It's interesting to me how many people salivate over the C-3 thing. It's an interesting idea, but what I'm hearing is "the C-3 could do this, this, and this" when it's nothing more right now than concept art, planes in the boneyard, and a list of promises. G-d knows what a contractor promises an airplane can do is usually what it winds up being able to do... The Plopter isn't perfect or totally suitable, but at least its sins and shortcomings are known.
Guys are talking about "just take the boneyard Hoovs and build a new fuselage" like that's the easiest thing in the world. It wouldn't just be cutting a hole in the back for a ramp and boom, you're done. Here's what you'd need to do: build a totally new fuselage, which would be plumbed with 30+-year-old hyds and wiring. That requires a production line, new tooling and so on, all of which are overhead costs that Lockheed is going to pass on to the Navy and gets folded into the unit cost. Assuming no issues with the design and production of that fuselage (ahem), and no issues with the parts they're pulling out D-M (ahem), now you've got a new airplane. It doesn't matter that it just looks like a stretched S-3, as far as NAVAIR's concerned, it's a new-build airplane. It would have to go through the same flight test regime as any other new airplane, including working it up at the Boat. That's going to take years and, again, all that gets folded into the unit cost. And we're talking about maybe 40-50 airframes at the most. At some point, even if there absolutely no major issues that crop up during this whole process, the Navy would have to justify to Congress and the GAO why they're spending a huge amount of money on building and testing a C-3 when the V-22 was already in production. It appears the plan is for the Navy to start getting their planes in 2018...anyone think a C-3 would be ready in 3 years?
I do think there might be merit in also refurbing some S-3s as US-3Bs. V-22s for heavy trash hauling and palletized cargo, US-3s for high-priority, longer-range stuff (like VRC-50 did with theirs back in the day) and as organic tanker. Unlike the "C-3", it doesn't require any major mods, and what mods it does require, were already worked out with the US-3A. So we kind of get the best of both worlds.