Comment by Animats
1 year ago
During wartime, it may be better to design for a short lifespan. Build the seeker with ordinary AA batteries welded in instead of thermal batteries with a standby life of decades. If it's intended for Ukraine or Taiwan, skip the part temperature range that would allow the thing to sit in the sun for a year in Iraq. Seal up the unit and stencil it "NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE" and "USE BEFORE 2026-12-31". It will have been fired at the enemy long before then.
It isn't as simple as "make a new design with a shorter lifespan" either. These systems are intended to work the first time every time, and every change introduces numerous second-order consequences. You swapped the batteries? Great the balance of the missile now changed and we have to re-calculate the flight dynamics. Remove some shielding and conformal coating? Now the thermal properties have changed on the control boards and the welds are cracking due to different heat propagation. We certainly could make them cheap and dirty, but their reliability and consistency would suffer. The last thing you want is to shoot a missile and piss off the guy on the receiving end, who isn't dead but is now very motivated to get revenge.
Considering that WW2 artillery shells were used all the way into th 70s and 80s, you might rethink that.
Ukraine is out of ammunition NOW. If the war suddenly ends and they have to dispose of warheads that will expire soon, that is a cost that can be paid. But more importantly for them is ammunition now, if that can be achieved by making the build process simple, it should probably be done.
You can't immediately scale up manufacturing. People have to be trained, parts have to be procured, and facilities made available to build the things. Ramp-up takes months, and if you're lucky the product is well established already so you aren't stepping on landmines as you scale. I helped to restart a mothballed process for a military product once and I have stories that you wouldn't believe.
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Yes, you should tell theilitary industrial complex to produce arms and ammunitions during times of peak demand. You know, they might not have gotten the memo that they should get production volumes up.
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Ukraine is out of ammunition NOW
There's no need to be hyperbolic.
They're certainly facing a serious situation. But by all accounts they still have some runway. And if you'll check your current news feeds very carefully: no, the front hasn't collapsed, and no, the Russians aren't on the verge of overrunning Kharkiv and Odesa.
So no, Ukraine is not "out of ammunition NOW".
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