*promote the first responders protecting property and lives during this current bout of wildfires ravaging much of the area surrounding the bay area.

For those interested:
Current fires in California https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/
Wildfire cams http://www.alertwildfire.org/
Current air pollution due to the fires https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/i/mAQI/a10/cC0#6.37/37.725/-121.332

=SUM(A2:A10, C2:C10)

I win

I like the setup. A lot of people would place the jets at the rear, like in a Lear Jet or A10 Warthog, or on the wings like most commerical liners. Where the jets would push the plane. Obviously this airframe was initally designed to be pulled through the air, so having everything up front probably balances thrust and makes the plane mostly react like the prop version. Definitely simplifies the engineering required for the modification.

Yea, we're looking at a horrible mosquito year unless we can stop the retard next door from nuking his pond again. We got him to stop last year and you wouldn't believe the size of the dragon flies. Mosquitoes were decimated. Ironically, he was doing it to kill the mosquitoes... We proved to him that DFs need the pond to develop, whereas any puddle or bucket of water is enough for mosquitoes.

Gosh, I love DFs. They're like the A10 Warthogs of the fight against getting bit to death...

It's ridiculous propaganda, but the A10 still looks fucking awesome doing it's thing.

Correction, the Air Force Brass hates them. Why?

1. They work perfectly for the role they were designed for. Brass want a plane that will be obsolete after 15 years or so, so that they can score big with plane mfg's

2. The typical AFB idea of close combat is a few miles away by button. You shouldn't be close enough to see the carnage. Just a poof and turn around to land. Having such a brute force plane is distasteful to them.

3. The A10 is called to support infantry most of the time. The Air Force overall still has a chip on their shoulder when it comes to the Army and other 'ground' forces. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't go out of their way to piss on an infantryman if he was on fire.

Basically the A10 is similar to the Harrier, it works well, it's not flashy, and it takes a beating. Complete opposite of most Air Force planes. The F35 that they want to replace both with is a joke and is mindbogglingly more expensive. If you watch any video that has an A10 pilot in it, talking about the plane, they can't sing it's praises enough. Sadly they have no say in whether it gets replaced.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by blackfox42.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by oritteropo.

I agree with your general point.

I personally would never consider 'replacing' the A10 with the F35.

But I still think you don't design weapons for what you need now, but to be ready for what you could need in the future.

Su-35 / Mig35, pak-fa, J-10, J-20, fighter tech is moving along in the world. The goal of systems like the F35/22 is to remain superior in any theoretical/potential future conflict. The only thing the F22/35 have to do with today's conflicts is the possibility to be shoehorned into dropping bombs on some scare crows in the middle of nowhere.

Sure, people pick on the F35 for being fat and happy - but fighters are more than turn turn turn turn shoot. They are systems to sense/detect, share info, build a battle field picture, jam opponents, strike the opponent's sensors, build situational awareness while denying the opponent his own SA. They build an environment where your forces can maneuver around enemy forces, strike key locations, and leave (without an actual fight), so that the enemy eventually finds himself with nothing left to defend, and they just quit without ever fighting. Modern fighters are an information system as much as a weapons platform.

Even in WW2 the powers learned the lesson that a good fighter is not necessarily a good pure dog fighter. The zero was the best turning fighter of the war - and it sucked. US planes would just not bother dogfighting with it. US planes would fly high above, dive down onto a zero, shoot at it, fly right by, and zoom back up. They didn't have to dogfight, because they had more speed and altitude, and the zero was helpless, it was a fighter stuck playing defense in air to air combat.

Times changed, today's tactics are not speed and altitude, they are situational awareness and detectability. It's the kind of fighting the F35 is tailored for, and it's not worth being too hard on it for not being ideal for more classical combat applications.

-scheherazade

This video lacks a lot of salient details.

Yes, the F35 is aiming at the A10 because contractors want jobs (something to do).

However, the strength of the A10 is also its weakness. Low and slow also means that it takes you a long time to get to your troops. Fast jets arrive much sooner (significantly so). A combination of both would be ideal. F35 to get there ASAP, and A10 arriving later to take over.

It's not really worth debating the merit of new fighters. You don't wait for a war to start developing weapons.

Yes, our recent enemies are durkas with small arms, and you don't need an F35 to fight them - but you also don't even need to fight them to begin with - they aren't an existential threat. Terrorist attacks are emotionally charged (well, until they happen so often that you get used to hearing about them, and they stop affecting people), but they are nothing compared to say, a carpet bombing campaign.

The relevance of things like the F35 is to have weapons ready and able to face a large national power, should a nation v nation conflict arise with a significant other nation. In the event that such a conflict ever does, you don't want to be caught with your pants down.

Defense spending costs scale with oversight requirements.

Keep in mind that money pays people. Even materials are simply salaries of the material suppliers. The more people you put on a program, the more that program will cost.

Yes, big contractors make big profits - but the major chunk of their charges is still salaries.

Let me explain what is going on.

Remember the $100 hammers?
In fact, the hammer still cost a few bucks. What cost 100+ bucks was the total charges associated with acquiring a hammer.
Everything someone does in association with acquiring the hammer, gets charged to a charge code that's specific for that task.

Someone has to create a material request - $time.
Someone has to check contracts for whether or not it will be covered - $time.
Someone has to place the order - $time.
Someone has to receiver the package, inspect it, and put it into a received bin - $time.
Someone has to go through the received items and assign them property tags - $time.
Someone has to take the item to the department that needed it, and get someone to sign for it - $time.
Someone has to update the monthly contract report - $time.
Someone has to generate an entry in the process artifacts report, detailing the actions taken in order to acquire the hammer - $time.
Someone on the government side has to review the process artifacts report, and validate that proper process was followed (and if not, punish the company for skipping steps) - $time.

Add up all the minutes here and there that each person charged in association with getting a hammer, and it's $95 on top of a $5 hammer. Which is why little things cost so much.

You could say "Hey, why do all that? Just buy the hammer".
Well, if a company did that, it would be in trouble with govt. oversight folks because they violated the process.
If an employee bought a hammer of his own volition, he would be in trouble with his company for violating the process.
The steps are required, and if you don't follow them, and there is ever any problem/issue, your lack of process will be discovered on investigation, and you could face massive liability - even if it's not even relevant - because it points to careless company culture.

Complex systems like jet fighters necessarily have bugs to work out. When you start using the system, that's when you discover all the bits and pieces that nobody anticipated - and you fix them. That's fine. That's always been the case.



As an airplane example, imagine if there's an issue with a regulator that ultimately causes a system failure - but that issue is just some constant value in a piece of software that determines a duty cycle.

Say for example, that all it takes is changing 1 digit, and recompiling. Ez, right? NOPE!

An engineer can't simply provide a fix.

If something went wrong, even unrelated, but simply in the same general system, he could be personally liable for anything that happens.

On top of that, if there is no contract for work on that system, then an engineer providing a free fix is robbing the company of work, and he could get fired.

A company can't instruct an engineer to provide a fix for the same reasons that the engineer himself can't just do it.

So, the process kicks in.

Someone has to generate a trouble report - $time.
Someone has to identify a possible solution - $time.
Someone has to check contracts to see if work on that fix would be covered under current tasking - $time.
Say it's not covered (it's a previously closed [i.e. delivered] item), so you need a new charge code.
Someone has to write a proposal to fix the defect - $time.
Someone has to go deal with the government to get them to accept the proposal - $time.
(say it's accepted)
Someone has to write new contracts with the government for the new work - $time.
To know what to put into the contract, "requrements engineers" have to talk with the "software engineers" to get a list of action items, and incorporate them into the contract - $time.
(say the contract is accepted)
Finance in conjuration with Requirements engineers has to generate a list of charge codes for each action item - $time.
CM engineers have to update the CM system - $time.
Some manager has to coordinate this mess, and let folks know when to do what - $time.
Software engineer goes to work, changes 1 number, recompiles - $time.
Software engineer checks in new load into CM - $time.
CM engineer updates CM history report - $time.
Software engineer delivers new load to testing manger - $time.
Test manager gets crew of 30 test engineers to run the new load through testing in a SIL (systems integration lab) - $time.
Test engineers write report on results - $time.
If results are fine, Test manager has 30 test engineers run a test on real hardware - $time.
Test engineers write new report - $time.
(assuming all went well)
CM engineer gets resting results and pushes the task to deliverable - $time.
Management has a report written up to hand to the governemnt, covering all work done, and each action taken - documenting that proper process was followed - $time.
Folks writing document know nothing technical, so they get engineers to write sections covering actual work done, and mostly collate what other people send to them - $time.
Engineers write most the report - $time.
Company has new load delivered to government (sending a disk), along with the report/papers/documentation - $time.
Government reviews the report, but because the govt. employees are not technical and don't understand any of the technical data, they simply take the company's word for the results, and simply grade the company on how closely they followed process (the only thing they do understand) - $time.
Company sends engineer to government location to load the new software and help government side testing - $time.
Government runs independent acceptance tests on delivered load - $time.
(Say all goes well)
Government talks with company contracts people, and contract is brought to a close - $time.
CM / Requirements engineers close out the action item - $time.

And this is how a 1 line code change takes 6 months and 5 million dollars.

And this gets repeated for _everything_.

Then imagine if it is a hardware issue, and the only real fix is a change of hardware. For an airplane, just getting permission to plug anything that needs electricity into the airplanes power supply takes months of paper work and lab testing artifacts for approval. Try getting your testing done in that kind of environment.



Basically, the F35 could actually be fixed quickly and cheaply - but the system that is in place right now does not allow for it. And if you tried to circumvent that system, you would be in trouble. The system is required. It's how oversight works - to make sure everything is by the book, documented, reviewed, and approved - so no money gets wasted on any funny business.

Best part, if the government thinks that the program is costing too much, they put more oversight on it to watch for more waste.
Because apparently, when you pay more people to stare at something, the waste just runs away in fear.
Someone at the contractors has to write the reports that these oversight people are supposed to be reviewing - so when you go to a contractor and see a cube farm with 90 paper pushers and 10 'actual' engineers (not a joke), you start to wonder how anything gets done.

Once upon a time, during the cold war, we had an existential threat.
People took things seriously. There was no F'ing around with paperwork - people had to deliver hardware. The typical time elapsed from "idea" to "aircraft first flight" used to be 2 years. USSR went away, cold war ended, new hardware deliveries fell to a trickle - but the spending remained, and the money billed to an inflated process.

-scheherazade

And they are phasing that model out.. A10 is simple and it works but nah, they want something hi-tech to keep the budget staggeringly high. It's like replacing every spoon in your house with robots that don't know what soup is.

The A10 may not get to combat as quickly as an F35 - but when it arrives, it's tailor made for the job. Not a "square peg in a round hole" F35.

Designed with input from Hans Ulrich Rudel - best ground attacker pilot to have ever lived. The man was a prodigy in the air.
(note : the Ju-87 G2 that he flew, had ammo for only 24 cannon shots total. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-655-5976-04,_Russland,_Sturzkampfbomber_Junkers_Ju_87_G.jpg)

I really recommend reading his wiki page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Rudel

-scheherazade

The A10 is just such an awesome piece of hardware.

And tell me if you were from any time before the 1900s and saw that thing you would not think it was a bloody dragon from myth (a giant flying beast that spits fire from its "mouth" and can totally destroy anything on land).

Perhaps some dude in the past saw a "vision" of it and that's how the dragon myth started? If you believe in that kind of thing

He's izzz clockin' some dollars riding that wave of frenzy, A10-This is a great transitional opportunity for hippy-man

Oh my ..., this video is great.
Obituary: Arjan Groot (1972–2011)