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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

#861

Post by aww_dang »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #676
yrgulation wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't policy and details a product of culture? If a group of people, be it a team or nation, dont have have a solid culture then surely they cant achieve solid results. And indeed it would appear that gradually there is a decline in achieving great results from countries that have historically achieved such results. Dont get me wrong, the US is still doing great, but maybe when the rest of the world keeps raising re…

This is where I failed to understand the idea of a "Developing Nation". Aren't they all?

Yes. What exactly is being 'developed'? When the institutions using this phrase are regressive, it is not only a misnomer but an excuse.

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

#862

Post by goatinaboat »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #811
CoffeeDregs wrote: post #725

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

but why in the world does it need to cost that much? what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. I mean we have like a gazillion of those things. what percentage of the military/armed forces is currently being used or has been used over the last 10 years. I'm guessing it's a very small percentage.

what's wrong with just using the jets we already have.

Two words: metal fatigue. Every airframe only has a finite amount of hours it can fly before its structure becomes too weak. Fighters in particular that regularly perform high-g manoeuvres. So they have to be replaced anyway.

The war in Afghanistan saw Western militaries burning off airframe-hours at a phenomenal rate using expensive fighters designed for neer-peer conflicts to drop dumb bombs, when you could have done the job for a fraction of the cost with simple propeller planes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano

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

#863

Post by chmod775 »

atleta wrote: post #641
drewvolpe wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA just successfully sent a helicopter to Mars. We developed two very effective vaccines using mRNA technology in a few months and had it through FDA trials in under a year. CAR T cell therapies (3 FDA approved and more coming) are changing how we treat cancer. There's amazing technology all around you.

Fun fact: the mRNA vaccines were developed in about 2 weeks after the publication of the SARS2 DNA sequence. (At least the Pfizer/BioNTech one was.)

Was it though?

The science that made this possible was in the works for decades, and it took Moderna and BioNTech many many years to get the technology right.

So that's many years of effort with the stated goal of getting a vaccine out the door fast when it's needed. But there was relatively little "science" left to be done when COVID struck.

The only interesting aspect here are the logistics to make vaccines in the required quantities, and honestly it's not looking too great, considering where we are with vaccinations. Though maybe it just wouldn't have been possible to make doses any quicker, regardless of effort.

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

#864

Post by inglor_cz »

raphaelj wrote: post #393
grecy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

A payload reduction of 30-40% is huge. And even if refurb and recovery is less than 10%, you still loose the 2nd stage at every lunch (18% of the rocket by weight). You then have to include the extra development costs and additional risk of failure. I highly doubt they hit break-even with only two launches, the math just doesn't add up. If reusing rocket was so profitable, there is a high chance someone else would ha…

While the 2nd stage is 18 % of the rocket by weight, it only has one engine. The booster has nine. Engines are by far the most expensive part of the rocket, or used to be. (ULA says that engines make 65 per cent of the total cost of their first stages.)

> If reusing rocket was so profitable, there is a high chance someone else would have done it before.

AFAIK it is only like 10-12 years that computers and engineering software got good enough to simulate everything that happens in a rocket engine, sloshing of fuel etc. Cruder simulations were available before, but not good enough for that.

SpaceX engineers did most of the design and testing on computers. It took them only a few tries in the real world to nail the first landing.

Earlier pioneers would have to try in practice, which would mean a lot more failures and a lot more money, with a possible deadly incident in between.

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

#865

Post by esoterica »

somjeed wrote: post #856
esoterica wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Covid bailout last year was about $60,000 per tax payer ( https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/ ). How much of your $60,000 did you see? My stonks went up by way more than $60k (that figure is completely wrong and inflated anyway), so I saw plenty of it. I'm sorry, were you fishing for a different answer?

your stonks liquidity is dependent on constant injection, so your "making" more than $60k may be temporary

That’s not how liquidity works.

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

#866

Post by portpecos »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #848
dillondoyle wrote: post #803

If we are looking for 'affordable, lightweight fighters' to 'complement a small future fleet of' F35s sholdn't we just build a ton of uber cheap drones? The F35 is supposed to have amazing networked situational awareness (idk the military terms) which seems like a great platform to control a fleet of slave drones? Kind of like an aircraft carrier, surrounded by a lot of support.

The square-cube law implies some performance characteristics that only big-enough craft can fulfill, and at that size point you aren't saving money with "disposable" cheap-and-small drones. Specifically, air resistance scales with cross sectional area, while fuel storage and engine power output scales with volume. You can trade off fuel for engine power by making a more missile-like design, but then you're left with…

Side note: If the Square-Cube law is true, then maybe the American Airlines UFO is definitely not a drone. Some were claiming it was likely a drone.

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

#867

Post by tored »

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…

There are of course many different reasons to "we just cant build cool shit anymore", but one is not understanding tradeoffs.

I think it is more likely for everyone involved, team, management, project, product, client, end user etc, to understand & accept that you have to make tradeoffs when you are on a tight time frame and/or budget. You solve one thing, not a hundred different things, even though they can be equally as important in the grand scheme of things.

F-35 tried to replace fighters in three different branches (Air force, Navy and Marine) and be multirole and also do close ground support, all with a long time frame and huge budget.

Some tradeoffs can be solved with a bigger budget, but many tradeoffs can't. If you want your bombs to be stored inside the fuselage to be more stealthy like the F-35, then of course the fuselage will become bigger, thus creating more drag. No amount of money will change that.

F-35 seems from the outside like a project that didn't understand & accept tradeoffs.

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

#868

Post by goatinaboat »

myself248 wrote: post #765
HelloMcFly wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite similar to one of my favorite saying that comes from my background in psychology: "When the mouse presses the lever, don't blame the mouse."

Oooo, that's profound. I ran across an interesting one earlier, understanding Maslow's Needs by negative example: We usually say that, when someone has food and shelter and safety, when they have friends and feel a sense of belonging, they can pursue higher stuff. And we know at some level that if someone is starving, they will do anything to find food -- civilized behavior goes out the window in that mode. But we fo…

understanding Maslow's Needs by negative example

Those are usually called “hygiene factors” in the literature.

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

#869

Post by imtringued »

bluejekyll wrote: post #821
Kranar wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the U.S. military basically runs a massive socialized jobs program and every politician works to get a piece of it for their state. No politician wants to be the one to make the case to shut down the factories that produce these things, even when the military has advised Congress to do so [1]. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-t...

What I’ve always found strange about this is that there would be far better areas to spend money that would directly benefit society. Education, rail, manufacturing modernization, health. Instead we have jets we don’t need, and tanks sitting in a desert unused.

Additional housing would even pay itself back on its own. Yes the government would take on debt but it would also receive rent payments that pay the debt off. The economic benefit of more housing in large cities is undeniable. Lots of people move to the city to work there, the end result is that you have employed both the construction industry and the future resident. There would be a net tax gain even though its a jobs stimulus program.

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

#870

Post by zokula »

WalterBright wrote: post #527
brazzy wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be communism, and we can't have that. The reason why the USA uses the military as a jobs program is that it's the only thing that gets bipartisan support.

Communism does an even worse job of allocating resources.

No worse than capitalism does.
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