While not a fighter, the EA-6 Prowler had a gold plated canopy as a form of radiation shielding.

Tyler, is the yet undelivered tech for the F-35s retrfittable into these handicapped early builds? I know that some of the issues are software related which means that (theoretically) these early models should be upgradable via a patch but how how much is hardwars?

I don’t disagree with that but there’s still the matter of landing on the carrier which is the tricky part. Taking off from a short deck can be done but landing without arresting gear is the one thing that has yet to be overcome, even in WWII prop jobs, they may have been able to take off completely under their own…

I’m sure that the radio worked just fine when it was on the ground, and not part of the aircraft. I’m betting that a lot the F-35’s systems work just fine on their own but as part of the F-35 is where the issues seem to be popping up. From what I can tell, it looks like things just aren’t talking to each other as if…

Good idea except for the no VTOL part. It should be two separate models, one conventional for the Air Force and Navy (starting with the naval variant and stripping down for the Air Force) and then a second, STOVL version for the Corps. The F-4 showed that one plane can work for both the Navy and Air Force but trying…

And is it the Corps’ fault that they’ve been used primarily as a second Army? The reason for that is because the Army is just not big enough to handle both Iraq & Afghanistan while still meeting their commitments elsewhere and giving their troops enough time off to recurerate from their deployments. So what better…

Good list but not entirely accurate. The A-4, A-7, and AV-8B Harrier are not fighters, they’re all attack craft whose primary job is to drop bombs.

Dogfighting isn’t relegated to just guns, planes still can and do dogfight with missiles, esp. with short range missiles like Sidewinders.

You may be on to something there, not quite in the terms you used but close. It’s possible that Putin is using this as a means of field and battle testing their latest generation of military equipment as well as, and possibly more importantly, getting his troops some real battlefield experience. Doing this in Syria…

To be fair, some of the territory that Hitler annexed were originally part of Germany but were given to other nations after WW I. But then again, some of that territory, in particular Alsace-Lorraine, was won by Germany from France as a result of the Franco-Prussian war. So it was French land that became German, then…

The advantage is that a plane can be sent anywhere at a moment’s notice, sattelites not so much. Sattelites have a fixed orbit and you have to wait until its orbit brings it near or over its target to be used and changing the orbit can be expensive in terms of fuel, something that sattelites don’t have much of and…

Different time and different place, warfare has changed a lot since WW II and a WW II Jeep would be a total death trap now a days. The Jeep was designed as something to be used mostly in the rear and not for patrolling along the front lines not to mention that now a days what exactly constitutes the front has gotten…

Not all steels are the same, there’s a world of difference between simple plate steel and hardened armor plate. If you took a sheet or mild steel and plate of AR500 steel, both of the same thickness and shot at it with a 5.56 rifle the round will penetrate the mild steel plate with no problem while it will just bounce…

Not really, the Humvee was meant to be a Jeep replacement and not really a combat vehicle. I think what it made appealing to the military was that the base frame was very adaptable and you could make all sorts of variants based off of it and save lots on maintenance and repair costs. In addition to the basic Humvees…

It really only seemed that way but in reality any number of the new ships, planes, tanks, etc. were already in development, if only on paper, by the time we went to war. So then it was mainly a matter of dusting off those plans we’ve kept on file and expediting things.

The JLTV is basically a Humvee 2.0 because if you tried to make an unpdated Humvee to the same specs as the JLTV you’d essentially wind up with the JLTV because there’s only so much that you can do to or with an existing frame before you wind up with an entirely new vehicle. Another thing to consider is that after a…

They’re probably based on the Russian model, they have the same style of caps, or they did back in the old Soviet Union days, I don’t know about now though.

I think that it would depend a lot on the type of steel used, not all steels are the same, some steels are stronger than others. Take swords for example, you can make one out of stainless steel and it will break the first time you swing it at anything hard but if you make it out of a tempered high carbon steel it will…

An anti-tank weapon would most likely make mince-meat out of it. Just because it’s large and covered in steel doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily all that tough. You have to remember that there’s many different grades or kinds of steel and they’re not all the same and the kind of steel used in armor is different than…

Double post.