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Comment by stretchcat | Hacker News Reader

The enemies of America are presumably meant to see American stealth aircraft in movies and TV shows, not over their capitols.

However, I think these airplanes are indeed designed foremost for function. The similar appearances of the B-1 and Tu-160 suggest that when two planes are designed using similar technology with similar mission requirements, they tend to have a lot of similarities. (In the years since they were initially designed, the way these aircraft are used has changed. But they were initially designed to meet similar requirements.)

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How many decades will it be before we see an F35 used in film?

F-35's have been depicted in numerous Hollywood movies already, though it seems not always in the most positive light. To get an actual F-35 filmed for a movie would probably require the cooperation of the US military though, so probably the next time a sufficiently aggrandizing American war movie calls for one? The US military has helped out Hollywood like this many times before, if they think the movie shows them in a good light.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-aug-21-la-ca-mi...

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-f-35-stealth-figh...

> How many decades will it be before we see an F35 used in film?

Rounded to the closest whole decade, -1; the first movie to use actual, not CGI/model/etc., F-35s on film was Man of Steel (2013).

I’m pretty sure there was also a couple of B’s in Die Hard 4

There was (bad) CGI of an X-35B in that movie.

Real F-35Bs don't have an internal gun, and if they did, the guns wouldn't fire from the intakes, and if the aircraft took a large chunk of concrete directly into the LiftFan it wouldn't shudder and slowly fall out of the sky, it would be a catastrophic and near instantaneous loss of aircraft and likely aircrew life.

> There was (bad) CGI of an X-35B in that movie.

Models (both miniature and full size) were used.

Ah, my mistake. Shame to put that much effort into putting something on film and have it look so awful that you think it must be CGI

You can see the same error in The Avengers: F-35B hovering and firing guns from the intakes.

I think it's a bad job of converting from a AV-8, which does have internal guns, located under each intake.

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