91–100 of 136 posts
What i see here is an old cold-warrior concerned that this fighter jet is not going to be good at "dog fighting". Who, exactly, are we supposed to be dog fighting with in next 20 years?
http://news.yahoo.com/russian-ships-old-arctic-nato-set-alar...
So each helmet is custom-made. If you lose the helment (or spill coffee on it or something), then you can't fly the plane anymore? A small thing like the helmet will ground a $200M airplane?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that the U.S.G. is the only buyer for most of this stuff, or tightly controls who else buys it through export restrictions. So if the government wants technology that does X, Y, and Z, it has to pay someone to develop it. Who is going to sit around building this technology in advance of its only customer wanting to buy it? And everyone knows that. A DOD contract isn't a purchase order for 10,000 iPhones.…
> Who is going to sit around building this technology in advance of its only customer wanting to buy it? Ok, so that's a fair point, but we don't really owe these companies a viable business model. What happened to funding DARPA and NRL and Lincoln Labs and other places instead of private companies for the research portion? What happened to funding real research instead of funding an amorphous combination of research…
I think going all in on the F-35 has to do with the some kind of power struggle between the air force and the army. The F-35 is the air force's baby, but it's a ground support role, which means the army is the organization that benefits from it. It's ground support as the air force prefers: fast, stealthy, light, in-and-out and not as the army prefers: slow, heavily armed, lingering for hours. As far as I can tell, the air force doesn't really care to do ground support the way the army would prefer. I assume they resent the idea that they're a support organization and not the principal actors. I don't know, maybe it's tied up in the old idea that pilots are the knights of the skies?
Of course, I'm no expert - everything I know I learned here:
http://www.jqpublicblog.com/lying-win-air-force-misrepresent...
here:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/a-10-f-35-air-force-...
and here:
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/12/fa... http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the-trag...
It's a very 'agile' project. When will it be done? Don't ask! How much will it cost? Who knows! It's going to be awesome, though! But... you don't have to wait to see how powerful this weapons system is. The F-35 completely took out the Dutch government before one even rolled off the assembly line! Note to governments: when ordering your weapons systems it may be a good idea to get a cost-per-unit quote before signin…
In my experience unfortunately, exactly 0% of customers (internal or external) are ablet to accept/wrap their head around a variable feature deliverable and demand a fix set of features decided at start and required to be delivered by some date. Aka utter fantasy.
So each helmet is custom-made. If you lose the helment (or spill coffee on it or something), then you can't fly the plane anymore? A small thing like the helmet will ground a $200M airplane?
custom made != only works with one aircraft
All this technology just to kill people. It is a sad world we live in.
Only the most facile could possibly believe this or any war machine is "just to kill people".
It's a very 'agile' project. When will it be done? Don't ask! How much will it cost? Who knows! It's going to be awesome, though! But... you don't have to wait to see how powerful this weapons system is. The F-35 completely took out the Dutch government before one even rolled off the assembly line! Note to governments: when ordering your weapons systems it may be a good idea to get a cost-per-unit quote before signin…
It's more a classic example of the situation that agile methodologies seek to avoid. The biggest thing Agile tries to do is minimize up-front planning. The reason for that is that you have the absolute least knowledge available to inform your decisions at the beginning of a project, so decisions made early on are massively more likely to be poor ones. Worse, you tend to get locked into them because other components i…
