America's fancy new fighter jet stinks at fighting. And the US Navy doesn't care.

Wildcat · 08-05-15, 11:41 PM

I don't think ultra-maneuverability is that important a feature.

A reasonable amount of maneuverability is enough.

We're talking about a platform with an extremely sophisticated radar system which will also be backed up with link and contact data from AWACS radar aircraft, among other sensor info.

When you're taking your shots 20-30 miles away with an active radar missile, you can turn away to get some distance before the other guy's even in range to fire his missiles, if he even gets a lock on you in the first place (Stealth).

And ignoring all that, it only takes a split second of yanking the nose to get an IR missile shot off, and after that the bad guy's usually going to have to break off to evade, or he'll be hit.

Look at the examples of dogfighting in a sim/game like Flaming Cliffs (Lomac). Fights with missiles rarely devolve into scissors battles, it's usually finished in 1 or 2 reversals or even at the break, if it even gets that close. Probably more than 70% of all the fights are over at 20miles distance with a long range radar guided missile.

08-05-15, 11:41 PM	#17
Wildcat Engineer Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 215 Downloads: 69 Uploads: 0	I don't think ultra-maneuverability is that important a feature. A reasonable amount of maneuverability is enough. We're talking about a platform with an extremely sophisticated radar system which will also be backed up with link and contact data from AWACS radar aircraft, among other sensor info. When you're taking your shots 20-30 miles away with an active radar missile, you can turn away to get some distance before the other guy's even in range to fire his missiles, if he even gets a lock on you in the first place (Stealth). And ignoring all that, it only takes a split second of yanking the nose to get an IR missile shot off, and after that the bad guy's usually going to have to break off to evade, or he'll be hit. Look at the examples of dogfighting in a sim/game like Flaming Cliffs (Lomac). Fights with missiles rarely devolve into scissors battles, it's usually finished in 1 or 2 reversals or even at the break, if it even gets that close. Probably more than 70% of all the fights are over at 20miles distance with a long range radar guided missile.