Comments by "Evan" (@MrEvanfriend) on "UK vs China: Aircraft carrier comparison" video.

  1. BVR combat doesn't matter, because rules of engagement almost never allow it. The F-35 is completely worthless for basically any mission, especially air to air. It's a program that should have been cancelled years ago, a complete lemon.
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  2. Mickey G Yeah, but it's worse than all of those except for the Harrier, which also sucks. The problem is that it was designed for three entirely different sets of requirements, including the Marine Corps' obsession with STOVL (I'm a former Marine and I love the Corps, but infantry-centric branches shouldn't get a say in designing fighters). You throw too many requirements into one airframe, and you get an overengineered piece of crap that does nothing well.
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  3. There's been almost no air-to-air combat over the past 30 years, the US has had a total of ONE air-to-air engagement in the 21st century (a USN Super Hornet shot down a Syrian SU-22 or SU-24 or something, I don't know what weapon it used or what the range was). With external payload, the F-35 loses its entire purpose, which is to be hard to detect on radar. This is a plane that can't run and can't turn, if it can be seen, it's completely useless. That being said, it has an abysmal sortie rate, all manner of maintenance issues, limited all-weather capability - it's generally a bad aircraft. The F-35 is at best an overambitious technology demonstrator in a mediocre airframe, at worst it's completely and utterly useless. It's time to cancel the F-35 project in its entirety, sell off existing aircraft to the British or whoever else will have them, and work on new designs for the Navy and Air Force, and let the Marine Corps buy whichever of those they think suit their needs. And a fighter/close air support (that's another thing to talk about, by the way) aircraft without an internal gun on two of the three versions? Have they learned no lessons from the past?
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  4. Mickey G Saying it can't run or turn is quoting a pilot who flew in a mock dogfight against an F-16. Even Lockheed Martin just made the excuse that it wasn't meant to dogfight. The airframes are slightly different, but the ridiculous STOVL crap in the B version affected the design of the other two versions as well. Oh, and that gun pod? It's by no means conformal, and only holds like 125 rounds. So basically, it's worse than useless. Face it, the F-35 is a bad design, it tries to do too much and does nothing well. We should cut our losses and start back at square one with different designs for the Navy and Air Force so each service gets something useful.
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  5. Cyrus Gideon That's assuming that that one F-35 is carrying at least five AAMs, which is not the standard loadout, and that all the missiles hit, which is by no means certain.
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  6. The PAK-FA/Su-57 is unlikely to be anything close to a match for the F-22. Basically, if you believe half of what the Russians say about it (and you certainly can't believe any more than that), it does nothing as well as an F-22 does, and a lot of things a lot worse. Russian claims about their military equipment tend to be ridiculously inflated (they claim that their navy can take on US carriers, among other utterly unbelievable nonsense), and the Indians were apparently pissed that the prototypes didn't perform half as well as advertised.
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  7. Antony Borlase I have no idea what that means
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