• KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 months ago

    Just something to point out to people who complain about the U.S. gifting stocks of vehicles to Ukraine. The U.S. was planning to get rid of them anyway.

    the vast majority of materiel we’ve sent to ukraine thus far has been old pre-modernization stock, or older, modernized stock in the case of some of the abrams i believe. It’s literally just shifting some budget to procurement to get us new stuff, while shipping some of our older kit to be used in battle, which is productive. There is almost no downside in us doing this, aside from the fact that we have to ship it to ukraine, which kinda sucks.

    the F35 has been incredibly expensive thus far, but produced in significant numbers and fielded for a similar amount of time as something like the f16 it will completely absolve it’s development costs over time. It’s also important to remember that the f-35 is quite literally the most advanced air warfare platform that exists right now, which kind of follows the price tag.

    90% of the complaints about the f35 on the internet have been “it bad at dog fighting” and “it expensive” and, that’s about it. As for dog fighting, it’s literally not designed to dogfight, so it should be no surprise that it’s not very good at it.

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 months ago

        if the f35 enters a dogfight, the other fighter is probably already fucked. I can’t imagine that would ever be a concern of yours, as an f35 pilot, especially with all of the fancy link tech they have.

        • Zink@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          Yeah you’re thinking along the same lines I was. If the situation ever occurred that an F-35 was in close combat with an enemy aircraft, shit has gone very sideways.

          Though you’re also right that with the interconnected platform of the thing, in reality the dogfighting F-35 would just have to distract the enemy for a moment while somebody dozens of miles away fires a missile.

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 months ago

            yeah, i also wouldn’t be surprised if f22 in the position of potential resistance would be escorted by fighters as well.

            If you’re trying to target any sort of lock on an f35 that isn’t pure vision based targeting, you’re pretty SOL unless the pilot can’t fumble with the switches correctly lol.