Viewing profile — V_Terranova_Jr

There is an element of truth to this. It's also true that the U.S. government is a terrible customer, especially for bespoke or expensive military goods. However, you can see my ot…

The highest priority in U.S. government acquisitions is to respect the business "rights" of suppliers and potential suppliers. It's hard to understand how tightly this is wound int…

I'm sorry, but this is basically incorrect on every point other than the limited tenure. Source: I work in this sector. PMs often come directly from industry. Once they do, there i…

Replying to finish a discussion no one will probably see, but... > That the original comment I replied to is false: "Good luck designing crash resilient structures without simulati…

What is your actual assertion? That tools like FEA are needless frippery or that they just dumb down practitioners who could have otherwise accomplished the same things with hand m…

I don't know about full-on nationalization, but we have plenty of evidence to show the incentives for publicly-owned for-profit companies whose primary customer is the Government a…

This is a poor example of "Government innovation". It's more an example of legislative overreach / "pork barrel" politics, and bad acquisition practices. The Government is certainl…

We probably won't get much further going back and forth on this. For what it's worth, you seem very reasonable, I've appreciated your comments for a long time, and I'm sure we'd ge…

There's more to the Linus-style jerk phenomenon than just telling entitled people to piss off (I would be reluctant to call that being a jerk if that's all it was). See https://new…

> ... the idea that Musk hasn’t considered oil panning and should’ve just asked an engineer is ludicrous. The author assumes Musk must be an idiot despite all of the evidence to th…

Elon is well-known for firing or sidelining technical staff with whom his intuition disagrees, regardless of his own technical depth in any of those matters. His companies have a l…

> I wonder what the situation will be in terms of fuel efficiency. Obviously it will take more energy per second to push through the atmosphere, but that may be defrayed by not hav…

> Give more funding to proper engineers, not physicists/chemists Materials science departments are often called "Materials Science and Engineering". How do they fall in your catego…

> So it makes sense that most researchers are looking for higher efficiency. It makes sense that researchers should be considering metrics other than efficiency as well for new mat…

I've previously written a few relevant comments that hopefully answer in parts: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27386119 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35124271 …

If commercial supersonic flight has any hope of being economically viable, one of the prerequisites will be cruising below Mach 2.

> I do wonder how much modern design can overcome, in materials, engines, aerodynamics, and flight controls. The basic physics are arrayed against you. Higher speed cruise flight a…

Carrier catapults violently accelerate aircraft to the point they are going fast enough to lift their own weight, within the takeoff length on the deck. You could likely lessen fue…

> then they realized the fuel economy of supersonic aircraft peaks around Mach 3 As I noted in a below comment, there isn't a way for this statement to be accurate without a lot mo…

> No, it's exceptionally bad to fly close to Mach 1 and you do better if you fly faster up to Mach 3 or so. Where do you get this from? I suspect you are talking about the Breguet …

I'm an aerospace engineer and I find the F-15 (esp. the C model) to be a hell of a sexy beast (so to speak), very visually stunning, and the F-35 to be relatively ugly. There's a r…

Current military thinking is "No" - the expectation, via lots of simulation, analysis, recent history, large-scale military exercises, and intel is that advanced weapons systems ma…

There is a kernel of truth in what you say, but only that. The article is basically right, but I would argue severely undersells the atrocity of an acquisition the F-35 represents.…

Counterpoint: Crichton's Airframe is a great book that illustrates how journalists reporting on complex subjects they don't understand can cause great harm regardless of their inte…