The F-35 fighter jet can be fitted with a variety of armaments, including this GAU-22 four-barrel gun pod capable of rattling off 50 25mm rounds per second. The destructive bore is impressive, the sound is downright terrifying.
This is the first test-firing of the GAU-22 as an external gun pod on the F-35, according to our old friend Tyler at The Drive. The gun holds 220 rounds and can use all of them in, well, pretty short order as you saw in the video.
But as fierce as the weapon appears to be tearing up targets at the gun range, it still requires software to actually be viable in combat.
The latest update on that per F35.com says:
“As of May 2015, 97.5% percent of the required F-35 software is currently flying and 99.9% percent of the required software has been coded. This equates to about 10,000 lines of code that remain to be written.”
How long does it take to write 10,000 lines of code? We don’t know! And I have to imagine that’s exactly why they developers chose that metric at the timeline. In 2015, the Pentagon promised the F-35's GAU-22 would be ready to go to war in 2017 according to DoDBuzz. As it stands, it seems like there are still a lot of variables between the jet’s current status and its total combat readiness.