The cost of failure.....

I was wondering, how much would it cost to restart one of the competitors which lost out to another aircraft, such as the yf-23 or the x-32?

If it was relatively affordable, could the US not make a fortune out of selling these projects to countires who have requirements for advanced aircraft but may also wish to expand thei own aerospace industries.

Jensy

p.s this would apply to any countries projects.

Im no expert, but theres no way that the USA would let YF-23 tech get into any other nations hands - But thats besides the point.

I agree that restarting a design from its early stages holds no problems for the companies involved, as when the competitions end the designes are held in secure storage along with all of the plans / designs / tech details and the like. these can sit for decades or longer without being declassified into the white world.

So yes it would be relativly easy, but no i don't believe the USA would do it.

I'd LOVE to have a 'civilianized' YF-23.... But that will NOT happen. The closest I will get is a scale model that I'm going to try and build and get to fly.... but I need some CG wind-tunnel testing so that I can get some flight dynamics look-up tables going to put into the on-board computer - as well as give it it's own flight dynamics model to run in real-time to allow it to 'guess' on unhandled exceptions. ...... That's going to take a while....

Yeah - there is absolutely no way the F-23 is going to another country. Even though countries may be our 'allies' - not only are we sending technology to their country where it can also be leaked out - but we never know who will and will not be our ally in the next war. Although I would like to see it proven that the F-23 will slaughter the F-22 - but not at the price of our pilots' lives.