engi_nerd

Eh, I give up.

I disagree with you wholly and completely.

Tired of seeing people on the internet defend obvious propaganda

Why do you want to grow?

I think the US is past being "fair" with China, and I believe this is a very good thing. The Chinese are cheating in every arena with everything they've got, and being fair only plays into their hands.

Seems rather binary.

Why do you think it so automatically likely that China wins?

YC going into China just proves that they have no ethics and morals

At my company, I don't have a staff of engineers to productionalize things so I have to do it myself.

Can you please explain? Because I've reviewed those rules and I don't understand where I fell on the wrong side of them.

Should I not call Chinese propagandists as I see them?

Exactly correct. The history of the United States is marred with some horrible events. But that does not change the fact that there is a large faction within the Chinese government that views the US as an enemy and second rate power that must be humbled. The US should recognize this and act accordingly.

I've been lurking here for 10 years. For most of that time I was employed as an electrical engineer.

Why should people who are interested in high quality technical discussion surprise you with their presence?

"Hacker" used to mean a lot more than "software developer".

I heard this gem a couple of weeks ago:

"Don't engineer things to failure."

When you find yourself saying "I ought to be able to generalize this", that's when you need to stop and just write the code you need to write NOW. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Yeah, the F-35 is delayed. Originally, Initial Operational Capability declarations for the services was supposed to be in 2010. Now it's 2018 and while the USAF and USMC declared IOC for their variants, the Navy still has not.

This sounds like an article of faith.

Do you really want to have faith in a place that is likely ephemeral?

People once had this same degree of faith in the technology corridor of New Jersey.

True, but that's only for the F-35A. The other two variants are more expensive per copy due to their lower production numbers.

Just FYSA, PAK-FA program was cancelled a few months ago.

To correct and expand upon your point a bit. Yes, the Super Hornet isn't just a limited upgrade.

The Super Hornet is a bigger airframe. You can think of it as "what would happen if we scaled up a Hornet by about 15%?" New wing. New intake design. It required a development program and a flight test program of a kind that you do when you make a new airplane, not upgrade an old one.

The Super Hornet is much more capable. Greater endurance, can have an AESA radar, better ESM suite, better communications.

So why do you think this was covered up?

There are actually quite a few reasons.

Yup, shape is the biggest thing you can control, then radar absorbing and reflecting materials.

One of the big anecdotes from the early days of stealth aircraft development in the 1970s is how at some wavelengths the Hopeless Diamond shape wasn't visible to range radars at all. During one test, the range radar guys went absolutely crazy trying to detect the shape -- which was a pole model, not even flying yet -- and were about to just give up, when suddenly, there it is on their screens, plain as day. Awesome, the Hopeless Diamond lost its stealth! Or not, because what really happened was a bird landed on the pole model.

That's the power of your aircraft's shape.

I've been replying to you, not attacking some strawman editorial, as you put it.

David Axe, the guy you linked to, has a long history of misunderstanding the F-35, like also, this piece.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/test-pilot-admits-the-f-35-...

You described that this was "covered up". You would have only gotten that idea if you read the piece I just linked to.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/read-for-yourself-the-f-35-...

You linked to this yourself.

They don't know, either. They are speculating.

You can't truly know unless you're on the inside, and then, you can't talk.

The F-22 is innately stealthier

You cannot know this unless you are read in to both programs, so this is further speculation. And if you were read into both programs (or either one) you wouldn't say things like this.

We cannot make an F-22 right now. A few years ago, Lockheed Martin was asked how much they thought it would cost to restart F-22 production. The cost was several billion dollars. Plus, the people with the intimate knowledge of how to build an F-22 are dispersed throughout the rest of the industry, retired, or deceased.

You got a link to any of this, or are you just speculating?

The size of the control surfaces was NOT changed after the report that you linked to. Where do you even get this misinformation?

You yourself linked the article that I'm referring to, and you mentioned it originally.

And I am informed on the F-35 and don't think it's wonderful, but I don't think it's a horrible piece of garbage, either.

I think you are making some of the same mistakes as the author of the piece you linked to. You are not understanding the context of the whole test, nor are you reading all of the pilot's observations.

Look at what the pilot says about pitch rate, and I'll pick out the part that makes all the difference. Brackets and emphasis mine:

"Insufficient pitch rate exacerbated the lack of EM. Energy deficit to the bandit would increase over time. Therefore there were multiple occasions where it would have been tactically sound to accept excessive energy loss in order to achieve a fleeting WEZ. [Weapon Engagement Zone]. The CLAW [Control Law] prevented such shot opportunities (and hindered defeating shots)."

In other words, the control laws prevented him from doing what he wanted. But, as he knows, because he's helped develop the aircraft, the control laws are trying to be conservative. Therefore, in his conclusions and recommendations, he says:

"Consider increasing alpha onset." and "Consider increasing pilot yaw rate control authority".

These fixes were put in the CLAW really quickly.

As for your jab about "pilots themselves aren't qualified to criticize the program either", well, look, the reporter didn't do his due diligence. You can criticize anything you like, but when you don't do the work to make your criticisms informed by relevant experience and knowledge, you're just another guy with an opinion and a blog.

Sure. The F-35 is a "fly-by-wire" aircraft, which means that computers are required to direct the movements of the control surfaces. The engineering and mathematics here is not my area (my flight test experience lies in data acquisition, instrumentation, and data analysis/reduction) but I do know that the computers run software -- control laws -- that take the pilot's instructions as inputs, observe the dynamics of the airplane, and issue control commands to the surfaces to execute the inputs.

That wasn't a trial of air-to-air combat. It was a control law test of the F-35. An F-16 aircraft, which was already being used during the mission as a "chase" aircraft for test execution safety reasons, was also used by the F-35 pilot as a visual reference.

There was no coverup. Rather, the reporter who was sent the document and wrote about it simply didn't have the engineering knowledge to understand what he was reading, nor did he ask anyone experienced with flight testing to review what he had been sent and what he had written.

I'm curious why Google is okay with doing more business in China, but they have moral issues doing business with the US Department of Defense?