| To alter the picture a bit and complicate a lot more: it's of course possible to make a new jet fighter/bomber/thing that satisfies all of the requirements. The issue is cost and time. The F35 is a classic mega-R&D project. Like going to the Moon, fusion, self-driving cars, XUV litography [or the whole process/node change from 10nm to 7 or 5nm]. Costs are enormous, lifetime TCO is also very high. It's so complex and funding is so far from infinite, that it is and will be never "done". We know these. Just as you can always tweak a nuclear reactor or atomic bomb design, just as you can always make better microchips, you can always make better jets. It's also very similar to the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) - the goal/design is pretty straightforward, just the engineering way to get there, is not. It calls for "tech" that's simply does not exist, and calls for systems integration of that tech on a level that simply cannot be adequately estimated/planned. Fusion, the JWST and the F-35 have different principal constraints (the JWST seems the simplest, it is simply cost constrained - every part of the R&D/assembly/verification process seems so underfunded that all the other parts/participants have to wait for each other - and downtime is not cheap either, specialists can't just go and have a gig while they wait for others/testing/manufacturing; the F-35 is probably very bureaucratically constrained, a bit like ITER [the big international fusion project] - everyone has a small part in it, so there's is lots and lots and even more back and forth between everybody, problems are discovered, tweaking needs discussions, discussions with many parties are a nightmare, everything needs paperwork, because it's public money after all, etc.) This does not make the F35 "bad", but of course begs the question of spending efficacy. Was there really no better way to spend all this money and achieve very similar goals? There probably was. But. Usually these projects are a success even if the end result is useless. Because they fund R&D in many places. For example a good overview of how mega-R&D translates into tangible innovations is the W7X brochure: https://www.ipp.mpg.de/987655/w7x_and_industry_en.pdf (Germany spent a few hundred millions euros, and most of that went to small shops iterating on their tech - which of course helps Germany remain competitive on the global markets). |