Re: Ever Wish We'd Built The YF-23??

On 2008-03-29 19:53:56 -0700, T.L. Davis <tldavis341@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Wow, am I sick of hearing about cost over-runs and technical problems
with the F-22 and F-35... Really makes me wonder if we had been
better off going with Northrop and Boeing.

If we can also assume that the B-2 program would be curtailed as it actually was, then we're talking about a Northrop that would have been a lot more motivated to reduce the flyaway cost of it's ATF-solution airframe (whatever that evolved to be, starting from the YF-23). During the mid-90's "peace dividend" drawdown, hungry (and innovative) Northrop could well have closed the "agility gap" with the YF-22 while doing a helluva lot more to reduce the flywaway cost of the fighter. Factor in some redesign for true thrust vectoring and a much less complacent upper management--you can't get much worse than LockMart!--and, hell yeah, we really might have rather bought the F-23.

That's what gets to me about going whole-hog for the F-22 now. I'm just the sort of peacenik pinko that should be touting interim builds of F-15s and hand-waving for the F-35 to stand in for the F-22 (whilst secretly plotting to kill funding for any new fighter and spend the dough on marijuana subsidies for Ebonics tutors)...and even I know that the US needs a stealthy air superiority fighter with a larger missile carriage capacity than the F-35. And we need to have it in squadron strength rather sprightly. But with fifteen years to work on reducing flyaway costs, LockMart's price tag for F-22's is still horribly bloated. Don't talk to me about low build-rate price inflation--LockMart's wishlist build-rate flyaway cost is still well over $100 million per jet. That's ghastly. Get it down to $85 million per jet and then I'll mau-mau Barbara Lee to support bulk-buy funding for the F-22.

(Naturally I'll expect them to sortie only to defend third-world abortion clinics, but you'll still have my support for the buy.)

Really now, how much would EADS Plus charge us for license-built Typhoons, seeing as how the Brits are trying to give away their later-tranche planes? Seeing as how cancelling the F-22 would all but guarantee them tens of billions in sales, I'm sure we could cut a pretty sweet deal.

...Intake too large? Look
at an F-8 or A-7, that's not new or prohibitive.

But the performance numbers of the F-8 were sexy as hell, which made the aesthetics of the chin intake moot.

The X-32 chin intake was _ugly_, and I'm a Boeing bigot saying that. When I saw the first the X-32 mockup I thought, "McNamara couldn't have forced the Coast Guard to buy a plane that ugly, let alone USAF/USN/USMC." With the thousands of experienced designers, systems managers, dedicated Pentagon suck-ups...er, program managers...assigned to the X-32 proposal, was there not one seasoned weapons procurement vet who stood up and said, "I don't know what the hell you all are thinking, but no service branch of the United States military is going to buy a plane _that ugly_ in peacetime. No way in hell."

Why the freakin' chin intake anyway? If you have to live with the tradeoffs of a curved intake in order to hide the fan blades from radar, why not go for a true doral-intake design? No need for an F-107 pilot-sucking monstrosity. Dual semi-recessed intakes in the wing roots, what kind of mass-flow penalty would that have imposed on the engine intake? I know, I know, they'll be blanked out by the wing leading during high-alpha maneuvers and the engine'll flameout--in theory. But given the vastly more sophisticated current art re. intake flow modeling, couldn't you go with a doral intake design for a fighter, especially if you factored in auxilliary lateral/ventral intakes?

.