The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber • Hacker News Board

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#221

Post by sitkack » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 12:53 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #140

b-mmxx wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the following: “In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were…

My heart hurts reading that. I felt something similar walking through Weird Stuff Warehouse and seeing old SGI workstations that I used to covet sitting on shelves for a pittance. Even if you bought them, you probably didn't have a 13w3 monitor or software to get them up. and now weird stuff is gone itself. It's that "it's gone and can't come back" feeling.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/tech-history/...

When we look backwards in time, we see lots of tributaries that dried up for various reasons. That SGI workstation is still in your head, it is really up to us to copy and extend those concepts forwards in time.

That software is still sitting on a box of junk in someones basement somewhere, it just has to be found.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#222

Post by imtringued » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 12:58 PM UTC

flyinghamster wrote: post #29

This brings up an important principle: the higher the tech, the shorter its lifespan. A cellphone from the 1980s won't function anywhere but in a Faraday-caged lab equipped with a suitable cell site, while 2G and 3G systems are fast disappearing. Only recently have landline telephone exchanges begun to drop support for pulse dialing, but otherwise, a rotary-dial desk phone from 100 years ago would still work today, a…

You can get hundred year old manual lathes/mills and they still do their job. It's because the basic principle upon which they were built is still valid today. The only difference with modern machinist tools is that they are fully automated and you can just retrofit CNC parts to the old equipment.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#223

Post by jedimastert » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 12:58 PM UTC

This sounds like an awesome idea for the beginning of a sci-fi story: a test for a team the government wants to reverse engineer an alien spaceship or something.

I also just remembered this is the beginning of the original Stargate movie...

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#224

Post by eru » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 12:58 PM UTC

ecpottinger wrote: post #165

b-mmxx wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the following: “In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were…

The same was done the Canadian Avro Arrow plane, and the British Black Knight rocket. What happens once you join government, they take away your brains?

How smart people behave depends a lot of context and incentives.

Many people are reasonable shrewd with their own money, and about stuff that directly impacts them. But people in charge of government organisations often have very different incentives and concerns.

(Other big organisations in the private sector can also go haywire. Especially when the threat from competition is low.)

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#225

Post by Spooky23 » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 1:11 PM UTC

b-mmxx wrote: post #122

dwheeler wrote: post #116

I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can lead to extraordinarily high costs later. Just look at the notice: "The deliverables will include all technical data related to the heat exchanger disassembly, all technical data related to the…

This reminds me of the following: “In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were…

It’s risk reduction.

That was an innovative plane and the reality is that nobody is going to wake up and build it again once production stops. Once you break up a team, the team is gone — that’s why we always build submarines, even if unnecessary. You have to keep the people and plant working.

That tooling was going to be compromised and useful to the Soviets or some other adversary. There is a well established record of traitors selling plans or materials to the KGB/FSB/Chinese intelligence that have been caught. Also, from a PR perspective, a headline like “Air Force spends $50M/year to guard stealth bomber tooling untouched in 30 years” isn’t great either.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#226

Post by chungus_khan » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

projektfu wrote: post #5

I read once that if you tried to build WWII-era aircraft according to specs and mechanical drawings, they wouldn't fly. The real design was found in the dies and jigs that were adapted after many iterations and test flights.

A huge amount of industry all over the place ends up like this. The engineers produce the theoretical form of the design, and the tooling up process refines it into a practicable-at-scale reality.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#227

Post by Spooky23 » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

h0l0cube wrote: post #166

dwheeler wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the revolving door is always a potential issue, and I'm sure it happens, I don't think that's a key problem for the DoD. When government officials leave office they're required to not do work, for a period of time, on things they controlled, and the penalties can be steep. That reduces incentives for the worst of abuses. Also: a US government employee who retires after 20+ years has a guaranteed pension; it's n…

Seems like if the US govt. can have a policy that disrupts the revolving door, they could also institute a policy that all tenders require the perpetual rights to technical data? Especially if this is a problem that even outsiders are aware of. So I wonder what's stopping such obvious and sensible policy from being enacted? Edit: I'll answer my own rhetorical question: because budget forecast time periods are aligned…

Because it isn’t obvious and sensible.

The whole point of hiring a contractor to sell a product is that the contractor is that it brings its own intellectual property to the table and “owns” the project.

Work performed as work for hire for the US government is public domain (subject to security restrictions). For some military products, the government “owns” the product. For example, artillery/naval gun tubes are manufactured by the Federally owned Watervliet Arsenal in New York, operated by a contractor.

The government owns other facilities relating to nuclear and chemical weapons that I’m aware of, and I’m not sure there is a material difference in competence related to the government “owning” all information.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#228

Post by numpad0 » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC

richrichardsson wrote: post #205

stratosgear wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/URSS/USSR/

s/USSR/CCCP I think this is why people like to refer to the Communinist Party of China (CPC [1]) as the CCP, because it evokes memories of the Soviet Union. [1] cpc.people.com.cn

SSSR

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#229

Post by sumtechguy » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 2:11 PM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #170

est31 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of how NASA had to design completely new rocket engines for SLS because while they still had the plans for the Saturn-V rocket engines, back then plans weren't followed to such high accuracy as nowadays a 3D model would be followed. Each engine was custom tailored with small modifications here and there. The knowledge to custom tailor them was lost, so they went with designing new engines from scratch inst…

It reminds you of a thing that never happened? That's a neat trick. The SLS uses the RS-25 engines, the Space Shuttle Main Engines which are in no way an engine "designed from scratch". Additionally the F-1 engines were redesigned using more modern techniques around 2012 with the F-1B [0]. The SLS went with the RS-25s for a number of reasons. While the F-1s provide high thrust they're not as efficient. The RS-25s can…

I heard this story as well. But in the end they picked something else they had and could make. I think the original idea was to start with the same as what went to the moon and build on that. At one point we made several thousand of something like them. They found they could not build that anymore, and it was not as good as stuff they could do, so they redesigned to something else that they could. That is as far as most people take that story.

In fact most 'stories' and 'news' is like that. The SLS is known to be in a congress sub committee hot potato game. So that there are different versions floating around of what happened and is happening is not surprising. Teasing out the 'truth' of what happened is not always easy. As many have interests in distorting it, or just remember wrong.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#230

Post by low_key » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

dwheeler wrote: post #116

I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can lead to extraordinarily high costs later. Just look at the notice: "The deliverables will include all technical data related to the heat exchanger disassembly, all technical data related to the…

There's a similar problem to the "we'll create it cheaper if" issue in a lot of government software acquisition. Contractors, especially big companies, often want a lot more money to hand over source code for software. Often the government takes the short-term discount, but then ends up paying massively over time by having no ability to maintain or upgrade the system without involvement from the same contractor.