While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Crezth]

Yes, you can. 80% of the plane is the same across all three versions - that's a major selling-point, remember - and they use the same engine, the same fuselage. The big differences on your chart are because the B has a lift fan that takes up fuel space, and the C has slightly larger wings for the low speed carrier approach; that doesn't markedly alter the plane's cross section or wing load. I mean, the reason it's got one engine rather than the two that Navy and Air Force would have liked is precisely because such compromises had to be made.

What? No. Single-engine designs are intended to maximize the flight envelope. It's an efficiency consideration, not a political one.

Anyway, finishing the F-35 is pretty important at this stage because it's a stepping stone. I think Sym hit the nail on the head when he mentioned the thing about starting 6th gen development. It doesn't matter if it isn't good enough, it doesn't really have to be. It's an ambitious and, in some ways, absurd project that will advance the cause of fighter jet development by several years.

Expensive, but who cares? Austerity is for losers.

 

[Symphony D.]

I think Sym hit the nail on the head when he mentioned the thing about starting 6th gen development. It doesn't matter if it isn't good enough, it doesn't really have to be. It's an ambitious and, in some ways, absurd project that will advance the cause of fighter jet development by several years.

Yeah this is the other thing, the ~SINGULARITY~ is almost certainly BS but that doesn't mean the pace of technology isn't quickening and things are coming online that will make all this stuff horribly obsolete in 20 years, because we'll be looking at optionally-manned Mach 6 hypersonic plasma stealth diode-laser equipped suborbital death machines or something that have time-to-detect and time-to-kill of literally seconds because they'll have gone over half your country in the time it takes your radar network's chain-of-command to understand they're even there.

Whoever masters and compacts the build process for rapidly and effectively managing and incorporating new technologies into its weapons will have a huge leg up. Guess what massive problem-riddled programs like the JSF constitute? A learning experience, and you learn most from making mistakes. It is, meanwhile, not actually very easy to learn best practices from simply observing somebody else without doing yourself. That's as true for bureaucracies as it is people.

In the long run it doesn't matter if the F-35 is an 85% or a 92% solution, it's a necessary step in a chain that doesn't end, not a teleological end-product. Getting it out of the way, patching, and moving on is not only no different from what other people are doing with their weapons, it's no different than literally any other weapon ever made. It's not a special snowflake.

 

[Daftpanzer]

New blood joins this forum,
And quickly he's subdued.
Through constant pained disgrace
The young noob learns their rules.

With time the child draws in.
This whipping boy posted wrong.
Deprived of all his thoughts
The young man struggles on and on.

He's known a vow unto his own,
That never from this day
His will they'll take away.

What I've felt,
What I've known
Never shined through in my posts.
Never be.
Never see.
Won't see what might have been.

What I've felt,
What I've known
Never shined through in my updates.
Never free.
Never me.
So I dub thee unforgiven.

 

[Shadowbound]

Symph: We're making this incredibly expensive airplane so that, next time we make an airplane, we don't screw up as much.

Perf: The military-industrial complex is wasting our money by pouring it down a giant money pit and lighting it on fire with jet fuel.

 

[Daftpanzer]

What if war, and preparation for war, is a racket, serving only the special interest?

 

[Tee Kay]

What an unprecedented idea, you should write a book about it.

 

[Daftpanzer]

I believe someone beat me to it.

 

[North King]

War is exploitation via other means?

 

[Crezth]

What if war, and preparation for war, is a racket, serving only the special interest?

Illegalize war. Bam. Problem solved.

 

[Lord of Elves]

What if war, and preparation for war, is a racket, serving only the special interest?

You're absolutely right, there's no way civilians benefit from stuff like battlefield medicine, jet engines and nuclear power.

 

[Perfectionist]

It doesn't matter if it isn't good enough, it doesn't really have to be. It's an ambitious and, in some ways, absurd project that will advance the cause of fighter jet development by several years.

Well, if that's the justification in the final analysis then it's perhaps the least cost-effective program in history. The F-35 will cost more than NASA has spent in its entire history, and they're literally doing rocket science. We put a mobile laboratory the size of an SUV on Mars for $2.5 billion, and the ENGINE of this damned plane will cost us $70 billion.

Also, that's definitively NOT how it was sold to people. The F-22 was the really amazingly good fighter that has so much cool stuff in it we won't let anyone else touch it; the F-35 was meant to be the cheap(er), mass-produced workhorse, the low in the high/low mix.

 

[Shadowbound]

There aren't any communists on Mars.

 

[Arrow Gamer]

Then why's it the Red Planet?

Checkmate, atheists.

 

[Shadowbound]

Because of high levels of iron oxide in the regolith, duh.

 

[North King]

You know what else had iron? The Curtain between East and West.

Done and done, Mars is the USSR.

 

[Daftpanzer]

See what happens when you indulge military-industrial profiteering and lose sight of the big picture - now 1/8 of the solar system is Communist.

 

[North King]

Strictly speaking, that's only if you count every planet equally, which is obviously foolish.

 

[Perfectionist]

Counting planets equally when they're clearly not equal is called communism.

 

[Arrow Gamer]

Everyone knows Earth is worth five solar systems because it has 'Murica on it.

USA #1

 

[Thlayli]

What we really need to worry about are rogue comets, coming in from impoverished sections of the Oort Cloud, attracted by our mass and gravity that we've worked so hard to build, and bringing their families with them.