Forum: General F-35 Forum

twintwinsingle wrote:

wrightwing wrote:

twintwinsingle wrote:

alloycowboy wrote:

I think what everybody keeps forgetting when looking at the F-35 is that it has been optimized using advanced computational fluid dynamics. So its lift to drag ratio is going to be far superior to the F-16 and F-18 especially when it is carrying weapons internally. So in ACM it's going to make mincemeat out of aerodynamically dirty F-16's and F-18's. Also the test pilots let slip that the F-18's and F-16's have to go full afterburner to keep up with the F-35 at full military power so we know at least the F-35 is a slippery airplane. Whistle

Alloy, I'd bet the F-35 can really get moving, compared with a Viper or Hornet. It has more drag, to be sure, but not so much more as to negate a 25%+ increase in thrust! The F-135 motor in Mil power has (roughly) the thrust of a -220 in MAX AB. I'd be very surprised if the -16 and -18 guys weren't having to stroke AB to keep up with the -35. That, however, doesn't say much (or anything) about how the jet turns. The F-105 could go like a raped ape in a straight line, pretty much nothing could hang with it (especially on the deck). Same goes for the F-111, Tornado, MiG-23, SU-24...all of these jets can flat out run. Just don't ask any of them to turn. The F-35 may be able to turn pretty well, I don't know. The F-35A hasn't been taken to 9G yet, to my knowledge, so we'll have to wait and see. But, unless it is really, using some unprecedented, ground-breaking technology with the wing (and, hey, maybe it is), I think that heavy jet with a fairly small wing is going to bleed energy very quickly. Computational fluid dynamics can't change physics, or aerodynamic theory and especially not aerodynamic reality.

All 3 models according to LM, will be superior to F-16/F-18s in ITR/STR and in acceleration. The F-35 with full internal weapons load, is supposed to handle better than clean legacy jets.

I love the "according to LM part of that, Wright. Awesome. You really think that a loaded F-35 (50+K weight and 43K thrust) is going to handle better than a 25K weight, 30Kthrustclean F-16? Really? That doesn't pass the common sense test, Bro. Wright, I'm not knocking you and I'm not trying to be ugly, but the 3K fuel dump in 6 sec comment and this last comment about a loaded F-35 out-turning a clean Viper tells me you can't apply common sense to what you hear. You clearly don't know what jets can and cannot be expected to do. You need to be able to look at performance claims and say to yourself,"does that sound reasonable?". I don't think you can do that. Therefore, how can you expect to champion the F-35 when you can't distinguish truth from fiction? Do some more reading on current capes and that will help you understand future capes a bit better. Respectfully.

Twinsingle, your forgetting in an airplane thrust equals drag and the effects of parsitic drag which ramps up very quickly with velocity. Since the F-35 is flying with minimal parasitic drag and the F-16 is forced to carry it weapons under it wings and has a lot of parasitic drag it's going to have less "excess thrust" available then the static thrust to weight ratio would imply. That excess thrust that the F-16 has going to get consumed rapidly by drag. Also the F-16 is going to bleed energy in a turn faster then the F-35 because it's lower L/D ratio do to the extra prasitic drag it has.

Another problem is that your static thrust numbers are for full afterburner on the ground. When you use more realistic numbers say the max dry thrust numbers for the F-35 and the F-16 the thrust to weight ratio for both aircraft get a lot closer and parasitic drag becomes the deciding airplane performance factor.

BTW dry thrust for the F-16 are 17,155 lbs and for the F-35 it's 28,000 lbs.

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It was my understanding that ACM doctrine dictates that external stores (AAMs excluded) are to be jettisoned in the event that violent dofighting manouvering becomes necessary. Is this no longer the case?

butters wrote:

It was my understanding that ACM doctrine dictates that external stores (AAMs excluded) are to be jettisoned in the event that violent dofighting manouvering becomes necessary. Is this no longer the case?

If they do it's a mission kill.

[quote="cola"]

wrightwing wrote:

So, the American guns overheating and busting in Korea, due the amount of killed Chinese is a political matter? (McArthur was a gentleman, not a butcher)
Carpet bombing in Vietnam with combat reagens' was also a political matter? (Did you know that it took ~50,000 small-arms rounds to kill a single NV soldier?)

Really? Those Vietnamese must be some tough hombres eh? 50,000 rounds into each man before they were killed... Sheesh. No wonder the US lost.

Or could it have been merely an estimation that 50,000 rounds of ammunition were fired for each North Vietnamese death that was actually caused?

I'm sure if anyone else could afford to fire that much ammunition in war they would do it too. I'd much rather a massive wall of lead flying away from me than towards me...

Is it just me or does the whole BVR missile strategy that the F-35 (and to a lesser extent the F-22) seem to be pinning their tactical doctrine on seem like just a revamp of the fifties anti-bomber missile plan? You remember the one, the F-4 doesn't need a gun because the missile will do the killing, etc. It’s the one that, after the powers that be discovered how badly it didn’t work commissioned the design of dedicated fighters like the F-16 and F-15.

It seems bizarre that that mindset should slip back in despite how badly it worked last time. Of course the only reason it didn’t work back then was because while the missiles were good, they weren’t quite good enough (smart enough, resistant to jamming enough etc). Are we comfortable enough with missile performance now (resistance to jamming etc) that we’re willing to try the plan again? And if we are, what’s the backup plan?

jeffb wrote:

Is it just me or does the whole BVR missile strategy that the F-35 (and to a lesser extent the F-22) seem to be pinning their tactical doctrine on seem like just a revamp of the fifties anti-bomber missile plan?

Why are you only singling out the US as proponents of the BVR strategy? Incase you hadn't noticed every single major airpower and infact just about every single airpower out there is pinning their hopes on BVR combat. It seems really very bizarre that you compalin about it and completely out of touch with reality.

As for a backup plan, why do you think the F-22 and F-35 were built to be able to dogfight?? For fun stunts at airshows? (And before any of you self proclaimed experts chip in with the b..b..but the F-35 can't dogfight line, I think i'll take the test pilots words over yours thanks, as much as that may hurt your feelings)

Last edited by cola on Dec 30, 2010 - 12:49 PM; edited 1 time in total

alloycowboy wrote:

Also the F-16 is going to bleed energy in a turn faster then the F-35 because it's lower L/D ratio do to the extra prasitic drag it has.

F35 has a much lower aspect ratio of the wings then F16 (2.7 vs. 4) and with comparable wing loading, it means F35 needs significantly higher alpha to reach the same lift coeff. (Cl) (overall lift, in this case), thus more exposing its much larger wing and therefore MUCH more adding to the overall drag then two pairs of missiles would do.
So yes, the parasitic drag is larger with outer weapon mountings, but in this particular case (F35 vs. F16), not nearly as significant, as the induced drag, the F35 exhibits during the turn.

From what has been released up to date, the F35 (240-3) is just over 1g short vs. F16 in sustained maneuvering across all altitudes and speeds and that's to expect, all parameters considered.

So, no. F16 won't bleed energy faster in turns, if comparably loaded.
It's the other way around.

twintwinsingle wrote:

wrightwing wrote:

twintwinsingle wrote:

alloycowboy wrote:

I think what everybody keeps forgetting when looking at the F-35 is that it has been optimized using advanced computational fluid dynamics. So its lift to drag ratio is going to be far superior to the F-16 and F-18 especially when it is carrying weapons internally. So in ACM it's going to make mincemeat out of aerodynamically dirty F-16's and F-18's. Also the test pilots let slip that the F-18's and F-16's have to go full afterburner to keep up with the F-35 at full military power so we know at least the F-35 is a slippery airplane. Whistle

Alloy, I'd bet the F-35 can really get moving, compared with a Viper or Hornet. It has more drag, to be sure, but not so much more as to negate a 25%+ increase in thrust! The F-135 motor in Mil power has (roughly) the thrust of a -220 in MAX AB. I'd be very surprised if the -16 and -18 guys weren't having to stroke AB to keep up with the -35. That, however, doesn't say much (or anything) about how the jet turns. The F-105 could go like a raped ape in a straight line, pretty much nothing could hang with it (especially on the deck). Same goes for the F-111, Tornado, MiG-23, SU-24...all of these jets can flat out run. Just don't ask any of them to turn. The F-35 may be able to turn pretty well, I don't know. The F-35A hasn't been taken to 9G yet, to my knowledge, so we'll have to wait and see. But, unless it is really, using some unprecedented, ground-breaking technology with the wing (and, hey, maybe it is), I think that heavy jet with a fairly small wing is going to bleed energy very quickly. Computational fluid dynamics can't change physics, or aerodynamic theory and especially not aerodynamic reality.

All 3 models according to LM, will be superior to F-16/F-18s in ITR/STR and in acceleration. The F-35 with full internal weapons load, is supposed to handle better than clean legacy jets.

I love the "according to LM part of that, Wright. Awesome. You really think that a loaded F-35 (50+K weight and 43K thrust) is going to handle better than a 25K weight, 30Kthrustclean F-16? Really? That doesn't pass the common sense test, Bro. Wright, I'm not knocking you and I'm not trying to be ugly, but the 3K fuel dump in 6 sec comment and this last comment about a loaded F-35 out-turning a clean Viper tells me you can't apply common sense to what you hear. You clearly don't know what jets can and cannot be expected to do. You need to be able to look at performance claims and say to yourself,"does that sound reasonable?". I don't think you can do that. Therefore, how can you expect to champion the F-35 when you can't distinguish truth from fiction? Do some more reading on current capes and that will help you understand future capes a bit better. Respectfully.

Why do you keep comparing the F-35 at take off weight, when it won't be fighting at anywhere near that weight? The reason why the F-35's turning performance will be superior is because it won't suffer from the drag issues of external pylons/stores, and because of inertial advantages of having its weight centered inside the fuselage, rather than on the wings. Add greater thrust and lift, and it becomes more obvious.

cola wrote:

wrightwing wrote:

In which scenario, do you envision the US taking on the entire world?

Ww, you can't compare US against Iraq (or France for that matter), due vast discrepancy in finances and population, can you?
I'm pretty sure the US aspire to a larger ability to project its power then busting an Iraq-size country, at least according to its budget.

Nonsense.

Quote:

Political issues, you say?
So, the American guns overheating and busting in Korea, due the amount of killed Chinese is a political matter? (McArthur was a gentleman, not a butcher)
Carpet bombing in Vietnam with combat reagens' was also a political matter? (Did you know that it took ~50,000 small-arms rounds to kill a single NV soldier?)
As for Iraq, WITH MY OUTMOST PIETY AND RESPECT for US troops there, Juba is a political issue, too?

You've completely missed the point. By political, I mean the solution(i.e. the various factions will have to come to some sort of amicable arrangement), not the actual fighting.

popcorn wrote:

In the context of CAS, isn't Blue Force Tracker intended to provide the precise GPS locations of friendlies and bad guys for more effective targeting? I think the pace and complexity of modern warfare has long passed the stage where the unaided eye can cope effectively.. mother nature needs all the help it can get lifting the fog of war on today's battlefield.

Maybe - trouble is its still giving away the position of all the blue forces to anyone able to subvert or crack the wireless transmissions. Depends how much faith they have in the setup.

jeffb wrote:

Is it just me or does the whole BVR missile strategy that the F-35 (and to a lesser extent the F-22) seem to be pinning their tactical doctrine on seem like just a revamp of the fifties anti-bomber missile plan? You remember the one, the F-4 doesn't need a gun because the missile will do the killing, etc. It’s the one that, after the powers that be discovered how badly it didn’t work commissioned the design of dedicated fighters like the F-16 and F-15.

It seems bizarre that that mindset should slip back in despite how badly it worked last time. Of course the only reason it didn’t work back then was because while the missiles were good, they weren’t quite good enough (smart enough, resistant to jamming enough etc). Are we comfortable enough with missile performance now (resistance to jamming etc) that we’re willing to try the plan again? And if we are, what’s the backup plan?

Read Norman Friedman's book on network centric warfare. The goal is to have a complete picture of the battlefield while destroying the opponent's picture and then his assets. The preferred means of destruction are standoff weapons. As technology improves we get closer to this ideal.

We've heard these Fighter Mafia type arguments before:
1. Tech doesn't work at all so we need the simplest thing possible
2. Ok, ok, tech works but not in combat
3. Ok, ok, we'll admit that some tech works but some key piece of tech needed for the Friedmanesque NCW will NEVER WORK
4. Our tech is too complex but the Soviet/Russian stuff is simpler so it will work
5. The latest piece of enemy high tech invalidates our whole high tech approach and we need to do XYZ instead
5. The NCW approach will always lose to a simple minded opponent with massive numbers and the willingness to lose them

I don't like to attack the opponent rather than the argument in most cases. However, the Fighter Mafia side has evolved over the years. They used to slam the F-4 type cockpit and extol the bubble canopy. Now that the F-35 has unprecedented SA the sophisticated ones find something else to slam, while the dinosaurs complain about the F-35 canopy being too much F-4 and not enough F-16. They harp and carp on one or two aspects of a system they don't like. They are always anti-tech, anti-establishment, etc. For whatever reason there is a desire to produce larger numbers of less capable systems that are far less capable overall because they can't network and interact.

The argument against the F-35 that stands up is that it can't fight well in a merge. In an environment with HOBS missiles the merge is considered mutual suicide and is therefore avoided by US forces. Think about the fact that enemy tactics attempt to force a merge, which means they die too. These merges will only happen if the system breaks down. One of the hallmarks of the Fighter Mafia (and Russian Fanboys) is to posit a particular situation, demonstrate the weakness of a system in that situation, and say that invalidates the system. This ignores everything else the system can do.

During the 80's the F-15 was brutalized in the type of publications whose niche today is filled by forums. The F-15 was too big, too expensive, too easily detected by eye, not maneuverable enough, too maintenance intensive, and it had been beaten in exercises by the F-5. All of this meant we should ditch it, either for the F-16, the F-20, the F-5 or the Blitzfighter. Then the F-15 goes 100-0 in air combat. So, we hear "Well, it's against incompetent opposition." "It's not really 100-0, F-15's were shot down but the Capitalist Pigs won't admit it." (The wreckage came down in Fantasyland so it hasn't been recovered yet.) "Well, it would have lost against the Soviets." Or, the argument just moves on to the next system and the statements against the F-15 are supposed to be forgotten.

The fact is, the F-35 gives up some maneuvering performance for range and VLO. The only way to shut its opponents up is for there to be a war. The fact is, the F-35 design fits squarely in with the way that weapons have been evolving for the last 100 years and either that direction is right or wrong.

Look at the scenario in which the F-35 loses. F-35 opponents just assume either one of two things. One, the opponent can find a way to avoid coalition/US surveillance and slip in to merge with F-35's. If they can avoid these surveillance systems, my guess is that they go straight for the coalition's headquarters and bases and forget the F-35's. Two, the opponent has so many planes, that they get past the F-22's, past the Golden Eagles, past the F-35's BVR shots and they merge with the F-35. Forget the opponent's willingness to do so, we all know that their pilots would be swelled with desire to die in order to stave off global capitalism. Instead, think about what it would take logistically to salvo that many planes into the air at once when their airfields are under coalition attack. How many places in the world have a density of airbases sufficient for this to happen? The anti-F-35 crowd just assumes that the enemy has clouds of aircraft, kamikaze pilots, and the logistical wherewithal to pull it off while under attack by the coalition.

The scenario where a single flight of F-35's gets merged and beaten in the context of a massive coalition victory is irrelevant. It's like the F-18 that got shot down by the MiG-25 in GW1. Twenty years later it's fodder for forums but has no bearing on the way war is conducted.

flighthawk wrote:

popcorn wrote:

In the context of CAS, isn't Blue Force Tracker intended to provide the precise GPS locations of friendlies and bad guys for more effective targeting? I think the pace and complexity of modern warfare has long passed the stage where the unaided eye can cope effectively.. mother nature needs all the help it can get lifting the fog of war on today's battlefield.

Maybe - trouble is its still giving away the position of all the blue forces to anyone able to subvert or crack the wireless transmissions. Depends how much faith they have in the setup.

Blue Force Tracker has worked, without betraying friendly positions thus far. Unless the enemy has access to the encryption keys, they're not going to get into the network.

Salute!

Very late to join the fray. Sorry.

Shin-breath has some good perspective, IMHO. Maybe naive, but worth discussing. I think Twin will agree to some extent.

I was there back in the late 60's and early 70's when we fought for the Eagle, bubble canopy and all. Same for the Viper ( aka LWF and then ACF). Those that say we are trapped in the 60's are not looking at history since then. Eagle and Viper have had exemplary success in the A2A mission and the A-G mission. We didn't face the air defense systems operated by the Sovs, but we did pretty good against their systems in 'raqi I and 'raqi II.

******* This will not always be the case *********

We may have to go head-to-head versus a very competent and well-equipped, well-trained adversary one day. And we'd better be prepared and have the best tools to work with.

************************************

From my view, I want something that can enter the fight without being seen by the other guy's sensors, then take the first shot.

But sierra happens, and sooner or later you wind up in the classical knife fight. Fer chrissakes, we learned this 45 years ago and had to come up with Top Gun and Red Flag and USAF Aggressors and such to deal with Korean War era fighters. 'course, our ROE worked against us WRT to the BVR Sparrows.

'tis true that the technology doesn't always live up to the PR. Sorry to take you on, shin-breath. OTOH, my experience was it worked 95% of the time. It was the other 5% I was worried about. And the lack of training to deal with a scenario when all the gizmos didn't work.

No substitute for training for all the possible scenarios, but don't spend 90% of the time for a situation that might occur 5% or 10% of the time.

From the looks of it, I would like the F-35 for the interdiction mission and as a supplement to the F-22 in the A2A arena. I still want something like the Warthog for CAS and CSAR. No sense wasting a zillion dollar plane for a mission that can be effectively accomplished with a $40 or $50 or $100 million plane that doesn't require cosmic maintenance or whatever.

The original post of this thread had to do with Sprey. He wrote a great piece ( with help) in the mid-seventies about "Quality, quantity or training". Might have been in Air University Review. The piece analyzed several classical battles and had a lotta truth within it from my perspective, having just gotten bacl from my second tour to SEA. The 1967 and 1973 IAF experience played much in the article. Then was a section about "exchange ratios" for the "defenders". e.g. a well-prepared defense can take out many attackers compared to their own losses.

I have a hard time with Sprey being a father of the Viper, but maybe he helped get us away from the increasing focus upon a few high-tech weapons versus a balance of quantity and quality. The real impetus for the Viper was the expense and complication of the Eagle when the projected buy went steadily down. Saw it again with the F-22. Bugs me.

We show up in the Viper and don't have a BVR missile due to politics. Why not have two or three Vipers for the price of one Eagle? So we endured years of ridicule until the AMRAAM came along and it was easier and cheaper to integrate on the Viper than for the Eagle, with it's 60's avionics architecture and such.

Let's face it, the future will be different than the present. As Yogi put it, "Prediction is very hard, especially when it's about the future". heh heh.

gotta go, now, and Happy New Year!!!

Gums sends...

I also don't understand why the F-35 is being proposed to replace the A-10. That one stumps me, I don't get it. Why not put a good pod on the A-10, let it do what the F-35 does, at least most of it, and let it do things the F-35 can't?

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