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Love the dude on the cellphone with the cig who's only reaction is to blink and take a drag.
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Apr 16, 2014 19:47
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Yeah, it turns out low level show of force flights are only truly scary if you occasionally actually bomb the hell out of people, like the Bone. Also, having experiened a Mach .98+ Bone flyover when they were about 150 feet AGL, it's so utterly insane compared to every other flyover I've experienced, including stuff like the Blue Angels or Thunderbirds. He wanted to do a 50 foot AGL flyover, but there were antennas in the way. Fuckers are crazy 
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Apr 16, 2014 19:53
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Waroduce posted:I'd like to write a letter to my congressman and state rep about the A10 being cut. Could someone who is more familiar with the plane than me possibly put together a brief discussion or at least some talking points about why it would be good to keep? As someone who's worked for a Congressman: don't loving bother writing. Mail from constituents is rarely seen by the member (or even by the relevant staffer). All you do is kill trees, waste some poor intern's time, and accomplish nothing. You'll get back a form letter and that's all the action that will be taken. And unless your Congressman is Buck McKeon or some other swinging dick with influence over appropriations, the average member of Congress has virtually no influence over whether or not the A-10 is going to be cut.
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Apr 16, 2014 21:44
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iyaayas01 posted:The bottom line is that the USAF isn't getting rid of the A-10 because we're a bunch of evil corrupt idiots who just like nothing more than screwing over the Army, it's because we are up poo poo creek money wise (for a variety of reasons, many of which are self-imposed and many others of which are internal DoD driven) and right now, from where we sit, the least bad choice is canning the A-10 fleet. The least bad choice would be to cancel the F-35, but we have that sunk cost fallacy thing going on now that makes the US government the abused house-wife of Lockheed Martin. Or I guess we could bleed Lockheed dry for loving up the F-35 nonstop, but I doubt that's legal or practical in the long term.
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Apr 16, 2014 21:45
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Concordat posted:The least bad choice would be to cancel the F-35, but we have that sunk cost fallacy thing going on now that makes the US government the abused house-wife of Lockheed Martin. Or I guess we could bleed Lockheed dry for loving up the F-35 nonstop, but I doubt that's legal or practical in the long term. Wrong. I hate the F-35 as much as anyone, but we have painted ourselves into a corner where currently, in the year of our lord 2014, it is the only viable option for USAF tacair recapitalization. Canceling the F-35 is not an option, period. Because the alternative is not to recapitalize, and that is a non-starter. It is callous, and I'm probably going to catch some flak for this, but what poses the bigger threat to the United States: the possibility that in the next Operation Useless Dirt we lose a couple more soldiers because our CAS capability is at a 85% solution instead of a 99% solution, or the possibility that the nation's air arm is unprepared to fight and win a major theater war in 2030? Because that's the choice we have to make right now regarding the A-10 and fleet recapitalization. The budgetary choices the USAF makes today are going to have ramifications decades down the road.
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Apr 16, 2014 22:01
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Snowdens Secret posted:Online sources at least say CGN-38 got Standards in '84, and I think all the nuke cruisers had swapped out their Talos/Terrier/Tartar with SMs long before they were retired. AEGIS would've required an entire superstructure rebuild to mount the radars, at a minimum. This is true, I forgot about that upgrade. The AEGIS upgrade would have been $2.3 billion (adjusted for inflation) at a minimum, which is an absurd amount of money. No one was interested in dropping that much in the mid 1990s. Concordat posted:The least bad choice would be to cancel the F-35, but we have that sunk cost fallacy thing going on now that makes the US government the abused house-wife of Lockheed Martin. Or I guess we could bleed Lockheed dry for loving up the F-35 nonstop, but I doubt that's legal or practical in the long term. This is what you get when you allow the military jet industry to become a duopoly. Lockheed has very little interest in making the F-35 affordable and delivering it to us in a timely fashion because it has very little competition. Right now, the only risk they run is losing out on the notional F/A-XX Hornet replacement in the coming decades, and it won't matter nearly as much as it should. They'll probably get F/A-XX and Boeing will probably get "2030 Bomber" or whatever they're calling it now.
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Apr 16, 2014 22:09
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Red Crown posted:This is what you get when you allow the military jet industry to become a duopoly. Lockheed has very little interest in making the F-35 affordable and delivering it to us in a timely fashion because it has very little competition. Right now, the only risk they run is losing out on the notional F/A-XX Hornet replacement in the coming decades, and it won't matter nearly as much as it should. They'll probably get F/A-XX and Boeing will probably get "2030 Bomber" or whatever they're calling it now. There's a bit of cart before horse here. The miljet industry became consolidated because the capital costs of developing new gens of aircraft got too high for your North Americans, Republics, Voughts, etc to be competitive on their own, while total airframe sales have dropped by orders of magnitude. Boeing and to a lesser degree LockMart can subsidize their military costs with commercial sales, another market which has seen tremendous consolidation due to capital expense. This mirrors other non-mil high-tech, high-capital industries. It's at a point where if company X doesn't get a major contract, they're pretty much doomed to be absorbed or go under (this will be Northrup-Grumman, with the NGB project.) It's not as extreme in aerospace as Electric Boat's "you must buy x submarines every 5 year period or we'll lose the national capability to build subs forever" scenario but it's not far from it. Which is not to say that there's not tremendous cruft, corruption and collusion in the process but that's in no way limited to the military purchasing process. E: also that vvvv Snowdens Secret fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Apr 16, 2014 |
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Apr 16, 2014 22:29
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iyaayas01 posted:Wrong. You're not thinking like a politician. Operation Useless Dirt only matters if there is an army base in my district. If so then I demand that the USAF be dedicated 110% to SUPPORTING OUR BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN ON THE GROUND because no American combat casualty is an acceptable casualty. Unless of course there is an airforce base in my district, in which case we need to spend every dime of national treasure on stealth to make sure none of our brave airmen are ever put in harms way. If there isn't a military base in my district than I don't give a gently caress either way. Look, is Lockheed going to give me some money if I vote for this poo poo? If so, sure, whatever. Wait, is there a factory in my district that we can make sure gets the contract to produce the left-hand threaded, proprietary nut for rear-right wheel of the bomb gurney required to load internal munitions? If so I might give a poo poo again. What the gently caress are you even blabbering about with this 2030 poo poo? Major theater what? Why the gently caress do I care, I'm going to be on K Street by then. Wait, do you think you can get me a job with Boeing instead? Because if that's the case I'm pretty sure we need to look at their 60 year plan to future proof our military into the next centuryTM via cloud networked autonomous drones socially integrated into the new future battelspace. edit: Oh poo poo, am I a congressman from Virginia or Maine? In that case forget everything up there, the answer is to build as many loving boats as we can. Have you seen my proposal to re-commission the USS Missouri as a modern bombardment platform? She fought in World War 2 don't you know  p.s. buy more subs
Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Apr 16, 2014 |
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Apr 16, 2014 22:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit: Oh poo poo, am I a congressman from Virginia or Maine? In that case forget everything up there, the answer is to build as many loving boats as we can. Have you seen my proposal to re-commission the USS Missouri as a modern bombardment platform? She fought in World War 2 don't you know gently caress that noise. If I'm from Virginia, we need to triple our number of carriers and they all need to be based in Norfolk, and nowhere else. e: I was working in Virginia state politics when they were talking about rebasing the carriers to FL and it was probably the only thing that literally every elected official in Virginia from Mayor of Bumfuck to US Senator agreed on. Veritek83 fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Apr 16, 2014 |
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Apr 16, 2014 22:48
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Snowdens Secret posted:It's not as extreme in aerospace as Electric Boat's "you must by x submarines every 5 year period or we'll lose the national capability to build subs forever" scenario but it's not far from it. I'll comment on this, because this touches directly on what I'm working on. I can't speak to Electric Boat's current status, but I can tell you that this argument has existed since the 1970s and it was weapons grade bullshit. For example, Newport News went before Congress and lamented how impossible it was to make money because of the Navy's unrealistic requirements, how they really just couldn't guarantee they could meet production needs in the event of a war, how dirty micromanaging nukes were slowing down their process and so on. If you asked them, there was a major shortage of skilled labor that required no less than major government intervention. In fact, the Norfolk Naval Shipyard was poaching the few skilled workers they had! You see, they really just can't operate without a steady five year plan of shipbuilding guaranteed to them. Otherwise, well, they might just go under! ...in reality, they posted a 106% increase in profits the year they made this testimony. The labor shortage? Norfolk wasn't poaching workers, all that was happening was that radio advertisements for jobs at Norfolk reached Newport News. Meanwhile, Newport News was sending personalized letters to Norfolk workers. Nationwide, shipbuilders involved in defense production paid their employees 20% less than they could get in other jobs that they were qualified for. This didn't stop the shipbuilders from successfully lobbying Congress to mandate that the government pay to train more skilled laborers for them. Those micromanaging Navy officers? Yeah, they were finding a long list of serious defects in construction. And through all this, major shipbuilders were suing the poo poo out of the Navy, for any reason they could think of. They were completely shameless, they were squeezing the Navy for every penny they could and greasing the palms of a lot of Congressmen. All this time Congress was pestering the CNO about why the Soviet Navy shipbuilding program was so much more productive than ours.
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Apr 16, 2014 23:07
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Cyrano4747 posted:You're not thinking like a politician. Thanks for the blood pressure points from reading this...
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Apr 16, 2014 23:11
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iyaayas01 posted:Wrong. Killing the F-35 project could have only happened before the first big checks were written. No one wants to be the pariah that'll be blamed for that boondoggle if it was killed. People would scream for someone to blame and no one would care that it was actually the right decision. Well, a right decision would be to flip off the USMC and say no VTOL silliness, and a further right decision would be to not have a plane be designed to operate off of both the land and carriers be the majority of our combat airframes.
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Apr 16, 2014 23:18
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Taerkar posted:Killing the F-35 project could have only happened before the first big checks were written. No one wants to be the pariah that'll be blamed for that boondoggle if it was killed. People would scream for someone to blame and no one would care that it was actually the right decision. Will the US even save any money by having less different type of aircraft to maintain (less different parts to order from my point of view) because the F-35 is going to every arm or am I just uninformed and there is no actual reduction of plane types?
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Apr 17, 2014 00:11
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Over three decades, probably. But that will be offset by "unexpected" repairs that crop up out-of-cycle, and an inability to get specific spare parts in a timely fashion because construction will proceed at a rate of 10 loving planes per year yet somehow utilize the entirety of parts production until we blast ourselves back into the Dark Ages.
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Apr 17, 2014 00:43
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That was the original idea (claim really), but since you've got different versions for each branch, that's going to cause problems. The Navy has different needs than the Air Force, so either you have things that are superficially similar, or you're going to have a compromise. Have enough compromises and you've got something that's not even a jack-of-all-trades airframe.
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Apr 17, 2014 00:44
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The F-35 really should be "that" boondoggle that changes how procurement is done, but none of the LRS-B stuff is unclassified yet so who knows what hilarity awaits. Strategic and tactical requirements, plus surveillance and electronic warfare? Sign me the gently caress up!
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Apr 17, 2014 01:08
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When was the last time the air force, navy, and marines all operated the same fighter craft anyway, the F-4?
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Apr 17, 2014 02:31
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Concordat posted:When was the last time the air force, navy, and marines all operated the same fighter craft anyway, the F-4? Yup. Which makes sense, since we're only one generation removed...the F-4 was replaced by the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18, all of which are still the frontline fighters.
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Apr 17, 2014 02:53
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Isn't it closer to 2 gens though? At least in the navy with the F-14 and superbug? 1.5?
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Apr 17, 2014 02:54
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Taerkar posted:Isn't it closer to 2 gens though? At least in the navy with the F-14 and superbug? 1.5? Not to mention that the F22 was supposed to be a thing at one point. edit: I started thinking about how many common airframes the services have, and did come up with a contemporary example however un-fighter it may be - they all use the C130 
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Apr 17, 2014 02:57
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Each service probably has some Gulfstream or Learjet type thing assigned to a tiny-assed VIP transport or long range medical transport squadron. Does the Navy run King Airs?
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Apr 17, 2014 03:03
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Propagandalf posted:Each service probably has some Gulfstream or Learjet type thing assigned to a tiny-assed VIP transport or long range medical transport squadron. Does the Navy run King Airs? Yeah, they use them for multi-engine training (and probably other stuff too).
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Apr 17, 2014 03:06
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In the helicopter world, don't they all use S-70 derivatives too (Blackhawk, Seahawk, etc.)?
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Apr 17, 2014 03:09
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I think the only H-60 variant the Marines use is the one for flying the president around.
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Apr 17, 2014 03:12
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Concordat posted:When was the last time the air force, navy, and marines all operated the same fighter craft anyway, the F-4? The three branches don't even operate the same helicopter and you'd think that'd be much easier to find commonality over. Even the H-60 variants have pretty significant differences. You might as well ask "when was the last time we used the same airframe for high-speed, high altitude intercept and low-level penetrating strike" and I'm not sure even the F-4 fit that one. Red Crown posted:Words on '70s Navy stuff I won't disagree with you on any of this, but it's stuff from forty years ago when the fleet was much fatter, and it conflates surface and submersible construction, when they have significant non-overlap in needed skillsets. In the '70s there was roughly no break between 637- and 688- class production, and a crazy amount of depot maintenance on active hulls to fill the gaps. There was a several year gap between SSN-773 and -774 (I guess technically you had Jimmy Carter slow-cooking) and a significantly reduced fleet with lower maintenance - well, I won't say needs, but certainly tighter funding, and fewer refuelings. The Groton EB workforce noticeably constricted (NNSY, Norfolk / Portsmouth could shift to surface work, although this doesn't preserve the same people and skills.) In the early '00s when we needed nuclear welding the only guy they could find was ancient and he had an absurd backlog of work to plod through. If the buy rate on VAs was lower it would mean noticeable gaps in production schedule where GD EB would have to furlough employees, and I think that would've made it much harder to man back up in the first place. For a while they were talking about having to move EB out of Connecticut and while there would've been real advantages I think the concensus was the brain drain would've been fatal. Shipyard work has always been fraught with shoddy work and fuckups but the VA program seems from an outside POV to be going surprisingly smoothly (in relative terms.)
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Apr 17, 2014 03:17
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Taerkar posted:Isn't it closer to 2 gens though? At least in the navy with the F-14 and superbug? 1.5? Superbug I'll give you 1.5, but not on the F-14. It didn't become an F-4 replacement until the D-model. Cyrano4747 posted:Not to mention that the F22 was supposed to be a thing at one point. The F-22 is basically complimentary to the F-15 at this point. There aren't enough off them to call them an F-15 replacement. The F-15 is still a frontline fighter and will be until the next fighter shows up, probably in the 2040s.
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Apr 17, 2014 03:45
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mlmp08 posted:Yeah, it turns out low level show of force flights are only truly scary if you occasionally actually bomb the hell out of people, like the Bone. Or replace the airplane with an even lower and much slower helicopter with twin counter rotating blades (Kamov), then it's a little scarier: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4a2_1397684237 Someone could have chucked one of those rocks and hit the drat thing. e: And holy gently caress, some Ukrainians are trying to create their own Tiananmen Square, this one lady is trying to stop a BMP with one hand. And a car gets run over. And machine guns are fired right over people's heads. poo poo is crazy: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=971_1397679010 Doctor Grape Ape fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Apr 17, 2014 |
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Apr 17, 2014 04:38
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Doctor Grape Ape posted:Or replace the airplane with an even lower and much slower helicopter with twin counter rotating blades (Kamov), then it's a little scarier: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4a2_1397684237 Probably could have destroyed a rotor blade with a broom held over their heads. Jesus.
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Apr 17, 2014 04:42
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The broom would snap, not the rotors. They're stronger than they look.
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Apr 17, 2014 05:28
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Godholio posted:Yup. Which makes sense, since we're only one generation removed...the F-4 was replaced by the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18, all of which are still the frontline fighters. I'd actually say that (in the Navy's case) the F-14 replaced the F-4, and the F/A-18 replaced the F-8 and A-7. And to be fair, the development of the F/A-18 was a loving nightmare as well. The only ray of sunshine I can hope for in regards to the F-35 is that 1) it never has to fight a major war, and 2) I'm sure it'll be at an even greater cost, but one can hope that successive block numbers improve the airframe's deficiencies. Mortabis posted:The broom would snap, not the rotors. They're stronger than they look. And depending on the grip on said broom, so would the forearm bones of the person holding it.
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Apr 17, 2014 10:36
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What if she's the Ukrainian Lana Kane?
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Apr 17, 2014 12:10
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Concordat posted:When was the last time the air force, navy, and marines all operated the same fighter craft anyway, the F-4? A-7 also right?
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Apr 17, 2014 12:50
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Breaky posted:A-7 also right? I think so...I know the AF and Navy had them, and I'm pretty sure the Marines did, but I'd have to look up dates.
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Apr 17, 2014 12:57
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I just read the OP, and holy poo poo was that interesting!
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Apr 17, 2014 13:00
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Doctor Grape Ape posted:e: And holy gently caress, some Ukrainians are trying to create their own Tiananmen Square, this one lady is trying to stop a BMP with one hand. And a car gets run over. And machine guns are fired right over people's heads. poo poo is crazy: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=971_1397679010 I don't get it. There are less than 50 people in that crowd, it's hardly a mob. None of them appear to be even remotely phased by the gunfire, many of them even seem bored. Why are the UA APCs trying to plow through them at all? In the MiG flyover video, the soldiers on the stopped APC are just chilling, it doesn't look like there's any actual tension.
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Apr 17, 2014 13:20
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Marines never flew the SLUF, they replaced their A-4s with Harriers. And really the USAF didn't fly it for all that long, at least on active duty...the -D entered service in 1970 and by the end of the decade AD had dumped them all off on the Guard.
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Apr 17, 2014 13:20
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iyaayas01 posted:Marines never flew the SLUF, they replaced their A-4s with Harriers. Ahh ok. I knew they had the F-8, just assumed they got the A-7 as well.
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Apr 17, 2014 13:30
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Doctor Grape Ape posted:Or replace the airplane with an even lower and much slower helicopter with twin counter rotating blades (Kamov), then it's a little scarier: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4a2_1397684237 Wow. That Ka-52 flyby was nuts. Not sure whether I'm repeating myself, but everyone who is interested in what's happening in Ukraine should watch/subscribe to VICE's YT channel. Their update from yesterday was intense, and showed the storming of a police station in Horlivka. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTdkY8tl2b0
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Apr 17, 2014 13:36
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I think my eyes about rolled into the back of my head when Russia went to the UN complaining about human rights abuses. Although it's hard to say how correct the Ukranian response is because the entire thing is a poo poo show of he said she said between them and Russia, even if my gut wants me on Ukraine's side.
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Apr 17, 2014 15:40
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If there are abused minorities in a neighboring country that happen to speak the same language as you and broadly speaking be the same ethnicity as you, the solution isn't to encourage them to break away and join the motherland for protection. Seriously, we settled this poo poo with the Volksdeutsche back in the 30s.
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Apr 17, 2014 18:28
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