LOL... everyone... we tried to hold the line on Euro-gibberish, but finally gave up. The military is as wed to km as the 24hr clock. ;)

Well, aren’t you a total dumbass. You’re assumption that a Mach 4 AIM-120 is launched at full speed (like .5 MACH difference in speed would matter) is laughable. More likely it’s launched after “the merge” or other maneuvering and the fighter is doing 3-400 kts - about the same speed as an AC-130. A much bigger factor…

NATO has them, and Turkey is part of NATO.

Congratulations on taking on a really complex subject matter and doing a good job covering it. Having written a few I know how much work went into this. Great job!

As a group readers here at FA have been spending a lot if time debating stealth where it applies to the Silent Eagle, F35, Raptor, Gripen and Rafale. I found this list of AESA radars and their ranges. Note how dramatically an RCS below a tenth of 1 millimeter cuts down on detection range. If operating in roughly the…

I agree, and I posted a graphic of the change in defense spending as well as each country’s % of GDP elsewhere on FA. I easily found it on the first try with Google, so if you want to shed some light on this discussion, it’s your turn to do some legwork. In general though, even 2% is far from adequate. The US spends…

What does exhaust heat have to do with stealth and an aircraft’s RCS?

The “Wonder Weapon” that managed to shoot down an Iranian Airliner by mistake? Yeah, let’s brag about THAT system.

You’re making my point for me. The whole point of W&B calcs is to keep the CG within an acceptable range of the CL.

More likely, as the production numbers go up for USN and foreign buyers, the cost comes down. That was the plan for the F22, the F35 and every piece of hardware in history. If for no other reason, the R&D costs get amortized across more units.

Sounds like the correct approach. It answers the basic question, missiles and radars and ISRTs aside, because we both know they can be made equal on similar sized aircraft, who’s going to win the fight. The Rafale.

Ran across this rather good analysis of the Silent Eagle tonight which focuses on its RCS - which the author estimates at .05m^2 or about that of the F117A.d

No, SAS like in the Falklands, which USMC DO documents cite as an example to be emulated.

The Rafale is a better air-to-air fighter than the F35 is, and MASSIVELY (hey, this is Jolly Punk, everything here is MASSIVE lol) better at A2A than the SuperHornet.

True that. If you ask for them in the grocery store they direct you to the feminine hygiene isle. lol

The F14 came to the Navy because they finally gave up on the F111 Ardvark the USAF was trying to pitch as a multi-branch solution like the F4. Giving up on what we now know was a ludicrous platform for a fighter jet and going their own way was one of the very best decisions the USN ever made.

Mostly it’s going to carry those 14 missiles to the bottom of the ocean after it gets shot down.

Dead wrong. The center of lift is an imaginary point around which the plane pivots in yaw, pitch, and roll. If thrust is applied above the center of lift it will pitch the plane’s nose down, and if applied below the center of lift, it will pitch the nose up. Having, or not having thrust from an engine doesn’t change…

The phase where it isn’t adding lift is precisely the one you want it to add lift - the one where you are trying to pitch the nose up to climb or stay in a turn.

The CG moves all over the place, depending on how the aircraft is loaded. The center of lift is the relative metric. It also never changes.