Mr Boffin
Excellent stuff as always. Clearly being free of certain previous commitments and statements relative to Ms Widdecombe and SRVL has lightened your spirits.
The issue of thermal and mechanical damage related to F-35B VL operations remains unresolved. The JPO and LockMart say "no significant difference from Harrier" while the people responsible for the flat bits that the jet will land on are calling for 100-foot-square pads of continuously reinforced high-temperature concrete (the stuff you make pizza ovens from) on land, and magic cooling pads on decks.
Meanwhile, the people that should be providing adult supervision over all the above groups are not banging heads together and telling people to come up with a single consistent answer.
I suspect that is because they are afraid that the correct answer is the wrong one, which would mean that F-35B would be as welcome on a CVN as an outbreak of plague, and that any effort to operate austere-base from anywhere ending in -stan would come to an abrupt halt in a cloud of molten asphalt and supersonic chips of concrete.
And if it turns out that an attempt to assuage the Guadalcanal complex of the Navy's army's air force was a technical nonstarter from the beginning (at least with stealth added to the equation) then we have invested a good deal for a negative return. And when I say "a good deal" I mean two new engines, the entire CDA X-plane program, the weight-reduction effort, the manufacturing complexities and delays arising therefrom, and the performance compromises inherent from trying to stuff the ten pounds of USAF/Navy requirements into the five-pound sack labeled STOVL.
Not to mention the fate of the pilots who, somewhere along the line, will have to eject when the engine quits.
/weeps softly, bangs head on desk