>>508258786No problem.
>>508259452>You stupid fuck, any plane can be refitted to do that but for some reason you think the F-35 is uniquely extra capable in that regardExcept no, they can't? If you can achieve a radar resolution sufficient for guidance on a non-stealth aircraft at a range of say, 200km, but you have to close to less than 20km to achieve sufficient return on a stealth aircraft, then the non-stealth aircraft effectively cannot return fire at all. This is why modern air combat is all in on quality over quantity, and range over dogfighting. Because even modest advantages in sensors/stealth/range lead to incredibly lopsided engagements wherein one side can wipe the other out without ever being threatened.
It gets even worse when you integrate the aircraft into the killchain. The F35s can load up with internal ordnance and receive their guidance telemetry from, let's say, an E3 Sentry that's a couple hundred kilometers behind them. It can get radar returns on generation 4 aircraft strong enough to guide the missiles to terminal phase from more than 400 kilometers out. Meanwhile if the gen 4 team has an AWACs of their own, it effectively can't resolve guidance on the F35s unless it closes to well within their own firing range, which would be suicide. So gen 4 team is having missiles lobbed at them from well over 100 kilometers out and have to just eat it in an attempt to close range and use their own radars to get a solution to shoot back. Meanwhile gen 5 team can drop their ordnance and literally just turn around and leave while the AWACs handles guidance until the missiles are close enough for their own onboard sensors to take over. This means that even if gen 4 team accelerates into the incoming missiles, they still will never achieve a firing solution because team gen 5 *never* needs to close range.
