Forum: General F-22A Raptor forum

Just because something scores more kills does not mean its a better piece of equipment,

Back to the F-22

Ok so the plane was designed 25 years ago, in the cold war era yes? So does that not answer the question of the purpose of the F-22.

In todays combat we already have aircraft that can do the job we need them to do with absolute ease.

the specially designed pen and pencil gave the same result with no advantages over the other, but the pen cost a hell of a lot more than the pencil. Same applies with the F-22, an awesome awesome piece of engineering, but just not necessary.

the armour is in fact British, its Chobham and the Gun is a lisence built version of the Leopard II gun.

The Tornados took heavy losses because they did low level bombing raids.

The point with the pen and pencil example is that, the pen is more advanced, can do more things than the pencil (like writing while under-water), but in space you just need it to write down something on a bit of paper with no gravity, both a pen and pencil can do that. The point is that the pen can do a lot more, but for its purpose the extra things it can do over the pencil are not needed. Same goes with the F-22.

Yes good point, but the cold war is over and this strategy can be put away until it is needed again (if ever, and lets hope not).

Lets look at potential conflicts in the future - Iran and N.Korea. None of these countries operate an air-force where a NATO airforce is not going to be challenged. In fact your most probably (especially in Iran) going to get a similar situation to Iraq. A massive insurgency, insurgency campaigns have shown their success and I can see a lot of them happening in future conflicts. The current situations in Afghanistan and Iraq are that if the ground troops need air support something like a Harrier is quite adequate (a decent platform to carry the right ordnance).

And R&D cost always comes into it. The raptor was well suited to the era where two super-powers were neck and neck in an arms race with each other.

Now a days, an iminent attack from an enemy nation is very unlikely, the USSR is gone - lets not forget that.

I can't see anything like WW3 with China happening in 30 years or so, and the current US strat of just overwhelming the enemy with advanced jets in high numbers works just fine.

As for the MBT issue, the M1 is not the most successful tank in the world, although it is one of the most successful MBT's in the world. The Challenger II tank has enjoyed as much success as the M1, and its exellent armour was demonstrated in GW2 when one was ambushed. Do remember that the M1's armour is based on British design, and the gun is based on German design.

On all simulations so far it has found the Typhoon has only been second to the Raptor. And the F-22 and Typhoon have capabillities above all current fighters.

I fear this is getting off-topic now. Ok I really cannot be bothered to quote all sections of your post and reply to them with my views. But I will say this, the M1 was likely to achieve higher kills than the Challenger II mainly because of where it was deployed and most of because there was a higher proportion of M1's to Challenger II's.

But yes we always need to upgrade but keep it within reason. I can give you an example, when the US and USSR were in the space race both sides had discovered a problem, pens did not work in space because of the lack of gravity. With the inability to use pens both sides had a problem because they could not carry out various tests/observations. So the US spent a lot of money researching and developing a pen that could be used in the absense of gravity and after a while came out with this pen. What did the Russians do? They just took pencils instead.

How does this apply, both the specially designed pen and pencil gave the same result with no advantages over the other, but the pen cost a hell of a lot more than the pencil.

I get the point, but that's a myth (just like so many things said by many people against the F-22). Read all about it here:

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp



That's not true--the pen in question is a far superior instrument for the task because you don't want conductive debris possibly floating around your spacecraft. It doesn't cost much at all, and even if you think that $45 is ridiculous overkill, it's negligible in the realm of manned space flight. Not much is analogous to the Raptor here, except that it is highly cost-effective as a contingency against the worst-case scenarios that we hope never to face but must prepare for nonetheless. Starting such a program only when we really need it would be too late.

The Raptor costing $120 million per unit, you may want to check that one again, I believe its between $220 and $380 million now taking into account R&D. And the US can afford it? Last time I checked the US was in an astonishing amount of debt, I mean an incredible amount. As someone mentioned the Typhoon wen over-budget and its not very popular because of that in the UK either.

We have lacked the political cojones to raze entire villages to pound a primitive people into submission by using the only language they know: overwhleming agression. To pretend to speak the language of democracy to savages who have no clue what it means is on the one hand disastrously naive and on the other dangerous in the extreme. . What we lack is the political will to see this fight through to its logical conclusion: undertake one last offensive that reduces much of Iraq to a smoking hole in the ground and get the hell out of that god-forsaken POS country. Or at least should be. Unfortunately, political correctness dictates that we pretend otherwise at the expense of our own people getting needlessly killed.

Iran and N.Korea would not be a regime change, Regime change was just an excuse from Mr. Bush to justify his illegal war.

I just reviewed the forum guidelines and noticed the following statement under the "forum etiquette" section:

Avoid politics and religion.

SpeakTheTruth is not the only one who has violated the above policy recently either. But his above statement seems to blatently violate the forum etiquette. What does regime change (or lack thereof) in Iran or North Korea have to do with the thread title? Nothing. There's no question this guy is trolling.