-captured-aircraft/ Pimpmust fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Nov 2, 2015 |
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Nov 2, 2015 21:02
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:The Air Force demanded that the tooling for those be kept around, right? What kind of costs would be involved in getting that production line rolling again? Seems like the only downside would be that the US Navy may not remain the world's second best air force. Surely bribing some countries around the world for airbases is cheaper than acquiring F-35s. And really, the F-35 seems like overkill for the Navy anyway. Russia and China, the only remotely realistic threats to US aviation, are more or less surrounded by bases F-22s can launch from. The Chinese don't even have an aircraft carrier. The Russians have one to our 10, and there's no reason to assume the (is it 90?) F-18s currently on even one of those carriers can't handle the 30 SU-33s on that Russian carrier. How is it not a massive waste of money to prepare for a battle that can't even happen without a at least a generation of massive build-up by a foreign military? The problem with the F-22 production line getting restarted is less the tooling and moreso the underlying electronics being very 1990sish. Somebody joked that there's zero chance of hacking in because even the contractor barely understands the language if I remember right (though to be honest I could be thinking of the F-35 or some other plane because they were all started 20 years ago). Also the whole carrier thing has been gone over a bunch of times: the US has at most 7 at sea (if they really push it), and normally has 6. There's always 2 undergoing year-long retrofits and 2 doing multi-month upgrades; plus the newest one is still undergoing sea trials basically. If I remember correctly they can under pull the ones undergoing the multi-month upgrades out of dock in something like 90/120 days; the retrofitted ones are basically down for the count. If you really want to complain about cost overruns the F-35 is hardly the only program to pick out: the DoD apparently spent 43 million (!) dollars to build a single gas station in Afghanistan. A similar gas station in Pakistan costs around half a mil to build. Auditing the books for Afghanistan costs would be terrifying because there's easily hundreds of billions that's gone completely unaccounted for. Party Plane Jones fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Nov 2, 2015 |
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Nov 2, 2015 21:41
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All those "they've kept the tooling, they could restart production" thing seem to assume that production is a fully automated process. Just put back f22blueprints.dat in those big robotic arms' computers and there you go. But you know, actually the tooling is not the sole necessary part of the production chain. There's another essential part, and that one you can't mothball it: the personnel. Turns out that building a jet fighter full of highly classified military technology requires very qualified and trusted people, and these people also need to be paid every month even when you're not using them to build more F-22s. So either you put them to work on another project, or you lay them off and they'll be hired by some competitor for another project, or maybe they've become old enough to retire. In any case, for restarting production, even if you can get back all the original workers from your old production line (spoiler alert: you won't), they will need to reacquire their F-22 production skills because, hey, it's been a while and contrarily to bicycling those are skills that you can forget, especially if you've spend the last several years doing a similar but different work. So there's a big cost to restarting a production line, and the longer you wait, the higher that cost. Then again, not everything is made in-house anyway, several parts were subcontracted and the subcontractors might have recursively subcontracted as well. There's no guarantee that you'll be able to get all the same pieces, especially for electronics as it is a domain which moves very fast and where it's tempting to use commercial parts. And since these parts have become dated anyway, the military might find it preferable to upgrade instead of looking too hard to get the exact same processors that Moore's Law left in the dust a while ago... Of course this changes the specs, so it'll be costly, and you get at the point where when you add up all the restarting costs and the upgrade costs it starts to look a lot like a brand new aircraft wouldn't be that much more expensive, and it'd allow to improve the design because come on, in all these years of course you've found some flaws and other design issues that couldn't easily be addressed by an upgrade program.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:24
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-Troika- posted:Amusingly, for all the whining about the A-10, even when it was new the entire production run was expected to be destroyed by the Russians in less than a week if it came to war in Europe. The low level AA environment it's designed to operate in has only gotten nastier since then. I think the prediction was actually 3 weeks. Pretty academic anyway, as we'd probably have escalated to a strategic exchange before the first week ended.
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Nov 2, 2015 23:54
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Deptfordx posted:I think the prediction was actually 3 weeks. Pretty academic anyway, as we'd probably have escalated to a strategic exchange before the first week ended. Just look at the Yom Kippur war. Israel was a few more hours of losing ground away from pushing the button.
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Nov 3, 2015 00:34
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The F35 has finally fired it's gun in flight! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdLj1ExREK4 It still can't aim it though. http://warisboring.com/articles/f-35a-stealth-jet-finally-shows-off-gun-in-flight/
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Nov 3, 2015 01:09
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The F-35A is still in development so that makes sense. The F-35B however is "operational."
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Nov 3, 2015 02:32
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No problems there then, it doesn't even have an internal gun!
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Nov 3, 2015 04:42
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Cancel the F-35B, ban the USMC from operating fixed wing combat aircraft, and tell the Brits they can either build real aircraft carriers or go suck eggs like back with the Skybolt.
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Nov 3, 2015 06:37
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I think the RN would love to have "real" carriers with exotic things like catapults but the government won't let them. We positively have to throw money at the US so that we can lock ourselves into 50 years of non-nuclear aircraft carriers with lovely useless planes. Support are troops.
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Nov 3, 2015 09:42
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Operating the F-35s would be almost forgivable if the carriers were at least nucs.
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Nov 3, 2015 09:54
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hobbesmaster posted:Just look at the Yom Kippur war. Israel was a few more hours of losing ground away from pushing the button. Forget a desperate NATO deciding to go nuclear. We know from stuff leaked during the 90's before the Russians closed down the archives again, that by the mid 80's the Warsaw Pact was planning to start any offensive with tactical nuclear strikes
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Nov 3, 2015 12:40
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Regarde Aduck posted:I think the RN would love to have "real" carriers with exotic things like catapults but the government won't let them. We positively have to throw money at the US so that we can lock ourselves into 50 years of non-nuclear aircraft carriers with lovely useless planes. Support are troops. Yeah isn't the British military in bad enough shape due to budget cuts they basically have to continue dissolving regiments? Well I guess the F-35 is good enough you really don't need an army.
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Nov 3, 2015 13:17
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Deptfordx posted:Forget a desperate NATO deciding to go nuclear. We know from stuff leaked during the 90's before the Russians closed down the archives again, that by the mid 80's the Warsaw Pact was planning to start any offensive with tactical nuclear strikes Well, the A-10 clearly wasn't designed assuming that.
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Nov 3, 2015 15:06
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True, but that's what why its original role was de facto redundant. Frankly a week to a global exchange is probably optimistic. Most of the known plans, it wasn't just a few Nukes here and there, we're talking hundreds ofwarheads, some of them crossing over into the strategic range (250Kt+). We'd probably have raced up the ladder of escalation inside 48 hours.
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Nov 3, 2015 16:11
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Deptfordx posted:True, but that's what why its original role was de facto redundant. That said, there was the possibility of continued warfare even after a full-exchange, especially in Western Europe. Tactical nukes alone may have not been enough to really stop advances from either side considering both sides have invested in NBC protection. Obviously major cities would eventually been turned to ash by strategic warheads, but armored units are pretty tough nuts to crack unless you get direct hits. WW3 might have kept on going even as nuclear winter came. It is a nice thought.
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Nov 3, 2015 16:32
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