Forum: F-22A Raptor

This thread is so full of inaccuracies and misconceptions it'll take two days to address them all. But basically there are the summary...

(1) The information posted on the F-35 in the initial post is completely obsolete and pertains to the the X-35 with which the F-35 shares not a single component or structure. The F-35 will also not be powered by the ad-hoc F119-PW-611 engine or be armed with a 27mm BK27 derivative gun.

(2) The "real" F-35 will be an 12~13 ton jet powered by a 43,000 lbs thrust F135-PW-100/400/600 engine with 28,000 lbs of dry thrust. The stated performance is a minimum strike radius (lo-lo-lo) of >1,100km with maximum internal loads. Maximum level speed at high altitude will be >Mach 1.6 and its frontal hemisphere RCS is estimated to be ~ 0.0014 sq-m. The F-35 will use the 25mm GAU-12/U 4-barrel gatling cannon which was selected against the advanced 27mm Mauser derivative. The reason being that the 25mm gun has better weight of fire (projectile weight x firing rate) and equally flat trajectory.

(3) There is a big misconception that the F-35 is somehow inadequate as an A2A platform or that it is somehow behind the F-18 E/F or Eurocanards or 4th generation Russia types. The fact is that the physical performance of the F-35 when carrying the typical combat loads is similar these 4th generation aircrafts, while range and endurance is significantly superior. Low speed agility such as extreme AoA maneuverability may be inferior, but high speed maneuverability will not be because extreme alphas will not be attainable by any fighter at higher speeds due to G-loading limits.

(4) In terms of sensor sophistication, integration and comprehensiveness the F-35 is without equal. It is in fact superior to the F-22 in this respect. Radar range will be second to none except the F-22 and only when the F-22 receives the updated AN/APG-77(v)1 radar which uses about 3,200 APG-81 derived T/R elements -- roughly twice as many as the 1600 elements employed in the F-35's AN/APG-81.

(5) In terms of detectability, the F-35 will overall be slightly worse than the F-22, and probably more so from the rear than from the forward sector. But this is not expected to make a significant difference it is ability to totally dominate opponents through its stealthiness. The F-22's RCS is estimated at ~0.0005sq-m whereas the F-35's is estimated at 0.0014 sq-m. By the logarithmic power rule, a radar that detects an F-16 at 200km will detect an F-35 at 25 km (~1/8th) and an F-22 at 20.8km. That for all intents and purposes is good enough.

(6) Compared to the F-16 or F-18 the F-35 is estimated to be 4 times more effective as an air to air platform and 8 times better as a deep striker. The F-35 is in every way and for every mission or role significantly superior to the F-18E/F. The reason it is not replacing the F-18E/F is because the F-18E/F is a relatively new jet which is not due for replacement yet, whereas the F-18C/Ds will be reaching the end of their economic lifespan when the F-35 enters service. Compared to the Super Hornet, the F-35 is about 1 ton (7.2%) lighter while having essentially equivalent dry or wet thrust. Despite its lighter weight, it will carry 27% more internal fuel and can store up to 5700 lbs of weapons internally. Structurally this makes it the most mass efficient fighter ever.

(7) Compared to the F-22 the F-35 is designed to accomplish EVERY mission the F-22 is designed to accomplish with clear superiority over all current and anticipated opponents on all missions and roles. The degree of superiority in A2A missions may be somewhat behind the F-22 but nonetheless sufficient to ensure that even the best 4th generation fighters will experience a loss ratio several times that of the F-35 when pitted against it. When pitted against the best 4th generation fighters the USA currently has to offer, the F-22 is currently expected to experience a loss ratio in excess of 150:1. Even if the F-35 is only 50:1 that is more than good enough.

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Forum Veteran Joined: Apr 16, 2005 - 03:16 PM Posts: 800

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ALSO

F-22 cost 120 million according to Wiki ( i feel its more )
F-35a costs roughly 45 million. Thats almost 3 F-35a for 1 f-22.

With these figures it's obvious that the F-35 is more cost effective that the F-22. However, that doesn't take into account the R&D cost of the F-35, as well as the production numbers.

If the F-35 money had all been diverted to building more raptors, the price of the raptor would have continued to go down. The Air Force will ANYWAYS buy 183 aircraft so what really makes sense is to compare the cost of buying more raptors AFTER THE 183rd instead of developing and producing a new fighter.

Right now the F-22 costs around 120 million, and its price is expected to go down to about 100 million relatively quickly - for the 250th aircraft produced or something like that -.

On top of that the price of the F-35 is likely to be WAY MORE than expected because of lower production and higher than expected R&D cost.

To sum it up, if all the money of the F-35 had been used on buying more raptors, the cost difference would have been much norrower, something like 90 million for one raptor compared to 60-70 million for one F-35. That's the same comparision basically as an F-15E compared to an F-16C ( around 50 million vs 30-35 ). The F-16C is nowhere near 3 times cheaper than the F-15E.

Concerning operation costs, the F-35 is likely cost less than the F-22, but certainly not 3 times cheaper.

A ratio of 1 to 1.5 would have been closer to reality probably. And that doesn't take into account the higher speed of the F-22 - meaning more sorties -, its better stealth, a/a capabilities, survivability in general..

And what's even worse is that even with the F-35 the Air Force won't even have enough aircraft, so they will have to upgrade the F-15s/16s/A10s anyways, which will of course require significant resources.

I was also surprised to read that the A-10 upgrade will be very expensive, something like 10 million per aircraft, and with no engine upgrade. Why don't they replace the A-10s first to avoid that upgrade? I don't get it..

Bear in mind that the raptor is going to serve as the USAF frontline fighter for the next several decades.. it has to be superior to today's threats but also those that will be emerging in the future. can the US afford to buy only 183 of them?

The F-15/F-16/A-10 upgrades are already taking place and have been for awhile now...Check

Forum Veteran Joined: Apr 16, 2005 - 03:16 PM Posts: 800

The F-15Cs were not expected to be upgraded with the new radar etc.. ( golden Eagles or whatever ). Also I don't think the A-10s were expected to be re-winged. These upgrades are in the works because F-35s/F-22s won't be available in sufficiently large numbers soon enough.

The Air Force could have started those upgrade before, pushed them even further, and put most of the ressources in more F-22s and UCAVs ( Keep in mind that computer power increases 100-fold every 10 years..). The F-35 comes to late.. And the air force could have kept the F-22 in production as long as needed until UCAVs really can take over the role of manned aircraft. The more capabilities you put in UCAVs the more you can reduce the fleet of manned aircraft.

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F-22 cost 120 million according to Wiki ( i feel its more )
F-35a costs roughly 45 million. Thats almost 3 F-35a for 1 f-22.

Actually, I was under the impression that the GAO gave a report in stating that they expect the F-35A to have a total unit cost $48.5 million each (2005$). Lockmart estimated it at $45 million (2004$). I take that to mean production and R&D amortization. Similar total cost figures peg the F-22 at ~$335 million.

In terms of production costs, the F-22 is currently at 110~130 million bracket and Lockmart believes that as low as $83 million is attainable if production is continued uninterrupted past 2010. There are no specific production cost figures for the F-35 released, but it is expected to be about $35 million.

The biggest difference between the two -- cost wise -- is not only that the F-35 was designed to be cheap to build by design and by its mass production strategy, but that R&D amortization is phenomenally lower than the F-22. The F-22 R&D cost was about $36 billion. At 183 units, that is a whopping 197 million per aircraft. Even if we build 380 like the USAF wants to, that is still ~$95 milllion per aircraft. The F-35 R&D is expected to be around $40 billion, but it is intended to be spread out over ~3,000 airframes resulting in a mere $13 million each. Even f the development goes way overbudget to $50 billion (doesn't look like it now, but who knows), and buy is halved to 1,500 aircraft, that is still only $33 million per aircraft or roughly 1/3 to 1/6th the F-22s.

If 3000 F-22s are built, they will cost around $95 million each total vs $48.5 million for the F-35 @3000 units.

If 183 F-35s are built they'll cost $254 million a piece compared to abotu $335 million for the F-22 at the same volume.

The moral of the story is that it is extremely uneconomical to develop a bleeding edge jet then buy just a handful.

R&D costs in relation to airframe costs shouldn't even be looked at. I'll give you a good example. How about $2Billion for four (4) F-35's? Call me a liar and then go look at the approved budget which is public. Bottom line is...you cannot demand all the technology and capability and then go to the vendor and demand the price be lowered...and oh by the way, were not going to buy as many as we said we were either. Everyone has paid for it, lets buy em'. When they cancelled Comanche everyone cheered...having seen it fly, I can say that for what was spent...it was worth every dime in performance alone. Bottom line is this happens EVERY time a new aircraft is developed and discussions like this one will continue EVERY time it happens. Have a good weekend all!

Check

I disagree. There is a fundamental difference between spending $40 billion R&D on 200 fighters and spending the same amount on 2000 fighters. Basically, it comes down to the fact that if you are going to buy 200 don't spend $40 billion. If you are going to spend $40 billion you should also commit yourself to buying enough of the resultant system to make the investment worth while.

The R&D costs of the F-35 are lower not only because they are distributed over a projected larger number of airframes but ALSO because F-35 development has been leveraged on a lot of the research used to develop the F-22 (airframe design, signature maangement, internal weapons carriage, AESA).

Comparing the R&D costs of the two programs therfore doesn't make a lot of sense. It does, however, help to justify an extremely expensive program with a low buy - to develop new technology and support industrial innovation.

Mike

dwightlooi wrote:

(4) In terms of sensor sophistication, integration and comprehensiveness the F-35 is without equal. It is in fact superior to the F-22 in this respect. Radar range will be second to none except the F-22 and only when the F-22 receives the updated AN/APG-77(v)1 radar which uses about 3,200 APG-81 derived T/R elements -- roughly twice as many as the 1600 elements employed in the F-35's AN/APG-81.

Where do you come up with this? There was an Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology document that was available a year or two ago that specified that the projected production T/R modules for the F-22 program was 496,500 units for 331 jets, or 1,500 T/R modules. The JSF was 3,422,400 units for 2,852 jets, or 1,200 T/R modules per set. The APG-77 is 25% larger in area than the APG-81 which indicates that the module size is the same. The newer radar is lighter however (from brick to tile T/Rs) and may have better loading on the duty cycle but I haven’t heard of this (nor that the APG-81 has superior A-A performance). Additionally the APG-81 has been optimized for SAR/GMTI modes whereas the APG-77 was optimized for A-A modes of operation.

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(5) In terms of detectability, the F-35 will overall be slightly worse than the F-22, and probably more so from the rear than from the forward sector. But this is not expected to make a significant difference it is ability to totally dominate opponents through its stealthiness. The F-22's RCS is estimated at ~0.0005sq-m whereas the F-35's is estimated at 0.0014 sq-m. By the logarithmic power rule, a radar that detects an F-16 at 200km will detect an F-35 at 25 km (~1/8th) and an F-22 at 20.8km. That for all intents and purposes is good enough.

Those look like Toan’s numbers and no disrespect to him, I think he takes the marble/golf ball size too literally. The only source that I’ve seen comes from AvLeak quoting -30dBsm for the F-35 and -40dBsm for the F-22: about an 8% difference. The problem is what frequencies are we talking about, what aspect and what do the RCS polar plots look like? I.e. how many and how large (wide and increase in dBsm) are the radiant spikes from planform alignment and material affects. We simply do not know, we only have what are likely frontal aspect X band figures, and they are probably ball park. What we do know is that ConOps for the F-35 is entirely different from the F-22 and is not earmarked for the penetrating role.

In fact the F-35’s ConOps is predicated on F-22/B-2 degradation of the high end threats, which again infers that in terms of it’s VLO capabilities is certainly less capable – perhaps by a large margin in the VLO world – than the afore mentioned F-22/B-2. Additionally it seems very unlikely given the US’ apprehension for selling VLO technology that the F-35 will have the same capability vis-à-vis the F-22. The F-35 is probably going to be very capable VLO wise now, but may not have the same degree of freedom in the future, especially when compared to the F-22 and B-2.

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(7) Compared to the F-22 the F-35 is designed to accomplish EVERY mission the F-22 is designed to accomplish with clear superiority over all current and anticipated opponents on all missions and roles. The degree of superiority in A2A missions may be somewhat behind the F-22 but nonetheless sufficient to ensure that even the best 4th generation fighters will experience a loss ratio several times that of the F-35 when pitted against it. When pitted against the best 4th generation fighters the USA currently has to offer, the F-22 is currently expected to experience a loss ratio in excess of 150:1. Even if the F-35 is only 50:1 that is more than good enough.

I don’t think that it can. As I said above, the ConOps for the F-35 was never intended for the (primary) OCA/DCA, or deep penetration roles. Certainly it doesn’t have the envelope that the F-22 has. It can do those roles, but not to the degree of effectiveness that the F-22 can. And again, it’s good now, but it may not be as effective in the future in fulfilling those specific roles. There is a reason why the USAF is willing to sacrifice some F-35s for more F-22s.

BDF

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Where do you come up with this? There was an Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology document that was available a year or two ago that specified that the projected production T/R modules for the F-22 program was 496,500 units for 331 jets, or 1,500 T/R modules. The JSF was 3,422,400 units for 2,852 jets, or 1,200 T/R modules per set. The APG-77 is 25% larger in area than the APG-81 which indicates that the module size is the same. The newer radar is lighter however (from brick to tile T/Rs) and may have better loading on the duty cycle but I haven’t heard of this (nor that the APG-81 has superior A-A performance). Additionally the APG-81 has been optimized for SAR/GMTI modes whereas the APG-77 was optimized for A-A modes of operation.

There was quite a few high res pictures of the AN/APG-81 antenna mounted on the BAC testbed. I counted the antenna "spikes". There were 46 and 44 respectively on the horizontal and vertical axises respectively. Because the numbers were so close I simply took the average of 45 as the linear density. (45/2)^2x3.142 = 1,590 or ~1,600.

N-G took down the high res photo download link, but here is a smaller rendition of the picture.

T/R elements are getting smaller these days. The APG-79 has ~1,200 on the 700mm class array. The 950mm APG-63(v)3 will use the APG-79 T/R modules and is expected to be around 2,200. If you put the same T/R modules from the 700mm class APG-81 on the 1m class APG-77 the surface area of the antenna is roughly double and hence the number of T/R modules are expected to be roughly double.

In any case, there is no way they are going to going all those T/R modules or plan to build them in advance for all the JSFs. The JSFs will probably be in production for the next 30 years and there will be a few generations of T/R modules during that time. The aircraft itself will go through probably two or three entire revisions of the radar at the minimum.

In general there has been four generations of AESA T/R modules pertinent to the US fighters.

The first was the brick style units on the F-15's APG-63(v)2 -- only 24 sets or something around there was fielded. The late 80s modules are relatively larger and the 950mm class (v)2 carries about 1,500 of them but in a square array. Had this generation of T/R modules been fitted on a 700mm class radar like the F-35, only ~800 could be fitted. In fact there was one fighter AESA that used this generation of T/R module technology -- the Japanese AESA in the Mitsubishi F-2.

The second generation was still brick styled but output and thermal conductance was improved. This was used on the current F-22's APG-77.

The third generation went to a tile style. They are smaller and thinner -- the latter is important because cooling has always been a power limiting factor. In fact, had cooling not been a factor, alternative materials like GaN or SiC with higher theoretical output would have been employed. But it was and hence material like GaInAs and GaInAl are employed. It is now possible to fit about 1200 on a 700mm class radar; ~50% more than previously possible. This will also find its way into the APG-63(v)3 bound for the F-15C upgrades and new builds like the F-15SG.

The fourth generation T/R modules currently being developed and used for the APG-81 is even smaller and dissipates heat even better than those used on the APG-79 and 80. From the antenna photos, it appears that about 1600 fit on the 700mm class APG-81 -- a 33% density improvement.

It is unclear whether the APG-77 upgrade -- the (v)1 -- will use the 3rd or 4th generation modules. I think it very much depends on when it happens.

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I don’t think that it can. As I said above, the ConOps for the F-35 was never intended for the (primary) OCA/DCA, or deep penetration roles. Certainly it doesn’t have the envelope that the F-22 has. It can do those roles, but not to the degree of effectiveness that the F-22 can. And again, it’s good now, but it may not be as effective in the future in fulfilling those specific roles. There is a reason why the USAF is willing to sacrifice some F-35s for more F-22s.

I don't think that is an official USAF position or even a L-M company position. That is an assumption which many third party analysts and enthusiasts like to tout. There is no way to prove or disprove it. However, with a greater range and greater payload than the F-22 -- and with internal weapons carriage, a better set of weapon target and delivery sensors and a stated 1st day of war strike agenda -- the F-35 will certainly be employed as a deep striker.

The main deficit of the F-35 may be its lack of economical high speed cruise capability -- the longer you stay in a high threat zone the more likely you are to get into trouble. It may also be the lower degree of shaping of the engine exhaust which may lead to a lower degree of rear LO. In addition, the lack of thrust vectoring controls will also lower control authority at high altitudes and hence lower the effective altitude at which it can prosecute combat effectively. This is in fact the greatest advantage of TVC accord to Raptor pilots not low speed dog fight agility.

There is also no official or reliable information to support the claim that F-35's LO measures are somehow more specific to the X-band frequencies or that it is in anyway narrower band than the Raptors or the B-2s. The only think we know for sure is that the official statements peg the overall RCS as being higher via those intentional vague golf-ball and insect statements. The latter is especially vague because while a golf ball is clearly 1.68" and round, an insect can be anything from a flea to a locust.

dwightlooi wrote:

I disagree. There is a fundamental difference between spending $40 billion R&D on 200 fighters and spending the same amount on 2000 fighters. Basically, it comes down to the fact that if you are going to buy 200 don't spend $40 billion. If you are going to spend $40 billion you should also commit yourself to buying enough of the resultant system to make the investment worth while.

And what happens when you think you're going to buy 2000, spend the $40 billion to develope it and then end up buying only 200? Welcome to the real world.

checksixx wrote:

R&D costs in relation to airframe costs shouldn't even be looked at. I'll give you a good example. How about $2Billion for four (4) F-35's? Call me a liar and then go look at the approved budget which is public. Bottom line is...you cannot demand all the technology and capability and then go to the vendor and demand the price be lowered...and oh by the way, were not going to buy as many as we said we were either. Everyone has paid for it, lets buy em'. When they cancelled Comanche everyone cheered...having seen it fly, I can say that for what was spent...it was worth every dime in performance alone. Bottom line is this happens EVERY time a new aircraft is developed and discussions like this one will continue EVERY time it happens. Have a good weekend all!

Check

2 billion for $ F-35s? nope, it would be plain stupidity to assume this aircraft would be more expeensive than a F-22. The F-35 will be built for other countries too which would only make it cheaper. Also i think the Comanche was cancelled due to the New Unmanned Heli.

Again I'll ref. everyone to see my above post. XXXX vs. XXXX always turns into arguing that XXXX sucks because and XXXX is better because. I can say that anyone who thinks we don't need the F-22 or the F-35 has never been on a flightline full of broken and/or canabalized jets before. Further, anyone who says were building jets that have no equal out there to fight, I would dare say that they have no idea about US Air War Doctrine. Again, hope you all have a great weekend, don't forget your clocks!

Check

Forum: F-22A Raptor

F-22 Raptor vs F-35 Joint Strike Fighter