36 réponses à ce sujet

[Han Shot First]

[Fidite Nemini]

 

There's only like 35% commonality between the versions.

 

Heh, maybe that's where the 35 part of F35 came from.

[AventuroLegendary]

If we are going to talk about aerial vehicles in this thread, wouldn't the AH-64 Apache be more appropriate?

 

Okay, I'll leave.

 

A single death is a tragedy

 

268 deaths is a statistic 

 

Rather 400+

[Inquisitor Recon]

It doesn't matter how much money you throw on the F-35. They can't correct the main problem, which is the airframe design itself.
The systems are very advanced, and if they can be made to work reliably, those will be just fine.
But there are still three problems with that: When you try to take as big steps as that, at the bleeding edge, it typically leads to huge costs. Another typical consequence is poor reliability. Finally, as they eventually becomes reliable, they will also soon be obsolete, with newer technology delivering better performance and better reliability much cheaper. But by then, you're still paying for your huge investment in the big step. You've already spent your money. But okay, let's assume the systems will be fine.

The airframe is reflective of what it was designed to do and the compromises necessary to achieve those goals. It was designed to replace the F-16, F/A-18, and AV-8 while being relatively inexpensive. The F-22 was to be the USAF's premier air-superiority fighter while the JSF would be a lower cost multi-role aircraft which would provide of the bulk of our tactical airpower. Essentially a modern version of the "hi-lo mix" concept first introduced in the 1970s. The lesser performance of the JSF was an acceptable compromise in order to achieve other goals. Compared to some other multi-role fighters the F-35 is more geared towards air-to-ground work but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

All new aircraft have teething problems and while the advanced avionics of the F-35 pose more challenges than a less sophisticated aircraft I have little doubt that we will work through them just as we have with so many other aircraft. The JSF program has been at the forefront of modern US avionics development but most of the concepts aren't new. "Sensor fusion" was also a key goal in the ATF (F-22) program but one of those areas they cut back on due to budgetary pressure.
 

Remains the problem that they're fitted to an aircraft which has very disappointing performance for a future plane. This is not something media has made up. Anybody with any knowledge about aerodynamics and aircraft architecture can see that written all over the wall. It's literally minutes slower at trans-sonic acceleration than the F-16 (a 1970'ies design), which also means it's gonna burn up lots of fuel in the process as well. If it turns hard, it's going to lose speed in a dramatic fashion, and when it's slow it turns even worse. At the best, it can only sustain somewhat more than 4g in a turn. And that's not good. You're catapulted many decades back in time, to compare with aircraft which at least had much better supersonic and transonic performance. And its payload*range is nothing to write home about either. It's decent, but not really as good as one would expect from an aircraft 40 years after the F-16.
The F-35's performance' main justification is made in comparisons with F-16 & F-18 with lots of stores under their wings. That's somewhat valid, but still doesn't represent what one have reasons to expect from a new and modern plane.

It's always disappointing when performance goals are missed as some were for the F-35. Yet it still seems the F-35 generally compares well to the F/A-18. An aircraft with great maneuverability and high AoA handling but acceleration that is average at best. Part of the requirement for a large internal payload necessitated a wider fuselage and hence more drag than a clean F-16. But in the real world clean F-16 isn't all that useful. Once you start increasing the payload (thus weight and drag) on the F-16 things are more favorable towards the F-35.
 

The main reason the performance of the F-35 is so secret to media and the public (it's not so secret to the competition; it's fairly obvious what ballpark it's in, from weight, wing area and engine), is that it compares very unfavorably with the aircraft (in clean condition) it is supposed to replace. Every time a curious journalist, spurred by the vitriolic criticism that can be picked up outside the invested circle, tries to question test pilots about the aircraft, those test pilots concentrate on describing how "easy to fly" the F-35 is. Same with press conferences/panels where the military have pilots appear. Focus on "easy to fly".

Defense programs in the US are far more "open" than those in Russia or China. You never hear about the problems their aircraft have in development but they also run into problems and miss goals and schedules. The media's reporting of defense programs tends to be amateurish at best and history can confirm that. The F-14, F-15, F/A-18, B-1, B-2, C-17, M1, M2, AH-64, V-22 and all sorts of other big ticket items were attacked and labelled as hideously expensive overcomplicated deathtraps at some point or another. Its the F-35s turn now and while there have certainly been legitimate problems with the program it is not the worst thing to ever happen in aviation as some tabloids would like people to think.

Easy to fly is a good thing, but yes, it's not going to be as impressive a performer as a F-15, F-22, a F-16 in a light configuration, or some other aircraft. That doesn't mean it can't defend itself however. The F/A-18 so often criticized as being a "jack of all trades, master of none" has certainly had a successful career despite its performance shortfalls.

 

It will have to perform all its missions with very advanced weapons. A good idea if it works. But where's the contemporary payload? That internal weapon bay doesn't take much. And what rate of sorties will it be able to fly?

All aircraft are increasingly relying on very advanced weapons including our current fighters. The F-35 can carry external stores if the situation permits it. Whatever the current sortie rates are now may not be very inspiring that impressive but it takes time to build up that capability to required level. With time I don't see any reason it shouldn't be able to match any contemporary fighter.
 

They say about critics, that we don't understand that it isn't about aircraft performance any longer. That it's about the weapons, stealth, and systems. That the new weapons make aircraft performance obsolete. Do you think they're right?

Performance still is useful and can't be disregarded entirely but it's true that missiles, sensors, electronic warfare, and stealth are more important than ever before. Improvements to weapon systems over the years have empathized to many to avoid the knife-fight that is WVR air-to-air combat. The latest IR guided short range missiles are near-impossible to fool (at least until DIRCM) and can't be outmaneuvered if you're within their engagement envelope. If both sides have such missiles WVR combat is going to be extremely costly for both regardless if one side has super-maneuverable aircraft with thrust vectoring.
 

The military very much wants the new systems. Thus they want the plane. But it was a mistake to try to build the same aircraft for all services. From what I've seen it's not even working. There's only like 35% commonality between the versions.

I think the decision to develop a naval variant was a bad choice but it's too late to do anything about that now. Commonality should be a "must-have" for many internal systems these days but airframe commonality is still very difficult to achieve. When it comes time to trim some weight on an airframe commonality tends to be the first thing sacrificed. At least a high percentage of the airframe components are considered "cousin" parts which have minimal differences.

Ultimately I hope the F-35 can be a modern A-7 but with much better air-to-air capabilities. Nobody would ever call the A-7 a very impressive aircraft but it was well respected for its air-to-ground capabilities.

 

Here is a rather well done analysis of the F-35's acceleration if you have the time. Like I said it may not seem very impressive but it's hardly as awful as some would claim.

[The Invader]

The words Epic Fail come to mind. It sucked that his men had to pay for his arrogance with their lives.

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

I like Lockheed Raptor.

 

[The Invader]

I like Lockheed Raptor.
 

Oh, how cute. Rail gun and it's latest victims say hello.

[spinachdiaper]

Never play Custer's Revenge. Seriously don't do it.

[Aimi]

The Little Bighorn is unusual because of the totality of the victory. Almost no significant engagements in history end with the total destruction of one side or another. Yet every single individual in the five companies Custer had with him was killed; the only survivor on the side of the federal government that was present at the start of the battle was a scout that left shortly after the engagement began.

Part of the reason for that was the small scale. Slightly over two hundred men were with Custer, a fairly small number even by the standard of the Plains Wars. (That the unit was referred to as a 'battalion' is almost embarrassing; a battalion at the TO&E of a full war footing would have several times that number.) The other great military disaster suffered by Americans at the hands of aboriginal peoples, the Battle of the Wabash in 1791, was a far more severe defeat in numerical terms: of a thousand US soldiers, over six hundred were killed or captured, another three hundred were wounded, and only 24 escaped with no significant harm. But, viewed another way: over three hundred men survived. But when Custer's Americans met the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho at Minneconjou Ford, none of them got out alive.

It is, in fact, one of the largest such total defeats that can be reliably credited by history. Classical historians sometimes threw up outrageous numbers, but they were intrinsically unreliable. For example, in 9 (AD) three Roman legions were attacked and defeated by an alliance of tribes - Hattoz, Heruskoz, and so on - in what the Romans called the 'Varian disaster'. Supposedly, every single soldier in the legions (some twenty to thirty thousand) was killed or captured. This is rendered unreliable by other accounts, which explicitly reference survivors of the Varian disaster participating in the defense of Rome's remaining Germanic provinces in the aftermath of the battle. But more importantly, there is the story of the battle. Velleivs Patercvlvs, Tacitvs, Svetonivs, and Dio all have quite in-depth and involved narratives of the course of the engagement, crediting specific individual Roman soldiers and officers with instances of bravery and ignominy in the face of incredible peril. One wonders where, exactly, they got these stories. In the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, Jack Sparrow and some other prisoners are stuck in the Port Royal garrison brig while the Black Pearl attacks the harbor. The other prisoners are terrified; they trade stories about how fearsome the ship's crew is, and how she never leaves any survivors. Sparrow responds sardonically: "No survivors? Then where do the stories come from, I wonder?" It's...a very, very good question, and one that should be kept in mind when looking at such historical accounts.

Compare the Varian disaster with the Battle of the Little Bighorn. American anthropologists and ethnographers interviewed participants in the engagement extensively after the end of the war. Archaeologists have sifted through the remains of the battlefield time and time again; it is one of the most heavily excavated non-urban sites in the world. We can bring a great deal of modern techniques and technologies to bear on the story of the fight at Minneconjou Ford. And yet this has yielded mostly confusion. None of the Americans could be picked out individually by the aboriginal fighters, not even Custer himself. There is not even a single convincing narrative of how the battle went. There are competing explanations, but they differ quite widely in the particulars; all they really agree upon is that there was a big fight between Custer's battalion and the allies, and the allies won in less than an hour, and that a few soldiers might have escaped to the so-called "Custer's Hill" late in the battle but were ridden down and killed. For the most part, the battle is a mystery.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to lay blame or credit, for those inclined to do such things. Custer's generalship was generally execrable (if explicable); he wanted to make sure he caught his opponents all in one place, but also thought that their fighting strength was low, two mutually exclusive assumptions that turned out to be fatal. His reconnaissance was poor and he did not pay particular attention to what intelligence he did possess. As a result, he divided his forces in the face of a numerically superior foe and attacked without waiting for backup. The failures were a sort of laundry list of every single way you could possibly screw up under the circumstances. Even so, some of them were instances of prizing one particular kind of military virtue to excess. Custer's tactics emphasized speed and dash over a more careful, considered approach; the positive aspect to that approach allowed his cavalry to seize advantages quickly and operate within the loop of their enemy's decision-making (an important skill for cavalry commanders to have), but the negative aspect left them blundering into ambushes and charging headlong into disasters, as at the Little Bighorn.

But that is not to deny the allies their own agency. They comprehensively proved Custer's assumptions wrong in assembling and controlling a far larger force than any of the Americans gave them credit for, and they handled it skillfully enough on interior lines against Custer's separate columns, holding off Benteen and Reno's battalions on the one flank while completely destroying Custer's battalion on the other. The sheer lopsidedness of the victory was something almost never accomplished in warfare, even at such a small scale, and for that Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Chief Gall, and their warriors deserve to be remembered. It was a tactical success like few others in history.

On the other hand, the scale meant that the battle had a far weightier psychological impact than it ever could have had in objective military terms. The loss of five understrength companies was trivial to the Americans. Furthermore, the allies had needed to amass a truly vast number in the large encampment on the Little Bighorn - an unsustainable number, in fact, due to the paucity of available supplies. Dealing a death blow to a small fragment of the American force was the most that that host could hope to accomplish. While the attack on Custer succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation, Benteen and Reno survived with more than half of the regiment, and General Terry's column was not far behind.

So much for the objective military sense. But the psychology of it was worse, and deeper. I would suspect that the Little Bighorn is probably the most famous military disaster in American history. The US military has suffered worse losses in a variety of ways, but the Little Bighorn trumps them all in the public memory, and there are a few good reasons why. For one thing, the defeat was total. A little over two hundred men died in that column - for the Army of the Potomac in the Overland Campaign, that wasn't a disaster, it was "Tuesday" - but none of them lived to tell the tale. Instead, lurid myths grew up over the course of the battle, crazy tales that could be gainsaid by no one save the aboriginal participants...and few Americans cared to hear what they had to say. That the defeat was suffered at native hands is also probably part of it. These were the sorts of people that were typically outclassed by American numbers and firepower, from King Philip's War on down to Wounded Knee. Yet they were propagandistically portrayed as a red menace, savage and uncivilized, prone to the most fantastical behaviors and susceptible only to defeat and domination, never to compromise or alliance. To lose to such people both lent weight to the absurd propaganda while also being genuinely shocking on a more 'realistic' level: nobody ever actually expected to lose to the 'savages'. And finally, unlike St. Clair's defeat on the Wabash, the Little Bighorn battle occurred at a confluence of events. It was closely associated with a presidential election, and involved a war hero. The story was told and retold in countless congressional and military hearings, and the modern American newspaper industry lent its considerable weight to the proliferation of the story in a way that would have been impossible in 1791.

Subsequent American defeats simply haven't gotten the pub, either. Compared to Custer's defeat, few remember Kasserine Pass, Bataan, or the Hürtgen campaign. Other times, the defeats are excused or explained away, like the great retreat from the Yalu in fall/winter 1950. And, to be perfectly honest, the Americans have enjoyed a lot more tactical success than defeat over the last 150 years. Even those who know of the failures counterbalance them with an endless parade of victory and triumphalism.

[Nattfare]

Never play Custer's Revenge. Seriously don't do it.

I wonder if Recon is playing a modded version of that game, Clopper's Revenge...

[Han Shot First]

Part of the tragedy with Custer at Little Bighorn is that he wasn't an inexperienced and incompetent officer who had no business being in command. Quite often that was the case with some of history's more memorable military disasters, but that wasn't the case with Custer.

 

He had commanded cavalry from the first battle until the final campaign in the American Civil War, and quite often with distinction. He was no tactical genius, but he was competent, and he possessed traits that made him a natural cavalry officer: fearlessness, an aggressive and daring leadership style, and charisma. He also never asked his men to do anything he himself wouldn't do and frequently led charges from the front, having multiple horses shot out from under him. All of those traits generally served him well, and the troops loved him for it.

 

A 2 minute clip on perhaps Custer's greatest moment, the desperate charge of the 1st Michigan on the 3rd Day at Gettysburg:

 

 

Of course there is a flip side to an aggressive leadership style, and that is that it can at times border on recklessness. Little Bighorn was an example of that, and he paid for it.

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

Oh, how cute. Rail gun and it's latest victims say hello.

 

I didn't get it.

 

Is this damage done by F-22 mini-gun or it's the F-22 itself taken damage?