The F-35 being a flop is more related to the Pentagon having their heads up their asses and making ridiculous demands of the project in an attempt to reduce costs. Hello decision to go with one engine. It's the classic, client always being right, bull shit that forces engineers to do a little "day drinkin". LM should have pushed back and told the boys in blue how bad their idea really was.
Then again It's hard to say no to your sugar daddy, no matter how degrading it might be. So management at Lockstep Martin says make it happen, too afraid to upset big poppa G. The engineers say, "It hurts, please make it stop, it's not supposed to work like that!" Lots of nasty internal emails, hemorrhaging, and a few bonus size bottles of lube later and oila... they managed to make something that flies. Now of course time has proven that just getting something off the ground is no longer going to cut it.
I mean that tricked worked at Kitty Hawk, but if the Wright brothers had been funded by the US government, they would have been required to build something that could mount a cannon and drop cavalry into the enemy trenches. Saying no, that can't work, is not a sign of weakness if you have the math to support it. But there are lots of physics-lly impaired people that call the shots and think that with enough money you can design your way out of anything.
So maybe this announcement is just a desperate PR stunt to try and gloss over the F-35 incendiary strike fighter with it's internal combustion engine. I mean hell, who wouldn't forgive them for making a multi-billion dollar piece of shit if they went ahead and turned available energy into an ? symbol. And they don't even need to show anything for their claims for like another 10 years... by then they will have built a plane that works or something. PURE FUCKING GENIUS.
