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I love that there's still a couple of Canberras flying around for NASA. English Electric flew the first one in 1949, thing must have been in development to some degree during WW2.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:05
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At least let them finish the balls before you screenshot it.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:05
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Murgos posted:With Cost+ the risk is on the purchaser.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:14
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large hands posted:I love that there's still a couple of Canberras flying around for NASA. English Electric flew the first one in 1949, thing must have been in development to some degree during WW2. NASA even has a detailed status page for them (even if the one on that tracking page is currently "inactive") https://airbornescience.nasa.gov/aircraft_status
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Apr 5, 2021 19:20
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standard.deviant posted:This was a good summary but oversimplified the risk discussion. In either case the programmatic risks (do we get a widget at the end/when do we get it) still fall on the purchaser. For example, if you have a FFP contract to buy an airplane and the provider doesn’t deliver, you still don’t have an airplane. It’s just that in that case you may not have to pay them. All respect to what cost plus actually means, but I should point out that the definition as used by Technowar author is to explain the US subverted the free market to make giant corporations (evidence: decline in number of corporations between mid-1920s to 1950) doing great harm to the economy, which was by 1945 half of earth's GDP. Nevermind that a lot of this economic control was a straightup command economy... There is a similarly confusing account of SE Asia in WW2 outside of Vietnam. Turns out China's decline as a nation was due exclusively due to western Imperialist powers, and Japan just took over the exact same role when it invaded China...in 1939. TL;DR This book genuinely has a good core, but the author is arrogant AF and writing in the social sciences as a Marxist in the early 1980s, and apparently these people were allowed to just make poo poo up in their dissertations and it didn't matter how little sense it made
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Apr 5, 2021 21:39
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Nebakenezzer posted:All respect to what cost plus actually means, but I should point out that the definition as used by Technowar author is to explain the US subverted the free market to make giant corporations (evidence: decline in number of corporations between mid-1920s to 1950) doing great harm to the economy, which was by 1945 half of earth's GDP. Nevermind that a lot of this economic control was a straightup command economy... As Murgos mentioned, it's a better option to actually end up with a deliverable when you're trying to build a completely new thing to address a nebulous requirement.
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Apr 5, 2021 23:24
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goatsestretchgoals posted:At least let them finish the balls before you screenshot it. That's Clippy, and he's about to ask the pilot if he needs help drawing a dick.
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Apr 6, 2021 00:10
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standard.deviant posted:If a FFP contract runs into impossible cost overruns, the contractor might be better off just giving up on the project, but with Cost+ they are incentivized to keep throwing money at the project and make it succeed. The government can terminate a cost plus contract at will, so there's certainly some degree of incentive not to let cost and schedule go haywire. Less dramatically, they can also penalize the contractor on the "plus" portion of the bill. The main problem is when the government gets itself into a position where they're unwilling to pull the trigger.
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Apr 6, 2021 00:21
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Captain von Trapp posted:The government can terminate a cost plus contract at will, so there's certainly some degree of incentive not to let cost and schedule go haywire. Less dramatically, they can also penalize the contractor on the "plus" portion of the bill. The main problem is when the government gets itself into a position where they're unwilling to pull the trigger.
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Apr 6, 2021 00:26
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standard.deviant posted:Yeah that’s getting into details between Cost plus fixed fee and Cost plus incentive fee and the other hybrid modes. I worked a contract that started out CPFF and then transitioned to FFP. It didn’t seem like we saved ourselves much money at the cost of the vendor being unwilling to entertain requirements changes outside of the planned project management lifecycle. That meant we ended up spending money on delivering features that we knew wouldn’t be useful even before they were installed. Companies will bid a large FFP contract aggressively with the expectation that there will be requirements changes and that those changes will trigger significant costs which is where they will earn the actual profits. Especially if they think the program has a lot of 'hidden' or not well understood development work that will cause scope creep. Again, once you *know* what your are making is when you go FFP. For that reason it's becoming more common to break a large program up into smaller items and use different contract vehicles for different parts and phases of the program. I think what Neb is talking about did happen in WWII. The government would sign a really broad contract to cover basically everything needed to get them the thing they wanted. What gets missed in a lot of that is they also would embed personnel at all levels of that organization to watch and provide feedback to help ensure the money was well spent and they were getting value for their dollar. Was there a lot of waste? In absolute dollar terms, probably. In relative to the amount being spent terms? Probably not so clear. I'd love to see some analysis on rates of waste, fraud and abuse during WWII.
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Apr 6, 2021 01:03
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American government agencies are just structurally terrible at contract writing and procurement in general, but especially when it comes to engineering projects of various kinds. If you want to buy custom engineered solutions you must understand what you're buying and that means having an in-house engineering team of your own, or you'll get ripped off no matter what. There are other factors as well (such as the legal system) that hamper American government procurement, but I think in general American government procurement is just fundamentally broken on a structural level. All government procurement is corrupt to some degree but in the US the state is actively trying to get ripped off.
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Apr 6, 2021 01:30
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On the military side it’s a really hard problem. I was on the engineering team and responsible for contract tech review & DT, but I only had a few years in the job. That included a year learning how not to get suckered, so the high rate of turnover definitely hurt us. Turnover in program management was just as bad, because it takes some time to teach the new manager that a) the contractor is constantly testing the limits to see what they can get away with, and b) you have to listen to the tech team when we say something is bullshit/shady even if the contracting team really doesn’t want to fight about it again.
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Apr 6, 2021 01:36
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TheFluff posted:American government agencies are just structurally terrible at contract writing and procurement in general, but especially when it comes to engineering projects of various kinds. If you want to buy custom engineered solutions you must understand what you're buying and that means having an in-house engineering team of your own, or you'll get ripped off no matter what. There are other factors as well (such as the legal system) that hamper American government procurement, but I think in general American government procurement is just fundamentally broken on a structural level. All government procurement is corrupt to some degree but in the US the state is actively trying to get ripped off. Hey so I've actually talked to the engineers working for the government. There's plenty of issues but "they don't exist and/or they don't understand how these systems/subsystems work" is not one of the issues. standard.deviant posted:On the military side it’s a really hard problem. I was on the engineering team and responsible for contract tech review & DT, but I only had a few years in the job. That included a year learning how not to get suckered, so the high rate of turnover definitely hurt us. This is a nuanced take on the situation which I have witnessed as an issue as well. TheFluff: Your comment however seems like the hot take of someone who read some GAO reports and said "must be they suck because they're on purpose bad" which is a simple and also completely wrong answer. Any reason to think otherwise? I make a stink about it because procurement for earned value required ($20+M) scale early R&D contracts is really a super hard optimization problem where the government does not have the resources to produce the thing, but they do have engineers who understand the thing, yet if they dont produce the thing themselves the number of stakeholders explodes to include congress and competing publicly traded companies and a whole slew of issues including the requirements that led to the RFP/solicitation requirements in the first place. So to write it off as "the government/DoD engineers dont exist or dont know their rear end from a hole in the ground" is A) not correct in my experience and B) not helpful to solving the real problems that likely are able to be improved upon.
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Apr 6, 2021 02:10
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Murgos posted:Probably not so clear. I'd love to see some analysis on rates of waste, fraud and abuse during WWII. IIRC there were several congressional committees and an executive branch office that covered this. don't know how much they did got published.
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Apr 6, 2021 02:22
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CarForumPoster posted:TheFluff: Your comment however seems like the hot take of someone who read some GAO reports and said "must be they suck because they're on purpose bad" which is a simple and also completely wrong answer. Any reason to think otherwise? I make a stink about it because procurement for earned value required ($20+M) scale early R&D contracts is really a super hard optimization problem where the government does not have the resources to produce the thing, but they do have engineers who understand the thing, yet if they dont produce the thing themselves the number of stakeholders explodes to include congress and competing publicly traded companies and a whole slew of issues including the requirements that led to the RFP/solicitation requirements in the first place. So to write it off as "the government/DoD engineers dont exist or dont know their rear end from a hole in the ground" is A) not correct in my experience and B) not helpful to solving the real problems that likely are able to be improved upon. I've seen it from both sides, as an employee of a Big Defense Contractor and as a SETA for a DoD agency that has a lot of money. In general I don't think the procurement process is that bad in principle, once the government decides what to procure and sticks with it. The problem is deciding what to procure and writing requirements for it that satisfy an executive branch that turns over every 4/8 years, a congress that switches parties at unpredictable intervals, etc. When the "what" is always changing, you might as well set the previously spent money on fire. Now some level of scope change is necessary and inevitable. But pretty much every time I've thrown my hands up in frustration at the process, it's been due to high-level people not understanding when to fish, when to cut bait, and for the love of all that is holy when to stop sticking your junk in the tackle box.
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Apr 6, 2021 03:39
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CarForumPoster posted:Hey so I've actually talked to the engineers working for the government. There's plenty of issues but "they don't exist and/or they don't understand how these systems/subsystems work" is not one of the issues. Meanwhile the career military people moved through and had the turnover problem, but we tended to be much more willing to tell the contractor to GTFO with their bullshit. standard.deviant fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 03:56
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I don't know what it's like from an engineering perspective but I can tell you that federal accounting practices are downright pathological. The supposed "cost spiral" where you deliberately work sunk costs into forward-looking per-unit prices is completely rear end backwards. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg. The irony is that state and local governments, which have to follow GASB standards, are actually much better about this.
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Apr 6, 2021 16:05
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CarForumPoster posted:Hey so I've actually talked to the engineers working for the government. There's plenty of issues but "they don't exist and/or they don't understand how these systems/subsystems work" is not one of the issues. No, it was mostly me being an rear end in a top hat late at night. Most of what I've read in depth about American procurement actually has more to do with public transit than military matters, and I was kinda assuming things were similar everywhere. Transit is plagued by a lot of structural issues with government side organizations that seem to be intentionally designed by the political side of things to be unable to do anything effectively other than siphoning public funds into fraudulent contractor pockets, and basically every project is at least twice as expensive as anything equivalent elsewhere in the world. I apologize for posting unsubstantiated garbage. In completely unrelated news, the saber-rattling along the Ukrainian border has escalated into saber-rattling all over Russia: https://twitter.com/pmakela1/status/1379408781407354882
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Apr 6, 2021 16:53
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Neo-maskirovka lookin mighty sus
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Apr 6, 2021 17:13
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MRC48B posted:IIRC there were several congressional committees and an executive branch office that covered this. don't know how much they did got published. I would be interested as well. I think I recall quite a few fancy planes, tanks, and guns being designed and prototyped at enormous cost only to be canned with 2 examples built. Which was a solid good thing. Yeah the money is lost but you avoided sending inferior materiel to the front. "Here's a plane which is in many ways a downgrade from your current plane. Look, you're not gonna believe what we spent on it. Just make it work, ok?" At least this way the company can retool to make the better design their competitor made and make 1 kind of good plane instead of 1 bad one and 1 good one or heaven forbid just one bad one.
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Apr 6, 2021 20:01
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The milhist thread and other places about the internet spend a lot of time breaking down how bad both Germany and Japan were at the economic side of war but for my money there wasn't a bigger boondoggle in that era than the B-29, and this by a pretty wide margin.
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Apr 6, 2021 20:08
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bewbies posted:The milhist thread and other places about the internet spend a lot of time breaking down how bad both Germany and Japan were at the economic side of war but for my money there wasn't a bigger boondoggle in that era than the B-29, and this by a pretty wide margin. I binged on WW2 in the pacific-type books a few months ago, and the B-29 figured prominently as one of the more half-assed airplanes to be used in active service. They were retrofitting fixes/upgrades on those airframes until WW2 ended 
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Apr 6, 2021 20:16
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bewbies posted:The milhist thread and other places about the internet spend a lot of time breaking down how bad both Germany and Japan were at the economic side of war but for my money there wasn't a bigger boondoggle in that era than the B-29, and this by a pretty wide margin. I've heard that the B-29 program cost as much as the Manhattan Project. So, yeah. It's a big spend. The way the war played out massed flights of un-escorted bombers sortieing from CONUS to bomb points in Europe ended up not being a thing that was needed but I don't think that makes it a boondoggle. If it were ordered knowing that it was a non-issue then maybe 'boondoggle' would fit, I can see a cautious planner still being justified in wanting to press forward with it even under that scenario. In 1942 though? Yeah, I would want to have it.
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Apr 6, 2021 20:19
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The B-29 cost ~$1.1 billion *more* than the Manhattan Project. $3b vs. $1.9b.
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Apr 6, 2021 20:59
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Wibla posted:They were retrofitting fixes/upgrades on those airframes until WW2 ended It kept going well after WWII ended. The USAAF/USAF never really got happy with the R-3350s as installed on B-29s, and despite huge efforts to fix them, those problems didn’t really completely go away until B-50 production started with R-4360s. It cannot be overstated how much of a technological reach the B-29 was. It was a quantum leap over anything anyone else was even planning in 1942, and remained vastly superior to any other large bomber in the world until it was (partially) replaced by the B-36.
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Apr 6, 2021 21:02
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The B-36 could almost be seen as a step *down* from the B-29. Sure, it's a gorgeous gigantic thing that doesn't look like it should've ever been capable of flight, but the B-29 could stage out of a lot more places, whereas the B-36 had to land at bases that had been reinforced. I mean, the B-36 was developed so it could carry and drop the Mark 16. The plane that gets my attention is/was the XC-99 based on it: 
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Apr 6, 2021 21:08
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So what was the drat problem with making the big plane.
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Apr 6, 2021 21:11
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zoux posted:So what was the drat problem with making the big plane. The XC-99? My guess is because it'd be needed to go where the B-36 was never intended to. See again the necessity to reinforce runways. They even experimented with *tracked* landing gear on the B-36 to help distribute the load and enable it to land more places: https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/wait-the-b-36-peacemaker-flew-with-tank-tracks-for-lan-1638780957
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Apr 6, 2021 21:17
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Murgos posted:I've heard that the B-29 program cost as much as the Manhattan Project. So, yeah. It's a big spend. 29 was designed to Pacific bomber specs, which were...more or less covered by B-24s, though it was admittedly a lot less capable. B-36 was the reverse Amerikabomber. "Wanting to have it" is great, I'm sure any would've wanted to have it, but it didn't come close to paying back the absurd amount of resources put into it. Part of that was just the basic flawed idea of strategic bombing in general, but the B-29 and in particular its engines were plenty terrible in their own right. Ex post facto and all that, but imagine what building lots more subs and mines could've done to Japan, and years earlier, for the price they paid for the B-29. It was a very, very bad investment.
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Apr 6, 2021 21:34
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If not the B-29, which plane would have carried the atomic bombs?
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Apr 6, 2021 21:51
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Saukkis posted:If not the B-29, which plane would have carried the atomic bombs? The B-32 was the "backup" if the B-29 didn't work.
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Apr 6, 2021 21:56
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Saukkis posted:If not the B-29, which plane would have carried the atomic bombs? Lancaster could have, or I'm sure they could have developed a slightly smaller device that the 17 or 24 could haul if they hadn't had the 29 to fence the specs.
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Apr 6, 2021 21:58
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Saukkis posted:If not the B-29, which plane would have carried the atomic bombs? IIRC only the B-29, B-32, and Lancaster were capable of carrying something like the Mark III any appreciable distance. The Little Boy type bombs were a touch lighter and might have been deliverable with a significantly modified (read: stripped) B-24. The B-29 (and B-32’s) ability to deliver from much higher altitude (~30k feet instead of ~20k,) and their superior speed made the exit from the bomb run a lot less [i]interesting/i] than it probably would have been in say, a Lancaster...
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Apr 6, 2021 22:04
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zoux posted:So what was the drat problem with making the big plane. Lots and lots of things were new ideas in the context of a combat aircraft. From memory: Pressurized. Making an aircraft, especially a big 'ol one like the B-29 pressurized and mass producing them was a new challenge. Auto-turrets. Using electro-mechanical analog witchcraft, the B-29 had turrets that were operated by gunners elsewhere in the airplane. So you needed to create a system where the turrets could operate without a human in the middle of them, while accounting for the difference in aiming. Engines. This was the main problem; the Wright R-3350s were very ambitious even for America, who was champion engine builder. Here lies a long agonizing saga of trying to make the engine work and not destroy planes and kill its pilots. This might be wrong, but I remember reading that Glen Edwards, the USAAF test pilot who Edwards AFB is named after, was involved in initial flight testing of the B-29, and it was so stressful he went psychosomatic blind for awhile. e: Oh and the B-29 program was considered so important that they had an entire backup program, the B-32 Dominator. Unfortunately, the B-32 also used the R-3350....
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Apr 6, 2021 22:12
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At what point did US Bomber Command go, you know what, turrets on bombers are stupid? Also what did the engines need to do that was so hard, was it just a question of the scale of the airframe or were their other design goals
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Apr 6, 2021 22:19
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The engines needed to produce a lot of thrust, and reliable jet engines didn't yet exist.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:21
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zoux posted:At what point did US Bomber Command go, you know what, turrets on bombers are stupid? Halfway through B52 models. Iirc they only ever had t ailguns to discourage pursuing fights and none of the waist belly or dorsal mounts. The last b52 runs may not have had tailguns at all
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Apr 6, 2021 22:21
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zoux posted:At what point did US Bomber Command go, you know what, turrets on bombers are stupid? It kinda started with the B-36, which omitted any defensive weaponry other than an a rear autocannon turret. Of course, the B-36's original defensive capability was being able to fly where any interceptor couldn't reach it. You can't convince me the Soviets didn't have a few cobbled-together Wasserfall copies stashed away, though.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:28
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Actually let me clarify: turrets on bombers are badass, they just don't seem to be terribly useful.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:32
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zoux posted:Actually let me clarify: turrets on bombers are badass, they just don't seem to be terribly useful. At a certain point, the aircraft you're trying to shoot down are too fast to be effectively engaged by guns of any sort. Factor in fast moving missiles and you're in an even worse spot.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:40
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