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The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

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Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#241

Post by grecy »

hef19898 wrote: post #190
grecy wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100% Literally all the "experts" said it was impossible to land the booster, and now it's almost routine. Nobody else in the industry can achieve what SpaceX have done successfully 40 times.

Experts from EASA didn't say it was impossible, but rather not economicaly feasible. And with SpaceX not publishing any financials we have no way to tell which side is right.

Are you really suggesting that throwing away a booster worth many tens of millions of dollars is more economically feasible than reusing it?

Elon makes it pretty clear in this tweet it's very financially sound to bring back a booster

"Payload reduction due to reusability of booster & fairing is https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1295883862380294144?lang...

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#242

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

samstave wrote: post #137
cwhiz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. The US spends about $3.6 trillion per year on health care. I have no idea what UBI might cost, but I know we don’t have the tax revenues to get even close. Maybe the money printer can go brrrr a little bit faster.

Just because we SPEND money doesnt mean that the price is VALID. "Medicine" is grossly overpriced. our entire model is FUCKED. Source: designed and built and commissioned several hospitals and an entire family of doctors. Fuck the US health care system and fuck the military-industrial-spyware-congressional-graft system. I was the tech designer for SF General (before Zuck stuck his name on it) (I designed the entire n…

The business model for healthcare is divorced from the actual healthcare provided. Emergency care for instance tends to be billed at nutty rates. IMO, the best thing to do is to avoid ambulance/emergency if possible, although this isn't always an option and can be risky, and to shop around for everything where possible. Call up your insurance company with codes and provider numbers and find out what everyone around you actually charges for something.

Each medical group can also have their own economic models which are optimized for different things. One local group actually has reasonably priced specialty visits, but their outpatient services are crazy expensive ($1000 in-network for a NCS/EMG), and that's how they've structured things. Another semi-public group (University of California based) charges significantly more for visits, but significantly less for outpatient procedures ($1000 for an in-network 3.0T MRI).

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#243

Post by dsr_ »

bun_at_work wrote: post #177
nemothekid wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a while back I was interested "where does billions we spend on national defense actually go" and I came to the conclusion that the DoD is really just a giant jobs program. Ultimately I think the reason we don't have things like flying cars is that the private sector gets stuck in local maxima (such as getting people to click ads) and in the public sector it's very hard to have focused time-blocked short term goa…

This isn't entirely true. The US subsidizes military costs for all of our allies. It costs a lot, and a huge amount of funds go to that. There are parts that are like jobs programs, and the contractors intentionally drive up costs as part of their business model, but there are also real expenses to maintaining stability across the parts of the world where our military operates.

The foreign military aid is also a jobs program.

It gives money to US manufacturers by giving money to other countries that they have to use to buy US products.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#244

Post by crazygringo »

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

I think your points are certainly common ones, but unfortunately they rely on three major misunderstandings.

The first is that all the "cool shit" we built in the first half of the century was the low-hanging fruit of new scientific understandings and materials.

It's not that we were smarter, it's nothing to do with toxicity, it's just that we exhausted most of what you can easily do with nuclear, steel, engines, etc.

The second misunderstanding is that we're not still building amazing things. Being able to access Wikipedia or Google through speech recognition, or talk to anyone in the world from a cheap videophone in your pocket, is astonishing.

And the third is that flying cars somehow respresent the future. But flying car enthusiasts only focus on the "cool" aspect of it, rather than nuts-and-bolts issues like how they could be fuel efficient, how an average driver will avoid fatal crashes, if we really want urban skies filled with visual, noise and emissions pollution, etc. Flying cars exist. But they don't make any economic or practical sense to use.

If you think we're still not accomplishing astonishing things today, you're not paying attention. Did you notice, for example, how multiple companies put together COVID vaccines in record time? How is that not amazing?

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#245

Post by dtx1 »

onepointsixC wrote: post #228
dtx1 wrote: post #156

So, they did a bradley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA

That movie and the book it's based on are both wildly inaccurate and biased.

You don't say! I would have thought this is a historic drama about the military industrial complex if you hadn't warned me!

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#246

Post by wycy »

cgearhart wrote: post #200
supernova87a wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe someone with more industry knowledge or interesting sources can corroborate -- But I believe that one of the things that happened to the military aviation industrial complex was that in the WW2, early Cold War era, planes and military development programs were very much driven by individuals or very small teams responsible for designing the requirements, overseeing the planning, and the outcome of new aircraft.…

At least three things happened: - congressional oversight increased, with the result that the purchasing authority is no longer generally the end user. We aren’t just buying a ship (plane, gun, etc.), we’re maintaining a logistics and manufacturing industrial base to produce that type of item (and maintain jobs in congressional districts). So maybe we should buy a few more tanks/ships/bombs than we need so that we do…

> - risk tolerance shrank.

There's a lot of truth here and it plays out in even more ways than that. I look back through documentation of legacy systems and see so many things designed based on "engineering judgement". Sizing for that bearing? Engineering judgement. Thickness of other minor structure? Engineering judgement.

Now, the load on every little thing requires a 50 page engineering calculation report with figures, charts, and tables, that takes 3 months to prepare and another month to get reviewed by everyone. The littlest things now take forever.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#247

Post by hef19898 »

exar0815 wrote: post #110

It's quite simple. The successfull military programs are the ones building one thing to do one thing well. A-10, F-16, B-52. The Programs wanting to do everything in one System fail. F-35, Zumwalt, Eurofighter.

I wouldn't pu the Eurofighte rin there. It is working just fine for the Brits and others. And is still a rather capable fighter, even if more dedocated strike aircraft, e.g. Tornado or a strike eagle, are slightly better in these roles.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#248

Post by adev_ »

So on one side, we have a program that costed > 406.5 Billions (2017) [¹] for a failed jet.

On the other side, we have the entire Apollo program that cost $156 billion (2018)[²], was stopped because too expensive. And we never have been able to go on the Moon since because "cost".

Decisions that lead to the usage of public money by governments is definitively a mystery.

I wish the Lobbyists of the Army/Lockheed Martin/Military complex could do a bit of training for NASA and the research sector. Something tell me humankind could benefit a lot from it.

[¹]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

[²]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#249

Post by FooHentai »

rubicon33 wrote: post #182
misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

I wonder if anyone has any theories as to why? Assuming it's true that technological innovation peaked in the mid 40s/50s, it begs the question why it has ground to such a halt now. Recognizing that is a big assumption of truth, would anyone here be willing to posit an explanation?

Necessity is the mother of invention. In the mid 40s a very large urgent necessity, the war effort, went away. There were some residuals after that as motivations and industries shifted.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#250

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

nemothekid wrote: post #142
medium_burrito wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand the purpose the F35- it is a jobs and pork program first and foremost, like SLS. It has the side benefit of keeping people trained to build this sort of thing, so SpaceX can hire them. We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.

Yes, a while back I was interested "where does billions we spend on national defense actually go" and I came to the conclusion that the DoD is really just a giant jobs program. Ultimately I think the reason we don't have things like flying cars is that the private sector gets stuck in local maxima (such as getting people to click ads) and in the public sector it's very hard to have focused time-blocked short term goa…

I keep seeing people say this. Maybe flying cars just don’t make sense? Wheels work really well when your engine dies. Have you seen people drive in 2d space? You want to add a z axis? What’s the efficiency of a small plane? Surely not better than a Prius.

Edit: I looked it up and a Cessna gets ~15 mpg.

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