Forum: General F-22A Raptor forum

Another thing I'm curious about is how much untapped potential does the F-35A and its various systems and subsystems have. If they have tons of it, then maybe there

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discofishing wrote:

QUIT FEEDING THE TROLL YOU GOOBERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! JUST IGNORE HIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How many times have we gone through this!?!?!

tacf-x wrote:

I'm with discofishing. Stop feeding the troll.

southernphantom wrote:

Oh, do shut up. I suggest we ignore this guy.

Correct. Ignore trolls and report them to the moderators.
If he is indeed considered to be a (fubar) troll, he will be banned. And that is what just happened to Craptorfan. EOM

Thanks Lieven Not Worthy

Deleted

I would caution people in thinking that the USAF buying the F-22 tooling has anything to do with a production restart. Owning the F-22 tooling can be greatly beneficial for the Air Force, particularly with respect to depot maintenance operations.

Bar the onset of World War 3, I don’t see an F-22 production restart ever coming about.

[quote="craptorfan"]

Quote:

There is a reason why spending disasters like the Craptor haven't happened in Australia, Canada, France and Germany. The people are a lot smarter.
The Russians have requested a fly-off / dogfight between the Craptor and the Su-35. The Americans have refused. I wonder why.

"craptorfan" may be a bit outlandish but he does raise a few good points.
He is wrong in the first instance. Australia - we decided to build the ultimate 6 Conventional Subs. It seems they are brilliant when they are operational but gradually the truth gets out. We are lucky to have 1or2 of them operational at any time. That is not a good sub to own. That's the point he is trying to make about the Raptor. What is the real cost of keeping it operational and could it be forward based. More truth coming out about the sub now we are talking about its replacement. Our Eurocoptors also having problems. Hopefully they can be solved.
e.g. The original Chinooks - I thought they were great until one day I ran into the crew of one staying at a Hotel in the country. They were forced to put down nearby in a paddock. The local Enzed contractor was fixing it. [Our military had a contract with Enzed so they did not have to send a maintenance crew with them all the time]. Just another oil leak one of the crew said - we are lucky to go 600km without a problem with the hydraulics - they are useless. The public were told they were great. A few years later the truth - we traded 40 for 16 rebuilt ones with completely new simpler hydraulics. The old ones were obviously were useless.
He has a good point on the fly-off. Russians have often put that challenge up since the 1990's. No takers yet.

discofishing wrote:

Another thing I'm curious about is how much untapped potential does the F-35A and its various systems and subsystems have. If they have tons of it, then maybe there

There is no doubt the F35 has much untapped potential and good basic concepts. The big question is when will it be mature and can it be made effective and improved or modified in the present compromised 3 in one Airframe. No room for anything bigger or heavier anywhere. It all has to wait until something smaller and better can be made. On its limits or beyond its limits weight wise now - normally aircraft that grow have room to grow.
Is it one giant step forward or a step backwards or sideways. The F16 did grow gradually but it had nothing fortunately that needed major fixes and was not designed for stealth.

That is a point the much maligned Kopp makes all the time. The essential thing any new aircraft needs is the room to grow and develop and mature. There has never been a new Plane developed that did not grow in weight as it grew in potential or needed fixes. Also there has never been a plane that did not need fixes.

One of the Russian top designers said that - any plane that is more than 70% new will have lots of problems you may never solve without starting again.
Thats one good thing the Russians had forced on t hem by a lack of money for 20 years. Time to think and consider - not react in haste.

rkap wrote:

He has a good point on the fly-off. Russians have often put that challenge up since the 1990's. No takers yet.

Only if by "good point" you mean "good zinger sound bite, as long as nobody thinks about it for more than a couple seconds." It's a no-brainer Russia's going to offer a fly-off challenge against the F-22, because it's a no-brainer the US won't accept.

First, what does the US have to gain by that? We're not selling the F-22 to anyone else, so showing a single F-22 beating ten Su-35 or PAK-FA gains the US not one penny in foreign sales. (Plus, history shows that the F-22 can win 100:1, and the one that the media will concentrate on is the one time a Sukhoi got a Raptor in its gun camera for a split second while completely violating the ROEs or exploiting an artificiality of the exercise, like hiding among "killed" planes waiting to respawn.) Second, why would we hand Russia a gold-plated intelligence-gathering opportunity like that? Why would we stick some F-22s directly in front of the radars and IRST of Su-35s at known (very close) ranges at known times, where even a target with the RCS of an F-22 can be detected and its RCS and IR signatures can be mapped spherically? And where their combat tactics against Su-35s can be displayed in detail? Where Russia can rig up extra detectors for an extended period of time, with Raptors in known locations, and maybe figure out some signature of the LPI radar or data links? Even if Russia "loses" the fly-off, Russia wins. (The US has no comparable gain. We have multiple friendlies flying the Su-30MK series and we've flown against them in exercises. The US itself bought two Su-27s, and there are even two Su-27s under private ownership in the US. We already know nearly everything about the Su-27 family. We'd gain trivial details of the latest Su-35's avionics, at best.) Third, even if we did accept the basic challenge, to avoid at least some of point two, we would still keep the F-22 in airshow rather than combat trim. Look at the real-world intercepts the F-22 has done against Russian aircraft: it always carries external tanks and/or a Luneberg lens radar reflector to hide what its real RCS is. And I'd bet dollars to donuts it operates its radar in a non-LPI mode. We don't want anyone to know what the F-22 would actually be like in a real fight. We'd be flying a hobbled F-22 using hobbled tactics (likely limited to only the capabilities already demonstrated in airshows), against Russian planes going all-out to beat it. Take away the F-22's stealth, supercruise, tactics, element of surprise, etc., and maybe a Sukhoi could beat it some of the time, even if in a real conflict the Raptor would beat them 10:1 or 20:1 or 100:1.

The F-22's real tactics wouldn't even be a fly-off. They'd be flying miles higher than the Sukhois and a full Mach number faster, shooting from BVR ranges without warning, and then staying out of the Sukhoi's radar and IRST detection range. The Sukhois would have to use afterburner and cut their fuel supply to just a few minutes at best just to keep up with a supercruising Raptor, much less close the range with it (assuming they even knew where the Raptors were well enough to fly in a direction that would actually result in closing the range). The only way a fly-off challenge would make any sense at all to the US right now would be if Russia simply sold (or loaned) the US some production Su-35s, and trained our aggressor pilots with their own squadrons to fly them exactly to Russian standards. Then we could thoroughly sanitize our Su-35s to remove any espionage equipment added to them, and do the fly-off on our own territory, under our own control, without risking classified information. (Possibly with Russian observers present but kept away from any classified info.) It would be ridiculous for the Russians to agree to terms like that though. And with only three PAK-FA prototypes, still undergoing basic testing, there's nothing to fly against there. Maybe when the PAK-FA is actually in service we'd have some actual reason to do a fly-off of F-22s against Sukhois. Of course, with India flying a variant of the PAK-FA, we'd gain just about as much for far less risk flying against them instead of Russia anyway.

river_otter wrote:

rkap wrote:

He has a good point on the fly-off. Russians have often put that challenge up since the 1990's. No takers yet.

Only if by "good point" you mean "good zinger sound bite, as long as nobody thinks about it for more than a couple seconds." It's a no-brainer Russia's going to offer a fly-off challenge against the F-22, because it's a no-brainer the US won't accept.

First, what does the US have to gain by that? We're not selling the F-22 to anyone else, so showing a single F-22 beating ten Su-35 or PAK-FA gains the US not one penny in foreign sales. (Plus, history shows that the F-22 can win 100:1, and the one that the media will concentrate on is the one time a Sukhoi got a Raptor in its gun camera for a split second while completely violating the ROEs or exploiting an artificiality of the exercise, like hiding among "killed" planes waiting to respawn.) Second, why would we hand Russia a gold-plated intelligence-gathering opportunity like that? Why would we stick some F-22s directly in front of the radars and IRST of Su-35s at known (very close) ranges at known times, where even a target with the RCS of an F-22 can be detected and its RCS and IR signatures can be mapped spherically? And where their combat tactics against Su-35s can be displayed in detail? Where Russia can rig up extra detectors for an extended period of time, with Raptors in known locations, and maybe figure out some signature of the LPI radar or data links? Even if Russia "loses" the fly-off, Russia wins. (The US has no comparable gain. We have multiple friendlies flying the Su-30MK series and we've flown against them in exercises. The US itself bought two Su-27s, and there are even two Su-27s under private ownership in the US. We already know nearly everything about the Su-27 family. We'd gain trivial details of the latest Su-35's avionics, at best.) Third, even if we did accept the basic challenge, to avoid at least some of point two, we would still keep the F-22 in airshow rather than combat trim. Look at the real-world intercepts the F-22 has done against Russian aircraft: it always carries external tanks and/or a Luneberg lens radar reflector to hide what its real RCS is. And I'd bet dollars to donuts it operates its radar in a non-LPI mode. We don't want anyone to know what the F-22 would actually be like in a real fight. We'd be flying a hobbled F-22 using hobbled tactics (likely limited to only the capabilities already demonstrated in airshows), against Russian planes going all-out to beat it. Take away the F-22's stealth, supercruise, tactics, element of surprise, etc., and maybe a Sukhoi could beat it some of the time, even if in a real conflict the Raptor would beat them 10:1 or 20:1 or 100:1.

The F-22's real tactics wouldn't even be a fly-off. They'd be flying miles higher than the Sukhois and a full Mach number faster, shooting from BVR ranges without warning, and then staying out of the Sukhoi's radar and IRST detection range. The Sukhois would have to use afterburner and cut their fuel supply to just a few minutes at best just to keep up with a supercruising Raptor, much less close the range with it (assuming they even knew where the Raptors were well enough to fly in a direction that would actually result in closing the range). The only way a fly-off challenge would make any sense at all to the US right now would be if Russia simply sold (or loaned) the US some production Su-35s, and trained our aggressor pilots with their own squadrons to fly them exactly to Russian standards. Then we could thoroughly sanitize our Su-35s to remove any espionage equipment added to them, and do the fly-off on our own territory, under our own control, without risking classified information. (Possibly with Russian observers present but kept away from any classified info.) It would be ridiculous for the Russians to agree to terms like that though. And with only three PAK-FA prototypes, still undergoing basic testing, there's nothing to fly against there. Maybe when the PAK-FA is actually in service we'd have some actual reason to do a fly-off of F-22s against Sukhois. Of course, with India flying a variant of the PAK-FA, we'd gain just about as much for far less risk flying against them instead of Russia anyway.

What's amazing to me, is that the considerations that you mentioned, didn't occur to the folks, wondering why the US wouldn't agree too a fly off. It's a no brainer, that we're not going to give away sensitive information, under such ridiculous scenarios.

Forum: General F-22A Raptor forum

F-22 Line can be restarted for $200M?