this JPL guy has been great at narrating what is happening and just how on edge everyone must be there
That was so fun! I was on a Teams manager meeting live-chatting the landing to the group while people were talking. Yeah, I'm gonna quit soon.
So...it wasn't to be for me, but man, my ex is ********ing smart. https://soundcloud.com/user-378624011/targeting-a-vulnerability-in-triple-negative-breast-cancer This is a fairly non-nerdy (but still geeky) podcast, but goes at a discovery which has a possible therapeutic line to treat or even prevent a kind of breast cancer. And if you listen she talks about how she discovered in childhood cancer.
This is a good story. If you like sarcasm, dry humour and money being poured down the drain while people are working for $5 bucks an hour. Two Freeking Trillion bucks! Even by Pentagon terms, this was a dud: The disastrous saga of the F-35 The military-industrial complex spent $2 trillion building a "flying Swiss Army knife." Now it's been shelved Somehow the United States has managed to develop a fighter jet for all three services — the Air Force, Navy and Marines — that goes for $100 million apiece, ran up almost a half-trillion dollars in total development costs, will cost almost $2 trillion over the life of the plane, and yet it can't be flown safely. How did this happen, you ask? Well, it's a long, complicated story, but basically it involves taking something that's supposed to do one thing and do it well, like take off from the ground and fly really fast, and adding stuff like being able to take off and land on an aircraft carrier or hover like a hummingbird. https://www.salon.com/2021/02/27/ev...is-was-a-dud-the-disastrous-saga-of-the-f-35/
Holy shit that article is bad, even accounting for the attempts at humor. The program is a freakin' disaster, but nearly everything the author attempted to state as a fact in the first 5 paragraphs (where I tapped out due to pulling muscles eye-rolling) was either irrelevant, highly misleading, or dead ********ing wrong. This is one among many reasons why journalists are not trusted. They cannot even pretend to report without beclowning themselves on technical issues. EDIT: I read on to the 7th paragraph, where, astonishingly, a half of a salient point is raised, though they attribute the problem incorrectly, unsurprisingly. Then they murder the rest of the point later in the paragraph. What utter shit. Jesus Christ. The author claims to have graduated from West Point. Well, that's either an indictment or completely expected that an Army guy would have no ********ing clue what "those zoomie things do". There are a gazillion things you can honestly write about w.r.t. the F-35 and the boondoggle it has become. Almost none of them are present here. What a supremely awful article.
Do you have a link to anything trustworthy? I'm fairly interested in an F-35 article that isn't hyperbolic.
This is in-depth on the supersonic issue specifically. The latter third or so says why, in part - according to modern doctrine - sustained supersonic flight isn't something you'd even be expected to do in almost all circumstances. https://www.defensenews.com/smr/hid...s-that-changed-how-america-operates-the-f-35/ I mean, the F-16, for example, is quite capable of sustained supersonic flight, but then you run out of gas, and quickly, because it requires afterburner and the F-16 is small, limiting internal fuel stores. In fact, only the F-22 is capable of supercruise (i.e. supersonic flight without the use of afterburners). Afterburners literally are pouring jet fuel into the exhaust sequence of the engine, so it's a touch wasteful. Dogfighting is and has been an outmoded doctrine for decades, certainly since the Wall fell. If you (or your adversary) get to sustained WVR aerial combat, you're basically trying to wait each other out to bingo fuel. You certainly cannot dogfight (in ANY airframe) at supersonic speeds for any length of time. You'll crack the frame, or, more likely, the jet will limit your control inputs to prevent excessive g-loading. It gets worse with stores on the wings. And that leaves aside physics, where, sure, you can enter a merge supersonic, but as soon as you start to pull around on the adversary, you're going to scrub speed instantly - AND YOU WANT TO for turning performance - to well below 1.0M. DefenseNews has a bunch of articles on the F-35's problems, but not a ton of really recent ones. Note I just checked what I remember being passed on before - DefenseNews shows up a lot in my circles, because they aren't morons. I'm sure one could rather easily find competent articles from industry sources that honestly address this stuff by just doing searches and not clicking on click-bait from Salon, et. al.
Jane's Defence Weekly is a good source in general, though I don't think there's a lot of "problems" reporting.
I found this remarkably useful-looking summary of pretty much the entire program. Looks like it's incrementally updated. TONS of information. https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f-35-lightning-the-joint-strike-fighter-program-edit-037947/ Might take you most of the day to absorb. Doesn't appear to have in-depth about specific acute issues, but is a fantastic overall summary.
The biggest issue is the cost of training hour. I remember reading it was like 3 times than the F-16, but perhaps I am getting confused with the F-22
The F-16 is a bad comparison in any event, since there are zillions of them and they're dirt cheap and a mature 4th generation airframe. And they're the most successful export fighter aircraft ever, so huge swathes of NATO and non-NATO allies use them and train in them (especially the Belgians and Dutch).
Sure and that is a problem for military budgets. Replacing f16s and f18s with F35 on a one per one basis was never going to happen. Technically the better plane can do more than the planes they are replacing, so you need fewer planes. But even if fewer planes eat up 3 to 4 times more of your training budget, that creates problems. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallm...ys-fighter-fleet-infographic/?sh=7cb9cc5685fc The F22 vs F15 does not seem to bad, it is a 50% or so increase on operating cost. But the F16/F18 vs F35 is way to big, it is 2X more expensive than the F18 and 3X more expensive to operate than the F16. I guess, if you can cut the number of air-frames needed by half for the Navy and by 2/3rds for the Air force, then we are ok. Edit: as F35's become more available and with better service records, the operating cost should decrease.
Never said the budgeting was anywhere approaching sane, just that a direct comparison is very, very flawed. The F-22 is straight-up air superiority. While the F-15 was originally conceived and operated as such, the E-model brought a ton of strike capability. So in that narrow sense, it looks worse for the F-22 (leaving aside a bunch of other factors) That's WAY less than I thought. The F-18 is morphing into a 4.5 generation platform, but let's just say that the comparison falls down on a number of fronts. The days of a cheap, almost throwaway multirole light fighter/attack airframe are done forever after the F-16 finally gets retired (which it won't, for a long time). That's the F-16. The F-18 will be around significantly longer for a variety of reasons. This is obviously true.
This is not really science but I couldn't think of another place to put this. New York to London in 3.5 hours? United Airlines to buy 15 ultra-fast planes from start-up Boom Supersonic. https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2021/06/03/united-boom-supersonic/
Which means that all the standards they use to dismiss evolution all of the sudden disappear when analysing creationism.