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The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

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Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#551

Post by smileysteve »

christoph wrote: post #295
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The average person does virtually no regular maintenance / checking of their car, even basics like tyre pressures and oil levels not being checked regularly, happy to leave as much as they possibly can for an annual check at the garage. There’s a shocking amount of people also happy to drive around ignoring warning lights flashing. Imagine that scenario with tons of metal that could fall out of the sky when something…

> Imagine that scenario with tons of metal that could fall out of the sky when something fails.

Hmm, this has different meaning with last weekends context of an engine cover hitting a yard.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#552

Post by tandr »

tablespoon wrote: post #56
tandr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please forgive my ignorance of military processes involved. Could that be addressed by old software trick of modularising components - software and hardware-alike - and rely on some extensive semi-open protocols to connect these? I think car manufacturers have faced that at some time in the past, even inside single manufacturer (not sure if they have solved it completely). Sounds like they need Ada-like project, but…

Full disclosure: I don't work in defense, but I've read Wikipedia. >>> I can't comment from the perspective of the F16 specifically, but from experience working on upgrade efforts of military and IC ground processing systems, the challenge is the legacy systems are very tightly coupled to the hardware. They make strong assumptions about register size and number, bus bandwidth, filesystem block size, all kinds of thin…

Thank you. I guess it is a good start. But, as a solution - develop new protocols and standards, and declare that military does not buy _anything_ that does not interoperate on these standards, no matter how advanced your shit is?

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#553

Post by WalterBright »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #345
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The reason you don't get flying cars, is the very same, you cant make a lot of other technology. People will want to invent the flying car parking house. And they kind of did - on the 11 of September 2001. You can not hand technology over a certain level to a infantile (nicer sound then retarded) species. Its that simple. Its already madness to allow wealthy citizens into space. Tesla and Amazon are one freight fligh…

> Its already madness to allow wealthy citizens into space.

??

> filled with tungsten rods, away from becoming there own nation - with non-nuclear deterrence.

In WW1, they tried dropping flechettes onto troops. Didn't work.

As for becoming a nation, that's hardly going to work without the launch/recovery site being part of that nation.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#554

Post by jodrellblank »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #528
Guthur wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, you head on out to the desert, we'll be right behind you... promise.

I do not get it- why is exponential powerful tech, such a serious matter if somebody wants a nuke (Iran, North-Korea) or even just proliferate per-existing ones, considered a serious issue. But once a entity with clear interests in venturing outside the sphere of law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Breakup ) and the monetary/organizational power to acquire such tech, ventures towards something similar cl…

OK, SpaceX applies to launch an orbital bombardment cannon and launch approval is denied. That was a good day, next.

OK, SpaceX ignores the denial and launches anyway. Elon Musk threatens to destroy Washington DC to gain independence for ... some territory somewhere. Unclear where, or why he'd want that since he already has enormous wealth and influence and doesn't need to run his own military to keep it. The United States arrests Elon Musk and seizes all of SpaceX with overwhelming military might. The end.

Is that really as threatening as North Korea developing nuclear weapons?

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#555

Post by [deleted] »

yrgulation wrote: post #516
sayhar wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for bringing a structural, informed approach to this. I'm getting a little tired of the tendency to handwave blame "cultural decline" rather than actual looking into the policies and details.

Aren't policy and details a product of culture? If a group of people, be it a team or nation, dont have have a solid culture then surely they cant achieve solid results. And indeed it would appear that gradually there is a decline in achieving great results from countries that have historically achieved such results. Dont get me wrong, the US is still doing great, but maybe when the rest of the world keeps raising re…

[deleted]

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#556

Post by totetsu »

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The 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…

If it stops us producing Civilization Ending technologies like the A-bomb then I'm all for the toxicity... Not all progress is linear, efficiency is no as vitrue unto itself!

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#557

Post by bootlooped »

The funniest anecdote about the F-35 I like to tell is this: the Air Force decided the F-22 was too expensive, they needed something cheaper, so they made the F-35. The F-35 ended up being the most expensive weapons program in human history.

Now, I understand that is oversimplifying things, bending the truth a little, and omitting crucial details... but it's not that wrong.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#558

Post by solidsnack9000 »

Aunche wrote: post #287

Is there any benefit for a multi-role fighter to have stealth? It seems like any applications where stealth is important, you might as well have a specialized air-superiority fighter.

The risks to CAS aircraft and fighter-bombers from SAMs and AA are actually significant enough to warrant stealth/low-signature technology.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#559

Post by Judgmentality »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #500
Judgmentality wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We failed in our goal. Simply by admitting this, you've already contradicted the person I was responding to. His entire scribe is "what is failure? have we really failed? no" instead of "yeah we failed, but we can learn from it" Failure is fine. Failure is expected. Failure is the best way to learn an iterate. But then don't say "well we always got what we wanted out of it anyway, which was to learn" when your goal…

I didn't get the same thing out of the comment you were responding to...but I otherwise agree with you entirely: > Failure is fine. Failure is expected. Failure is the best way to learn an iterate. and > don't say "well we always got what we wanted out of it anyway, which was to learn" when your goal was "to build the ultimate fighter jet at this budget in this timeline"

> I didn't get the same thing out of the comment you were responding to

This is my fault, as I was mostly paraphrasing what he said in other comments. So that's just lazy commenting on my part, and probably I deserve downvotes for it.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#560

Post by peeters »

digi59404 wrote: post #7

“The F-35 has failed” is a strong statement that depends on what your definition of success is. Did it fail because it couldn’t replace the F-16? Did it fail because it’s expensive and bloated? Do those things even matter? I’m not defending the F-35 but anyone deeply and intimately familiar with the platform knows and understands that it is a Ferrari. You don’t bring your Acura TSX to a Formula 1 race track to win a…

The Ferrari metaphor is revisionist at best. The F-35 program wasn't created to build a Ferrari, it was designed to build the best, cheapest commuter car possible using economies of scale and shared cost. That the only role left for it is as a Ferrari (after the design was butchered by stakeholders) is a testament to how far it fell from its goals, not a success story.
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