I don't know enough about the SHAR FA2 to make meaningful comparisons with the F35.
]]>Also known as Moore's Second Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Moore.27s_second_law
]]>617's Tonkas got quite a few sorties under their belt without having to fly off a carrier, before the unit was disbanded in Apr 2014.
Unsurprisingly, apart from the one-off of the Falklands, and the formation of [where are they now] the Joint Force Harrier [2000-2011] taking off and landing on carriers was not the RAF's job.
The Tornado can drop all the ordnance the F-35 can drop, and the Typhoon is getting there.
A bomb truck is still a bomb truck, no matter how sophisticated and expensive it may be.
gravelbelly22 @171
There's lots of "ifs", "mights" and "maybes" as to whether the F-35B could take on the S-400 Triumf SAM system
http://whythef35.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/f-35-v-s-400.html
Still, it's only money, innit...unless you are the pilot.
]]>we should just field these tanaris drones off the carrier, maybe some crazy skijump launcher gadget. perhaps fuel air?
]]>Yes, I get what you are driving at...perhaps I've not made myself clear. The F-35B maybe more versatile that a SHar or a Tornado, but that versatility will have been gained at a cost - shorter range, lower payload, worse acceleration/manoeuverability/higher unit cost.
[There hasn't been a combat aircraft cheaper than the one it replaces since the P-51B/C/D replaced the P-47D in 1944.]
This ensures the F-35B is not a straight swap for each aircraft. No aircraft, no matter how good, can do the job of two/three aircraft, or be in two places at once, or can be funded from a bottomless pit of taxpayers money.
The aggregated capabilities of the F-35B may make it a vast improvement on the Tornado/SHAR/Harrier Gr9/Block Sixty F-16/F-15I/Slam Eagle/Typhoon/whichever, but if you are only using it on enemies whose idea of an air defence system is a 14.5mm heavy machine gun, the expensively acquired advantages cease to be.
andyf @ 176
only one F-117 was ever shot down - 82-806 - no other airframe was damaged by enemy action alone to put it out of service. The Serbs got lucky once and have been milking it ever since.
Even so, you are right. If you design an airframe to deliver bombs whilst having a low radar cross-section, chances are that aircraft will sortie-to-loss ratio of 1:1300 [or better], but apparently the non-stealthy F-16 has a sortie-to-loss ratio of 1:4500.
Is "stealth" worth the money/technical effort/training involved? I'm not 100% convinced.
]]>I'm more counter-convinced by the RN frigate that detected a bogie on their surface radar but not on their air radar, and were about 3 minutes from slaving the Sea Dart to use the surface radar return as targettign info when they got a call from a US Military Aircraft Controller to tell them that the bogie was "one of ours".
]]>Assume 600 (statute)mph ground speed cruising, 30 minutes over the battlefront, and 30 minutes to refuel/rearm, and the 10 make 1 sortie/attack every 2 hours per aircraft, where the 30 manage 1 every 11 hours, so they're actually only about half as effective despite you having 3 times more of them.
]]>same waypoints
That's the USAF's version of "working to rule." When the Pentagon doesn't like the orders they get from the Oval Office, they interpret them in such as way as to increase casualties.
That's why they flew the same paths and altitudes hitting North Vietnam when they were ordered to make sorties to facilitate bringing the NV back to the negotiating table. When Nixon saw the rise in casualty figures he went ballistic; he talks about it in "The White House Years." It wasn't politically feasible to have the officers responsible executed, but I'm sure Tricky Dick thought about it.
]]>Fuel isn't the only commodity carried by the escorts, of course, ordnance haulers are also needed if a high-cycle operation in in process -- for good reasons involving safety and available working space on carriers they don't store a lot of bombs and other ammunition on board at any one time. Adding avgas tankers to the escort mix isn't a big deal because of that.
]]>That isn't the selling point for having a reactor in a carrier though. The point of having carriers be nuclear is that it gets you strategic mobility. A nuclear carrier isn't inherently any faster than a conventional one, but it can leave port, go to full flank speed and sail around the world at that pace. Trying this with a conventional carrier is going to get real expensive in fuel and logistics hassle, very fast.
]]>Sorry, that's using conspiracy theories when plain old incompetence or complacency will do.
There are some reasonable and detailed articles on how the Serbian cloudpuncher brought down the F-117; essentially, the lowered observability is aimed at the most effective guidance radar frequencies. The Serb, like the RN's Type 42 destroyers, had a lower-than-typical-frequency search radar (in both cases, rather old). This let them detect the aircraft; but not necessarily guide a missile to them, because the guidance radars (that give the fine resolution needed for missile guidance) operate at the lower-observable frequencies. Simplified, low frequency means big antenna, and that's a bit hard to fit in the front of a six-inch-wide missile. If, however, you fire in the right direction at the right time because you're right underneath the same old flight path, and the target is only a couple of km away, it's "low-observable", it isn't invisible.
They flew the same route, for the same reason that Scott O'Grady (the F-16 pilot shot down over FRY) wasn't wearing the correct clothing under his flight suit (hey, it was warm in Aviano, why sweat on the way to the plane?), didn't pay attention in the lesson on "how to use your SARBE as a radio" and found himself shivering for several days until the CSAR team picked him up - because "it wasn't going to happen to them".
Two Sea King Whiskey collided in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq; one explanation I heard was that they both plugged in a course from ship to centre of operating station, and hit each other head on; because they hadn't done the basic "always fly a couple of hundred meters to the right of any linear feature, just in case someone else is doing the same thing".
As for "is stealth worth it", obviously. Look at a modern warship, and note the lack of right-angles. Most military aircraft these days (including the Typhoon) have "stealth" features, and even the Tornado received some RAM application during the 1991 Gulf War. Note for the unaware - Radar-Absorbent Material (only one part of "stealth") works the same way as the anti-reflective coating on spectacles; a quarter-wavelength thick, semi-transparent coating that produces cancellation in the key frequencies. The question isn't "is it worth it", it's "how much emphasis are you willing to place on it".
Anyway, "Day 1" against even a third-world opponent means taking on any existing air defence system; suppressing or destroying people who have bigger power supplies, bigger antennas, and more space for computer power because they're on the back of a truck, not shoehorned into the front of a fighter aircraft. If you're bombing an opponent limited to a Toyota pickup with a heavy MG on the back, anything will do; but that is increasingly a rarity. Libya, Yugoslavia, and even the current mobsters in the Donbass, all had air defence equipment that would make a Cold Warrior smile.
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