Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Sandboxx"
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@WembysTRexArms There is a 360° passive RF sensor network fused with the 360° IR DAS, so it does have a level of surround situational awareness that doesn't exist on other fighters.
The RAM is not compromised from flying within its performance regime, including supersonic. There were 2 of the 6 original developmental F-35s, 1 F-35B and 1 F-35C that exhibited some slightly higher temps in the h-stabs that concerned engineers because of embedded antennae in those structures.
They tried duplicating the problem on the other birds with extended supersonic runs, dives, and maximum Mach value between 2 tankers up and down the East coast, and never saw those temps in those structures again.
The production F-35s after that didn't even use the same materials in the rear tailplanes, so the whole thing was a fluke. That was over 10 years ago, never duplicated.
The F-35 series doesn't rely on RAM paint like other VLO designs. The paint is mostly IR spectrum camouflage. The physical structure of the 3-later skin has carbon nanotubes with wide spectrum RF energy defeating characteristics.
The common maintenance access points have seam covers that don't require removal of and reapplication of RAM paint or treatments.
There are periodic inspection and mx points like around the wingtip nav lights that have RAM tape covering them that does need to be scraped and reapplied, but they aren't day-to-day squadron-level operations.
As a result, F-35A has less than half the mx hours of a stripped, new F-16. It's just a vastly-superior aircraft from a mx perspective, and former F-16 wrenchers have said as much repeatedly.
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@WembysTRexArms Hardened shelters you mean. Only a few get in, while they deal with incoming headed their way too, and every Chicom-flagged coffin floating in the South China Sea starts eating stealth anti-ship missiles and submarine-launched weapons. Meanwhile, USMC and US Navy start casting their votes, outside of Chicom missile ranges as well, while the anti-satellite program uncorks.
Any oil tanker headed to China gets orders to go ahead and hold up just a bit, or find another port to dock in away from the conflict zone. Remember that 85% of China's energy comes from the Persian Gulf.
China is watching how a bare bones army in Ukraine with none of the real high-capability US systems is keeping Russia at bay in the land, air, and sea.
Now imagine Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, who have been building their defenses for the last 70 years, combined with US and Australia.
The last thing China can afford is launching missiles at US bases in the Pacific. It would see such a dramatic loss in their combat power overnight, and cause massive humiliation for Xi and the CCP.
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Anyone who refers to the Century Series as a model to emulate now, clearly has no freaking clue what the Century Series was. Each design never really reached its intended potential, and several of them served their ultimate purpose as QF-1xx target drones for AIM-120s.
F-101A was meant to be a Strategic Air Command supersonic escort fighter. Due to transcontinental capability of bombers, that was ill-conceived, so they made the F-101B interceptor variant, and RF-101B tactical recon variant.
F-102 was meant to be a higher supersonic interceptor. Couldn't reach much more than Mach 1.2 clean, was put into Air National Guard service quickly.
F-104 was never asked for by USAF, and instead served as an interceptor or multirole fighter among NATO partners. USAF literally had no use for it outside of flight sciences and NASA test bed work at Edwards AFB.
F-105 was meant to be a supersonic tactical nuclear strike fighter. Early variants were structurally unsound, broke apart in-air, so it had to be upgraded and was most produced in the F-105D model. This was probably the most successful of the century series, but it had all sorts of problems, was shot down in Vietnam repeatedly, until being replaced largely by the F-4 and F-111.
F-106 was what the F-102 was meant to be, but was limited to Air Defense Command as a Mach 2 interceptor. This video incorrectly showed a Mirage in place of the F-106.
The real success story of that era around the Century Series was the F-4 Phantom II, which wasn't a Century series at all, but initially a US Navy fleet defense interceptor.
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@xyzaero Demonstrating carriage and separation does not equal multirole. You have to work out the systems, implement the profiles into weapons manuals, and train on those in order to be truly multirole.
Grey Eagles and F-14A never had that. F-14A didn't even have the AIM-54A working throughout the 1970s, and was hit & miss in the early-to-mid 1980s until the bugs were ironed out and the -54C finally got into the fleet.
There's only so much money for things. With F-14A, they burned $369m on the F401 engines in the 1970s, which were never produced. That was supposed to be the production motor for the F-14B, with only a handful of initial F-14A LRIP birds as stop gaps.
After that fiasco, Tomcat money was allocated to developing the TF30-P-412A into the P-414A. They were hurting on RWR and other systems money and didn't get ALR-67 until much later, and were stuck with an old analog AWG-9 Radar that couldn't look-down/shoot-down over land.
Same with AIM-7F integration from AIM-7E2, then AIM-7M and AIM-9L. These aren't plug-and-play, but require a lot of testing and systems integration, live fire weapons testing on TGT drones, and weapons manual additions, as well as weapons school syllabus updates.
With F-15, the money went for Radar upgrades when we did Programmable Digital Signals Processor that went into F-15C, plus its EW systems were sucking up funds to get that side working better.
We also had problems with the F100-PW-100 motors. Nozzle sections ripped off at high supersonic speeds, and it suffered compressor stalls, AB unstarts, and blades letting go.
All the money going into F-14A and F-15A-D upgrades was focused on propulsion, A2A Radar, A2A weapons, and EW equipment. None of it was going towards A2G.
The only funded additional role for Tomcats was for select F-14As to become TARPS birds as we retired the RA-5C Vigilante.
The multirole F-15E was and is treated as a separate program, though we did have both F-15C/Ds and F-15Es on the CTF at Edwards. There was cross-pollination in A2A modes between APG-63, APG-70, and APG-71, but Grey Eagles never got any of the A2G capes from the APG-70 because it wasn't part of Grey Eagle community mission set allocation or training.
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