Interesting point with regard to the $400,000 or so helmet. The helmet capability of launching high-off-bore-sight missiles is moot, because the F-35 is such an abysmal dogfighter and specifically designed to never be in that situation anyway. And if it carries the weapons for a dogfight (Aim 9X), it can't maneuver for it. Bit of a contradiction in the design.
$400,000 helmet on a F-35 is (partly) like throwing pearls to a pig?
Two comments:
1. The whole point of the helmet is being completely missed. The F-35 is the ONLY fighter that has spherical coverage in the RF and IR spectrum. A conventional HUD does great when all your sensors are optimized/limited to a narrow tunnel in the forward hemisphere. Making a HUD with spherical coverage (including backward and down) is literally impossible. The solution was a helmet that becomes a HUD with totally spherical (4Pi steradian) coverage. This enables the pilot to literally look down through the bottom of the airplane or backward through the engine and tail of the airplane and see (at both long and short range) EVERYthing that his sensors are seeing. That's why the F-35 has no HUD. And the helmet is integral to the ability of the avionics systems to display fused sensor data. That simply cannot be done on flat panels and HUDs in a single crew airplane. And BTW, has anyone priced a conventional holographic HUD lately? No you say? Well a holographic HUD costs only slightly less than the helmet system. So cost wise, its nearly a wash. Knocking the price of a helmet display is about as sensical as knocking the price of stealth. It's the cost of doing business in the modern world of air warfare. And calling it a "contradiction in design" indicates (please excuse my bluntness) a rather gross misunderstanding of the design.
2. Characterizing the F-35 as "such an abysmal dogfighter" is in my opinion both utterly false and hugely irresponsible. It's ONLY short coming is in close-in dogfight maneuverability which while not stellar, is far far far from "abysmal". And in every other realm of the dog fight it is stellar and if flown and fought properly, should enable the pilot to avoid the knife fight in a phone booth. Because no matter how stellar a close quarters knife fighter you are, such a fight is immensely dangerous and much better avoided in the first place. This is a lesson learned the hard way by the pilots of zero fighters well over half a century ago and a lesson many on this forum have apparently never learned.