The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

Post by mcguire » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 1:22 AM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #107

jleyank wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If we invest in tools to defeat ISIS, we'll get crushed by peer enemies" As I see it, the only peer enemies of the US are Russia and China. As both of these countries are nuclear powers, war between any of them risks terrible escalation. FWIW, the A-10 was designed to fight Soviet tanks in Europe, and I doubt the top armour of tanks has thickened that much since then. And there's lots of APC's and other semi-hard ta…

> the A-10 was designed to fight Soviet tanks in Europe, and I doubt the top armour of tanks has thickened that much since then. And there's lots of APC's and other semi-hard targets that would be killed just fine. From what I understand, the A-10 was designed for that role as it was envisioned in the 1970s, 40 years ago. The air defenses have greatly improved since then and planes like the A-10 won't get near the ba…

Post by to3m » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 1:29 AM UTC

scintill76 wrote: post #126

CountSessine wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? Accept C but reject C++? That's completely ridiculous. "Well, the scout leader's fire control computer should have returned fire at the MIG. It should have, but the C-programmed fire control software cast the void* target object to a ... well, a seagull_t object. I guess you could say that the scout leader was shot down when a seagull fired a radar-guided missile at him. That's pretty funny, right? R…

It seems like I've seen this type of C-bashing (vs. C++) recently, and I don't understand it. How is well-written modern C less type-safe than C++? I define that as something along the lines of "using the latest language specification, making judicious use of all features possible, turning on extra-strict compiler warnings and errors." To address your specific scenario, you could just as well cast a void* to seagull_…

Post by brc » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 1:49 AM UTC

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #66

javajosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utterly false. Prior to involvement in World War 2, the US had hardly any standing army and rather weak tooling industries (being wiped out by the Great Depression) and yet still managed to field like 2 million troops and vast amounts of weapons for allies in a very short period of time.

I don't know how this was downvoted - it's completely true. Read any bio of Eisenhower. Eisenhower was involved in big experiments just to see if men and materiel could even be moved across country in the US by wheeled vehicles.

Post by brc » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 1:55 AM UTC

Shalomm wrote: post #18

gnoway wrote: post #6

It is just inconceivable that we have a multi-decade program to develop a new fighter to fill all these roles, and what we've produced is either equivalent to or worse than the incumbent in all cases, is not safe to fly in combat situations, and is more expensive to boot. I mean we've seen this sort of thing happen on a smaller scale before, but versions of this plane are supposed to replace, like, everything in mult…

Just a friendly reminder why governments and large corporations can't develop shit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA

Post by Spooky23 » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 2:04 AM UTC

leoc wrote: post #114

venomsnake wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the times they were conceived they were. A different european theater would have made nukes absolutely needed at least as deterrent. And US urgently needed to catch up in the space race - space is very efficient way to drop nuke on someone.

IIRC it was increasingly unlikely that the Axis could actually win a conventional war in Europe during the period of the Manhattan Project. The big fear was that Germany could develop its own atomic bomb first.