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F-ZeroOne

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Everything posted by F-ZeroOne

  1. In what is likely to be a watershed moment for civil aviation, a drone has caused travel chaos at Londons Gatwick airport from late evening yesterday well into today: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-46640033
  2. Ah, please ignore, misread someone making the same point I was.
  3. On that note, "Turn around when possible": https://www.adsadvance.co.uk/f-35-makes-milestone-reverse-landing-on-hms-queen-elizabeth.html Try doing that with "cats and traps"!
  4. Reportedly Japan is going to work on converting the Izumo-class "destroyers" to be F-35B capable, and possibly buy up to a hundred F-35As and Bs (in addition to the 42 already ordered): https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-Relations/Japan-to-order-100-more-F-35-fighters-from-US
  5. Fast, big radar, lots of missiles... so a Typhoon then?
  6. Hmm, maybe they had it right with all those shiny aluminum finishes in the 50s after all...
  7. Super-hyper-sonic vehicles? Then someone makes a Hyper-super-hypersonic vehicle? Gentlemen! We must not have a Hypersuperhypersuperhypersuperhypersonic gap!
  8. I saw it the other week, and although arguably its a bit workmanlike its by no means as bad as some reviews have made it. I felt it got better as it went on, and of course it helps that its been gifted with a ready-made soundtrack of awesome. The timeline is definitely mixed up, but the recreation of Live Aid is astonishing, and I watched that the first time! (on TV). Edit: And, oh, while the guy playing Freddie is good I think they cloned Brian May!
  9. Point. I should have specified "Tekkaman Blade", by the way.
  10. Something that seems to have got a little overlooked, couple of days after the landings on HMS Her Maj, a USMC F-35B was lost. Pilot ejected safely, problem traced to a faulty fuel line component which are being/have been replaced fleet-wide where required: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018/09/28/an-f-35b-has-crashed-near-marine-corps-air-station-beaufort/
  11. Outside choice for that blurred image - Tekkaman?
  12. Cost was definitely a consideration, but possibly also commonality with the rest of the F-35 fleet. Theres also the fact that at the time the carriers were being designed and these decisions made EMALS was still being developed and tested.
  13. And then there were our "Invincible" class through-deck cruisers, a name so blatantly transparent that they were sometimes referred to as "see-through cruisers"!
  14. Yeah, it was the numbers compared to the B-2 that made me think of the B-21. They built 563 F-111s, but that was divided between the various models so that the number dedicated to "tactical" strike would probably have been less I guess...
  15. Possibly slightly worried about other companies developing similar concepts like the S-97 "Raider": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-97_Raider
  16. You won't get any argument from me about how messed up defence procurement is [1] - and remember, I'm British. [1] Though I will point out, as ever, its not always a one way journey down Overspend & Underperform Avenue. For whatever reason, we "British" (though more accurately, in co-operation with our European/American partners) seem to be pretty good at missiles for example...
  17. But won't the B-21 handle the "Deep Strike" role?
  18. But thats the thing isn't it? If the technology had existed at the time, would they have built the F-117 or something more akin to the F-35? Lockheed certainly wanted more F-117s, or at least derivatives of them (including a scaled up version as a kind-of B2), so had history and politics taken a different turn its possible we would be now talking about dozens, if not hundreds, of F-117s... would anyone have bit I wonder if the F-35 proposal had been for a souped-up but still limited role subsonic strike bomber...?
  19. I take the point, although I think its a little unlikely the F-15E is going to have that stated combat radius with 22,000lbs of stuff under it. And as you say, the F-35 will be part of a package. Its arguably a more pertinent question for those nations that don't have more of everything like the US does, and for whom the F-35 is going to be the only fighter asset. But its still interesting that the F-117 with two bombs seems to be regarded as having been perfectly adequate for first-day(s) strikes that can be followed up with less stealthy aircraft carrying larger loads, but the F-35 is the demon spawn from aviation hell for essentially doing the same thing, and the only difference being that the follow-up strikes will be F-35s being less stealthy with external loads.
  20. Presumably though the idea is that once you've eliminated (or at least, largely neutralised) the anti-air (or anti-surface, for that matter) threat, you can move the support assets closer? How far could a F-117 go? And that could carry, what, 2 x 2,000lbs at most? And yet a plane that absolutely couldn't dogfight and had no self-defence capability at all doesn't seem to attract the same ire the F-35 does. (I know that - and after pointing it out myself previously! - I'm not exactly making fair comparisons but I'm trying to play Devils advocate here). Incidentally, according to Wikipedia (yeah, I know), the F-15Es combat radius is roughly the same as the F-35 (presumably the A or C variant, anyway)...?
  21. Okay, sorry, as usual its sometimes difficult to detect the intent of a comment in text (and I've seen so many "F-35 can't dogfight a Sopwith Camel, which is the only aircraft in the world that can strafe properly!" threads it just set off a twitch). They did build quite a few P-38s, but then the loss rate of P-38s (and most other World War aircraft) was also significantly higher - as one historian put it, its not often recognised these days just how much of a risk World War II wartime leaders took when they undertook long flights in aircraft of the era (and leaving aside the degree of training required - pilots were a bottleneck then in some cases just as they are now). And those numbers were achieved under wartime conditions and utilising a significant proportion of the available production capacity; compare the numbers of aircraft fielded by what would become the Allied nations in peacetime. Of course, and again its a different era, such a production ramp-up would be much more difficult just due to the increased complexity of modern fighters, but thats how the argument goes - they need that sophistication to give them the qualitative edge (I'm aware of the arguments either way, thats just how its usually presented). Also, and to use another historians argument, the P-38 was the F-35 of its day (as were the Spitfire, Me109, and P-51) - expensive, cutting edge machines on the verge of what was technologically possible and designed to be on a par or better than the rest of the worlds designs. And like the F-35, there were people who didn't always appreciate their value. After all, the RAF nearly fought the Battle of Britain with Boulton Paul Defiants...
  22. Its not exactly a fair comparison, is it? The P-38 weighed 12,800lbs empty, topped out at 414mph and detected targets with something called an eyeball. The F-35 weighs 29,000lb empty, tops out at Mach 1.6 and detects targets with a range of different sensors and can (in theory) shoot down a target from over 70km away. To kill Yamamoto, the P-38 had to physically fly to where he was, carrying all the fuel itself, and get close enough to actually see the aircraft he was in. How much easier would the P-38s job have been if it could have refueled from a tanker, and fire a missile at the target from a distance? How much more of a "pure" dogfighter would the P-38 have been if it had had a single engine and didn't carry all that fuel, like a Spitfire? How long would a P-38 last in a modern, SAM-populated, radar-directed world? The two are different aircraft from two widely separated periods of time and technological advancement and - a point often forgotten in this sort of comparison - different design goals. The F-35 was not designed as a Tomcat replacement - politics and economics have arguably "forced" it into that role. If the US wished to do so, it could design a "true" Tomcat replacement, if its willing to spend the time and money to do so. And for better or worse, modern combat aircraft don't exist in an "isolated" support environment anymore - Yamamoto saw his death coming, but he might not even have known he was under attack at all from an AWACs directed shot...
  23. Now I think of it, the P-38 itself had its fair share of development issues - and it wasn't a stellar performer in Europe; it just happened that its particular characteristics proved to be incredibly well matched to the operating environment of the Pacific theatre.
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