US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
In the past 20 years in US procurement, It's about milking tax money and not about capabilities. It's just a loss of potentials caused by greedy managements.
The F-35 is a bloated pig. But that revelation of the engine being heavier than two F414s while delivering worse performance is a real shocker to me. I guess the latest Russian and Chinese fighters aren't as much behind in propulsion as I thought. Is it stealth treatments bringing engine performance down or what? It has higher operating temperature than the AL-41. But it doesn't have better thrust to weight.
The whole program needs to have a major effort to fix its issues. GE should be funded to develop a new engine and they should use modern technology to make the flight computers and radar to cut the power usage down.
As for the NGAD competition they can assign the task of designing the aircraft to someone else. Northrop Grumman.
They basically developed the YF-23. I think constraining oneself to Boeing and Lockheed Martin is reductionist.
Sure it would increase their workload given the B-21 Raider program. But whatever.
They should just split the design and construction tasks. Lockheed Martin seems to be able to build things just fine. They just can't design a working aircraft.
The whole program needs to have a major effort to fix its issues. GE should be funded to develop a new engine and they should use modern technology to make the flight computers and radar to cut the power usage down.
As for the NGAD competition they can assign the task of designing the aircraft to someone else. Northrop Grumman.
They basically developed the YF-23. I think constraining oneself to Boeing and Lockheed Martin is reductionist.
Sure it would increase their workload given the B-21 Raider program. But whatever.
They should just split the design and construction tasks. Lockheed Martin seems to be able to build things just fine. They just can't design a working aircraft.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
So the fact that a pair of F414 in Burner produces 44,000 lbs of thrust well a single F135 produces 43,000 lbs of thrust in somehow makes it inferior? Really?
One F135 in military no burner produces more thrust than the AL-41 the only way to match it is to double down. That’s a powerful engine of course it’s heavy.
Radars only get more power hungry as they demand more resolution and more operating modes and larger size to deal with more scanning power. Computers need more power too.
A new engine? Sure? But not for the reasons you would think. For better range and more power generation for future growth.
This isn’t Russia. Design competition and programming isn’t just assigned by committees. They actually have to do the work of demonstrating and bidding.
Funny because F35 is designed and built across multiple venders and F35 is actually flying as opposed to some fifth generation aircraft… F22 as well. In fact most of the world’s Fifth generation aircraft take after Lockheed Martin designs… hmm. In fact almost all the world’s flying fifth generation fighters are Lockheed Martin aircraft.
Of course it does. Those twin F414s weigh less than that single F135. It is worse. Period.
Total thrust has nothing to do with it. Otherwise the NK-32 engine of the Tu-160 with 55,000 lbs of thrust would be the best and most modern military engine in production. You can always increase total thrust by making the engine bigger. But if you don't increase the thrust to weight of the engine, you won't get more acceleration or increased payload mass fraction.
The F135 weighs more and has less thrust than a pair of F414s. Which part there didn't you understand?
It has worse thrust to weight. It is worse.
GaN can have lower power consumption than GaA.
More modern chips are typically expected to have better performance per Watt. Do you even know what you are talking about?
After 28nm planar this is done with improved transistor designs like FinFET or GAA.
And then a committee decides which aircraft gets selected. Your idea that Russia doesn't do competitive bids is also bullshit. It is just that quite often they do the selection when the aircraft is still at the detailed design stage. Actual competing physical prototypes are often not built. Instead they select a detailed design from one of several competing ones, and that goes through prototype and production stage.
Did you see multiple competing B-21 Raider physical prototypes? You didn't either. The thing is the US does the exact same thing when it would be too expensive to do a flying competition of prototypes like in the bombers.
It will be interesting to see what you people will say when there are more operational Su-57s in service than F-22s. And no NGAD in sight.
There are already more J-20s than F-22s. Even including retired and non-operational F-22s.
Most of those aircraft are F-35s. A terrible aircraft. Or F-22s with obsolete electronics.
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Lethe
Captain
I think "worse performance" is too sweeping a statement. After all, engines have many different design parameters to be met for their intended applications. It may well be the case that F135 outperforms two F414s in certain domains that align with design objectives for the F-35, such as military thrust, specific fuel consumption, and compatibility with a STOVL solution.
Nonetheless I do think this "revelation" concerning the weight of the F135 engine is significant. I don't recall the notion that F135 weighed less than two F414s ever being questioned at the time. It made intuitive sense: a single engine avoids or at least mitigates certain duplicative inefficiencies inherent to a twin-engine solution, and the F135 engine had benefitted from a further decade of technological development, with production F414s dating from the late 90s and production F135s from the late 2000s.
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Yeah, the f135 engine weight is a curious thing but the source does look quite legit. Historically, there was apparently a PW official comment how f135 was 1500 pounds heavier than f119. And cites f119 weight at 5000 lb. So it all meshes pretty well.
It would appear that PW and LM made a purposeful decision to drastically lower the thrust to weight ratio of the F135. From what most expect to be - a 9:1 class engine into a just 6.7:1 class engine. Basically getting back to 1960/1970s engine class.
One can only guess what benefits might have been so worth such a trade. Stealth levels could explain it. Durability might explain it. Desire to have a common core with the STOVL engine variant might partially explain it, possibly leading to a heavier engine than otherwise needed.
There also might be some sweet spot, engineering wise. Where past a certain point making larger and larger engines simply doesn't yield as much thrust.
It would appear that PW and LM made a purposeful decision to drastically lower the thrust to weight ratio of the F135. From what most expect to be - a 9:1 class engine into a just 6.7:1 class engine. Basically getting back to 1960/1970s engine class.
One can only guess what benefits might have been so worth such a trade. Stealth levels could explain it. Durability might explain it. Desire to have a common core with the STOVL engine variant might partially explain it, possibly leading to a heavier engine than otherwise needed.
There also might be some sweet spot, engineering wise. Where past a certain point making larger and larger engines simply doesn't yield as much thrust.