Comment by Retric
3 months ago
It didn’t take 20 years to make an airframe it took 20 years to do lots of research which eventually resulted in a wide range of systems and multiple very distinct airframes.
Hell F-35B does vertical takeoff and still mostly uses the same systems as the other designs, that should tell you something.
F-35B was added to JSF to ensure Lockheed (who had been working on exactly that since 1980s even to the point of licensing designs from USSR) was the only company that could win the contract.
What evidence is there of that?
And without the F-35B, what would be flown by the US Marines, and by most other countries' aircraft carriers, all of which require vertical take-off and landing?
Late addition of VTOL variant on mandates common airframe when it was well known that only Lockheed had anything in pipeline that could match the requirements and even then -B meant delays and issues due to inherent complexity of VTOL (to the point Britain nearly canceled the order for -B, only finding out it was too late to refit Queen Elizabeth carriers with CATOBAR kept the purchase afloat)
Reality is that VTOL model is ultimately a niche variant whose mandated commonality with air force and CATOBAR carrier variants impacted negatively both non- and VTOL options.
However, slapping supersonic VTOL requirement on what was supposed to be F-16 replacement in the given timeframe meant Lockheed would automatically get ahead as every other vendor had to scramble nearly from scratch while L-M had fresh supersonic VTOL data from both their own lab work and experimental work on Yak-141
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Harrier 2.0
It doesn't take 20 years to do that, it takes 20 years to do that and wade through the bureaucratic morass. The SR-71 went from initiation to deployment in under a decade, more than half a century ago. With the myriad of advancements in everything from engineering, computation, to business development/management practices, building new cutting edge planes is the sort of thing we should be getting better and quicker at.
Design iteration cycle-times should be decreasing due to CAD, experimental cycles-times reduced due to the proliferation of rapid-turn 5-axis CNC mills, experimental cycles reduced due to simulation, business processes streamlined due to advancements in JIT manufacturing and six-sigma/kaizen/etc, and so on and so forth. That this isn't occurring is a giant blinking red light that something is wrong, and that we are going to get our lunch eaten by someone who researches, designs, and manufactures with a modicum of competence. Ostensibly China.
The SR-71 had a strait forward mission well suited to a specialized airframe, and again you’re focusing on the airframe.
Just the software for the helmet alone provides a huge technical advantage that has little to do with how the aircraft is manufactured other than having the appropriate sensors, communication systems, and computing power. Yet through all that bureaucracy what would normally be 3 different airframes all get to leverage the same systems without the need for retrofits etc. It’s inherently a two step process to figure out what you need before you can finalize the design.
By comparison vs the F-35, the B-2 spirit was vastly more expensive and far more limited. The F-35 also costs less than the more specialized F-22, but that versatility takes time.
To be fair the F22 would have been closer to the F35 in price if the number produced were larger so that the R&D was spread over a larger number of airframes. Such a pretty plane.
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Agree, agree, agree.
New technologies should make iteration time on this stuff faster not shorter... even for complex things like fighter aircraft.
The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.
I will say though that during WW2 and the Cold War, the amount of tolerance for killing test pilots was much greater given the number of people dying during active military conflicts at the time.
But it's not the technologies that are a problem most of the time. It's that:
- DoD / DoW is a chaotic project owner, trying to squeeze in colossal and sometimes self-contradictory lists of requirements, which it wants to change often.
- The US government is a poor customer, which runs out of money from time to time.
- The US Congress is a cantankerous financier, which haggles for the money every year, and demands the production to be distributed all over the place, to bring jobs to the constituencies which voted for the congresspersons.
- The companies that produce this stuff are few and mostly cannot be easily replaced, and they know it. This is because in the late 1980s the US government decided that it has won the Cold War and will not need the many competing manufacturers of military gear any more. That proved to be a bit shortsighted, but now it's a bit late.
> The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.
I think that mostly means money is cheap in China. In America, if you try to start a humanoid robot company you'll immediately run into the "Why though?" question when you try to get money for it. The case for the economic relevance of humanoid robots is dubious at best, so to proceed with such a development program you need your own money or at least good friends with connections who don't care about money.