Look, man, the President managed to shave $600 million off the program cost in a week. Let’s just celebrate his effectiveness, okay?
LOL no emoticon on this forum suffices.
The Washington Post gives Trump’s claim to credit of knocking $600m off the program Four Pinocchios.
Whoosh.
(I just quoted you to continue that train of thought, not to dispute your fine suggestion that we simply look into Trump’s heart and see how good and effective he is.)
Bump
Footage from the first operational deployment of an F-35 in a Marine Expeditionary Unit, on location in the East China Sea.
Wait, what?
Ok, so your main thesis is that some of the fancier software for the aircraft is years late.
And that some of the features that they plan to offer need more processing power than what is specced for the plane.
Well, first of all, optimization can work wonders if you’re willing to pay the cost in labor. It is entirely possible to get enormous speedups with better algorithms, inner loop optimizations, and so on. The field of image processing has in fact found many such tricks over the years - the methods they started with 7+ years ago are already obsolete.
And second, umm, over the last 7 years there have been ever smaller and more powerful processors available. In fact, Nvidia just released a new wonder-architecture that is supposed to be enough for level 4 autonomy on 50 watts. Now, yes, going to a new hardware platform would be very expensive. There are all these verification steps, interfacing to the old architecture, qualifying the new circuit boards with the new chips, and so on. Probably take 3-5 years with 100+ people. But if that’s what it takes, it can be done. And the F-35 is very much flyable and somewhat fight-able even without these features.
While it probably will end up costing an appalling amount (like most government work) the concept was that the F-35 was designed to make hardware updates easier: The F-35 With Software Upgradeability Built In
Yeah, makes sense. And coremelt keeps ranting on about not having anywhere to dissipate the waste heat or not enough power. Like, really dude? It’s a jet fighter. I don’t think he has any idea what he’s talking about.
In fact the aircraft can potentially produce so much power that on paper it can drive a laser weapon. Mere machine vision is 2-3 orders of magnitude smaller. Now, yeah, you won’t be able to just cram in a circuit board festooned with the most power hungry GPUs into the same slot that whatever it currently has occupies. There are limits and any major modifications to the airframe such as upsizing it’s alternator (I assume that is what it ultimately has - an engine driven alternator) or adding new cooling channels aren’t going to be cheap.
But I’m beginning to get the idea that coremelt is not a credible or rational poster.
As a reminder, I bumped the thread earlier today after it had been dormant over a year, so “coremelt keeps ranting” is a bit inaccurate.
According to the commander of the Israeli Air Force, the F-35 has popped its combat cherry.
Updating this thread:
I think Japan has followed suit. I haven’t heard about the UK, but they have probably done similar things. It’s pretty standard with a new fighter when they encounter what might be a systemic problem. I think that some of the original fuel tubes had faults, but the newer ones don’t, so they are going to ground everything until they figure out where the older ones are and replace them.
That said, the US has nearly 400 of the things in service or working up at this point, and we’ve been delivering them to the allies who bought into the program, so it doesn’t seem to be in a death spiral. The program actually seems to be accelerating, this small set back aside. The other 5th generation planes being deployed are far, far behind this, and F-35 now has more active air craft than our other 5th gen fighter, the F-22.
And it sounds like several of the F-22 were likely damaged at Tyndall Air Base during Hurricane Michael.
How much do these cost?
Why wouldn’t you fly them out of the way?
Read an interesting article on this very question the other day. Among the reasons: the planes can be in various states of readiness depending on the maintenance being done, they’re not designed to be simply loaded onto a transport, and priority was given to evacuating personnel and dependents. Frankly I don’t know enough about military aviation to judge the credibility of the article but it seems legit.
Of course, the primary question is why you would locate these planes in a hurricane zone to begin.
Air superiority fighters (like the F-22) are often positioned near the coast to be able to intercept hostile (or potentially hostile) foreign aircraft. Not much point in sticking them all in Kansas and leaving the coasts undefended. We want them in places like Alaska, Guam, California, and yes, Florida.
Yeah, but you’d think they’d build them protected hangers or something.
There was no NEED to station air interdiction fighters at Tindale. Alas, the stationing of aircraft and crews/ ships/ army/ marine units is a political football. See any of the previous Base Realignment And Closure (BRAC) attempts. How influential are your congress critters and senators? Does the president need votes for some legislation? Can the party maintain their majority?
Hardened hangers for bomb or wind defense aren’t cheap. The military is just like many on the gulf coast; never had one that powerful in XXXX years and the storm did intensify dramatically.
Same reason the Russians keep fighters and interceptors in Tundra, Pakistan high up in the Himalayas, the Chinese on their coasts and the RAF in Scotland. Since that is where the likely enemy attack is going to come from.