Comments by "Titanium Rain" (@ChucksSEADnDEAD) on "F35 Main Mission: Evade Russian S400 Air Defense" video.

@jupiterjunk Masters of all trades are the workhorses of modern airforces. You didn't have easy access to the deficiencies that were found in other projects. Mind that the F-16 and Harrier straight up KILLED pilots in their early days and now they're beloved machines.
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@jupiterjunk The Warthog wasn't even dominant. It had to be pulled away from the Iraqi National Guard because the losses and aircraft put out of action waiting for repairs were unsustainable. In 1985 the Israelis bombed the PLO's headquarters in Tunisia with F-15Cs and Ds. Despite the not a pound for air to ground mantra, the A-D models had a dormant ability to carry Mk 82, 83 and 84 bombs. In this attack, the F-15Ds were carrying GBU-15s. The F-16 doesn't dominate? It's arguably the most common close air support aircraft considering how many flags it serves under, one of the biggest payload droppers in recent history, and also one of the best fighters in inventory. Dog 3 was trained so smell nitrates, cocaine, cook pancakes and sing the national anthem. It's a smart dog. I want Dog 3 on my team. "For the F-35; did they ever resolve the sheering of the stealth coating at super-sonic speeds?" - Only happens with the B and C variants and at very high altitudes, and the Pentagon won't pay for it. Lockheed Martin will have to solve that on their own. "Consolidating the services to one airframe is a bad idea." - Except for the USMC nobody's consolidating into a single airframe. The F-22 will be the F-35s companion and it will be replaced by a 6th gen air superiority aircraft, and the Navy will get their F/A-XX to recoup F-14-like capabilities they lost with the Hornet. "Imagine if the Air Force and Navy (for the sake of argument) only had F-15's when the crack in the airframe started to appear" - And what if the Navy didn't have the F-15? Put F-14s serving under the USAF? Navy gets tasked with airspace defense? "the F-35 would've been the rock star it should be, IF it were created just for Air Force procurement" - But how? I keep pressing people to explain this but they can't give an answer. "Like the same folks that gave us the M-2 Bradley" - Oh no someone who actually believes the nutter who wrote Pentagon Wars... we'll be here a long time.
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@jupiterjunk "Stealth, carrier, and VTOL" - So? Still don't see how that's a problem. The Navy is also looking into a program to make a stealth carrier-borne fighter that gives them back F-14 performance they lost by switching to Hornets. The VTOL aspect of the B variant doesn't affect the others. "If the F-35 was just a replacement for the F-16, it would be awesome; but it's not. It's trying to replace 3 airframes at once" - The F/A-18 derives from the YF-17, which was also on the lightweight fighter program that picked the YF-16 as the winner. Although the airframes are different they were convergent in their design, two different ways of reaching the same goal. And again, the B variant's VTOL doesn't affect the others. "I think the project cost overruns were because of this" - I'm almost certain that most of the problems were software related. "and the F-35 suffers because of this" - Why? You don't actually explain the why. "They can sniff/detect a lot of scents, but they have to be trained. The more odors you train the dog to hit on, the less effective they become at detecting them" - You do understand that airplanes aren't dogs, right? The analogy doesn't make sense because a wing doesn't care if there's an air to air missile or air to ground missile attached to it. The radar and sensors can be fed data on thousands on different vehicles to recognize them from the air with your limitations being only computing power and memory - which we got plenty of - rather than a numerical limit. You can communicate directly with software and just have it do exactly what you want, rather than dealing with an animal with it's own personality/temperament and limited communication abilities. Analogies make sense when the things are actually analogous. Animal training and fighter jets are absolutely not comparable.
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@eternalvigilance6095 The Yak 141's three-bearing swivel nozzle was initially developed by Pratt and Whitney for an engine that would go on the Convair Model 200. The concept already existed, Lockheed Martin just took the opportunity to buy all the testing data so they wouldn't need to start from a clean slate.
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@jupiterjunk The F-16 only had a deep stall issue resolved in 1981 in the Block 15. That's 9 years after the drawing board. "that's because they are asking it to do so much." - But most of the issues have nothing to do with the multirole nature. "If you want awesome, then you need dedicated single-role aircraft" - Why? "their performance suffers when you have them doing too many different jobs" - But why? You say things but you can't explain the core concept behind it. In dogs you're limited by genetics, in cars you're limited by inherently different demands. A job in an aircraft that isn't a bomber or cargo airplane has mostly the same needs as other jobs. The things I need to be a good fighter are exactly the same things I need to be a good ground attack aircraft. It's funny, the F-16 is so good at fighting it's the MiG-29 surrogate in aggressor squadrons, and so good at bombing it was picked for Operation Opera, the deep strike on a nuclear reactor. By your logic, the F-16 shouldn't be able to do either role.
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@jsn1252 The C only refers to where the munitions land, not where the aircraft is. Close Air Support can be performed anywhere you want, you're just dropping payload on enemies within firing range of your friendlies.
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@hoosiered471 But keeping factory lines open to service legacy systems is not sustainable. It's easy to dismiss it as greed but sometimes everyone's needs can't be met and a company can't be expected to grow to maintain ageing models. If anything, the custom ordering of parts helps smallish/medium sized businesses that can cover those gaps.
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@Vares65 The US federal budget 2019 - pre pandemic to not spoil the numbers - had 1000 billion on social security, 644 billion on medicare and 409 billion on medicaid.
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1.5 trillion over the entire service of the F-35, which means the cost is spread over several decades. The US burns a trillion on welfare a year easily.
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You're gonna have to name names brother.
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@adamwright9741 You don't fire the entire drum. The computer has a burst limiter and the new F-35 gun does something other gatlings don't which is spin backwards to use the live rounds that get cycled out at the end of a burst as the weapon stops. So you can't think of it as 5 seconds worth of firing, you have to think of it as how many times you can pull the trigger until you're done. If the burst limiter can be set to 30, think of it as being able to pull the trigger 7 times. You won't need more than that even against ground targets. Especially if you can carry Small Diameter Bombs and APKWS rockets as your primary close air support weapons, with the gun being only for the really specific instance where you need to strike targets at grenade tossing range from friendlies where even a small 250lb bomb would be dangerous. Comparing modern autocannons to 50 cals is not a good argument. If you look at other modern fighters 150-200 rounds is considered enough. The ballistic computers are just so good, if you do your job you won't miss. You're not likely to even meet an adversary at gun range, and even if you do you probably won't be in a position to nail more than one adversary. It's like thinking a modern soldier is expected to kill more than one adversary with a bayonet.
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@jupiterjunk I got what you meant. I don't think the requirements are that big of a deal. Most of the delays caused by the B variant only affected the B variant, while the rest of the program's biggest delays resided with the fact that it took years to get the first 15% of the code base done. The rest of the problems deal with weird quirks like the supersonic issue with the coat on two variants, concerns with hypoxia (which has affected other aircraft in inventory), the overblown bad weather restriction that was related to the on board inert gas generator, the gun mount apparently not retaining zero so the gun isn't accurate, etc. These are not the aircraft's design flaws. And no, I'm not affiliated with the tumblr page.
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You got an aircraft factory laying around? You'll need to rebuild it or else it's gonna break apart mid air.
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What the hell does that mean? What niche? Advanced 4th gen cost as much as the F-35 because you have to purchase a lot of avionics separately to hang it on pylons. The F-35 comes with all the FLIR/laser targeting and ECM "pods" internally, which is cost effective and reduces drag penalty.
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@Its_shiki_time4876 The A-10 will be replaced by the F-35. As it stands, the A-10 has already been replaced by the F-16 and Strike Eagle. They are meant to do the same job. The F-35 will inherit it indirectly because of Congress block on the A-10 retirement.
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Not exactly. The US Navy lost a ton of capabilities by retiring the F-14 that weren't fully covered by the Hornet. The US Navy wants a F-14D successor with 6th gen capabilities while the F-35 force replaces the F-18.
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How do you scramble what's essentially an uber-FLIR camera that's not available on the market because the resolution and sensitivity is regulated?
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@WPSent You really need to read the report. The pilot said that the software governing the flight parameters was hesitating and taking too long to change AoA, which caused the F-35 to bleed off too much airspeed when attempting maneuvers. He literally wrote in the report that the recommended fix would be removing the restrictions on the control laws.
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@WPSent Stick to the F-22? Man... The Advanced Tactical Fighter was a program to come up with the F-15's successor. It was extremely expensive and the government couldn't justify an overpowered air superiority fighter after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just like the F-15 itself, it was an expensive and overpowered aircraft that couldn't be purchased in the amounts needed to cover the entire need for fighters, so a lightweight fighter was designed to fill the gap - the F-16. The Joint Strike Fighter program was the junction of several programs to make an aircraft for the USAF, Marines and Navy and it would replace the F-16, Harrier, F/A-18, etc. It was never meant to replace the F-22 because its replacement will be another expensive, overpowered aircraft that can't be purchased in enough numbers - and the F-35 will be its companion. The F-22 isn't exactly in a good place and it will need replacement. Too few were produced, reactivating the production line would be extremely costly, and at this point it would need massive upgrades to keep up with the F-35 and its technology. It's extremely good at what it does so it probably won't get major updates, it will just coast of its capabilities until retirement.
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@WPSent It doesn't? I think it does. The F-35 parts commonality does save costs even though it's lower than initially expected. About 30 percent parts commonality in the A and B variant, and almost 40 percent on the C. It's cheaper than three separate planes, and even cheaper than multiple airplanes for all the roles it covers. You're going to have to explain why an airframe that does everything means what you say it means. Speed is limited in the B and C variants due to the coating and that issue will have to be resolved later. The F-35A does 1.6 Mach, and unlike other fighters it won't get the drag penalty of external weapons. All the other fighters will be speed and G limited while carrying weapons and fuel bags. If you buy 2,600 F-22s, how much more do you think you'll be spending on the total cost of the program? It's going to be a lot more than 1.5 trillion.
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@WPSent Software does help. The F-35 has excellent alpha abilities. In an age where pointing your nose matters more than turn circles, the F-35 is good to go. The report was literally made after flying a testbed aircraft - not an actual production aircraft - with severely restrictive software. This isn't about software solving problems, this is about software that was literally hindering the aircraft. Removing the restrictions massively improved the performance.
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@WPSent So even though we're saving money by getting parts commonality, this is bad because each branch has a different inventory? The point is reducing costs, not shipping USAF parts to the USN. You order part C but it gets made by the same people who make the B and A part, so you don't need to keep three different suppliers on contract with three different workforces, three different health plans and three different workplace insurances. "The F-35 needs to be a stealthy air superiority fighter, a strike craft, and a VTOL capable craft. Those really don't mix well in my opinion" - Your opinion? You're going to have to actually justify that, I don't know who you are. And even if you had credentials, I'd still want to hear what analysis brought you to that conclusion because authority alone doesn't make opinions right. "And the F-35A is slow at 1.6. Hell the F-18 is still faster" - With weapons and fuel bags? Most airplane statistics are measured with airplanes in clean configuration. The F-35 has the option of flying clean even when armed. "The other 800 billion or so could go cover operational costs" - But that's not how it works. You'd need to pay for an extensive upgrade package to stick all the F-35 avionics on the F-22. The F-22 has no ISRT or DAS. It can't self-lase for bomb drops. The money you'd save would all be spent on trying to make the F-22 into a F-35.
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@WPSent It sounds cool in concept, but you go tell the USAF that money they spent out of their budget is going to go to the Navy or vice-versa. The point is reducing costs and logistical issues, not mixing and matching parts from different services. I cannot find a single shred of evidence to back the notion that the JSF had a program requirement for parts to be traded among services. Guess what, you're not sending USAF carbine parts to the Army or Marines even though they share the M16/M4 design on their weapons. They have separate inventories. Yes, you are saving massive amounts of money. Like I said you don't have to pay three different companies to maintain three different production lines who have their own business expenses. "Justify what exactly?" - You're making claims that you seemingly want to pretend are just a given. I want you to explain those claims. "As for the F-18 v F-35, taking a closer look" - That's not a closer look. Was Mach 1.8 measured clean or with weapons and bags? That's what I asked. You have to limit the aircraft to the performance it can achieve in a real mission, not at an air show. "this is a whole lot of money spent on a Generation 5 "meh" plane" - It's an amazing plane. It's a dream in air to ground and it wipes the floor with 4th gen aircraft. You say it's meh, while everyone who's ever flown it and spoken publicly about it describes it as a game-changer. "versus just either spending some of that on a plane we've already done the work on" - We haven't done the work on it. Its development was stalled because not enough F-22s were made to replace the F-15 so it made no sense to. We'd have to do all the work that was put on the JSF program into the F-22.
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@hoosiered471 hmm okay guess they're wrong. But there's other factors, for example the National Guard announced they were experimenting with 3d printed parts to keep helicopters in service because Sikorsky would not manufacture those parts, only for newer variants.
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If wikipedia is to be believed the last CH-53E came off the assembly line in 1980. Good god replace those at once before one splits apart in flight...
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@linusa2996 The F-14 was one of the most expensive aircraft to fly, so I doubt that.
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Because the USAF will need to retire F-22s in one day and the Navy wants a F-14-like performer with more range than the F/A-18? Which are reasons totally unrelated to the F-35?
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You don't get the chance to use firepower if you have no stealth. How can you get overwhelmed? You dictate how and when engagements happen. Stealth is used precisely because of the ground threat. Losing GPS wouldn't even make the F-35 break a sweat, it would still feed all of its information to command and control while internally knowing its position through INS. Short term there's not much drift on INS and you can reset your coordinates every time you land at the base.
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It will replace the A-10. The A-10 has already been replaced by the F-16 and F-15E. The F-35 will replace the F-16 which means inheriting the A-10s job.
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@jupiterjunk Amazing. Nobody is actually able to state why multiroles can't excel at their job.
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Anything that can shoot down F-35s will make it hopeless for any other aircraft in the air. I don't get the argument, so we should be flying aircraft that are easier to detect and track? How does that make sense?
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@Mediiiicc Yes and no. Navy improved their score with TOPGUN and better crew training to avoid damaging the missiles while handling them - which contributed to reliability issues in early missiles - but a major factor was that the Navy fighters always had radar coverage from the ship radars behind them. The USAF had huge blindspots and flew into ambushes constantly. One of the issues was F-4s escorting slower strike packages, the enemy MiGs would come around through the border and deal a high speed attack from behind, and the F-4 escorts couldn't accelerate to meet the fleeing MiGs. The USAF slightly improved their kill ratio by flying combat air patrols meant to destroy MiGs. What really made the jump was Teaball. An intelligence and radar station program that fed USAF pilots situational awareness. Phantoms in MIGCAP missions after Teaball had a 14 to 1 kill ratio if I remember correctly.
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The speed would be a non-issue because currently at high altitude the B and C variants will have certain parts of the aircraft overheat and damage the coating if you go supersonic. The Pentagon threw their hands in the air and won't pay for a new coating to be developed. VTOL did not sacrifice anything. The shape of the airplane is driven by the bomb bays, eliminating the VTOL variant would not have made for a sleeker F-35 unless you sacrificed weapons carrying. I also don't see how you'd get better stealth. We're either at the second or third coat upgrade since the F-22 and if LM finances the development themselves we may get a new better coat. The shape of the aircraft was designed by computers more advanced than we previously used. So I don't know much much more stealth you could get in there without sacrificing other fighter aspects.
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That doesn't make sense, it can't replace the F-22 because it's the F-22's companion. Just like the F-16 was the smaller and cheaper companion to the F-15. Anyone pitching it as the F-22 replacement has no idea what they're talking about. The three types make it not do any job well? Why? What would be the reason?
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@bret9741 Shifting the goalposts are we? Now it's about cost. Like Slipknot once said, dig your own grave and fill your mouth with all the money you will save. While you're worrying about cost of weapons, you're advocating to launch a woefully inadequate aircraft that's extremely vulnerable, have it spend a precious minute circling around to line up a gun run when it could have just launched the attack from several miles out, then dive straight at the ground in a pathetically predictable flight path that makes the aircraft vulnerable to even manually aimed AAA. How much you're going to spend on replacement aircraft, SAR missions to go get the pilot and benefits for the family in case he digs the aircraft straight into the ground? Your analogies aren't valid. Boom booms are the primary way to kill ground targets. The gun has a niche application hence the reduced round count in most fighters and even the A-10 is the biggest fixed-wing user of APKWS. By your logic it shouldn't need it. But it's a gamechanger.
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@m1a1abramstank49 Not to mention that the F-117 broke lock twice, and they only attempted a third lock because they knew there were no SEAD aircraft at the time due to observers reporting aircraft take offs from Aviano, Italy and thus wouldn't get a HARM fired at them. Even then, out of the two missiles one also lock track and the second missed, detonating by proximity fuse.
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@bret9741 Most aircraft made in the recent decades only have 120-150 rounds. Gripen, Eurofighter, Rafale, MiG-29, Su-27 all have 150 round or less. The ballistic computer does what used to take hundreds of rounds to accomplish by landing hits accurately rather than needing multiple passes to get good hits. With Small Diameter Bombs and APKWS rockets you don't need the gun except for the very niche instance where enemies are at grenade throwing distance of friendlies. Everything else gets firecrackers dropped on their heads because lining up a gun run is literally slower than just firing a couple of rockets from 6 miles away.
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There's only 11 Su-57s in existence and over 500 F-35s produced. Even if they're 1:1 equivalent there's enough F-35s to destroy the existing Su-57s and still retain 489.
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Russia still sells their weapons to nations that the West is not in friendly terms with.
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Official names and nicknames often don't match. The F-16 is the Falcon but it's referred to as the Viper. The Super Hornet is called Rhino to prevent any confusion with the legacy Hornet.
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No, it wasn't. The OA-X program was designed for Vietnam where 14.5mm was considered the most serious threat due to 23mm not being common enough. It was then repurposed to fight tanks where it would have a suicidal mission and the entire West German contingent of A-10s would be lost in a matter of days due to Shilkas and MANPADS. Mind that in 1991 seven A-10 were lost and Gen Chuck Horner pulled them off from the Iraqi Republican Guard because as it turns out, if you send the A-10 against skilled and well-equipped units the A-10 is extremely vulnerable. Again, the environment is much more hostile to aircraft than it was in the 1980s. Now you have to fend off Tunguskas and Pantsirs. The short range missiles are guided by laser beamriding or electro-optical trackers so you can't jam their radars or use flares. It's not disingenuous if you consider the facts.
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