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Originally Posted by *[FOX
* Bort]
This is incorrect.
All F/A-18E/F's have a vulcan cannon
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Pardon me. You're right. I could have swore I read somewhere, years ago, they'd swapped it out for avionics. I forget, but I think that thing + 500 rounds of ammo runs close to 4000 pounds. On A/B/C/D's, that's 16% of it's empty weight.
The 18 has been sold to lots of other countries, true. It's avionics are
customized for that country, as well as the firmwares. They don't get all the ECCM and identification stuff, along with the crypto and a few other things. The airframe might be the same (with minor differences), but the computers are inferior. The Israelis might actually get some superior stuff on the ECM side (they use jammers rather than the fleet deceptors), but everything else is custom. "Stealth" is a whole other issue. Exporting the technology is one thing, tooling up your plants and economy to actually produce the damn things are
something else completely.
As far as I know, the Airforce runs B-2's for precision strikes, and some reconnisance. B-2's can launch from Louisiana and refuel, in-flight, but that is an expensive mission. Which is why we've been using Dubai and Saudi Arabia/Kuwait. Certainly Diego Garcia for the first few days when it was open bombing season out in the desert.