Obama the best adman for Sukhoi, Mikoyan, and Kamov ever.

[Sea Skimmer]

An FB-22 program would run at least 10 billion for development (even Lockheed claimed at least 5-7 billion would be needed for the lowest risk version...and we don’t know them for being conservative) and then at least 15 billion to produce 100 aircraft. Could be more like 20-25 billion though, depending on if the FB-22 used the existing fuselage modules for F-22 or not. The more realistic proposals would only change the wing, but that also means no major increase in terms of internal payload leaving the plane little better then an F-35 in terms of bombs carried.

So that’s 25-35 billion dollars, and the public UAV programs are just not sucking down that kind of money. Predator and Reaper combined only eat up about 1 billion dollars a year in procurement dollars for the aircraft and support systems for example. Globalhawk is another billion, and all the smaller UAVs only run to a few hundred million. You’d have to gut them all to fund an FB-22. The Black Budget would have more money to steal, but those black UAVs are going to be the ones we would want most in a hot war kind of situation when the FB-22 would be relevant.

The only way to fund an FB-22 would really be to rob F-35 accounts and slow down its development and procurement. That’d be a total disaster for theprogram and just generally mean we fuck ourselves and any hope of USAF modernization. The alternative, just fucking spend more on the damn air force, just isn’t going to happen with Obama in office and Congress operating in a world in which only military spending must be detailed and approved line by line while trillion dollar bank bailouts are handed out monthly. It really is fucking insane how only 10-20 billion more a year could fix nearly all out ABM/Air Force/Navy shipbuilding procurement problems and yet we just don’t do it and further ruin our remaining industry.

[Pelranius]

Cost issues aside, wouldn't a FB-23 be more ideal for the role of a bomber (the design is more stealthy, at least according to popular 'wisdom' on the Internet).

[Sea Skimmer]

The FB-23 has almost nothing in common with the F-23; it represents a total reworking of the fundamentals of the design to an even greater degree then the most exotic of the FB-22 concepts. It is also like the FB-22 almost certainly a series of concept studies rather then any specific design. All of which only makes sense since the F-23 was never even close to fully developed and was never produced so no reason exist to try to reuse any of its components in the first place. You can hardly say anything more about it; certainly one cannot argue it is ‘more ideal’ when you don’t even know what the bomb load is let alone any other specification.

In any case, ideal depends highly on what you want to do. The Regional Bomber requirements, requirements which never had any hope of being funded anyway, (go congress, demand new bomber studies when you wont fund existing program properly) as they got drawn up emphasized more range above speed. FB-22 had already followed that road, supercruise would have been ditched in favor of F136 engines with much better subsonic fuel economy, supersonic speed could still be reached on burner. But even then no version of FB-22 could reach the required minimal 2,000nm (2,500nm+ perfered) mission radius even with drop tanks. A dedicated design was far preferable and could have accommodated a large internal payload far more easily too. The streamlining required for supercruise is a major determent to high internal volume. This is why F-35 also dropped supercruise, it just wasn’t going to work if the plane was also going to have 4,500lb of internal warload and 600+ mile mission radius, though cost was also a serious factor.

And just so people understand, here are some of the many FB-22 configurations studied alongside a stock F-22 on the left. As you can see they are very different beasts, though in all reality limiting changes to the wing only was the only way the plane was ever gonna happen and hell even then and with no war in Iraq it proubabbly wouldn't have happened.