are manned fighter aircraft even relevant anymore?
The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
251–260 of 1001 posts
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#252The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…
> Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.
The first thing that springs to mind is the fact that the covid-19 vaccine was imagined, developed and started to be synthesized over the course of a single weekend.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#253> The 17-ton, non-stealthy F-16 is too difficult to upgrade with the latest software, Brown explained. Instead of ordering fresh F-16s, he said, the Air Force should initiate a “clean-sheet design” for a new low-end fighter.
It's more difficult to upgrade the F-16 systems than to design a whole new aircraft? I mean, maybe there are other reasons to design a new aircraft, but this doesn't sound like the whole story.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#254Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
You misunderstand the purpose the F35- it is a jobs and pork program first and foremost, like SLS. It has the side benefit of keeping people trained to build this sort of thing, so SpaceX can hire them. We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.
More than that, thr SR-71 was purpose-built. That means fewer hands on thr steering wheel, and fewer compromises to achieve multiple missions. The F-35, by comparison, was a platform vehicle, with the base suited to adapting to a variety of capabilities and missions. That means more voices demanding priority of features, more expensive engineering to get a variety of polygon pegs into the same round hole, and many fi…
>> More than that, thr SR-71 was purpose-built.
Not really. The SR-71 was the final plane of an extended program called OXCART which created the A-12. The program was nominally to replace the U2, but even oxcart was within a large aircraft design plan. There was even a interceptor (YF-12) that was meant for shooting down Valkyrie-class mach3+ bombers. These aircraft were very similar to the 71, so similar that most people seeing them might not spot any difference. Any assessment of the 71's development costs is therefore very difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12
"YF-12C: Fictitious designation for an SR-71 provided to NASA for flight testing. The YF-12 designation was used to keep SR-71 information out of the public domain."
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#256Other than F-35, what are the US going to field on its carriers? Super-hornets until 2050?
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, a while back I was interested "where does billions we spend on national defense actually go" and I came to the conclusion that the DoD is really just a giant jobs program. Ultimately I think the reason we don't have things like flying cars is that the private sector gets stuck in local maxima (such as getting people to click ads) and in the public sector it's very hard to have focused time-blocked short term goa…
I keep seeing people say this. Maybe flying cars just don’t make sense? Wheels work really well when your engine dies. Have you seen people drive in 2d space? You want to add a z axis? What’s the efficiency of a small plane? Surely not better than a Prius. Edit: I looked it up and a Cessna gets ~15 mpg.
You ever fly over a mountain? It saves a lot of time.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
You misunderstand the purpose the F35- it is a jobs and pork program first and foremost, like SLS. It has the side benefit of keeping people trained to build this sort of thing, so SpaceX can hire them. We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.
More than that, thr SR-71 was purpose-built. That means fewer hands on thr steering wheel, and fewer compromises to achieve multiple missions. The F-35, by comparison, was a platform vehicle, with the base suited to adapting to a variety of capabilities and missions. That means more voices demanding priority of features, more expensive engineering to get a variety of polygon pegs into the same round hole, and many fi…
Yeah it was "design by (military) committee" turned to 11
I'm surprised it got off the drawing boards
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#259Wasn't the goal of the F-35 to sell an inferior aircraft to allies and keep the F-22 for the real action? I don't know the sales figures, but it may have been a success using those metrics.
Allies have cut back on the F-35 orders too on about the same scale. But no I don't think it was ever planned to replace the F-22. The F-22 is really an interceptor, the F-35 is much more multirole like the F-16.
Exactly. It's like:
F-15 -> F-22 + some F-35 F-16 -> F-35 F-18 -> F-35 carrier version AV-8B -> F-35 STOVL
It is unfortunately compromised in weight by needing to do the carrier role. But on the flip side, the extra strength in the fuselage means they could last a long time.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#260The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…
> Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today. The first thing that springs to mind is the fact that the covid-19 vaccine was imagined, developed and started to be synthesized over the course of a single weekend.
> The first thing that springs to mind is the fact that the covid-19 vaccine was imagined, developed and started to be synthesized over the course of a single weekend.
Piggy-backing off the efforts of mRNA vaccines for the past decade or two, and existing efforts for personalized cancer immuno-oncology vaccines.
There ain't no chance you figure out the lipid nanoparticle magic in a weekend.
(Indeed, it's not really figured out: what we have is inadequate for mRNA drugs, which are the holy grail... but the shortcomings were realized to be useful for vaccines ~a decade ago).