F-35 Joint Strike Fighter News, Videos and pics Thread

voyager1

Captain
Registered Member
And why you need tablets to achieve this target ?
Well thats obviously a failure from the Project office.

However the app-based approach is still valid.
I dont know why everybody is fixated to the tablet thing

Clearly the capabilities that it offers are more important than the tablet device itself.
 

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
British Tempest program doesn’t have a glass cockpit, they are allegedly using Augmented Reality. This tablet is similar and is an upgrade, imagine not having to develop cockpit instrumentation and control and just plug in your tablets instead.

This will be great for controlling drones, there is already apps for that!
British Tempest doesn’t exist yet. It’s talking about a virtual cockpit but again that’s conceptual not reality yet. F35 are flying right now. Tempest concept is an evolution of the HMD concept used in F35.
 

Anlsvrthng

Captain
Registered Member
It is not only the F-35, but the whole efficiency / capability of the military of USA.


In the past the Capitol/Pentagon enjoyed the supremacy in the amount of man and weapons, and many cases had the luxury to trade the hands on frontline with hands at homeland, making sophisticated weapons for inflated price.

It is not the case anymore, the USA was ten times stronger in the 2nd WW than Japan, but now the USA is the weaker in the play. So it is not brute force anymore - it is clever organisation from the very basis .

I love to highlight the differences between capability with the gun loading of the Abrams/Leopard/T-72.

Sorry to say, but the USA gun breech rubbish, and has the lowest quality of all three. If you have five times more tank then you can afford it, but it is not the case anymore.

But the same can be said about the F-35 vs Su-34 vs. Typhoon.
 

siegecrossbow

General
Staff member
Super Moderator
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I’m less surprised by how many F-35s have entered service than by how many F-15s have retired! No wonder they need start the F-15X production line to fill the role of interceptors.
 

mig-31

New Member
Registered Member
Recent information from MBDA conference
Spear-ew will have low frequency antenna inside the wing
Spear-ew can operate as ISTAR asset and the range will be 420 km

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MarKoz81

Junior Member
Registered Member
Swiss just selected the F-35:

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Not just F-35 but PAC-2 GEM as well. That's the strangest part about the whole tender. It was for jets and missiles both and they chose the newest jet and the oldest missiles. Which probably means it was rigged one way or another.

Having read the documents on the Swiss government website it is rather obvious that the Air2030 competition was rigged. My only question is whether it was rigged for Rafale + SAMP/T or F-35 + Patriot. Or perhaps for one from each country as a diplomatic solution? There was also a third component of the program - the air defense C2 system - which went to Thales.I don't know what the hell is going on there and I'm not sure I want to know.

The previous tender which was won by the Gripen and then rejected in a referendum was to replace just the old F-5s. This new tender was an all-or-nothing approach which replaced the F-5s, the F-18s and also included the SAMs as an integral part. It was meant to be referendum-proof. I suppose we'll see about that fairly soon.

The government did not publish any data on the tender justifying it with commercial interests of the participants. I call bullshit on that. They didn't even include final price for each submission other than the winners. That's what happens when you want to hide something.

In the evaluation F-35 received 336 points which was 95 more than the next jet. The final score was weighed - 55% for combat capabilities, 25% for product support, 10% for "cooperation between military and procurement authorities" (WTF???) and 10% for offset. Only in the first category does F-35 win clearly but I still don't see how it gets 95 points more than the next jet unless the primary mission in the test was bombing Moscow rather than air policing over Zurich or Geneva.

At the same time the evaluation - according to the government website - was conducted jointly with the SAMs. Somehow old Patriots worked really well with new F-35s. Switzerland chose 5 AN/MPQ-65 radars and 70 PAC-2 GEM missiles at circa $2 billion. That couldn't possibly be better than SAMP/T which also shouldn't be more expensive (unless the French didn't think it through). There's simply no way Patriot in this configuration is better and yet the article explaining the results describes it as if it was the superior system.

Finally they insisted that the F-35 was both the cheapest to buy and cheapest to operate. Cheapest to buy? That's likely. Cheapest to operate? With $35 thousand per flight hour??? The only way that worked is if Lockheed Martin listed their originally promised $25 thousand price as given in current dollars.

In the end the competition matters little. Switzerland will mostly keep the jets on the ground anyway. They're a rich country that found a way to pay the US some $7 billion now and another $20 billion or so in the future. That's obviously provided there's no referendum that overrides the decision so that the government has to set up Air2035 that will involve new jets, new missiles and also not surrendering the German-speaking cantons to France and the French-speaking cantons to Germany. Now that must be referendum-proof!
 

gelgoog

Brigadier
Registered Member
It makes zero sense to bundle those things together. The Gripen cancellation was already a highly political decision which made no sense.
 
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