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

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

#351

Post by delecti »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #95
delecti wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Afghanistan exit was a completely predictable colossal failure, but it did mean we stopped lighting money on fire in Afghanistan.

Ignore that we funded the taliban and warlords for the next 50 years with 1.9 billion in vehicles, machine guns, small arms, night vision, and explosives?

I didn't ignore that. That solidly fits under "completely predictable colossal failure".

But the next 50 years of funding they received came from money we spent prior to us leaving. Certainly we could have done a better job with the withdrawal (to put it lightly), but it's nonetheless good that we aren't still spending money there.

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

#352

Post by avianlyric »

Schweigerose wrote: post #342
avianlyric wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation. Seems unlikely. Regulation and Health & Safety are both societal luxuries, which only happen once societies are stable and prosperous enough to start valuing human life beyond its ability to perform labour. The moment the bombs start dropping, the time for luxuries also stops, and the value of human life drops to value a person can produce defendin…

No. Certainly not. The fundamentals of modern flight safety rules, Procedures and organizations were created in the Second World War when losses of aircraft and crew due to weather, environment, maintenance, poor training and so on greatly exceeded the losses inflicted by enemy action. Rules and regulations on safety and health will maintain combat effectiveness and manpower where the loss -even temporary due to inju…

I think I covered all that with

> the value of human life drops to value a person can produce defending their society.

OP was talking about how US munitions software needs to go through a 6 week long integration test before it can be deployed. I seriously doubt that kind of testing would last very long if the US was engaged in peer level war, and their enemy had found a flew in their munitions guidance systems that made the munitions useless.

At the end of the day, when at war time isn’t just money, it’s also lives. When you have people dying on the frontlines, the risk of equipment failures from lack of testing will be substantially smaller that loss of lives from ineffective equipment, that can only be improved every other month.

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

#353

Post by maerF0x0 »

toephu2 wrote: post #245
maerF0x0 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally? China. Is it rational, IDK. It's just the largest more capable power at this moment. (particularly their industrial base and ability to out produce weapons / soldiers)

Why would they want to? China’s entire economic model relies on the US remaining a stable, wealthy consumer base for their industrial output. Physically invading your largest customer is a form of economic suicide. They don't want to govern California; they want to ensure that the global infrastructure, shipping lanes, and institutions run on Chinese technology and standards. From Beijing's perspective, a kinetic war…

You're assuming economics is the ultimate goal and not just a tool in service of a greater goal.

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

#354

Post by ACCount37 »

pixl97 wrote: post #350
ACCount37 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA's failures as of late are less "dramatic explosions" and more "delays", "cost overruns" and "lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal". The last time NASA caught any serious flak was what, the Starliner shitshow? And that was just splash damage from Boeing getting dunked on by everyone at once.

This is kind of an odd reply as what is going on now is exactly what one would expect from a culture that cannot take risks at all. 1. Something blows up. 2. It gets pasted all over the news. 3. People wonder why we give NASA money to blow stuff up 4. Congress people with room temperature IQs grill NASA admin for months. 5. NASA becomes risk adverse. 6. Today.

NASA had real safety issues in the past - Space Shuttle is a testament to that. But if this is the fix, they clearly overcorrected.

There's some sort of happy middle ground between flying a ship that has a very significant chance of a catastrophic failure killing all crew and can't even fly unmanned, and almost not letting Ingenuity fly because the chance of failure was deemed too great. NASA didn't find it.

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

#355

Post by aidenn0 »

im3w1l wrote: post #344
aidenn0 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I described was for bugfixes, not features. Features were set in stone way before this. I also maintain that it is impossible to know which changes depend on other changes. In one case, applying a bugfix that changed the order of allocations at startup caused vtable corruption somewhere else because it changed how much padding a particular malloc() call was returning, and someone was writing past the end of thei…

It's may seem like a nitpick but I think it's a whole different way off looking at it to phrase it as "applying a bugfix that changed the order of allocations at startup exposed memory corruption somewhere else" I do think there is something to be said for both perspectives, especially for code that is extremely critical. With sufficient testing and determinism maybe you can actually make sure that dormant issues sta…

IMO All it exposed was writing past the end of buffers.

There was no memory corruption previously due to partially to luck, and partially to heavy testing (which would have exposed most forms of memory corruption).

I think it is fare to say that the change was a cause of the vtable corruption occurring, since without the change it didn't happen.

Once this is discovered, you need to rethink your change plan for the next release; if you back out this one change, your software will return to a working state. Whether doing that, or fixing your buffer overflow is the correct thing to do depends on a lot of specific factors.

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

#356

Post by platevoltage »

CMay wrote: post #329
platevoltage wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were WMDs in Iraq too right?

Iraq was never really about WMDs. WMDs were a surface political mechanism to achieve the aims, which were different. If you look at all the individual events that transpired before then it was clear something had to be done, but it wasn't a neat one liner that's easy to rally people around like WMDs.

Wow. It's like you're trying not to get it.

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

#357

Post by CMay »

Lomlioto wrote: post #339
CMay wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose you have reliable sources for this?

There were plenty of YT Videos of Military analysis and News Paper articles about why USA suddenly attacked Iran. Adelson Family as donor to Trump and Bibi. Other donors might have motivated him too: Bernard Marcus and Paul Singer I can't collect though a list of sources to read through for my statements. But i don't think my view is very controversal at all.

That's speculation. We were going to attack Iran regardless. My point was, the attack you are talking about was done _by_ Israel and was not part of the plan.

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

#358

Post by SanjayMehta »

4a443da9 wrote: post #283
yonaguska wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the drone footage is actually pretty horrific to see.

Actually nothing cheers me up more than seeing Russians being hunted down and killed by drones. Fuck them.

You must be British.

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

#359

Post by megous »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #294
pjc50 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

President threatened (emptily) to cut off all trade from Spain the other day.

I wasn’t aware of that but it looks like he is upset that Spain won’t meet its defense spending commitments for NATO. Which goes back to my point about how the EU is totally reliant on the US for security. Europe’s biggest threat is itself, they won’t even do the bare minimum to ensure their security.

Some arbitrary threshold set by a completely demented US president (25% of government budget or whatever nonsense that idiot asked NATO peers to spend, probably on american mil. tech) has nothing to do with how european countries would/are able to defend themselves.

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

#360

Post by MrSkelter »

ACCount37 wrote: post #167
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…

In Ukraine, the first place that was bombed was the red tape factory. The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned. So they use civilian motors, batteries and SoCs, sketchy firmware with zero code inspection, and more. Does it work perfectly? No. It works well enough. I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation. I'm not sure if "AI for re…

You are making a good point but blaming the wrong thing.

Caution needn’t spiral cost. The reason US weapons cost so Much is because it’s profitable.

Building things that work 80% of the time makes sense in wartime. It doesn’t as a rule. Hence wartime production will always be cheaper.

Americas problem is that the military industrial complex is built to maximize cost and profit for private corporations, despite them being entirely dependent on government.

Until they are nationalized, and the profit margins are eliminated, you will always pay 20-50% more than you should and gains from efficient won’t be realized.

Look at the auto industry in the US. It’s protected by tariffs and still incapable of matching the Chinese and others on cost. It mainly survives because of incentives which subsidize vehicle types other countries don’t want (pickups) and Americans only buy because of incentives.

Iran is building drones for £3k. The US clones cost 30x that for “additional features” the spec didn’t ask for.

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