There is an element of truth to this. It's also true that the U.S. government is a terrible customer, especially for bespoke or expensive military goods. However, you can see my other comment…
The highest priority in U.S. government acquisitions is to respect the business "rights" of suppliers and potential suppliers. It's hard to understand how tightly this is wound into the very foundations of USG…
I'm sorry, but this is basically incorrect on every point other than the limited tenure. Source: I work in this sector. PMs often come directly from industry. Once they do, there is a period over which they are not…
Replying to finish a discussion no one will probably see, but... > That the original comment I replied to is false: "Good luck designing crash resilient structures without simulating it on FEM based software." In…
What is your actual assertion? That tools like FEA are needless frippery or that they just dumb down practitioners who could have otherwise accomplished the same things with hand methods? Something else? You're replying…
I don't know about full-on nationalization, but we have plenty of evidence to show the incentives for publicly-owned for-profit companies whose primary customer is the Government are strongly misaligned with the…
This is a poor example of "Government innovation". It's more an example of legislative overreach / "pork barrel" politics, and bad acquisition practices. The Government is certainly capable of doing a shitty job, but…
We probably won't get much further going back and forth on this. For what it's worth, you seem very reasonable, I've appreciated your comments for a long time, and I'm sure we'd get along fine if we were to work…
> I wonder what the situation will be in terms of fuel efficiency. Obviously it will take more energy per second to push through the atmosphere, but that may be defrayed by not having to hold the airplane up as long.…
> So it makes sense that most researchers are looking for higher efficiency. It makes sense that researchers should be considering metrics other than efficiency as well for new materials or architectures, and there's no…
I've previously written a few relevant comments that hopefully answer in parts: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27386119 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35124271 [3]…
If commercial supersonic flight has any hope of being economically viable, one of the prerequisites will be cruising below Mach 2.
> then they realized the fuel economy of supersonic aircraft peaks around Mach 3 As I noted in a below comment, there isn't a way for this statement to be accurate without a lot more qualifications. For "equivalent…
> No, it's exceptionally bad to fly close to Mach 1 and you do better if you fly faster up to Mach 3 or so. Where do you get this from? I suspect you are talking about the Breguet range parameter, which is (M / SFC * L…
I'm an aerospace engineer and I find the F-15 (esp. the C model) to be a hell of a sexy beast (so to speak), very visually stunning, and the F-35 to be relatively ugly. There's a reason the U.S. fighter community refers…
Current military thinking is "No" - the expectation, via lots of simulation, analysis, recent history, large-scale military exercises, and intel is that advanced weapons systems make dogfighting increasingly unlikely.…
Within a given class of system, sometimes rugged, robust, and plentiful does win the day over sophisticated but more fragile and expensive. On the other hand, an advanced military will want advanced capabilities and…
It's really for two primary reasons: 1. Storing tooling, especially huge aircraft-sized tooling, has real costs associated with it. There's the physical space it occupies as well as the costs associated with keeping it…
> The F-16 actually had a carrier demonstrator, the Vought 1600, for VFAX. To be clear, the Vought 1600 (a partnership with GD where Vought took on the prime role and GD became a sub, similar to the what happened with…
Extraordinary claims ought to be supported by extraordinary evidence. Those are some serious accusations you make.
It's a false dichotomy to say you either have to be "all-inclusive to the entire world of developers" or you should applaud project leaders throwing out useless condescending rants with no real technical content like:…
Not sure how mysterious it can be when he opens with a rant like: And the *reality* is that there are no absolute guarantees. Ever. The "Rust is safe" is not some kind of absolute guarantee of code safety. Never has…
There are a number of non-starters here: 1. Efficiency counts for a lot in these aircraft, and it's absolutely possible to do better than the Olympus. In particular, high-temperature materials and engineering, along…
I'm not sure how accessible this is for the layperson, but I thought this report was pretty well done: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150015837 Also, I didn't really answer your question directly before, but…
@throwawaylol_ is correct. I'm afraid you're mistaken.
There is an element of truth to this. It's also true that the U.S. government is a terrible customer, especially for bespoke or expensive military goods. However, you can see my other comment…
The highest priority in U.S. government acquisitions is to respect the business "rights" of suppliers and potential suppliers. It's hard to understand how tightly this is wound into the very foundations of USG…
I'm sorry, but this is basically incorrect on every point other than the limited tenure. Source: I work in this sector. PMs often come directly from industry. Once they do, there is a period over which they are not…
Replying to finish a discussion no one will probably see, but... > That the original comment I replied to is false: "Good luck designing crash resilient structures without simulating it on FEM based software." In…
What is your actual assertion? That tools like FEA are needless frippery or that they just dumb down practitioners who could have otherwise accomplished the same things with hand methods? Something else? You're replying…
I don't know about full-on nationalization, but we have plenty of evidence to show the incentives for publicly-owned for-profit companies whose primary customer is the Government are strongly misaligned with the…
This is a poor example of "Government innovation". It's more an example of legislative overreach / "pork barrel" politics, and bad acquisition practices. The Government is certainly capable of doing a shitty job, but…
We probably won't get much further going back and forth on this. For what it's worth, you seem very reasonable, I've appreciated your comments for a long time, and I'm sure we'd get along fine if we were to work…
> I wonder what the situation will be in terms of fuel efficiency. Obviously it will take more energy per second to push through the atmosphere, but that may be defrayed by not having to hold the airplane up as long.…
> So it makes sense that most researchers are looking for higher efficiency. It makes sense that researchers should be considering metrics other than efficiency as well for new materials or architectures, and there's no…
I've previously written a few relevant comments that hopefully answer in parts: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27386119 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35124271 [3]…
If commercial supersonic flight has any hope of being economically viable, one of the prerequisites will be cruising below Mach 2.
> then they realized the fuel economy of supersonic aircraft peaks around Mach 3 As I noted in a below comment, there isn't a way for this statement to be accurate without a lot more qualifications. For "equivalent…
> No, it's exceptionally bad to fly close to Mach 1 and you do better if you fly faster up to Mach 3 or so. Where do you get this from? I suspect you are talking about the Breguet range parameter, which is (M / SFC * L…
I'm an aerospace engineer and I find the F-15 (esp. the C model) to be a hell of a sexy beast (so to speak), very visually stunning, and the F-35 to be relatively ugly. There's a reason the U.S. fighter community refers…
Current military thinking is "No" - the expectation, via lots of simulation, analysis, recent history, large-scale military exercises, and intel is that advanced weapons systems make dogfighting increasingly unlikely.…
Within a given class of system, sometimes rugged, robust, and plentiful does win the day over sophisticated but more fragile and expensive. On the other hand, an advanced military will want advanced capabilities and…
It's really for two primary reasons: 1. Storing tooling, especially huge aircraft-sized tooling, has real costs associated with it. There's the physical space it occupies as well as the costs associated with keeping it…
> The F-16 actually had a carrier demonstrator, the Vought 1600, for VFAX. To be clear, the Vought 1600 (a partnership with GD where Vought took on the prime role and GD became a sub, similar to the what happened with…
Extraordinary claims ought to be supported by extraordinary evidence. Those are some serious accusations you make.
It's a false dichotomy to say you either have to be "all-inclusive to the entire world of developers" or you should applaud project leaders throwing out useless condescending rants with no real technical content like:…
Not sure how mysterious it can be when he opens with a rant like: And the *reality* is that there are no absolute guarantees. Ever. The "Rust is safe" is not some kind of absolute guarantee of code safety. Never has…
There are a number of non-starters here: 1. Efficiency counts for a lot in these aircraft, and it's absolutely possible to do better than the Olympus. In particular, high-temperature materials and engineering, along…
I'm not sure how accessible this is for the layperson, but I thought this report was pretty well done: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150015837 Also, I didn't really answer your question directly before, but…
@throwawaylol_ is correct. I'm afraid you're mistaken.