Nied

How about the pilot's spine?

I doubt the G forces involved would be any worse than the ones the pilot would experience while ejecting.

What would have happened if the Hook had not slipped off?

It looks like it never even touched the deck so the hook never slipped off so much as it never caught in the first place. I imagine if it had caught you be looking at a bunch of blown tires, likely a collapsed landing gear and maybe even enough structural damage to the plane to make it a write off.

Ok, here's a more blatant hint:

Nied has frequently used his computer to repaint valk drawings etc into other schemes here.

I wish I were that good! This came from the Secretprojects forum where I occasionally lurk. I'm hosting it because of the way they handle attachments, but you can find a smaller version at Aviation Week's site. And yes it appears to be legitimate.

T-50 finally got a paint job. Looks like that rendering Saturn released all those years ago was pretty accurate after all.

Yeah Carlo hates the F-35, but he does raise some valid points. I still love his comparison of the F-35 to the THUD.

What bugs me about that is he discounts body lift on the F-35 to make that comparison, while wanking the F-22 and T-50 both of which derive a ton lift from their bodies. I guess it only counts when you like the plane you're looking at.

As for some REAL F-23 porn, these have been posted at Secret Projects for the last year or so. Unfortunately it doesn't illustrate the number of AIM-9's or 120's or how exactly they would have been mounted, but it looks like the AMRAAM bay is probably deeper then the F-22's main weapons bay and probably would have been capable of carrying larger weapons. Note the hidden lines for a possible IR sensor.

Deeper but narrower You could probably carry 2 2,000 lb JDAMs in there instead of the Raptor's 1,000 pounders, but there'd be no room to carry the 2 AMRAAMs along side them without turning on the no clipping cheat I talked about.

Oh, looky what just became available again:

::Snip giant F-23 pics::

Do you know how rare weapons bay pics are?

And that right there is one of the big reasons the F-23 lost to the F-22: What happens when the bottom AMRAAM in the stack fails to fire? Answer: You lost half your missiles kid, but hey your plane is real pretty! Don't even get me started on those "geometrically possible" loadouts, apparently we're supposed to believe bombs will just drop through the AMRAAMs as though they turned on a no-clipping cheat (though I guess that answers what happens if you get a hung missile, the pilot just punches idspispopd into the weapons MFD).

I've recently switched over to Chrome as my primary browser, and I'm noticing slowdowns with it that I don't see via Firefox. Literally I can load two pages side by side and Chrome will hang where Firefox doesn't. I don't know if it's related or just an issue with Chrome.

That's a new one. 757 refuelling in mid-air. Seems it may be one-of-a-kind, assigned to SOCOM.

David I'm surprised you of all people don't know about the C-32. Although the all white paint scheme on that particular aircraft does in fact scream black ops.

::Edit:: Upon further research this appears to be a C-32B which the State department uses to fly people in and out of foreign disaster areas.

There's also the fact that the sheer size of the A380 means you were probably a lot further away from the engines then you are used to, that can make a big difference. One of the quietest flights I was ever on was when I was able to snag a last minute upgrade to business class on a 717. I ended up in the very front row, the only way I could have been further from the engines would be to sit in the cockpit. It was near dead silent.

The rivets are easy to deal with, and the engines will be upgraded later in the development. But I agree that total stealthyness wasn't top priority in the design. Don't know if active stealth is still all the rage, though.

LOL active stealth! Haven't heard that one in a while. And the engines can be changed, but changing the nacelles they fit in is re-designing the fuselage.

Which are the 'little-non stealthy aspects'?

Besides the straight intakes (can be mitigated by shape of ramps inside?), the IRST ball, those funny cylinders at wing trailing edge and the tubes and antennaes (on prototype only?).

How about the big round engine nacelles? Or all the exposed pop-rivets (notice that those are always covered over with filler on American VLO aircraft and are invisible once painted), or the moving LERXs (innovative though they are the, they wreak merry hell on any attempt at edge alignment)? The PAK-FA is a great aircraft but to pretend it's somehow going to be some nigh invisible uber-weapon is to engage the same kind of fact-free wanking people were doing over the Su-27 ten years ago.

Also how awesome is it that that guy falls for APA's ridiculous India fear mongering? Christ the IAF just finished participated in Red Flag right along side Australia and there's a very good chance they're going to buy the exact same airplanes as the RAAF, but they're going to turn around and attack a mutual friend and trading partner? Give me a break.

Another one just now for a good hour. I just left MW loading in one tab while browsing elsewhere, and you can go a good long time without getting any kind of timeout error. Though at one point I did get an IPS driver error. They're like slow storms, you just have to wait for them to blow over and then everything is nice again

The F-35 is officially "comparable to" the F-16 in agility. And if it was .0001% better in some part of the envelope, you know the official word would be that it was "superior to" the F-16.

Anyways---I think the nations that are going to have the ASRAAM as the main missile for the F-35 have the right idea.

As for F-16 looks---uber-fugly hump-backed UAE (and Greek and Israeli) ones don't count.

While a clean F-16 and a clean F-35 might have the same performance, the clean F-35 is two bombs or six AAMs away from flying a combat mission, while the F-16 needs to have all the crap in the pic above strapped to it to do the same thing. So yeah an F-16 is a great performer when it's not carrying anything, but strap enough ordinance to it to do something useful and give it enough fuel to carry it further than five feet, and it turns into a dog. The F-35 will be able to perform the clean F-16's airshow routine carrying all the extra weight of the dirty one.

Also you forgot Poland!

Looks are everything when it comes to public perception of how bad-ass a plane is. F-16 wins there.

This is what a F-35 will look like going to war, and here's an F-16 with the same warload. You tell me which looks sexier.

Should I read that as that the F-35 is primarily an attack craft with secondary air to air capability? Most of the smaller European partners in the project are going to use it as their main air defense fighter. The lightweight F16s were ideal for that role. I guess a stealth plane will give it an advantage and off course good integration with other NATO systems. I can't help but wonder that later generation F-16s pretty much offer the same but with a proven track record.

No you shouldn't. In a stealthy config a JSF can carry 4-6 AAMs internally (again roughly equivalent to what a F-16 or Baby Hornet actually carry in a conflict) so any nation using it in an air superiority role isn't losing anything there. People seem to get hung up on the fact that the F-35 only matches a clean F-16 in performance, but the fact of the matter is when an F-16 actually goes to war it can't match it's own clean performance. An F-16 on a mission is going to have several thousand pounds of fuel taking up a quarter of it's pylons it's going to have all sorts of ordinance hanging off the rest making it tough to pull more than a handful of Gs or get much past the sound barrier. A F-35 will be able to reach it's top speed with a full warload (mach 1.6, which just happens to be the top speed of an F-16 with only a pair of sidewinders and single droptank). It'll be able to pull 9Gs with the equivalent of the F-16's three droptanks of gas inside. Add stealth, a radar that does triple duty as a jammer and ELINT gear, an IRST array that allows the pilot to look through the floor of his/her cockpit, and low speed handling on par with the Super Hornet, and I'm having trouble seeing how it's not better than an F-16.

In what way is the F-35 going to be an upgrade over the F-16/F-18s it's going to replace? Most of the discussions I have read seem to focus on it's cost and number built rather then what it can do. The national debate is completely absorbed by compensation orders and noise/emission worries. Any sites or magazine issues that anyone wouldn't mind recommending on it's performance and future roles?

Stealth for one, it wraps the same same load an F-16 or baby Hornet carries inside the fuselage. So you've got the same warload being carried by an aircraft that will be exceedingly difficult to detect. Of course if you want to ditch stealth you could get close to F-15E levels of ordinance hanging off the wings/internal bays. Then of course you have the avionics which are likely the best to ever fly on an aircraft, the Helmet mounted sight actually allows you to look through the plane!

Don't get me started on the F-22 computer system, some buddies of mine over at that CTF are going crazy over it, and the best hope of getting that computer system's replacement will probably be in a B model aircraft, but that is about impossible now with the production halt. Time will tell though since the tooling still exists and apparently plans have been drawn up using a more open architechture based on the F-35 systems.

Well and that's my point, the costs of building an "exportable" F-22 for Japan were enormous, mainly because it needed to have a new computer system with the DRM for export baked in and more open architecture to accommodate all the changes for the Japanese sea control mission. You have to figure since the F-35's systems have all that built in, the DoD based their estimates on starting with that and integrating it into the Raptor, and even then it was still ridiculously expensive. Like I said above with that in mind we're better off with a JSF swarm to overwhelm any T-50s or J-XXs they might encounter, with a handful of F-22s and later F/A-XXs working as backup.

Yeah, the F-22 has the ultimate argument of "it's in service, it works, it rocks". The F-35 is still "we hope".

Meh, I soured considerably on the Raptor when I found out how much it would cost to fix it's computer system for sale to Japan. We could get three F-35s for every two Raptors we upgraded with a workable on board computer (and that assuming such a thing could be retrofitted rather than requiring a newly built airframe, which would cost another 2-3 F-35s). I think we're probably better off muddling through with several thousand of F-35s (quantity has a quality all it's own) and replacing the rest of our Eagles, Strike Eagles and Raptors by having the Air Force buy the F/A-XX when it comes on line. Buying more Raptors at this point just gives us more planes with a dead end system that's nigh impossible to integrate new weapons and technology into. Do we really want to be stuck in 2020 with a fighter that has near godly kinematic performance, but that can't even mount a proper HMS or IRST?

Probably not. Turkey signed on to the F-35 program.

It'll be interesting to see who wins India's MRCA contract. The Eurofighter Typhoon is supposedly in the lead.

Yeah, if I had to guess it'll be either the Typhoon or the Super Hornet that win the MRCA, because both bring a great engine they can share with the LCA. On a political level the Super Hornet might even have an advantage since it strengthens relations with the US.

Are you talking about the A-12 navy stealth carrier plane?

The F-14. Cheney was hell bent on making sure the F-14D program was canceled, and went as far as ordering the factory jigs destroyed so that no more could be produced. It's the aircraft manufacturing equivalent of salting the earth so that nothing grows.

All I can say is we had quite different readings of that artice. Especially the author's sidebar directly addressing the issue.

Honestly the sidebar reads like ass covering to maintain access to the Chinese aircraft industry by repeating the official party line. It's clear from the body of the article that it was a pretty direct rip, with concessions made to the realities of the Chinese industrial base. Do I need to pull this picture out again?

My favorite part is how they had to add the odd hump back on the J-10 to maintain the area ruling that was done naturally with the canopy of the smaller Lavi.

The engines on the prototype are not the engines the production plane will have. The new engines weren't ready in time.

Yeah but unless they plan on re-designing the entire fuselage, the way the engines are mounted in the plane is final and that means the engine faces will be exposed, which dramatically increases the RCS of the plane.

You should read the recent IAPR articl on the J-10 if you think its a LAVI knockoff.

Short version: it's not.

Actually I have the IAPR article on the J-10 and the short answer is: it totally is.

The long answer is that most of the modifications to the design were done to compensate for the Chinese industrial base (China doesn't have the experience with composites that Israel has, and the only engine they had access to that was close to suitable for the design was the AL-31) rather than any originality on Chengdu's part.

Lol, if this were China's prototype and not Russian, we would have had 3 pages of:

"NOOOOO ASTRO PLAN GTFO! WTF PLAGIARISM.... FAKE LV HANDBAG!!1!!!"

Other than the nose, which has a decidedly YF-23ish look, the T-50 doesn't look much like existing designs. Compare that with say the J-10, which is nothing more than an up scaled Lavi, or their new not-a-DC-9, and you can see why the Chinese have gotten a reputation for making knock-off planes.

Remember you are also looking at the first flight prototype, so a lot of those pitots and arials will probably be made much less obtrusive in the production model. If I had to hazard a guess I would say it's RCS will likely be close to if not slightly better then the F-35s. My biggest question at this point, what are those blisters under the wing roots, sensors, vortex controllers, small weapons bays, what?

I don't know, I think that IRST housing alone is going to give them some issues. Look at the EOTS window on the JSF or it's predecessor on the NATF concepts, a Su-27 style fishbowl will show up huge compared to those designs. That and the exposed engine faces (I don't buy the claims that slapping some RAM on the engine faces is some great fix) give me the impression that while Sukhoi has put a lot of thought into having a stealthy aircraft, it's wasn't the priority for them.

Also from what I'm reading those blisters are for short range AAMs, the analogue of the Raptor's side bays.