Comments by "Titanium Rain" (@ChucksSEADnDEAD) on "The Submarine Fighter Jet" video.

  1.  @colinsanders9397  Fails every test? 17 to 1 and 20 to 1 kill ratios at Red Flag. That thing is a killer.
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  2. But the B-52 doesn't do today what it was designed to do. It was a strategic bomber that nowadays has been doing Close Air Support, and it can drop long range air launched cruise missiles. So the concept that it was designed to do one thing well doesn't mean much when it's been upgraded for its modern role.
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  3.  @scrubsrc4084  It didn't lose to the A-10 in combat, that was a flyoff competition.
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  4.  @chrisbingley  The vectorable thrust usage in combat, or VIFF'ing, is somewhat of a last resort maneuver. If you use it, you lose a ton of energy. Fix what wasn't broken? The Harrier was simply not capable enough. It's a good low level strike and close air support aircraft, but it needed to be replaced.
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  5.  @KT-pv3kl  The fact that it can see without being seen. What good is fitting an A2A missile on an aircraft, if it will be a burning wreck on the ground before it knows there's a F-35 in the area?
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  6.  @Uryendel  The F-35 doesn't struggle with the F-16. It eats them for breakfast. 17:1 in Red Flag a few years ago, 20:1 the following year. The avionics are better than the F-22. The F-22 flies with 1990s tech. The F-22 vs Rafale story is not that simple. The Rafale was forced to go near stall speed to keep up with the F-22, and even then it had trouble locking it up. WW2 aircraft and radars are not built to the same standards. This argument is beyond insane. The F-35 is stealthier than the F-117. Which is not a WW2 aircraft.
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  7.  @stephennelson4954  That's not true. Most of the Phantom kills were delivered by missile. The USAF scored 89 kills by missile and only 6 with gunpod and 5 with internal gun. The Navy scored 40 kills with missile, they didn't use guns.
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  8.  @Marinealver  The gun wasn't needed for the F-4. That was a "hardware solution to a software problem". Brute forcing a gun to the F-4E actually hindered performance as it required the use of a smaller radar and the added weight up front negatively affected flight performance.
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  9. The Harrier can't deal with the 21st century. Even against the Iraqi military in 1991 it suffered a few losses that show it's not survivable in the modern world.
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  10.  @ailius1520  Please stop believing MSM misinformation. The F-35 is actually a very affordable fighter. It didn't "lose" a dogfight. It was a control laws software test. The F-16 is not a specialized dogfighter since the 80s. It's a generalist multirole. The F-35 is not 10x more expensive. A modern Block 70/72 F-16, with spare engine and pods is around 120-140 million dollars which puts it in the same price range of a serviced F-35. "At those numbers the best the F35 is ever going to do is fire all its missiles, run home, and die on the runway." - That's actually wrong. At Red Flag the F-35 scores 17:1 and 20:1 kill ratios. "So the F35 would get overwhelmed by a large number of cheap aircraft" - But again, the cheaper the aircraft the less capable it is. And the F-35 is more capable than aircraft as expensive.
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  11.  @Kandralla  I love reading the ignorance that comes from people who have no idea how anything works. Case in point, the sole reason the F-15EX exists is because the US government needed to keep the St. Louis plant open or else the lack of fighter orders would force Boeing to shut down. Nothing else.
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  12. "cannot combat enemy aircraft as well as the f22" - Because the F-22 is the air superiority fighter. Just like the Su-27 has the smaller MiG-29 as companion, the F-15 has the F-16 and the F-22 has the F-35. "isn't too good at much because it tries to do everything" - I question that guy's experience. How is he in the defense industry and not realize that for the past 40 years multirole aircraft have ruled the skies, and role specific aircraft are in decline?
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  13. Not really. The F-15EX is simply a corporate welfare gift so that the Boeing St. Louis plant can stay open.
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  14. The F-22 was cancelled because of people like Secretary Gates, Rumsfeld and McCain. It was an absolute travesty.
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  15.  @mack-ut4ft  The aircraft wasn't, but the project was. It was supposed to have been a 700 aircraft production run. The USAF begged for 300-something. In the end only around 180 were built when the program was shut down.
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  16.  @Sorain1  The F-14 was in service with the Hornet, then the Hornet was in service with the Super Hornet, and now the F-35C will be in service with the Super Hornet until it gets replaced by the F/A-XX or the navalized NGAD. There's nothing specific about the Hornet or Super Hornet either, they're both multiroles.
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  17. Nobody is making them anymore.
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  18. Exactly. Gen. Brown had to come out and state that the F-35 is the backbone of American air power.
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  19.  @citizen_or_civilian  You're replying to the wrong person but the F-16 was the "lawn dart". The Harrier might have got it due to the high number of crashes in the first years but the F-16 had enough of a bad reputation that a movie was made about the wife of a pilot who got killed. Afterburn, with Laura Dern.
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  20. It was kind of the other way around. Lockheed was not delivering results so the military intervened. The project got back on its rails once the threat of cancelled orders made Lockheed clean up their act. Multiroles rule the skies.
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  21. I don't see why. What's the purpose of calling your friends if you can deliver sucker punches out of nowhere?
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  22. That's just a souped up Harrier. Would not be relevant for the 21st century.
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  23. Is this a joke? The .280 British was an anemic cartridge. The 6.8 is a screamer. The recoil is stout and the case is 51mm sort of like the 7.62 NATO round. It's made to bust plates.
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  24. That's not true. Many single role aircraft have been splashed by multiroles.
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  25. The Bradley is great. In 73 Easting two lowly Bradleys came across thirteen T-72s with defensive position advantage. Thinly armored and lightly armed, caught by surprise, the two Bradleys destroyed 5 T-72s on their own before help arrived. Name a IFV that was expected to face such odds and destroy so many main battle tanks.
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  26. Okay. So instead of sending an expensive jet, you send another expensive jet in its place that can be detected much sooner. You're going to have to explain how a burning 100 million dollar wreck is cheaper than just letting the F-35 do its mission.
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  27. They literally made the FC-31 which is extremely similar to the F-35. The difference is that they use two smaller engines because they can't make a single engine as powerful as the Pratt & Whitney F-135.
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  28. The F-35A and B structure is not reinforced for arrested recovery carrier landings so they're unaffected by the C variant.
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  29. Sub-80 million flyaway cost. Around 110 million for the B or C variants, give or take. That's 4th gen price, but 5th gen performance. The Swiss recently evaluated their options and figured the F-35 was cheaper in the long run.
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  30. Harriers are Cold War relics. Not survivable in the modern day.
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  31.  @chrisbingley  In the Falklands conflict the Sea Harrier was used for carrier defense. The RAF Harriers were not. The AV8B in US service is more in like with the RAF Harriers than the Sea Harrier, as the Sea Harrier had the radar. The AV8B has an electro-optic system and forward looking infrared device in the nose rather than radar.
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  32.  @BATOGames  Not really. The F-22 is still flying with 1990s tech.
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  33.  @Uryendel  How is it an excuse? An aircraft had to essentially give up its energy and become a sitting duck to get the F-22 in its sights, and if you look at the video the F-22 still manages to evade. Cost 3 times more? Look up prices. "on ww2 radar technology," - What's your obsession with WW2 radar? It can't guide weapons. Great. You have a radar that shows you incoming F-35s and there's nothing you can do about it except watch. You also forget that WW2 radars are larger, less mobile, and everyone knows where they are. So they'll be the first things being hit. Remember Desert Storm? Radars and control centers are the first things hit, then once defenses are blind the onslaught begins. "the design of the F35 only help against one type of radar" - The type of radar that's actually useful to guide weapons.
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  34. Not really, it's just that Arizona state representatives have a stake in keeping it in service. The A-10s only did 20% of CAS from the early 2000s onward, only 11% of CAS since the mid-2010s. The F-16 was doing 33% of CAS.
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  35. The picture mostly shows surface damage. What it doesn't show is the 6 A-10s that were lost in 1991 and F-16s had to go in their place. Those didn't get shot up.
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  36.  @nattygsbord  The Gripen is Saab's own little marketing scam. The Brazilians are paying more per Gripen than the cost of a F-35. Wing loading is misleading, because the F-35's body is a wing. The F-35 has an excellent thrust to weight ratio. The issue is that it carries a lot of fuel. So a 50% full tank means the F-35 is being compared to aircraft that should be carrying fuel bags. The Gripen has shorter range and less capabilities. A naval Rafale first tranche costs over 200 million per aircraft, with following tranches being 150 million.
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  37.  @raymondjames57  Meanwhile in 1991 Gen. Chuck Horner had to pull them back away from the Iraqi National Guard because as it turns out if a trained and equipped force sees A-10s coming, they splash them out of the sky.
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  38.  @raymondjames57  Not really. The first hot war the A-10 faced, it was humiliated by Saddam's finest and had to spent the rest of the conflict strafing the poorly trained and equipped Iraq Army units (which had been decimated during the Iraq-Iran war). So no, not "literally everything" can have that statement applied to considering that the F-16 was sent in the A-10s place to deliver cans of whoop-ass.
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  39.  @raymondjames57  What do you mean playing stupid? You expect to always face illiterate peasants?
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  40. The person who wrote Pentagon Wars is a madman who thinks everyone is an idiot but him. The film is largely based on his biased account and it's just that - comedy. In fact the Bradley is an amazing vehicle and Burton's ideas were flawed.
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  41. There's no such thing as taking a beating when a single missile can slice aircraft in half.
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  42.  @sithticklefingers7255  Name the last gun kill on another aircraft that wasn't a helicopter. And date.
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  43.  @jimtaylor294  Vietnam proved the opposite. The "Last Gunfighter", the F-8 Crusader, scored 19 kills and only 4 with gun. The Phantom scored over a hundred missile kills in both USAF and USN service and almost no gun kills. Only a handfull.
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  44.  @jimtaylor294  Many flight leaders prohibited their Phantom pilots in the squadron from fitting gunpods. They didn't have lead computing gunsights and pilots were not trained in aerial gunnery anyway. "as real air combat rarely if ever plays out how theorists - that seldom have any actual hands on experiance of the topic" - As opposed to real pilots, who haven't scored gun kills on jet aircraft in decades. Most pilots in active duty these days were probably not even born when the last jet vs jet gun kill happened.
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  45. A Reaper drone is extremely incapable in payload and flight performance. Mobile anti-air needs aerial cover to survive. Look at Serbia. Their air defense brigades performed very well for a country their size. But what happens when you have no fighter cover? Enemy aircraft simply avoid, jam and suppress anti-air, and go for power plants, factories, rails and bridges. What good is anti-air when your country is brought back to the stone age? The US shown the world in 1991 and in 1999 that without air power, ground defenses are sitting ducks. Nobody does long range bombing? Someone please tell the Americans. The B-1Bs launched standoff weapons at the facilities in Syria. Difficult to shoot down a missile? Well, there's a reason everyone is investing on anti-missile and anti-drone tech.
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  46.  @ressljs  For the record the X-35 was slimmer and STOVL capable. The F-35 is wider due to volume for avionics and more importantly fuel and weapons carrying capacity. The F-35 looking stubby is due to the natural evolution of the project, not STOVL requirements. Regarding speed, many aircraft have legendary top speeds only reached at specific altitudes, without much fuel and absolutely no weapons. So those aircraft never reached their top speeds in combat. When the rubber meets the road, pilots say that a F-16 has to punch in afterburner to keep up with a F-35 in dry thrust. Not bad for a stubby aircraft. Regarding the concurrency, that's actually an advantage. Remember the F-15? The USAF received hundreds of A variant F-15s. After just 5 years of service, the USAF sent those to the Air National Guard as they started taking in F-15C deliveries. This was a common occurrence. Aircraft manufacturers "finished" an aircraft, sold that early variant, then only really "completed" the design with a more modern variant. That's needlessly expensive. Meanwhile a hundred F-35s Block II have been converted to Block III. Aircraft that would have to be retired, sent to the national guard or sold to allied countries for a discount could be reused to become more advanced. It looks an expensive way of doing business, as long as you ignore that in the good old days the US taxpayer paid for hundreds of aircraft that would only serve for 5 years in the USAF.
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  47.  @Marinealver  The F-22 is the twin-engine air superiority fighter like the F-15. It needs a smaller single engine companion, like the F-16 is.
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  48.  @colinsanders9397  "The F-35 consistently loses in dogfight exercises unless other aircraft follow a script" - False. You're repeating a lie by David Axe. A smear merchant.
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  49.  @jackaubrey8614  "If you don't have F22's (and only USAF has) then that leaves the whole usage of the F35 in doubt" - Not true. The F-35 is a killer by itself. "Air-to-air F35 armament is limited" - 4 AMRAAMs per plane is enough, the Sidekick mod will give the A and C variants 6 AMRAAMs. "I'm in no way convinced that fitted to F35 will ever be as truly effective as its developers would like us all to think" - It's already been used. Red Flag exercises show that it's unparalleled in its abilities to see and not be seen.
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  50. The warthog was meant to be retired in 1992-1993. It's literally only in service because of Arizona representatives having a stake in its prolonged afterlife.
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  51.  @mytruthslays1303  "The plane and the price COULD be improved" - It's already cheap. 79 million flyaway cost for the A variant. The less capable and less survivable F-15EX is at least 85 million flyaway. When the EW and pods are added to the package it easily adds up to the same cost as F-35A plus spares and service. The fact that it could be cheaper is encouraging, because it should be, but if Lockheed Martin is selling 5th gen for 4th gen prices why would they focus on that right now? They're selling a killer and charging less than Boeing, Dassault and Saab. It's insane.
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  52.  @nattygsbord  It's actually pretty cheap.
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  53. NASA famously dragged their feet on the SLS launcher for years and SpaceX beat them to the punch.
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  54. Not true. The F-22 is a twin engine air superiority fighter, like the F-15. The F-35 is a single engine multirole fighter, like the F-16. The F-35 doesn't replace the F-22. The NGAD will. The A-10 has already been replaced. The F-16 and Strike Eagle got its job.
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  55.  @The_Crimson_Fucker  "It makes some sense to have greater expectations for a substantially more expensive aircraft built 50 years later." - What does that even mean? VTOL is for air shows. There's no reasonable expectation for an operational aircraft carrying full fuel and weapons load to take off vertically when a rolling take off is extremely short. "it is not as stealthy as older stealth aircraft" - There's literally no proof of this. In fact the military suggests it's better. "there are weapons that older generation stealth aircraft can carry internally that F-35 can't" - The next generation AGM-88 anti radiation missile will be designed to fit the F-35 bay. Older weapons get upgrades. That's how it works. "given the engine it has it could stand to be markedly more maneuverable" - It's very maneuverable. Long gone are the days of restricted software. "this will be at least the 3rd time someone thought to trade maneuverability for BVR capabilities, and the last 2 times ended badly" - Not true. "There's no particularly strong reason why the targeting features need to be exclusive to the F-35" - Giving those targeting features to other aircraft is a waste. You need a stealth design to make use of them. It's a game of seeing without being seen. "it sure costs as much as great" - Apart from the F-22 it's a menace in the air. Rookie F-35 pilots wipe the floor with experienced 4th gen pilots. And it costs the same as 4th gen aircraft.
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  56. There's dozens of US and foreign pilots who disagree.
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  57.  @jimtaylor294  He is. There's way more pilots that say it's one of the best performers they ever flew.
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