Cool story bro

The Aviationist has a cool article up about the flight demonstration that sold the F-14 to Iran:

After the F-15 had finished its display, everyone was waiting for the underpowered F-14A demonstration: the Tomcat’s TF-30 engines would have not given to the aircraft the same thrust to weigh ratio of the Eagle.

However, during the F-15’s performance, Evans and Romano burned down a great quantity of fuel and now they had only 2,500 pounds of remaining gas: while this little quantity was only sufficient to accomplish their flight demonstration, 2,500 pounds was also one eight of the Tomcat’s  internal fuel capacity and thanks to this fact the Tomcat had the same thrust to weight ratio of the Eagle.

At this point the F-14 had one thing that the F-15 didn’t have: variable geometry wings that would have made the difference for the grace of the flight demonstration.

Funny that flash ended up selling the bird, guess the Shah wasn't big on energy-manoeuvrability diagrams.

The F-14 actually did have another thing going for it though: the AIM-54 Phoenix long range missile. To this day, it remains a capability gap.

What's with this picture anyways? There's no way that's a real combat loadout right? This must for Macross battles!

Can't these liberal art guys consult an engineer before publishing this stuff?

From the Economist:

"Morris Technologies has invested heavily in 3D printing equipment and will be printing bits for a new range of jet engines. Morris Technologies uses a number of 3D printing machines, all of which work by using a digital description of an object to build it in physical form, layer by layer. Among the 3D printing technologies used by Morris Technologies is laser sintering. This involves spreading a thin layer of metallic powder onto a build platform and then fusing the material with a laser beam. The process is repeated until an object emerges."

"One of the attractions of printing parts is that it saves material. Instead of machining components from solid billets of metal, in which much of it may be cut away, only the material that is needed to shape the part is used. Printed parts can also be made lighter than forged parts, which promises fuel savings. 

Many manufacturers already use 3D printing to make prototypes of parts, because it is cheaper and more flexible than tooling up to produce just one or two items. But the technology is now good enough for it to be used to make production items too."

No, dammit!

That's not why the aviation industry uses sintering!

Think about the conditions in a jet engine: extreme heat, extreme stress. Any material that can withstand those types of conditions is going to be prohibitively expensive to machine. Sintered alloys are actually much weaker than cast alloys, which means the recipe is going to need to be all the more complex to get that strength back.

Aside from needing to melt substances that are explicitly designed to have an extremely high melting point, the problem with casting is that as the material cools, it shrinks from the mold, so it becomes impossible to cast parts with precision. That means the only alternative to sintering would be taking a big block of superhard alloy, and then trying to grind it down to a blisk or whatever you're making.

Forging produces even stronger materials (through stress hardening), but the logistical impossibility of forging a turbine blade should be obvious to anyone.

Sintering is used in mass production when there's no other choice.

If you're trying to make tank armour on the other hand, where precision is not so important, but strength and cost are..yeah, good luck selling the industry on your 3-D printers.

What??

What if the original Arrow design was upgraded, taking advantage of 21st-century materials and technology? What if the result was an Mk 3 Arrow flying 20,000 feet higher than the F-35 and seeing it disappear in the rear view mirror as the new Arrow hits twice, yes, twice the speed — Mach 3.5 as opposed to the pedestrian F-35 at Mach 1.67?

...

A detailed feasibility plan regarding the production of such an aircraft in Canada has been in the government’s hands for over a year now. It has been seen by the Prime Minister’s Office, the offices of the minister of national defence, the associate minister of national defence, the assistant deputy minister (material) and the newly appointed chief of the defence staff while he was deputy commander of NORAD. 

I've got your feasibility study right here: IT'S NOT FEASIBLE

Round holes

I've often complained about why F-35s are no good for Canada, so I'm finally going to write a post about it. And I'm going to write under the best-case assumption that it does everything it's supposed to. And all things considered, it's still a square peg.

Here's the thing about F-35s, people look at it, compare it to something like an F-22: they're both 5th gen stealth fighter aircraft, and then conclude that they are meant to perform the same roles. People assume that we pay more and shrink the fleet size for a plane that is better at defending our air space.

(The F-35 airframe was based off of the Raptor airframe, accounting for some similarity in appearance)

But that is not the trade-off. F-22s and F-35s are not similar planes, they weren't designed to be. F-22s were designed to be air-superiority (or as some marketing guys like to call it, air-dominance) planes while F-35s are what people like to term "multirole" fighters.

What this actually means is you don't want to go against other fighters if you can help it.

That's because designing a plane for missions like strike (i.e. air-to-ground) adds weight, weight, weight. If you want an idea of how much, an F-15E is about 2000kg heavier than an F-15D. That is huge in the domain of high performance aircraft. Most of it goes towards strengthening the airframe for heavy ordnance payloads. Affectionately (or sometimes not so affectionately) we can call it a "bomb truck".

Of course most nations cannot help it, because there are limited amounts of money to buy airplanes with: not enough for a separate fleet of pure-blooded air superiority fighters. F-16s are cheap, that's why they are popular. The problem is that F-35s are not cheap, they are extremely expensive. You're buying a next-gen F-16 for $120-170M/pop. What bang does that extra buck buy?

The flight envelope of an F-35B is reportedly comparable to that of an F/A-18 (4th gen multirole fighter). It has a bit more power in some maneuvers and an A model will be a bit more agile but the performance difference will not be huge.

It is stealthy but it is stealthy with caveats; an F-22 has all-aspect very-low-observability (VLO), the F-35 does not. It is mostly stealthy in the front and somewhat stealthy from the side. The American versions will be slightly stealthier than export versions. Of course if the afterburners go on, it's not stealthy. If it's not flying clean, it's not stealthy. It's also important to note that all 4.5 generation fighters have radar cross-section reduction features, especially from the front, even if it's not outwardly apparent. For instance, a F/A-18E Super Hornet is harder to detect than a F/A-18C even though it is bigger and looks like basically the same plane to the casual observer.

It has a very good AESA radar but F/A-18E/Fs also have very good AESA radars. The advantage is that the F-35 will be able to conduct electronic warfare missions with it and even purportedly "insert malicious code into enemy radar stations".

A big selling point of the F-35 is that it offers interoperability between nations, but realistically everybody will still be flying a diverse fleet of fighters into the far future. The USN (who by the way spend more money on aircraft procurement than the USAF) will be operating Super Hornets for the next 30 years; upgrading the RCAF to those planes instead will not necessitate such drastic changes in our support structures (which includes things like training pipelines and fleet tankers that are completely absent in public discussions but will obviously incur large costs beyond aircraft procurement).

So the F-35 is a strike aircraft with frontal low observability and electronic attack. What kind of mission does this lend itself to? Penetrating strike. Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses.

This is not something in alignment with Canadian strategy and interests.

The F-35's strengths are oriented for Day 1 strike in a war of aggression. Canada has no overseas colonies and only two notable neighbors (Russia and the United States); Day 1 strike is not a capability that we should be building towards. Super Hornets are more than adequate to exercise control over our airspace, can be purchased at less than half the price of F-35s, and are conflict tested.

Our CP-140s perform important roles in maritime patrol and interdiction but they are aging and people tend not to take notice. The extra money would go well towards purchasing P-8s and maybe even BAMS. These would be especially appreciated support for allies in conflict because maritime assets are always in demand and its ability to effectively persecute naval targets under and below the surface is invaluable.

The Economist and Cartoons

Part 1: Putin is riding a bear

Part 2: Nobody in the Economist comments section knows how BMD works 

"It is a missile defense system, is NATO trying to convince the Russians that the defence system will work just against Iranian missiles? That they will just let the Russians ones through?" 

"The very fact that missiles dont need to point in any direction, they are facing the sky is being overlooked in the simplistic analysis of this picture."

To hit a ballistic missile you need a looker and a shooter; this is because the optimal point to launch an interceptor (head on) is not the optimal point to track a target (side on). So in real life, BMD is not like a shield in Supreme Commander, they have to be deployed according to specific threat axes. I am not an expert but I do suspect the arc of a missile coming in from Iran would be different from that of a missile coming from Russia. In this sense, yes, you are pointing the defense system at a specific target.

Caveat: most of the tracking platforms are mobile, so they could be redeployed to face a different axis fairly easily, though not immediately in response to an incoming threat.

On scouts

There is a silly trope in common in video games with small scout units having larger sensor ranges than large dreadnaughts.

The thing with sensors is that (all else being equal) the larger the aperture, the more powerful it will be. This is a simple physical law, the larger something is, the more signal it collects, the better you see.

This has two consequences, one is that it will be physically larger so you need a big hull to support it. The secondary consequence is that a larger sensor needs more power generation and so you need a larger hull for bigger generators.

Now obviously if you have ship A with sensors and weapon systems and ship B with just sensors, then ship B will be smaller, but it realistically won't be an order of magnitude smaller. Hypothetically though, what if you can build the sensors an order of magnitude smaller? Well you'd still build it into the large platform with the weapons systems because it'd be more survivable and why would you ever want shooters without seekers? So either way your small vessels shouldn't see better than your big vessels.

There is one circumstance where it would make sense to separate sensors and weapons.

And ironically it is when the sensor systems are larger than the weapon systems.

Which is actually the case in real life.

For instance, fighters will almost always operate with AWAC support, but we separate the AWAC platform from the fast-movers. Why? Because those radomes are huge and it would be stupid to try and push that thing past the sound barrier.

We can look at warships for another example, a 3000 ton LCS is large enough to support strike-length VLS tubes, but you need an 8000 ton destroyer to carry the 12' SPY-1 radar. And even that's not big enough for the cancelled 22' AMDR, which required a 20000 ton nuclear powered cruiser to support. This has led to some interest in a surface warfare role for a Cobra Judy type vessel, because for the cost of putting all the sensors in a vulnerable dedicated platform, you get the benefit of needing only one 20000 ton spotter to cue all of those 3000 and 8000 ton shooters.

That doesn't mean small, short-sighted scout platforms aren't valuable though. They are cheap, which means you can build many of them and deploy to many locations at once and you can afford to lose them if they confront a superior force.

I don't understand

HOOOWWWWWW

Talking points

New cost figures for F-35 are over-budget again; Lockmart's press release is not entirely convincing.

"For example, media reporting on the 2010 SAR estimate included only operations and support costs, while recent reports on the 2011 SAR estimate add the cost of acquisition and development which the U.S. government currently estimates at $396B. This results in the appearance of cost growth year over year."

Development being constantly being over-schedule and over-budget obviously does not contribute to the appearance of cost growth.

"The government also included the cost of lifetime modernization to the aircraft to improve its capabilities — expenses that are not included in the cost projections for other aircraft."

...because other aircraft come with their baseline features out of the box, none of this spiral development nonsense.

"Lockheed Martin remains confident that F-35 operations and support costs will be comparable to or lower than that of the seven legacy platforms that it will replace."

Lies.

"The F-35 also provides our Armed Forces and allies with the unprecedented 5th Generation fighter performance capabilities of radar-evading stealth..."

F-35 stealth is not all-aspect, not VLO.

"..supersonic speed..."

No supercruise.

"..agility..."

Flight envelope is comparable to an F/A-18, i.e. the bomb-truck from 1980.

"..and the most comprehensive integrated sensor package of any fighter aircraft."

This is a massive coding project and most of it hasn't been done yet, expect more bugs, more overruns, more delays.

"The F-35 will achieve cost advantages over the platforms it will replace by leveraging economies of scale – gained through deployment by the three U.S. service branches and international partnerships – and a common logistics, maintenance, training and supply chain infrastructure."

You can streamline the logistics, but that's null if you require more maintenance and more expensive parts in the first place.

"The F-35 will also achieve lower or comparable operation and support costs than legacy systems while providing greater capabilities."

Lies.

Let me esplain you about torque

Say you have a car, when you make a turn the outer radius is going to be a longer distance than the inner radius. That means that the outer wheels are going to need to make more rotations than the inner wheels to make a turn. If you have a solid axle connecting them, then by necessity either the inner wheels are going to slip or the outer wheels are going to skid in a turn.

This is why we have differentials.



Differentials do many things,for instance they act as a reduction gear because your wheels don't spin as fast as your engine shaft (even coming out of the transmission), but the most important thing is that they allow your inner and outer wheels to spin at different speeds. I won't go into the details of how they work, but the key thing to know is the the engine is applying power by revolving the green gear (the purple is not directly connected with either the red or yellow shafts) and if there is unequal resistance coming from the shafts (e.g. in a turn), the green gear will also spin so the power goes the path of least resistance. There are more complex coupling mechanisms (like Torsen differentials which are super cool and I have no idea how they work really), but 99% of vehicles will be using these cheap, reliable and proven mechanisms here.

Let's talk about 4x4 vs AWD then. Apparently there actually isn't a straight forward convention with this terminology as it varies from manufacturer vs manufacturer, but this is how I use it consistently. 4x4 means that your entire powertrain is locked together. You see, because differentials transfer power to the point of least resistance. When turning, this is would be the outer wheels because they can spin more without slipping, but what if one wheel is on ice? Or if it's in the air? All the power is going to be wasted spinning that useless wheel while the differential ensures that no rotational energy is being imparted to the grounded wheel at all. So you lock the differentials and ensure that everything spins at the same time and all of that torque is going into resisting the ground. This does mean that your wheels will slip in a turn, but if you're climbing sand dunes in a Ford Raptor, the surfaces are slippery anyways so this is not a big factor.

You want AWD in a sports car because the main limiting factor in your acceleration isn't how much torque your engine is putting out, it's the amount of grip you have in your tires. So, power to 4 wheels equals 4 times the grip equals better acceleration. Now your R8 is expected to be driven on groomed tarmac, where all the wheels are always mated to a consistent surface, and you don't want to lose traction because your wheels are slipping because everything is locked down in a turn. That's why everything is on differentials and that's AWD.

Now say your Evo lifts off the ground. I believe that it uses a viscous couple mechanism, which submerges the mechanical connections between shafts in a shear-thickening fluid. So, corn starch and water right, if you move slowly through it, it flows around you but if you try to hit it, it acts as a solid. Same idea: if your shaft frequencies are too far apart the fluid solidifies, locking the shafts together. Maybe they use something else fancier these days, but the point is that if your Evo hits a bump, it doesn't shift torque by disconnecting the lifted wheels, it actually locks down everything so that you're not bleeding power through the diffs to a bunch of tires in the air: your AWD Lancer temporarily becomes a 4x4.

So when Richard Hammond breaks a diff in his Toyota, that's easy to understand. He just opens the diff box, severs the powertrain connections, presumably his front and rear are locked so he's not losing any power to a free-spinning shaft and his 4x4 becomes a 2x2. Simple. But when James May loses power to a single wheel, that is mysterious, because you look at that picture of a differential and tell me what parts need to have broken in what fashion in order to enable such a consequence. Any combination I can think of just seems absurd.

Good news!

Meanwhile, Canada’s early production model F-35 Joint Strike Fighters won’t have the satellite communications gear necessary to communicate with the outside world while flying over remote regions like the Arctic, according to the Winnepeg Free Press.

...

Canada isn’t slated to receive F-35’s equipped with Satcoms until 2019 and Ottawa is apparently looking at installing communications pods used by Canadian CF-18 Hornets on the F-35s as a stopgap measure for Arctic ops. This move would obviously trade stealth for communications.

Primary.

That's cool

Ruby has no interfaces, but let's see what we can do:

module FooInterface
def bar(a,b) raise "bar(a,b) must be overridden"; end
end

class FooClass
include FooInterface
def bar(a,b) a+b; end
end

It's not particularly robust, but ehh, this isn't Java.

This is getting a bit out of hand

I like Steve Jobs as much as anyone.

In fact, I probably appreciate his work more than the average person.

Suddenly today I find on my feed "Steve Jobs' Influence on the Military".

Gosh.

He invented iPods, not penicillin.

People need to stop treating this like the death of an American hero.

Don't use it, lose it

People think that the easy dissemination of information makes it difficult to lose knowledge in the modern age.

Actually, it's extremely easy to to lose knowledge. Especially technical expertise. So much of it is very specialized and only existent in the private hands of corporations. And within these corporations, specific and important facts are only kept in the minds of a handful of people.

If the engineers depart and the line workers depart, without replacement, you've already lost most of the knowledge.

For instance, the principals of an internal combustion engine are well known, and there's quite a bit more than that circulating around in papers. Do you think that's enough to reconstruct a modern car engine? Engine fundamentals from the Model T to the Fiesta haven't changed. But over the last century, Ford has figured out how to squeeze out more than 3 times the mileage and 6 times the power with an engine volume of half the size. Do you know what they did? Do you think your educational institution knows what they did? Not a chance, unless your professor worked in a very specific field within the industry. Even then, his knowledge grows more outdated year by year as Ford engineers continue to squeeze out a few more percentage points of performance year by year.

Or let's say that you already know that you can get a 5% efficiency gain by tweaking the inlet aero. How would you know where to tweak? You'd have to go through all the testing that was done before, and you'd need to design and build the infrastructure to conduct the tests in the first place.

It's the same across all fields, from cars to bridges to computers. Good luck building a modern virtual machine using the Dragon Book. And that's still only talking design knowledge.

Im CAD hat's passt.

It fits in CAD. Not good enough.

You can't learn how to build something without actually building it and, more than anything else, this is something kept exclusively in the minds of workers. And god help you if the toolset had been struck already (which is common), because now all of sudden all of your work instructions are worthless without the accompanying equipment. Now you have to redesign and rebuild the infrastructure too and go through the teething process all over again. Think you can make a violin from an instruction book? Nope, you learn by building a violin and a lot of crappy violins.

See how we've decided to stop going to the moon for a couple of decades and suddenly it's a pain in the ass to figure out how to do it again. And that's with all of the previous generation's artifacts around, more computing power than our predecessors could ever imagine and an extremely competent corp of people who've been shooting things into space non-stop in the intermediate period. Sure you don't have to go though the paradigm shift breakthroughs again, but most of being able to do something is just grinding, and that's a feat that'll need to be replicated if you ever forget. Technology has not dark age proofed us.

What's Google got on you?

http://www.google.com/ads/preferences...

Arts & Entertainment
Arts & Entertainment - Comics & Animation - Anime & Manga
Arts & Entertainment - Music & Audio
Arts & Entertainment - Music & Audio - ... - Song Lyrics & Tabs
Arts & Entertainment - Music & Audio - Urban & Hip-Hop - Rap & Hip-Hop
Arts & Entertainment - TV & Video - Online Video
Arts & Entertainment - Visual Art & Design - Painting
Arts & Entertainment - ... - Photographic & Digital Arts
Business & Industrial - Advertising & Marketing
Business & Industrial - Aerospace & Defense - Defense Industry
Computers & Electronics - Hardware
Finance - Credit & Lending
Finance - Credit & Lending - Auto Financing
Food & Drink - Restaurants
Games - Computer & Video Games - Fighting Games
Games - Computer & Video Games - Simulation Games
News - Politics
Reference - General Reference - Dictionaries & Encyclopedias
Science - Mathematics
Shopping - Photo & Video Services
Sports - Team Sports - American Football
Demographics - Age - 18-24
Demographics - Gender - Male

Did you think A380s were big?

Pimp my code

I guess this works:

---

function combination(n,k){
return factorial(n)/(factorial(k) + factorial(n-k);
}

function factorial(n){
nf = 1;
for (i=1;i<=n;i++){
nf = nf*i;
}
return nf;
}

---

I'm looking for something more like:

---

def combination (n,k)
f = lambda {|x|(1..x).inject(1){|x,y|x*y}}
result f(n)/(f(k)*f(n-k))
end

---

If anyone can use array.reduce in Javascript without it turning into a mess, I would like to know. <_<

Stealth, the white elephant

Stealth is very expensive to make and maintain. There are other trade-offs too, for instance, the F-22 nose is smaller than the nose of F/A-18(E/F)s and F-15s so the latter jets can be upgraded to hold better avionics.

Aircraft usually have a service life of 30 years. So here's a problem, if anyone starts building radar sophisticated enough to track stealth aircraft (VHF/UHF beams), you can't just modify your fleet to counter it. Your stealth advantage is negated.

At least F-22s have their thrust-vectoring and supercruise abilities, so they would still make very capable air-to-air fighters. Very overpriced ones, but that's a sunk cost.

As far as I'm aware, F-35s do not have all-aspect stealth as F-22s do, so they will be easier to crack. F-35s have the flight envelope of an F/A-18 and no supercruise. Without stealth, you just bought a $115m gen-4 fighter with somewhat bigger load out. Bravo.

Anecdote: the USAF does not intend to use F-35s for air-to-air. That will still be the mission of their F-15Cs and F-22s, the F-35s will supplant (or supplement?) the F-16s for strike and SEAD roles. Take that as you will.

What I think is a better alternative? Active defenses. Electronic warfare. Get a better ARM up and running (I hear HARMs are terrible, and ALARMs are marginally better) and send in your Growlers and Wild Weasels. And if the enemy adapts, you just need to come up with a better jamming pod instead of scrapping the fleet.

The space shuttle could use more door guns!

People like to complain about talk about how great the AK-47 is and how much the M16 sucks based on the Vietnam war. Okay guys, in case you haven't noticed, that was 40 years ago and we're on the M16A4 already, it's hardly the same rifle anymore. How about directing the debate towards some real comparisons, like the SCAR or HK416?

A-10s aren't that great. It's not a must-have addition to every air force ever. Remember, they were built as tank hunters, that makes them about as suitable for close-air as an Apache. The fact that Apaches and A-10s are better at the job than F-16s speaks very little to their abilities. What you really want for COIN is an ISR platform with long loiter time and small yield precision strike, oh look, it's called a Predator. And what a coincidence! Turns out that that's the bird everyone's scrambling to buy! Sorry internet generals, I'm sorry it won't come back with bulletholes from 20mm cannon shells, it's only good at doing its job. Alternatively, if you really need a man in your plane, Super Tucanos are what people in the know are actually gushing about, so take your Soviet-era flying battle tanks and shove it.

Battleships are done with. It's over. You know how often they've been called on for fire support with their 5" guns vs 16" guns? Spoilers: it's heavily weighted towards the former. And since their deactivation, the world has only grown more wary of collateral damage so the chances of us actually needing their large rifles again are slim. Besides that, they're unaffordable to operate.

Going nukes

Here's the thing, Fukushima I-1 is one of the oldest reactors in service with TEPCO, built to withstand 8.2 earthquakes. It survived an earthquake 5 times the intensity, followed by a tsunami and ultimately failed because the backup backup generators shipped in by the military had the wrong power sockets.

And nobody died.

Nobody will die.

By all means this should be indicative of how safe nuclear power is. But that's not what the public is going to take away from this. For instance, Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) wants to impose a moratorium on further building any plants in the United States. I wasn't aware that the midland United States was tsunami central; just, keep these things away from Cali.

I guess expecting the media, as stupid as they are, to get nuclear reactors right was a doomed prospect from the beginning. Not that TEPCO did much to help, I heard the press conferences on the NHK being described as, "shit from the source".

Okay.

Hey, Mr. Lieberman! Mr. Lieberman! You live in Connecticut right? That's where Electric Boat is; how do you feel about the nukes getting built in your backyard right now? 774s don't sail on lollipops and sunshine, you know.

Data Synchronization

I've long given up on it: too many platforms, too many operating systems. What I've ended up doing is designating devices for particular functions and never using anything else for that.

Blackberry: Contacts -> Backed up on desktop
Macbook: Music -> Backed up on desktop
Desktop: -> Everything else, backed up on external

I also assume everything on the cloud is backed up on the cloud. Photobucket, my magical girl image collection rests in your hands.

There might be an easier way, I don't know. I haven't seen anyone with multiple computers do better.