The Gilmore memo says 3F may not be complete by the end of SDD is 2018. Where do you get the idea that it will “never be delivered?”
Is there a giant asteroid headed for earth that I’m not aware of?
If that’s isn’t the case, then you should think about how work on block 4 is already underway. I would suspect that to the extent that tough problems show up in 3F (which is inevitable), some capabilities will be pushed to block 4. Which is what happens all the time in software, right?
It was in my original post. The capabilities in Block3F simply may not be possible with the currently specced computers embedded in the F35. What they are attempting to deliver with the helmet is processing a massive amount of sensor data in realtime and with very high reliability rate, it needs a huge amount of processing power, probably something on the order of at least 10-12 top spec Xeon’s, but of course they can’t just use off the shelf CPU’s everything has to be aerospace spec and probably hardened against EMP as well. Boosting the processing power means a major re-design as weight, space, power and heat are all already constrained in the F-35.
Now I am only saying this as a possibility, not a certainty, but I cannot think of any other likely reason for the ridiculous software delays. It’s all too easy to imagine a situation where programmers in the trenches have already tried to make the case for a re-spec and no one listens so they keep trying to deliver something that’s just not possible on the current hardware.
So, uh, LM bribed the Chinese and Russians to try and develop 5th gen fighters as well (and bribed the Chinese to steal the F-35 plans and try to reverse engineer it), instead of spending their money more wisely on those sweet, sweet nukes? Because that’s what I’m talking about in the paragraph you quoted from me.
Those as for your own tangential point, you do know that all of the European and other nations who are on board with F-35 have actually had their pilots fly the thing…right? I mean, this isn’t just some politicians selling them a crap fighter sight unseen.
coremelt, you are being ridiculous. A 4.5 generation fighter is not a viable alternative to the F-35. There is a reason the UK is still buying F-35s when it could navalize the Typhoon far more cheaply.
Apparently you are not aware that Japan could quite easily have captured and held Australian territory in WWII. Are you under the impression that China is less capable 70 years later?
It’s a bit misleading to say that the Eurofighter is more expensive. In terms of absolute unit costs, the F-35 appears to be cheaper simply due to economy of scale. But if you need to buy some fighters right now, you can’t buy F-35s without absorbing some of the program costs, which are astronomical. And they will cost far more to service and fly.
And EF unit costs are based on the partner nations’ flyaway prices, which reflect the deals made to compensate each other for reduced buys rather than the true purchase costs (Germany wrote the EF memoranda in such a way as to make the penalties for reducing initial buys prohibitive, though it was the Germans who were the first to try and get out of them).
Beyond that, export contract unit costs are typically meaningless because the true value of the contract is the multiyear support/spare parts agreement. The aircraft themselves may be sold at a considerable loss (especially after taking production offsets and technology transfer into account), with the profit being made on spares. This is easier to sell to legislators, for one thing.
Yes and no. It’s not just “optional” systems that the F-35 has some trouble with. Some of the problems affect the flight controls, or at least cause the flight control software to crash or fail. But there doesn’t seem to be anything insoluble, and some of the problems are likely tied to “optional” bits - like there may be one weapon system issue that causes other issues and can be deactivated until it’s fixed.
Yes pilots have flown it, but no one has actually seen the promised capabilities of Block3F, the sensor fusion, the ability to feed data to other planes or the ground, the long list of other amazing features. These things exist only in power point presentations and promises from a company that is 10 years behind schedule and $183 billion over budget.
Yes Japan could threaten Australia because they first captured Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, somehow I think we’d have a little bit of warning if that was to happen, and I think other powers would get involved at that point. No you are being ridiculous saying that Australia must have 5th generation fighters. What for? Our neighbours won’t have stealth fighters anytime soon. 4.5 Gen or 4th Gen fighters are perfectly adequate for Australia’s actual needs, patrolling our own air space.
And yet, as with the article from a pilot who flew the thing first hand, the pilots generally like the plane, feel it’s solid and that the software issues are mainly soluble. You are claiming they aren’t and claiming that the underlying computer core hardware simply can’t do what they are proposing, but I haven’t heard that particular spin from anyone but you…not to the degree you are taking it.
The trouble with your OP and your follow on posts is that you are all over the place in your criticisms. You seem to be saying that ANY 5th gen fighter would be a waste on the one hand, then you are critical of the contracts system (that you clearly don’t understand) on the other, then you are claiming that it’s simply impossible to fix the software issues with the current hardware and that a refit is impossible (in a plane designed from the ground up to be modular and upgradable…and with the examples of planes NOT so designed getting similar upgrades in the past). It’s like you are throwing arguments against F-35 at the wall just to see what will stick.
All I saw was an appeal to ignorance, something along the lines of, for all I know the hardware may not be good enough. DOTE’s assessment says nothing about the hardware refresh (which just happened for 3i) being insufficient for 3F. As you can tell, I know about a thousand times more about this program than you do, and I haven’t heard anyone speculate that the hardware is insufficient for 3F, but there is a refresh scheduled for roughly the same time as 4 is released.
Please, you don’t even know what a major redesign means. Did you know that every jet fighter in history, over its lifetime, has averaged weight growth of one pound per day of its service life? And you think that a processor refresh – which is entirely unfounded speculation on your part – presents a major weight issue? You may know lots about software, but you don’t seem to have any experience with aircraft.
It’s also possible that Putin has mind-control rays that are conducting disinformation campaigns through the Project on Government Oversight. Do you really have any evidence that he isn’t?
You may have missed this recent test
Note that the capability wasn’t even planned for the F-35 as part of the initial requirements, and was just added in recently.
The only “real” problem with the F-35 is the sheer size of the program. I imagine the joint program office will soon be disbanded, with the services taking over management for their their respective platforms and Lockheed dealing more-or-less directly with the international partners, now that production is ramping up and the jets are starting to go operational. That way all the niggling this or that thing that doesn’t work right can be more effectively addressed and every time something crops up it’s not making headlines in the liberal media.
Oh, yeah, that liberal media hates the F-35.
Good thing the author of that opinion piece didn’t put money down on some of his predictions as posters in the thread have tried to have the OP do. He’d owe some serious cash at this point. 
So would Nick Harvey, though he’d only owe the chance of a cat in hell.
I think this is one of those bi-partisan issues that transcend left and right…there are definitely factions on both sides who dislike the F-35 program, though obviously for different reasons and from a different perspective.
Sorry, allow me to re-state: …media, most of which is liberally-oriented due to their MO for monetizing crowd stupidity. Yeah, they all do that. :rolleyes:.
In another thread, a Doper pointed out the similarity between the logic of some anti-vaxxers and some military opponents: Undesirable Event X hasn’t happened yet, so why should we have to prepare against Undesirable Event X?
Anyway - the tenacity and persistence of F-35 opponents is remarkable, but like Republicans trying to repeal Obamacare, it won’t happen. The F-35 is here to stay. If anything, I would bet that Obamacare is more likely to be terminated than the F-35.
Decades from now, when 2,000 Lightning IIs are in the air, the opponents of the JSF can fall silent and pretend they were never opposed to the Lightning II from the beginning.
So the reason I am stating this with some reasoning behind it is because I directly work in software development for image and signal processing including processing 360VR video. Now not for the military mind you, but the principles are the same and I do have a pretty rough idea of the amount of processing power they need to pull off what is promised in Block3F. So a system I work with that processes 4K video in real time, doing much simpler algorithms that the F-35 needs takes a rack mount Linux 8 core Xeon system with 8 GPU’s running in parallel. The resolution of imagery that the F-35 needs to process to accurately provide the real time sensor fusion feed is much higher than 4K, at minimum 8K for the 360 view and probably more than that, and they’re processing a hell of a lot more data than just RGBA pixels. They are probably using custom ASIC’s and FPGA’s which gives them some advantages but still it’s a hell of a lot of processor power.
OK, so I grant you that they can probably add weight, space and power (but every KG more computer is less fuel and armaments), but they cannot easily add more heat elimination to the F-35. The thing is already right at the limit, it can’t take off if the fuel loaded into it is too warm.
Thermodynamics is a bitch and it’s a hard limit, more processing power needs more heat, in a very tightly constrained space. I would bet they are already using the fuel as a coolant like other designs have done, that helps but it still only gives you so much headroom. So no I’m not arguing from ignorance, I’m arguing from my expert knowledge of real time image and signal processing hardware requirements.
Shortly after that article came out, the Air Force painted its fuel trucks white to reduce fuel temperatures. And it appears that no sorties have been prevented or cancelled in relation to fuel temperature. There are also no “special restrictions” on fuel temperature for the F-35.
I take your word that you know a lot about software. But you barely know anything about the F-35. Just because I know a lot about the F-35 doesn’t mean I have good reason to say that you’re doing your job all wrong when you say you need elventy server racks to make sure the gonkulator doesn’t stutter.
Yes and that article confirms they are using fuel as a coolant, and it must be kept a minimum temperature for the F-35 to be functional. So that means they already have zero overhead for heat dissipation, any processor power added to achieve sensor fusion means eliminating heat production somewhere else.
I don’t need to be an expert on aircraft, this is physics, thermodynamics is the same for an aircraft or a server farm. And yes I can state with some knowledge that there is a very real chance that the image and signal processing capabilities promised in Block3F simply cannot be achieved in the thermal envelope they require for the rest of the F-35 to function. Throw all the money at it you want, you can’t change physics.
Boy, you think the chief weapons tester would have said something in his sharply-worded memo about how the F-35 cannot break the laws of physics.
Do you think Dr. Gilmore simply overlooked that little issue, with respect to your assertion that thermodyamics prevents the F-35 from achieving sensor fusion? While highlighting the faults he found with 3i, did he just run out of printer ink to write that the entire program is now a complete failure because of excess heat?
Or could it be that you are making bold statements without a shred of actual evidence to back it up?
Given that Lockheed Martin is 10 years behind schedule and $183 billion over budget I think that the burden of proof is on you to say why their feature list is realistic and achievable for Block35, not on me. They have not delivered to any of their milestones on time, and I am stating a plausible reason why that could be the case, because they under-estimated the hardware / software requirements by a massive amount. We know that Lockheed Martin does indeed precisely have a track record of doing this, of promising the blue sky and then delivering late and over budget.
So my evidence is their failure to deliver, and I do find it hilarious that you are so vehemently defending a program that is so late and so over budget. Only in the defense world is this even remotely possible. In any other industry, it’s total failure.
PS. actually yes I do know more about image and signal processing than Dr Gilmore does, so he is more likely to believe Lockheed Martin’s unrealistic over optimistic promises than I am.
If the jet uses fuel as coolant, how does it cool off when the fuel is depleted near the end of a sortie?
I find it hilarious that you cite a memo from the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester with a variety of criticisms of the program, but he doesn’t mention that thermodynamics dictates that they can’t fit any more computing power in the airplane.
I mean, that’s a pretty bold claim, and Dr. Gilmore didn’t mention it. At all. Yet you insist that the F-35 has “zero margin” for cooling. Man, Dr. Gilmore must be terrible at his job of testing weapons if it takes someone with no detailed knowledge of the F-35 to point out such a big problem.