Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

Post by ethbr1 » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 1:45 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #175

ethbr1 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> future of warfare Color me skeptical. It feels like what we're seeing now is a local optimum: new systems (drones) designed to asymmetrically win ($) against legacy systems (mechanized vehicles) designed for very different goals. We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side. That said, I do think the Marines are right, in that distributed agility/logistics from…

> We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side I'm not convinced this is feasible in the short term; drone warfare is predicated on launching not just cheap drones but many of them. The new armor isn't steel or iron to survive the blast, but to shoot down attacking drones before they can explode. Most current defenses are ground-based missile batteries that can't…

Post by ng12 » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 1:46 PM UTC

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #60

anyfactor wrote: post #56

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Thank you very much. I feel like engineering innovation has been concentrated on technology and not in defense engineering at all. Immigrants have helped a lot in building the tech sector's innovation in the last half of the century. But the defense industry often requires naturalized citizens to work on these projects. I think there is a difference between immigrants coming to North America to work and eventually se…

Innovation has not been in defense engineering lately because the US has lost A LOT of public trust when it comes to the defense industry in the wake of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The US is not the country, nor do they have the reputation in front of the public that led to the Manhattan project, where the greatest minds would willingly work on defense projects, not just willingly but eagerly. The breakthroughs a…

Post by ranger_danger » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

neonsunset wrote: post #97

klausa wrote: post #10

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Anduril was supposed to be a sponsor for a Nix conference; it was then dropped after community reacted negatively to having a weapons manufacturer being a sponsor. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418351

"Outraged community" were about 30 people with few to no project contributions but a lot of political slogans and of likely questionable state of mind.

Post by defrost » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 1:58 PM UTC

greedo wrote: post #180

torginus wrote: post #46

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The problem in the US defense industry is, that since the end of the cold war, defense companies have consolidated into just 5 huge conglomerates and the lack of competition wasn't great for the pace of innovation, affordability or timely development. And the Cold War ended more than three decades ago, about the time we went from piston aircraft to the teen series jets making up the bulk of US inventory even today. I…

Your timeframe is a bit off. Piston powered aircraft were not in use in the US military 30 years ago. 30 years ago was 1994. We had B2 bombers, and the F22 was in full development. Also Boeing was developing the F-32 (which lost out to the F-35) in the mid 90's, so it's conceivable that an engineer on that program might still be around in some role.

Post by ranger_danger » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 2:00 PM UTC

klausa wrote: post #82

ordinaryradical wrote: post #50

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If you don’t want to build weapons because you don’t like the variety of ways they may be wielded, that’s a valid and reasonable ethical stance. If you don’t want to build anything that could ever potentially be used in the manufacture of those weapons, you probably shouldn’t be building open source software or contributing anything to do with any programming language at all.

I think there's a big difference between "being used by" and "being active members of the community". Open Source means you can't really prohibit Anduril from using your projects; but _welcoming_ them and their money is a different matter altogether.