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

[Lord_Iggy]

The Moon also has several Murica flags does it not?

 

[Shadowbound]

No blood for helium-3! No blood for helium-3!

 

[talonschild]

Sorry I couldn't find a version without the silly pictures.

Link to video.

 

[Crezth]

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.

Ah-heh. I can tell you're being facetious because:

a.) Jet engine design also slots into the category of *ahem* "rocket science."

b.) Comparing engines and SUV-laboratories.

Though I grasp your point, which is that the F-35 is really expensive. Yeah, it is. So, what? Technical learning isn't cheap, and it's senseless to put a price on progress (beep, boop). Mobile laboratories are fine and all, but suppose you wanted NASA to start putting tick-tack houses on Mars - well, then you could probably start expecting double or triple-digit billion dollar figures, and at the end you don't even get a useful machine for murdering brown people. Basically what I'm saying is we tolerate expensive mistakes from NASA - hell, we even expect them - and this is because we know that you just have to spend a lot of money on mistakes some times.

At the risk of being tedious, I'm just going to repeat that the F-35 is the definitive next-gen project and, finish it or no, it's going to be looked at for a lot of upcoming design challenges. And I say might as well finish it because, as stated, austerity is for losers, and I don't really see what we gain by scrapping it other than the ability for the true producers (read: congressmen) to pat themselves on the back that they have once again ensured that the financial sectors of this country can entertain their fantasies of grandeur for a little longer.

Much better, I think, to let the engineers entertain their fantasies of grandeur, because at least then you get nifty gadgets you can show off at parties. Eventually. Sometimes for $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.

True enough, but neither here nor there. We're a ways past that now.

 

[Symphony D.]

A guide to understanding this post:


Link to video.

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.

NASA wasn't mass-producing Saturn Vs or space shuttles in industrial quantities. Did you know that if you multiply the number of M1 Abrams variants built just for the US (3,273 M1, 4,796 M1A1, 77 M1A2 = 8,146) by their unit cost of $8.58 million (2012 US dollars accounting for inflation) that equals $69.89 billion? (By the way, 8,146 Curiosity rovers would cost $20.365 trillion.) Now consider the development costs from the failed MBT-70 program, the ultimate cost of developing the M1 Abrams itself, the upgrade costs of modifying several of them, the operational costs, the fuel costs—all the things that are included in lifetime program costs—and I'm willing to bet you that number is somewhere between $250 and $500 billion and might very well be larger than the NASA budget too. For tanks. Mind you, the Apollo Program cost $170 billion (2005 dollars) according to NASA, or $109 billion (2010 dollars) according to Space Review. OMG HOW ARE WE SPENDING SO MUCH ON TANKS VS. GETTING TO THE MOON??? (Did you know that the Apollo spacecraft cost more than Saturn V development and production??? How can that be??? One is like 100 times bigger than the other!)

So yeah, comparing a single one-off rover on Mars that has an expected operational life of maybe 5 years on the outside with a mass-produced engine designed to work for around 50 years is totally a legit comparison. Of course, all that doesn't take into account that the $1 trillion is pretty oversold:

Take a deep breath, everybody. The trillion-dollar operation and maintenance cost everyone is hyperventilating about is hardly worth the paper it is printed on. It counts every possible cost to operate and modernize the F-35 during a 25-year production run, followed by a 30-year operational life. It represents a half-century’s worth of fuel, parts, upgrades, and even related construction costs.

This time horizon extends until 2065. What makes the estimate particularly worthless is that it is computed in "then-year" dollars—an estimate that measures cost not by 2011 standards, but by what they will cost in the year they are spent. This includes 55 years of inflation at the tail end of the computation, an enormous multiplier that is especially damaging because all of these costs are still, psychologically, perceived as 2011 dollars.

All one has to do is think about the references to what a gallon of gas or a loaf of bread cost in some long-past year to appreciate the effect of decades’ worth of inflation. Just as 2065 is 54 years in the future, 1957 is 54 years in the past. The iconic 1957 Chevrolet cost roughly $2,500 at the time, while the average paid for a new car today is more than $28,000. Decades of compound inflation do amazing things, and anyone who claims to know what inflation rates or fuel prices will be 25 and 50 years hence is a fool.

But the Air Force is totally in the tank for Lockheed Martin and this is just a pack of lies with no basis in actual economic or mathematical fact, right? A trillion hypothetical 2065 dollars! Inconceivable! (Actual 2011 dollars program cost: probably again somewhere between $250 to $500 billion. Imagine that!) Also did you know modernizing our nuclear triad will cost $1 trillion over 30 years (whatever that means, I can't be bothered going and looking up where they got that number from right now), making it approximately at least twice as expensive per unit time as the F-35?

(It's almost like it's the dumbest possible way of expressing the program cost, verging on deliberate sabotage of public opinion on it. The Minuteman wasn't sold in 1962 on the basis of its lifetime cost in projected 2014 dollars.)
((Guys guys guys did you know the United States Air Force spent $8.3 billion dollars on jet fuel in 2011 alone??? That's like almost $100 billion worth of fuel over a decade! The Air Force spends enough on gas to go to the Moon! How is that possible???))
(((How NES am model logistics???)))
((((I want you to take a moment to think about "special project" costs right now, moderators.))))
(((((Given the historical total NASA budget is $790.0 billion in somewhere between 2010-2014 dollars, in hypothetical 2065 dollars it would have been way more than a trillion, checkmate.)))))

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.

Then Congress cut the F-22 buy off at the knees and surprise, the follow-on program ballooned in cost because it had to compensate for a huge loss in expected capability, almost like political bureaucrats that only pretend to be policy experts and whom are motivated by things like public opinion and bringing home the pork for their districts micromanaging military acquisitions programs leads to bad decisions and superfluous spending and cost overruns!

I get that you're suspicious of all authorities or whatever, but you're looking at the wrong ones in this equation. Just sayin'.

New blood joins this forum,

You were better when the only song you sang was Kumbaya.

 

[Perfectionist]

Basically what I'm saying is we tolerate expensive mistakes from NASA

Yeah, but that's just the thing: the expensive mistakes we tolerate (grudgingly, it should be noted) from NASA are two or three orders of magnitude less expensive than the F-35. Since Sym brought it up, even the MBT-70 expensive mistake cost us less than $5 billion. You want to take a risk on pushing the engineering limits or whatever, that's fine and you should - I think the SR-71 was just as cool as everyone else does - but you'd better be sure that if it doesn't pan out you're not totally screwed. It's fine to bet that Ryan Howard is the next Frank Thomas, but it's not fine to give him such a ridiculous contract based on that bet that your first base situation is borked for a decade when it turns out that he's not, if you follow the analogy.

NASA wasn't mass-producing Saturn Vs or space shuttles in industrial quantities.

If main reason you're building it is to push the technical envelope and iron out the kinks (which is the justification you're now relying on and the one I was responding to) you don't need to produce the thing in industrial quantities; conversely, if it's something you DO need to produce in industrial quantities, you'd better be damn sure it works properly before you commit.

 

[Symphony D.]

Yeah, but that's just the thing: the expensive mistakes we tolerate (grudgingly, it should be noted) from NASA are two or three orders of magnitude less expensive than the F-35. Since Sym brought it up, even the MBT-70 expensive mistake cost us less than $5 billion. You want to take a risk on pushing the engineering limits or whatever, that's fine and you should - I think the SR-71 was just as cool as everyone else does - but you'd better be sure that if it doesn't pan out you're not totally screwed. It's fine to bet that Ryan Howard is the next Frank Thomas, but it's not fine to give him such a ridiculous contract based on that bet that your first base situation is borked for a decade when it turns out that he's not, if you follow the analogy.

This goes back to you assuming a priori that the program is a mistake, which neither you nor anyone else can really prove, and which goes back to your reliance (given that you aren't a fighter pilot, military strategist, or aerospace engineer) upon hearsay from rival industrial experts who would love to see it fail that it is in fact a flying Pinto, for which there is zero conclusive impartial evidence. Really it's the word of one set of experts (and the buyer and operator) against another set of experts, again going back to supposing the buyer and operator is knowingly buying a death trap and is wholly idiotic and incompetent (which you also can't prove).

Isn't it interesting how when you decide beforehand what you want the result to be, all the evidence you find supports that conclusion? It's fascinating! Almost like a "bias" or something...

If main reason you're building it is to push the technical envelope and iron out supply chain kinks (which is the justification you're now relying on and the one I was responding to) you don't need to produce the thing in industrial quantities; conversely, if it's something you DO need to produce in industrial quantities, you'd better be damn sure it works properly before you commit.

You're not very familiar with industrial engineering, are you? And no, my justification is both that it will actually 1. do its job adequately, and 2. will provide a technical advantage in the future. I therefore consider it likely to be a good plane and therefore a good investment and am willing to afford it wide leeway.

Here's a challenge for you to continue with your unceasing and irrational hatred of the F-35, Perfectionist: prove it's a bad plane and therefore a bad investment (or, at least, not a good plane and therefore a bad investment). Prove it. Somehow. Until you have that proof, everything you're saying is based on (unsourced and uncited) second hand opinion from somebody else. Try approaching it scientifically, since you're supposed to be a scientist.

 

[Symphony D.]

Because I've been so dismissive in this argument, and maybe this isn't entirely clear to the lay observer, I'm going to walk through this process step-by-step. First by means of historical comparison:

Congress cancelled the MBT-70 because its unit cost was too high ($6.43 million in 2014) and we built the M1 Abrams which costs $8.58 million per unit in 2012 dollars so it's way over budget.

Congress cancelled the Seawolf-class submarine because the unit cost was too high ($2.8 billion per unit in 1991 dollars, $4.88 billion in 2014 dollars) and we built the Virginia-class submarine which costs $2.7071 billion per unit in 2014 dollars. It was anticipated that it would cost $1.8 billion per unit in 1991 dollars ($3.14 billion 2014 dollars), so it's pretty well under budget.

Whether you get a better deal on starting over is kind of a toss-up. In the case of the MBT-70 and M1, we did need them, because the M-60 was essentially a jury-rigged WWII design and comparable-to-inferior to its Soviet rivals which vastly outnumbered it. In the case of the Seawolf, we didn't really need them, because the Cold War was over and there was no apparent pressing need for a new SSN right away. Costs are probably associated with this urgency.

The F-16 and F-15 will cease to be relevant over any kind of serious airspace in approximately 10 years or less, if they aren't really already. They're 36 and 38 years old, respectively, and you've conceded that building more of them isn't a good idea, which puts you ahead of most people on the opposite side of this argument. There's a need for an immediate new replacement. On this we agree.

The development time for the F-15 spanned from 1965 to its introduction into the force in 1976, or 11 years. The F-16's development time spanned from 1971 to its introduction in 1978, or 7 years. The F-22's development time spanned from 1986 to its introduction into the force in 2005, or 19 years. The JSF program began in 1993 and the F-35 will enter service next year at the earliest, or 22 years. We can see that the more complex the plane, the longer the time it takes to build and introduce, and if we were to look at some other examples, we'd see that this time has been increasing ever since WWII as they become more complex.

We can also see from the examples of cancelled programs like the MBT-70 and the Seawolf that coming up with the replacement for the thing that's been cancelled generally involves throwing away most or all of the work and reassessing from the new current state of affairs and takes about as long as the original program did to yield some sort of usable product from there.

Let's be charitable and say that if the F-35 was cancelled right now, it would only take 18 years to produce a replacement. That'd be 2032. USAF and USN are expecting a 6th Generation fighter to have an initial operational capability in 2030. So skipping the F-35 right now would mean functionally aborting 5th Generation aircraft development entirely because any replacement using the same technology would be obsolete by the time it was fielded. Even if we built a new 5th Generation plane (and really, based on what we already know, we'd be building three, one for USAF, one for USN, and one for USMC) and managed it in a much shorter time and for less money, those hypothetical new 5th Generation aircraft would have a much shorter operational lifespan, so they would still be largely a stop-gap waste of money.

6th Generation aircraft development probably can't be sped up due to the high degree of new and untested technologies that will form the core of their capabilities, and that will probably not work exactly as anticipated given many of them don't even exist yet. Of course, factoring in technologies that don't exist yet means that you will run into unanticipated problems and probably spend a lot of money fixing those problems. You have to incorporate such technologies because delivering a product using wholly reliable and safe (and therefore likely wholly obsolete) technologies is unacceptable in the defense industry, as someone else will not share your caution and will have a huge advantage over you.

It takes approximately 5-10 years to produce the next generation of aircraft in a really usable quantity, during which time they're usually backed up by the previous generation and form the tip of the spear, with replacement taking place over the next 10 years.

Your solution is to cancel the F-35 today, and essentially start 6th Generation development now (which will be just as buggy and almost certainly more expensive, given we'll be skipping a generation and doing even more untested work with no attendant experience) while leaving America with effectively no fighter capability from 2020 to 2040, and undergunned all the way until 2050. So you want us to undertake a program far riskier than the JSF/F-35 program, and you want us to do it with no fallback systems, that we need functionally right now. In the process you propose we cease having the ability to contest airspace for 30 years because you're worried about a program that isn't actually much more expensive or buggy than any program before it.

The only vaguely politically and militarily acceptable solution in the wake of cancelling the F-35 would be to reactivate F-22 production in the thousands, which would be more expensive than the F-35 (all the production line tools are boxed up and sitting in a desert as we speak), and modifying the F-22 to be a multirole aircraft, given it was only ever intended for air superiority. This would also still leave both USMC and USN in the clutch, requiring yet more money (and piss off all the international partners to the F-35 and more or less destroy the American defense industry's credibility in international markets, in which it currently competes heavily and fairly successfully). In other words, it isn't politically or militarily acceptable at all.

Your solution isn't safe, it's suicidal.

This is why your solution is 1. bad, 2. why I'm glad you aren't in any way associated with the decision-making chain regarding the F-35 or military acquisitions as a whole, and 3. have been extremely dismissive of this entire line of thinking the whole way through. The F-35 literally is too big to fail, which was a consequence of politicians demanding the services work on a joint fighter. Once again, this doesn't go back to some error in the defense industry or the military establishment. I continue to remain confident those two parties will find a way to make it work, because they have no choice but to do so. Of course, none of this is new. The Manhattan Project and B-29 are pretty good historical examples of putting all the eggs in one basket while under the gun and it paying off in spades. Our current situation is notably less dire.

In other words, yeah, if it doesn't pan out, we're totally screwed. That's still better than your solution, where we're totally screwed period and only might not be totally screwed by the time all of us are middle-aged.

 

[Symphony D.]

 

[mrrandomplayer]

 

[Crezth]

Yeah, but that's just the thing: the expensive mistakes we tolerate (grudgingly, it should be noted) from NASA are two or three orders of magnitude less expensive than the F-35.

Well, I think you've completely missed my point, which is that expensive mistakes are good and we should keep doing them, because that's kind of how progress happens, and hence why I don't understand the outrage about the F-35 et al except as part of the larger misguided push to Save Money.

$70 billion is still a drop in the bucket, which is both depressing and stimulating at the same time.

If main reason you're building it is to push the technical envelope and iron out the kinks (which is the justification you're now relying on and the one I was responding to) you don't need to produce the thing in industrial quantities; conversely, if it's something you DO need to produce in industrial quantities, you'd better be damn sure it works properly before you commit.

"Working properly" is not the bone of contention. It will work properly. The only question is whether or not it'll cost a lot of money to get there. It may not work exceptionally, but it's not dead in the water by any extravagant stretch of the imagination.

 

[mrrandomplayer]

I've been talking about this on the forums for the past week or so, but I'd like to officially announce here that I will be leaving CFC for the next 5 weeks. This is because I will be going to a summer camp where no internet is allowed. I leave tomorrow morning (where I might get to very quickly check the forums) and don't get back until the late afternoon of August 3rd. Because of this, all of my nations in current NESes will be NPC'ed until I get back and I will write ordersets looking ahead to the next 2 or 3 updates, as well as my general policies.

Thanks,

mrrandomplayer

 

[Wrymouth3]

How quickly we forget that asteroids are manuevers done and devices created by the Lumpenbourgeosie to hold down the Martian proletariat. I'm sure azale can attest to the fact that he has read about Marxist geographers and the rather interesting perspective they provide. Me? Well I'll just continue watching this conversation, and hope that my children in the future are able to get a drone along with their Happy Meal at McDonalds (Do they still do the Big Kids meal?).

 

[talonschild]

Y'all seen this?
Latvian Defence Ministry Analysis of Russian Strategy

 

[Gem Hound]

Now this, I must say is fan dedication. This is the new Ensign for the HMCS Regina, they just recieved it on the 24:

Spoiler :

What do you all think?

 

[JohannaK]

What is this?

 

[Gem Hound]

It's a flag for a Canadian Football team(American foot ball with Canadian rules)
http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/iphone/news/latest/story.html?id=9968333

 

[JohannaK]

You sure mean Canadian handegg.

Well, it's nice story... I guess...

 

[Symphony D.]

I'm shocked, there's an ultra-rich dude who gets it.

The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts.

What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too.

It’s when I realized this that I decided I had to leave my insulated world of the super-rich and get involved in politics. Not directly, by running for office or becoming one of the big-money billionaires who back candidates in an election. Instead, I wanted to try to change the conversation with ideas—by advancing what my co-author, Eric Liu, and I call “middle-out” economics. It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.

Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

 

[erez87]

Those rich are too few, and it's not so true anymore. Those rich don't need anyone to buy anything anymore to make money. They just make money out of having money... Take previous presidency candidate Mitt Romney, he became rich without selling a single product.