Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

media.defense.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 113 posts

Re: The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

#91

Post by kevbin »

zokier wrote: post #89
greedo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might be talking about Belenko's defection with a MIG-25 to Hokkaido in the early 1970s. Though neither aircraft is really related to the other except in very basic visual sensibilities (twin engine, twin tail).

And F-15 had its first flight four years before the MiG-25 defection. So unless they had time machine at hand its unlikely that it had major influence on F-15 design

My impression is the Westerners’ best guess about the Mig-25 contributed significantly to the design of the F-15 and helped to make it what it is. Getting their hands on it was a relief, or even a let down.

The alternative scenario, where the Mig-25 really was generations ahead, plays out in the movie Firefox from 1982 where the US is so far behind they have to steal a Soviet Mig-31 superplane. Good for laugh today, but once upon a time…

The rumor I heard is Soviet intelligence infiltrated American industry and stole what they thought were plans for America’s next generation air superiority fighter. What they’d obtained were the plans for Plymouth’s Roadrunner Superbird, thus the Mig-25’s uncanny resemblance. Proof: https://robbreport.com/motors/cars/1970-plymouth-superbird-a...

Re: The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

#92

Post by nradov »

wolverine876 wrote: post #74
dralley wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This narrative is nonsense. To point out one example >> To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with diesel fuel. No, the reason is so that you can see what got hit by shrapnel and where afterwards, and not have a burned out wreck of metal. The goal of testing is to make improvements to the design, not produce very expensive fireworks dis…

> We now have decades of experience with the Bradley and while it's not a perfect vehicle, it is pretty good. We have no experience with it fighting a peer or near-peer enemy, is that correct? That doesn't make it bad, but not good either. We have little data.

We have data. Several Bradleys were hit during the Iraq wars by weapons similar to what near-peer adversaries use. Some shots penetrated, others did not. Overall, it held up about as well as can reasonably be expected. It's simply not physically possible to build an IFV that can stand up to modern guided weapons, and so the Army accepts that risk in order to accomplish their mission.

Re: The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

#93

Post by formerly_proven »

mulmen wrote: post #77
skeeterbug wrote: post #7

Megaprojects just did an episode on the F15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgI7jDd7hww

That video is loaded with inaccuracies. They make an inexplicable Top Gun/Tom Cruise reference which suggests they don’t seem to know the difference between the F-15, F-14, or F-18. Or perhaps even between the US Navy and USAF. I’m not aware of any plans to send F-15s to Ukraine. I have only heard of F-16 and maybe F-35. The video thumbnail shows F-15s with a single (offset?) rudder. There’s a reference to the F-11 w…

> That video is loaded with inaccuracies.

> It’s so egregious I unsubscribed from the channel before my Gell-Mann amnesia could subject me to further incorrect information. It’s a shame because I enjoyed these channels but now can’t trust them.

Kinda curious that a lot of people complain about "videos replacing text" yet these "inaccurately paraphrase Wikipedia out loud while playing a Powerpoint made from Wikipedia/Commons and other images" channels like the one you linked, Asianometry and so on are huge and popular. And those at least write a (highly derivative or essentially plagiarized) script and read it, there's channels that do the same thing but with GPT for the script and TTS for the voice, and even those are pretty big.

edit: Funnily enough both kinds of channels have the "GPT issue" in that they always want to sound confident and authoritative, so they never point out if they are unsure about something. Compare this to channels like Applied Science or Breaking Taps where they very clearly point out when they don't understand something or are unsure of their understanding.

Re: The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

#94

Post by nradov »

belter wrote: post #37
FridayoLeary wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have multiple (unproven but everyone knows who did it) strikes against iranian positions in syria and even in iran itself, it is rumoured. The ability to be invisible to radar is an absolute gamechanger.

That just make it difficult to lock on with weapons. They are not invisible and any radar operator would tell you that if they would be allowed... "...Stealth designs minimize an aircraft's radar signature, delaying and sometimes even preventing detection, but because of the physical requirements for tactical jets, stealth fighters can be easily spotted by certain low-frequency radar bands. In fact, it's not even unc…

That isn't really how it works. Low observable aircraft flying in friendly civilian airspace generally have radar transponders turned on specifically to make themselves visible to air traffic control and prevent collisions. Those transponders are turned off for combat missions. And ATC mostly doesn't use primary radar any more so they don't even get skin paints on regular aircraft.

Re: The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

#95

Post by nradov »

zoomablemind wrote: post #55
jmvoodoo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why both platforms were designed to be used together as a team. F-35 provides sensor fusion and the F-15 is the missile truck. That also allows the F-35 to continue to evade detection, since launching attacks tends to get you noticed by the enemy. Modern air combat can't be measured in direct comparison like this, or even thought of in terms of "we should be using X instead of Y" The F-35 costs are also going…

It always seemed to me that F-35 is an advanced replacement to F-16, which excelled in networked and multi-role operations. Of course, by now the networked operations are in use by other aircraft too, just F-16 and F/A-18 operate at the very tip of the multi-role. Whether the networked use could remain operational in a conflict against technologically advanced enemy (with saturated ECM and comparably aggressive AA sy…

The F-16 never really "excelled" at multirole operations. It was pressed into that because there were no other options available. But it has always had an insufficient fuel fraction and is forced to depend on constant tanker support to accomplish anything. The tankers are becoming more vulnerable.

Re: The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

#96

Post by cpgxiii »

greedo wrote: post #84
cpgxiii wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the F-111 is a particularly odd case, given the vastly different initial requirements involved. To be clear, everything that made the F-111 a great long-range interdictor for the USAF would have have also made for a great long-range interceptor and strike platform for the USN. It wouldn't have made a good air superiority fighter, and the experience over Vietnam made it clear that this capability was still ver…

The USN didn't need an air-superiority fighter when they were working on the F-111B, they needed a fleet defense fighter capable of lifting a huge radar and missile set. When the terrible engines in the B model gave them an out, they took it and moved forward with the Tomcat (which used the same engines and weapons set). Little did they realize the TF-30 would remain a terrible engine for so long, and replacing it wi…

The engines certainly gave the USN the out it wanted, but the thing that truly killed the F-111B was the need for a dogfight-capable fleet fighter. There was no way they could have afforded two separate fighter development programs at the time, and Grumman had just the design they wanted ready to jump to.

The NATF program probably would have worked out fine, albeit expensively. There has always been speculation that part of the selection of the F-22 over the F-23 was because the F-22 was considered more suitable for a navalized version - and the comparatively small design differences between the F-35A and F-35C designed later by the same group suggest that a similar amount of work would have been involved in navalizing the F-22. Coatings would have been an issue in the 90s, but would largely have been solved by an realistic service entry date in the late 2000s. What killed the NATF was post-cold war budget reductions and shortsighted policymakers, not technical challenges.

The story of a navalized AH-64 is an equally strange saga. To hear the USN and USMC tell it, you would think it impossible to operate the AH-64 from a ship, yet the RN has done so extensively with relatively minimal modifications to the airframe. Given the small production run of the AH-1Z/UH-1Y program, it's questionable if much was saved. Certainly if you look at foreign customers, the capability/price of the AH-64 has been much more appealing than the AH-1Z.

Re: The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

#97

Post by mulmen »

formerly_proven wrote: post #93
mulmen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That video is loaded with inaccuracies. They make an inexplicable Top Gun/Tom Cruise reference which suggests they don’t seem to know the difference between the F-15, F-14, or F-18. Or perhaps even between the US Navy and USAF. I’m not aware of any plans to send F-15s to Ukraine. I have only heard of F-16 and maybe F-35. The video thumbnail shows F-15s with a single (offset?) rudder. There’s a reference to the F-11 w…

> That video is loaded with inaccuracies. > It’s so egregious I unsubscribed from the channel before my Gell-Mann amnesia could subject me to further incorrect information. It’s a shame because I enjoyed these channels but now can’t trust them. Kinda curious that a lot of people complain about "videos replacing text" yet these "inaccurately paraphrase Wikipedia out loud while playing a Powerpoint made from Wikipedia/…

I'm one of those people who complain about "videos replacing text". The difference here is context.

I don't want to watch a video about how to configure my shell, or Kubernetes. I want hypertext for that, so I can quickly seek through the information and find what I need. I want it to be searchable. I want to be able to reference it. I don't want to wait for YouTube to buffer just to see the config file path for a setting that would be one paragraph up in text.

Megaprojects, Asianometry, and friends are entertainment. They curate some content that is generally relevant to some topic and then present it in a simple way. I can basically switch off and learn about something new that is relevant to my interests. I don't expect them to be the authorotative source on the topic but I also don't expect them to lie to my face. Wikipedia has a random page but it doesn't have a "random pages visited by people like you". That's all these channels are.

Nothing in life is absolute. There is no one true media format. I like to read technical documentation in text, watch high fantasy on a dedicated screen, and consume popsci brain candy with my phone's screen. Similarly I listen to music on vinyl and Spotify. None of this is contradictory.

Re: The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

#98

Post by justinator »

mpclark wrote: post #60
YZF wrote: post #49

I got to see F-15s flying every day for almost three years pretty close up. They are amazing machines.

I get to see them flying at low level pretty much daily, as I live on the Mach Loop in Wales where they practice. The howl as they go over never gets old, though I guess I’d feel very differently if they weren’t just training.

Death From Above

Re: The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

#99

Post by justinator »

The_Colonel wrote: post #70

I'm kind of fascinated how these deadly machines can be so good-looking / elegant.

I've worked at Wings Over the Rockies a bit, and they have an old F4. It's not good looking/elegant. It just looks like a bunch of giant metal cylinders welded onto each other that holds a lot of very explosive liquid with mounting points to put smaller cylinders on with more explosives. I get that the status quo has marketed fighter jets as sexy, but they just are there to do a job and that job is to kill.

Re: The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf]

#100

Post by jojobas »

chiph wrote: post #59
29athrowaway wrote: post #51

The Soviets had better aircraft, then pilots defected to the US and Americans reverse engineered them.

Certain aspects were better, yes. That's because the Soviets made different trade-offs in the design -- variously because of doctrine, time constraints, availability of exotic materials (and the ability to use them in manufacturing), and "helpful" direction from Moscow. The MiG-25 "Foxbat" is a famous example. To succeed in it's role as an high-speed interceptor it should have been made from titanium. But it's a very…

Mig-25 is 80% stainless steel, compare to SR-71 which was 85% titanium.
Post reply on HN