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Comment by to3m | Hacker News Reader

1. Since He threated the F-35 program with closure, I guess we will see more of these. The US$399,792zn that's been spent so far must have left at least some spare for PR

2. There was an unofficial war hardware porn series on HN a while ago, front page full of Boy's Own stuff, one of them being an article by a pilot who sounded pretty positive about the F-35's capabilities. So this is either a long-running PR drive or the plane actually doesn't suck

3. For US$401,722zn (since it's now a minute or two after I wrote point 1) I'd like to think that we can expect the plane to be, at the very least, OK

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The question isn't really whether it's ok it's whether M F-35's are better than N alternative fighters at some task, for M<N.

A problem is that it needs to replace a lot of different planes (a-10, f-18, f-16, harrier...) and those have different roles. It's likely to suck royally at replacing the A-10 for example, or to act as an interceptor for defending the airspace Norway and Denmark which have no alternative fighters to back it up - but if a decision is made to e.f extend A-10 life, or buy a light attack plane for that role, then F-35 numbers go down, and unit price up.

Basically the F-35 has to be bought to do things it doesn't do very well or very cost effectively because otherwise not enough will be sold for it to be economical

Good points, but also consider the question of survivability in a world with increasingly sophisticated anti-aircraft threats. One F-35 might be inferior to four F-16s militarily speaking, and more expensive to boot, but are you willing to lose pilots in the latter scenario to accomplish the mission?

Additionally, are you factoring in the cost in training, maintenance and fuel for the larger force?

The iPhone 7 is obviously inferior to the 3GS. For one thing it's larger, which is ridiculous, I mean I thought the whole point was to make phones smaller. And, can you believe it, it doesn't even have a headphone jack! Obviously worthless, throw that thing in the trash!

That's what I hear when people bandwagon bash the F35 without reference to avionics, comms, sensor systems, or low observability features.

In part, people are discontented that for the cost it's not as clearly superior in every way to the 4th generation as the 4th was to the 3rd. That's really because the manned jet fighter, like the smartphone or main battle tank, is a maturing technology.

The real frontiers of military innovation are in autonomous weapon systems and space warfare. So be careful what you wish for, I guess.

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