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F-ZeroOne

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Posts posted by F-ZeroOne

  1. The runway reopened this morning, disruption is expected to take until at least tomorrow to clear. Unless its changed since I last checked, the perpetrator remains at large. The maximum penalty under current UK law for this sort of act is up to 5 years in prison, there may well be a rethink about the penalties.

    As far as government conspiracies go - a UK politician in parliament was explaining how guard dogs barking scares away drones from prisons, does that sound like someone who could engineer such a plan to you? :D

  2. 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! :lol: (on TV).

    Edit: And, oh, while the guy playing Freddie is good I think they cloned Brian May!

  3. You won't get any argument from me about how messed up defence procurement is [1] - and remember, I'm British. :lol:

    [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...

  4. 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...?  

  5. 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. 

  6. 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)...?

  7. 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...

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