Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
The F-22, Domestic Jobs, and the Military-Industrial Complex
Posts
That's interesting, because I've generally been told that the airframe for an aircraft usually isn't designed to withstand G-forces significantly greater than what the human body can handle. Perhaps it was designed that way so that if we ever decided to transition to an unmanned airforce we could retrofit our F22's so they could be flown remotely.
This thread has given me the urge to watch Macross Plus.
To be fair, I'm not 100% sure of the article's reliability. I think I read it on the internet
Though the age of UAVs seems inevitable, I'll be sad to see pilots go, egotistical bastards they may be. Can a remote-controlled drone cry over Goose's dead body? I think not.
Helicopters will always be popular for moving guys from place to place quickly until we have the troop transports the Clone Troopers rode in in Episodes 2 and 3. Seriously, being able to basically teleport your guys compared to guys on foot is a useful ability to have in any type of combat operation. Moving at speed, helicopters almost are never hit except by something homing or laser-guided. The RPG kills are at hover, which is rough to avoid. Their only hope for a serious defense a is small, light anti-missile machine gun, since there's no way you can ever armor the rotor, the true weak point. Despite this weakness, they are tremendously useful.
Last I heard, Apaches will be fitted so that they can control Fire Scouts from their cockpit.
Which seems to be both a ridiculous and awesome idea all at the same time.
How about this instead? =P
I support retrofitting all EA-18Gs with this equipment.
They sound awesome, but all I seem to hear about in the news is them going down all over the place. I understand they are complicated machines but they sound like death traps.
Does anyone have any figures about missions flown vs casualty causing crashes?
Edit: Why is a teenager singing from a flying mech death-machine?
...because it's Japan?
Me too! I was totally watching some clips on Youtube after someone posted about orbital defense platforms earlier.
A pretty basic understanding of the hi-lo concept is available here.
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0216.shtml
Basically the F-22 is your high end air-superiority fighter, that secures the skies with little trouble, while the F-35 is a multi-purpose and cheaper single engined design. Now the F-16 or F-35 can certainly perform air to air missions, but they are not nearly as capable as the F-15 and F-22 respectively in that regard. Plus, having a single engine as opposed to two means less range, speed, and usually payload. Despite what some say the F-22 can already haul JDAMs and possibly JSSAM and JSOW with an upgrade. This combined with it's superior stealth gives the F-22 a useful ground attack capability in it's own right, comparable to that of the old (now retired) F-117.
Now the F-16 had the advantage in maneuverability over the F-15, but that is not the case with the F-35 and the F-22. The first production F-35 can only carry four of our current air-to-air missiles (AIM-120C, AIM-9X) internally. And even when an upgrade introduces the ability to carry six internally, it is still outclassed in that regard by the missile loadout of the F-22. In the end the F-35s advantages are pretty much limited to a lower cost, some newer avionics including a fancy electro-optical/FLIR system, and the ability to carry a wider range of ground attack weapons. Despite what some want, the F-35 like the F-16 will not be able to replace the flying tank that is the A-10 either. The USAF should always have some truly dedicated CAS aircraft like that.
Defense Secretary Gates has made some good and some poor choices. And his hate for the F-22 (which he seems to have inherited from John Young) has been his worst. He is almost as bad as Rumsfeld when it comes to his "my way or the highway" approach. Despite what the anti-F22 crowd says 183 is not enough to meet USAF requirements. (for comparison we built some 800+ F-15A-Ds and 200+ F-15Es) It is a pain in the ass to restart a production line and some idiots in Washington might force us to destroy the production tooling. So unless we get some politicians with some brains and serious cajones, we aren't going to see more F-22s. In the world of aircraft having 183 of somethign does not mean those 183 are ready all the time, and we are going to lose some F-22s due to attrition over the years, as happens with any aircraft.
Plus there are plenty of jobs connected to the Raptor program, and maintaining production would be a simple and effective way to keep those people from losing their jobs and not being able to find another one. That money would be put to far better use and effect than where much of the stimulus $ has gone.
Air superiority UCAVs are still awhile off, and there are quite a number of concerns with those. In fact these first UCAVs like the X-47B, are going to be low cost, stealthy, relatively slow, strike/reconnaissance aircraft with a long loiter time. Such aircraft will be very useful, but they won't be taking the role of supersonic air-superiority and multi-role designs with radar and long range AAMs.
Personally I think the USAF should have taken up Northrop on it's FB-23 proposal which would have the range, stealth, and payload to be very useful in any theater. The Next Generation Bomber is bound to delayed in the coming years by politics and funding anyway.
British publisher and writer Ernest Benn [1875-1954]
They probably won't seeing as most people we'd be fighting in the air would have 10 Migs from 1975
Though the F-15As are from 1975 too.
Is that myth still being spread? I am pretty sure the USAF actually gave a B-2A bomber a bath for the press in the 1990s to disprove that. The only reason the B-2A is so hideously expensive per unit is because we only built 21 or some of them too.
British publisher and writer Ernest Benn [1875-1954]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/09/AR2009070903020.html
Way to read the thread or understand the the things you have opinions about
We could build a couple of thousand F-15s and F-16s for the cost of the F-22 program. Maintenance costs of the older planes are a really poor reason to switch to a less reliable and more expensive plane. Look I realize you just kind of repeat opinions from whatever conservative blog you frequent, but there are damn good reasons as to why the F-22 sucks.
Gee because no fighter EVER besides for the F-22A had problems with readiness rates when it first entered service. And besides...
http://www.f-16.net/news_article3621.html
British publisher and writer Ernest Benn [1875-1954]
Er, the link that blog uses to justify its claim that "the opposite is true" when it comes to increasing F-22 maintenance costs is....
just the front page of airforce-magazine.
There's nothing to back it up.
Call me crazy, I'll trust the WaPo
And since when does the air-force still have the manpower for to maintain and fly a few thousand more F-16s. Also a fully modernized F-15 or F-16 is not a cheap thing. The F-15Ks the Koreans bought were about $100 million a piece. And think of all of the programs connected with the F-22. APG-77 radar (the F-35s APG-81 is based off of that), the F119 engine (the F-35s F135 engine is based off of that, and many other subsystems. The program has a whole has given us an impressive amount of new technologies to apply to other aircraft like the F-35. Not to mention the improves in airframe design etc.
Before you attack my sources perhaps you should stop getting your technical information from the Huffington Post of MSNBC.
British publisher and writer Ernest Benn [1875-1954]
You... are completely missing the point.
You said that it's too expensive to maintain F-15s and F-16s so we need the F-22, and I used an example to point out the absolutely ridiculous difference in pricetag. The disparity is so large that we could literally just scrap an F-15 or F-16 when it had a problem and build a new one and it would be cheaper for a really long time than we've already spent on the F-22
Think if all that money had gone to various technologies to keep the boots on the ground safe, boy wouldn't that be something.
Try looking a bit harder next time. Especially when you look at media accuracy when it has come to well... pretty much every program since the M1 Abrams and M2 Bradley.
Your looking at the pricetag of the whole program, not the price per individual fighter. By your logic why should we have developed the F-15 either when we could just produce hundreds more F-4 Phantoms? And continually producing the same aircraft for 40+ years is going to put you technologically behind.
All of the money going into various technologies for soldiers on the ground? Like MRAPs, JLTV, Strykers, Active Defense Systems, body armor, ERA kits for tanks, remote controlled weapon stations, packbots, better C&C systems and all of that? The only thing that keeps our men from getting new carbines and rifles isn't money, but politics. This is not a case of dumping all of the money towards the USAF. And the boots on the ground certainly like it when 500 pounds of high explosives take out an enemy position. In case you missed it both the AMS program in the 1990s and the recent FCS program have been canclled. Both of which would have provided new vehicles. And the new vehicle plan to replace the FCS MGV has yet to be seen.
British publisher and writer Ernest Benn [1875-1954]
I'm curious, who knows much about the Typhoon, and how it compares in the spectrum?
Just reading through the wikipedia article right now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurofighter_Typhoon
As a pure hypothetical, of course.
I'M A TWITTER SHITTER
Be very careful, you're setting up a strawman here.
I'M A TWITTER SHITTER
Thats the first thing I noticed, but I did some searching on the site, and I *think* this may be the article it was referencing. It does not start talking about maintenance for a while, but it was an interesting read.
To be fair the UK places very heavy emphasis on tank survivability. The Challenger 2 is currently the most heavily armoured tank in the world, because of that it's a damn expensive tank. It has a stupidly good combat record. Only a couple have been taken out of action, one was due to friendly fire (another Challenger 2) and the other was a gigantic bomb (the crew survived). Compare that with the M1A2, the US has lost an awful lot of them in Iraq.
---
I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
The Challenger 2 has really only seen combat in Iraq and more specifically in Basra which has never been as bad as say Baqubah and the Sunni triangle. I'd like to see how it would fare against tens of thousands of pounds of HME, triple stacked anti-tank mines, or an EFP. My favorite tank would be the Merkava, mainly due to the fact that it can fit a team of dismounts.
The brits are developing new type of electric armor that should be extremely useful on the battlefield.
Umm, it kinda has been widely acknowledged that the Challenger 2 is the most heavily armoured tank around. When it can survive 70 rpg hits I think that's a sign it can take punishment. The lesson learnt from Iraq two (for the Americans) is that the armour is insufficient around the middle side of the tank behind the tracks, the defining image during the invasion was seeing burning, destroyed M1's where they'd clearly been hit at that point. (my guess is the news of its weakness got spread pretty quickly among the Fedayeen)
The Challenger 2 does actually use a more modern variant of composite armour (Dorchester) whilst the M1A2 uses an older but improved version of Chobham. (I know these things because the Challenger was built in Leeds, I'm from Leeds.. I know people.. Okay, I talked to people in pubs who built them when it was Vickers and not BAE Land Systems or whatever the stupid name is now)
The Challengers weakness is its speed, among western tanks it is pretty slow in comparison to say the M1, Leopard etc.
---
I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
What I'd like to know is, what happens if you just ditch the radar absorbant skin and cockpit for something more conventional, since those two seem to be the greatest weaknesses of it. Or to put it another way: how much capability is wrapped up in those two components compared to the rest of the fighter, and how much do they cost in it?
Because if it still decimates all other airpower in theorycrafting sessions, then I guess it would still be worth it as an air superiority fighter - this is going on the presumption that when this gets said, it isn't with addendum "because no one sees it on radar till here you see..." but rather that it outmanoeuvers everything else.
Red herring. It's an air superiority fighter. Iraq no longer has an airforce. There's no need for it to fly in Iraq.
Because the project length is so great for something like an Air Superiority Fighter, we've got to be producing things now to counter threats that may not exist for another two-three decades.
Clearly, the F-22 isn't relevant to Iraq/Afghanistan. However, the best air superiority fighter is the kind that'll have potential enemies not even try to counter. Arguably, not needing an air superiority fighter is a sign of success.
Of course, that leads us straight into the "rock that keeps tigers away" problem. We can't exactly ask the Russians: "Would you be building a bunch of Sukhois, if we didn't have the F-22?"
It can accept a ground-attack mission package, just like a F-15.
As someone said quantity is a quality all of its own. Also having the best equipment is not going to guarante victory. Remind me again who had the best tanks in WWII? The Allies or the Axis? How about the most advanced airplanes?
Yes it could, but you don't want to use your most expensive plane, operational and unit wise, as a bomb truck.
...and you especially don't want other people to be trying to eavesdrop on its classified capabilities.
Also it's interesting that you mention the F-15, because before the Strike Eagles rolled out, their motto was not a pound for ground.
F-22 can beat up scrubs too. Wiki:
Nothing about head-to-head, but why would they?
The F22 is the latest in a list of planes beginning in the 1960's designed to combat imaginary dogfighting superplanes flown by pilots in imaginary airforces supported by imaginary superpowers who are instantaneously capable of developing and launching an advanced military force which will catch the United States flat footed in an arms race and destroy all opposition if by god those precious F22's weren't already there to save the butts of true patriotic americuhns.
There are already 140 of them costing ~35k in maintenance alone for every hour they fly around, with nearly fifty more on the way. The fleet of f22's have already collected over 50 000 flight time hours. They have nothing to fight, and have fought nothing since being created. They come with a price tag that varies between 90 and 250 million dollars, depending who you talk to and how much they like the plane. The only reason 187 of these things have been produced is because there are factories to build individual bits of the plane in over 40 states.
Want to know why it hasn't been cancelled? A penalty system devised by Germany, essentially if any country decides to order less Eurofighters than agreed then they end up paying heavy penalty fines which are pretty much the same as if they were to buy the planes.
The irony being is that Germany was one of the first wanting to decrease its order, as such a compromise was done that the UK got more workshare on the agreement that Germany could order less. So, in other words the UK receives more money.
There are lots of similar complaints against Eurofighter as the F22, like how many are being ordered, how Russia and any potential enemies don't have anything in service that could compete against our current generation etc.
The UK is ordering 208 Eurofighers, we'll also be ordering 138 F35B's too. Think about that, Europe and the USA pretty often do joint wars. In total there are planned to be 683 Eurofighters, that is a massive number of aircraft when you think of what they are likely to be up against. Russia the only neighbour who are even a nearby threat doesn't even have more than 20 SU-35's and even that isn't likely to be a threat to a tranche 3 Eurofighter.
In a way it's reassuring in how bloody capable a plane it is and in another it's horribly sad in how many billions are spent on something that's unlikely to be used in any real large numbers because our focus is on fighting a bunch of pissants in Afghanistan. Those billions could be better spent on more helicopters etc.
---
I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.