Actually there is. Boeing's design was forward thinking, e.g. using carbon fiber before anyone else --now common place. They also figured out a way to use the main engine to provide vertical take-off and landing, instead of having a separate engine, which would have made a big difference in cost. I watched an excellent documentary on the whole project long ago, and it was clear that Boeing design was superior, but they got shafted b/c, as other have pointed out, it wasn't about the best product, it was about defense contractor dollars.
My main reason for posting was that your original comment would have been much stronger had it included any of the arguments you made here.
That said, I would reiterate that it's not clear that all of the possible advantages would have actually been delivered in the production aircraft. Wikipedia summarizes the problem engi_nerd mentioned as “eight months into construction of the prototypes, the JSF's maneuverability and payload requirements were refined at the request of the Navy and Boeing's delta wing design fell short of the new targets”. That's the kind of thing which makes software projects fail and software is a LOT easier to change than a high-performance aircraft design.
It's very easy to believe that this wouldn't have been the only such change and that the Boeing project would have ended in the same muddle because the project is simply badly managed. Accepting so many different missions as requirements for a single design seems like something which would doom anything constructed near our our current technology levels. It really sounds like it'd have been cheaper and more successful had the Marines’ VTOL requirement been a separate design since that's frequently mentioned as the reason for the many compromises for engine safety, performance, stealth, etc.
> but they got shafted b/c, as other have pointed out, it wasn't about the best product, it was about defense contractor dollars.
Definitely contractor dollars but also high-paying jobs in legislators’ districts. From the sounds of it, the “political engineering” process has been a lot more successful than anything else on the project:
Boeing would have spent much engineering effort on mitigation of the hot gas ingestion in mode 4 problems. It's impossible to know now how difficult or easy that issue would have been to resolve. The lesson that I take away from this is: STOVL is not easy. LM, Rolls Royce, and Pratt&Whitney have had their hands full with the LiftFan.
It wasn't so crystal clear then. I'm assuming the documentary you saw was Nova's "Battle of the X Planes". Recall that a Navy requirements change made Boeing's design overweight, so it never performed any STOVL operations in its full flight configuration. Lockheed Martin had an aircraft with enough margin to do a short takeoff, supersonic dash, and then land vertically, all in the same trim. So the DoD had to choose between Lockheed, which had a plane that had already shown it could fulfill the mission, and Boeing, which proposed to build an aircraft significantly different than it had tested and hadn't had a single flight that demonstrated all capabilities like LA had.
Proven versus unproven. That's the choice that was present.
