The tiles ablate. The shuttle returned from every mission with missing tiles.
The problem was never solved and turned what was supposed to be a few days into weeks or months. Every mission the shuttle had to go back into the assembly building and have all tiles inspected and potentially replaced.
Shuttle had more unique perimeter shapes, but starship still has a lot of variation due to tickness. I don't know if that is easier to vary in production or still needs custom molds for the variation.
Obviously doesn’t guarantee they’ll find solution, but fast iteration will definitely help.
Its turn around time is ridiculous, it has to be maintained with specialized equipment/hangers, along with external contractor assistance.
Compared to the Gripen, as an example, which can land on a freeway and be up in the air again in a few minutes.
One was designed to be used in war, in desperate scenarios, with no ability to coddle it. The other, the F-35? Is designed around milking the taxpayer as much as possible, and employing people in as many politician's states as possible.
The shuttle was like that, I think. Which is really sad.
The gripen is a much less capable non expeditonary platform designed to maximize asymmetric losses if sweden is invaded. As a small country sweden has to follow a porcupine strategy to deter invasion.
Presently the actual comparable to the F-35 is attritable drones, which is why every mid-size and major power is developing them.
The whole point of the F-35 is that it is a stealthy platform with a very advanced set of targeting and weapons capabilities: but the issue is a similar capability drone would basically have a similar price tag since the expense of the pilot is minor in that case.
Like plausibly the best autonomous F-35 platform would just be an F-35.
Ukraine's success with precision targeting of Russian assets would have been unthinkable with a fleet of F-35s and associated missiles because of the cost.
Cheap, smart, disposable drones are orders of magnitude cheaper and at least as effective for many mission profiles.
Which is exactly what it was used for in Iran.
There's no drones currently in development AFAIK with this goal either - the focus is on getting them to do useful mission without a pilot, rather then out dogfight or outmanoeuver missiles.
Basically the point stands: a hypothetical "better then F-35" drone is likely more, not less expensive then an F-35.
>Compared to the Gripen, as an example, which can land on a freeway and be up in the air again in a few minutes.
I have no idea where people got the idea that the F-35 requires a major refit after each sortie or that it needs climate controlled hangars, but there's literally no truth to any of it.
The turnaround time for an F-35 after a mission in a wartime scenario isn't going to be much different from any other older fighter jet. Refuel, rearm, get back in the air.
One of the key requirements for the F-35 programs was to minimize extra care needed for the RAM (Radar Absorbent Material). Unlike older stealth aircraft the F-35's ram is "baked in" to the aircraft skin, rather than being a coating. The F-117 and B-2 require climate controlled hangars because their coatings are old and delicate, the F-22 doesn't, but needs regular touch-ups for its coating, the F-35 is just left sitting outside most of the time regardless of where it's operating, a desert, the arctic, a jungle, the deck of a ship, you just leave it out there. The only common maintenance done on the F-35's RAM is replacing a relatively small amount of special RAM tape which is usually used around the edges of the access panels which are opened for other types of maintenance.
The maintenance is the real difference - US specifically USAF gear is designed for nice air conditioned hangars to do regular maintenance, Gripen, MiG-29, and to way lower effect F-18 (when compared with F-16) - the first two assume forward bases without ability to do major maintenance, and even the latter (and other carrier adapted ones) promote things like quick swap engines because that's no space for hangar queen to have deep engine maintenance just so engine vendor can claim long time between overhauls
The engines did have lower overall hours, yes, but the suggestion they need whole overhaul after very few hours is because it looks so when looking at it from USAF doctrine where "removing engine and sending it to special facility" is only for rare complete overhauls, and local mechanics are supposed to do regular minor work all the time.
MiG-29 instead was done under doctrine that the airbase does not have mechanics capable of doing such overhaul, nor the facilities to do so, and instead you swap the engine and send the used one to maintenance facilities further away from the front, same with other aggregates.
F35 can actually do something in such scenarios, as detecting them in the first place is hard.
It’s an extremely different design goal, the US doesn’t mind exotic weapons that require exquisite (and expensive) methods of servicing, they have the budget and the assumption that a well equipped air field will be immaculately maintained.
Meanwhile the Mig-29 designers assumed it’d operate from damaged/poorly maintained fields, so on the ground you can shut the primary air intakes and it uses ones on top of the plane to get air, drastically reducing the FOD risk on taxi/takeoff.
I do wonder how well the F-35 would fare in an actual shooting war against near peers when all the peacetime assumptions breakdown.
The F-35 was just in a war, in Iran. It performed as expected and was able to roll back Iran's air defense network in days.
"Rolling back" Iran's air defense seems like very fuzzy phrasing. Certainly, Iran was not able to close its own airspace, nor prevent ongoing airstrikes on many American and Israeli targets. At the same time, my armchair observation is that a great many US and Israeli airstrikes were accomplished using stand-off weapons [1], which would not have been needed if the United States and Israel had achieved 'air supremacy'[2] as has been the case in America's conflicts in recent history.
The observed trend in USAF readiness has been downward for some time [3][4]. Air war is more than single sorties. If you have anything resembling an accurate summary of sorties flown, targets successfully hit, and number of combat-ready aircraft throughout the (currently on hold) war, and so on, please share. Absent such detailed information, all we have are various degrees of speculation.
1. https://news.meaww.com/us-used-tomahawks-himars-standoff-wea...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_supremacy
3. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-mission-capable-...
4. https://havokjournal.com/culture/military/the-hidden-erosion...
> an actual shooting war against near peers