Recent content by Vanshilar

Yeah most modern combat plane programs have taken around 15 years from contract award to IOC, or 20 years from prototype to IOC. Nevertheless, they seem to always plan for 10 years from contract award to IOC, despite it usually end up taking ~15 years. (I note that the LRS-B contract winner was...

Um, or it simply isn't a high priority. The gun is a low enough priority that they're even making it optional for the B and C variants. For example, the F-22 didn't test fire its gun until 2003: F-22 Milestones, Part 2 | Code One Magazine The F-22 is generally around 10 years ahead of...

What's funny is the article doesn't bother trying to justify why the author calls it a trillion-dollar burden, when he says it's an $80 billion program. He refers to "the whole package" as a trillion dollars, but that's right after bringing up the Navy's nuclear carriers and submarines. Maybe...

If anything, it's the other way around. Most of the people who write about the F-35 are anti-F-35, and use propaganda techniques against it. For example, just look at the test report that I posted about earlier. If you Google "F-35 vs F-16", you'll mostly just see articles from the end of June...

It looks like what you're using as your cost figure is the program acquisition cost. This is the overall cost of the program, including research and development, divided by the number of aircraft produced. Because the F-35 is just starting production, that number will go down as more planes are...

Um, the F-35 can carry 2 air-to-air missiles in addition to 2 2k lb bombs internally, that's part of its spec: Aerospaceweb.org | Ask Us - F-35 JSF Weapon Carriage Capacity Additionally, currently the flyaway cost is already $108 million while in low-rate initial production (LRIP), with a...

I'm not sure where you learned your math, but at the probabilities that we're talking about, adding the probabilities of failure is a good approximation, in the same way that Newtonian equations of motion is a good approximation at speeds very much lower than the speed of light. Take a dice...

Actually, the improvement in aerodynamic performance between 4th generation and 5th generation aircraft is relatively limited. It simply isn't worth it to design a more maneuverable fighter (in terms of structures, reduction in payload, increase in cost, etc.) when it won't really be able to...

Just wanted to post about the test, because I haven't seen it covered in this way yet here: Not only was it not a true dogfighting test, but the test wasn't really about dogfighting at all. It was just looking at the F-35's software control laws at high angle of attack. Having an F-16 there was...