Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 365 posts

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#141

Post by supriyo-biswas »

Jtsummers wrote: post #108
freedomben wrote: post #2

I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the…

> As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not. Or you're batching your releases into larger builds because you know it'll take 6 weeks to test regardless. This increases the duration of each development iteration because you have 100 things you want to do and you could do that in, say, 4x13 week efforts, but with the added 6 weeks b…

My last job was like this, a full round of QAs manually testing, along with writing up a grandiose release document, stakeholder approvals, and whatnot, for something that should just take two days of development work, and an insistence on putting configuration values into the database, supposedly because it's "safer" than deploying a new configuration file.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#142

Post by pc86 »

freedomben wrote: post #2

I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the…

This only makes sense if you have to test each fix in complete isolation which seems silly even for government employees and contractor body shops. You can't batch 80 real bug fixes and 20 "silly bug with no practical impact" fixes together?

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#143

Post by moi2388 »

Lomlioto wrote: post #99

Will be quite interesting what the end evolution of this will be. I think high direct movability (like droping a few meters or shifting left/right) might be the next bigger thing for these. Easy enough to add, will make it even harder for air defence missiles catching them. Besides, the air defence missiles are a lot more expensive than what a drone does. And in Russia you saw another huge issue: How to shoot down a…

> And in Russia you saw another huge issue: How to shoot down a drone in your city without missing it and destroying something else?

More drones.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#144

Post by ponector »

ivell wrote: post #104
delecti wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US in general, and this administration in particular, has bought into US exceptionalism and action movie tropes. Just gotta blow up the death star with the leader on board and then the war is over. In reality there's a chain of command and line of succession, and military equipment all around the country. If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine, because we've found ourselves in basicall…

> If they had been smart, they would have been learning from Ukraine This administration seems to have neither the required skills nor an interest to learn from mistakes. Even if they were filled with smart people, they would still fail because of their lack of skill and learning attitude.

Why do you think war in Iran is a mistake? They definitely became richer. Isn't it the goal of the people in power at the moment?

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#145

Post by [deleted] »

matwood wrote: post #22
pixl97 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life critical software that gets visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process. Your boss doesn't want your commit being the one that causes a worldwide diplomatic issue. I assume that smaller/cheaper drones avoid a lot of this because the stakes aren't near as high and quite a bit of the development occurs in private industry first.

> visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process See also SpaceX vs. NASA. No way would NASA have been allowed to blow up as many rockets as SpaceX did to finally get to their working solution.

[deleted]

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#146

Post by 27183 »

pjc50 wrote: post #10
freedomben wrote: post #2

I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the…

cf the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845442 ; Ukraine has a hugely inventive and effective drone industry because it has to work . If it doesn't succeed, there is no Ukraine, and everyone involved in making the drones is dead, fled, in a POW camp, or sucked into the internal Russian displacement system away from their family. By comparison, if the US products fail, there's no real negative effe…

> if the US products fail, there's no real negative effect on the mainland United States

It's even worse than that. Schedules slipping and cost overruns are good things for the manufacturer, because they can charge more on top of their initial contract. Cost-plus ftw.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#147

Post by budsniffer952 »

Noaidi wrote: post #74
dataviz1000 wrote: post #26

There are ~350,000,000 of us. When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. It doesn't matter considering the ~$117,550 of the national debt I'm responsible for. It palls compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for. What boggles my mind is that I make coffee at home because I'm frugal. I guess it is good the government and DoD are seeking cheap…

Now you know why there is war. We have war because the U.S. is failing. Just look at the reversal of the 10 and 30 y bonds over the last 20 years. All the free money that was given to the oligarchs killed our economy.

10y rates are almost exactly where they were 20 years ago, and about 10% lower than they were 20 years before that.

So...what are you talking about?

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#148

Post by CapricornNoble »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #37

Makes sense, drone technology has come an insane distance since these were developed. Probably the biggest learning from the Ukraine war alone is the effectiveness of cheap drones. It was suspected for years but hadn't been put to the test yet.

>>Probably the biggest learning from the Ukraine war alone is the effectiveness of cheap drones. It was suspected for years but hadn't been put to the test yet.

Some of us were paying attention as early as the 2016-17 Battle of Mosul, when ISIS was using DJI drones to drop grenades into the turret hatches of Iraqi uparmored Humvees. Others started to notice during the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, when Azeri UAV superiority dominated Armenian ground forces. But all of these professionals were like the military officers who observed the Boer Wars, and the Russo-Japanese War, and then wrote in the military journals of their day about how machineguns were gonna change warfare in a very bad way.

Flag officers still slept-walked into the carnage of WW1 trench warfare....shrug. "History doesn't repeat but it rhymes."

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#149

Post by Noaidi »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #139
xienze wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular case I think it's just because Trump can't resist doing every single thing Israel wants.

its because they have him on tape having sex with children

But what about Graham Platner?

/s

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#150

Post by craftkiller »

mmooss wrote: post #96
jschveibinz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side note: The federal government costs about $19 billion per day to operate based on an annual budget of roughly $7 trillion. So $1 billion is about equal to 4 hour hours of government spending.

> The federal government costs about $19 billion per day to operate based on an annual budget of roughly $7 trillion. $7 trillion is not operating expenses. Much goes into assets that are retained decades or more. The Interstate Highway System isn't an operating expense.

Every mile of road is an operating expense. Looking at a report from NY state:

> Based on aggregate highway spending reported in 2009, the average statewide cost of maintaining a lane mile was $13,841.

source (pdf): https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/local-government/publications/p...

Post reply on HN