It's funny to see Indians going over board with LCAs price and comparing it to Rafales or M-MRCAs, although the LCA MK1 can't meet core IAF requirements of the M-MRCA competitions like the 9G limit, or a TWR of 1 or better. It has just passed the ICO 2 requirements, which means the
MINIMUM requirements to be inducted into IAF service, but doesn't mean that it would be even close to the flight and A2A combat performance of the upgrade Mig 29 or Mirage 2000, let alone the top level of MKI and Rafale. So guys stop these nonsens calculations about "we can get ... LCA MK1s for the money we spend on Rafale, ignoring every bit of logical sense, or even requirements of MoD and IAF of the M-MRCA competition (ToT, offsets, industrial improvement, fully fledged medium class multi role combat capability...)!!!
What does the price really mean? That even after all the delays and cost-overruns, the price of the fighter is still around the $20 million unit cost that was aimed for it initially. So that is one thing we should be happy about, that it didn't cost us too much apart from many years delays.However, the figure alone doesn't tell us anything about LCA's real performance, about it's technical capabilities and that are the real points that sets the fighters apart and not the cost of a light class fighter. It doesn't tell us about the radar cone, the drag, or the speed issues, or the fact that we still speculate only what the radar of the MK1 or even the early MK2s will be and what performance they have.
The 300Km combat range is also a figure that is given on very old specboards, but neither says anything about the profile and the loads related to the figure, nor what combat range the version now has, that was cleared through the IOC 2.
In comparison to the JF 17...
...we know that both currently have pretty similar empty weight and internal fuel capacities
...that both have 3 x wet stations to carry similar sized fuel tanks
...that both have can carry only 4 x AAMs with all wet stations loaded
.
So does anybody really believe that JF 17 could have X times longer combat radius than LCA with the same load, although their base specs are so similar in this role? Also don't forget that increased internal fuel capacity was not a requirement of IAF for the MK2 varient, but from IN since N-LCA needs more for carrier operations and ski-jump take off. That again shows, that range actually isn't an issue and when you look up official statements, there were no complains about the range at all. So this whole issue seems to be more one for discussions on forums, rather than a real problem for the fighter or the forces that want to use it.
So paper specs, or price figures alone doesn't make LCA worse, or better than it is, but of course there will be always those that try to critize it, just like there will be those that overhype it, just to fight about it.
