PhilipG, Guys,
Perhaps I can help here.
The F-35 was certainly not designed as an 'out an out' dog fighting aircraft. I've certainly never claimed that, nor has the programme as far as I know. However, it was required to have a good level of manoeuvrability so as to be able to defend itself, and the post earlier today from A1bill with Maj Hanche's comments seems to show that it might have achieved some of that. I'm sure other contributors may have a different view.
The F-35 is a strike aircraft that's intended to be a balanced design, using reduced signature, advanced active and passive sensors, very good datalinks and good weapons. Time will tell if LM have succeeded. I'm certainly not privy to any of the detailed (and almost certainly highly classified) combat assessments, so I can only offer my knowledge of what the programme was aiming to do.
External carriage of weapons has certainly been tested, I've not yet seen any weapon drops from the stations, so that may not yet be cleared. The gun has certainly been tested on the A, the pod has been ground tested, and carried in flight, so I'd expect the gun to come along in due course.
The recent OT&E report gave a lot of detail on progress towards 3F software, multi ship communications (I presume you mean MADL) is certainly being worked, and the spars didn't exactly 'crack under load', they cracked under fatigue cycle loads, and are being redesigned. Not a great result, but not at all unknown - Tornado suffered some fairly massive fatigue issues (in service) with its wing structure. Please note that I'm not having a 'pop' at the Tornado, just using it as an example of how damn hard designing combat aircraft airframes is. BAe fixed the Tornado, LM will fix the F-35.
I'm not, repeat not, claiming all is rosy on F-35. Software development progress has been a problem for some years now, as I've said in other posts. But, and I do think that it bears repeating, the F-35 programme has aimed very, very high, and is breaking new ground in areas such as integrated avionics, MADL, sensor integration and signature management.
I'd also gently point out that this thread only survives because so much information about the programme is being made publicly available. Some UK aircraft programmes that consumed large amounts of our small defence budget (e.g. Typhoon) had some fairly horrible problems that took a long time to be solved at great cost, but these were kept out of public gaze for no other reason than to avoid embarrassment.
Finally, may I make a gentle suggestion that accusations about libel, slander, defamation and the legal aspects would be better done via PM? There's a real danger that if the tone of this forum carries on down this track, it could degenerate into a board with three or four people shouting bad stuff at each other. Just my thoughts, it's a free forum at the end of the day.
Best Regards as ever to all those trying to do the right thing at the right time for the people at the front line,
Engines