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The Pentagon's Supersonic, Shape-Shifting Assassin
grammar fascist writes "CNN reports that Northrop Grumman is under contract to build a new supersonic, shape-shifting bomber by 2020. The main innovation is in its single, rotating wing. From the article: '[It] will cruise with its 200-foot-long wing perpendicular to its engines like a normal airplane. But just before the craft breaks the sound barrier, its single wing will swivel around 60 degrees (hence the name) so that one end points forward and the other back. This oblique configuration redistributes the shock waves that pile up in front of a plane at Mach speeds and cause drag. When the Switchblade returns to subsonic speeds, the wing will rotate back to perpendicular.'"
So, having one part of the plane change its angle is now shape shifting? WOW. My laptop is a shapeshifter, because the lid opens. My car must be a shape shifter too, the sunroof can take several positions!
Go America! Fuck Yeah!
I am sure I came accross this in a history book about technology that the Germans had developed in the closing part of WWII.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
How will they cope with the inestability that the rotation of the wing will cause?
Any ideas?
Hmm, a curious asymmetric orientation for an aircraft, swiveling at an angle like that.
Could this translate into anything similarly useful for missile or even rocket design? Like a hypersonic aerospace plane, for instance?
Waste
We clearly see where the priorities of this adminstration are. Forget the rising unemployment rate, the balooning deficit, and the fact that medicare is getting slashed to the bone.
Let's continue to invest in war, because as we all know, war is good business, right?
takes on a whole new meaning here...
Practical and affordable too I bet. Who cares how many kids can't read?
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
Sony thinks they can sell 100 million PS3s. http://gamepro.com/news.cfm?article_id=68990
Registered Linux user #421033
I, for one, welcome our supersonic, shape-shifting overlords.
May I say that I know many strategic points which you may find enlightening!
The fighter for the new millenia brought to you by the idiots who couldn't build the postal service a truck that works 50% of the time.
Seastead this.
More bombs!
I just hope that it's control software won't use Windows 2020 or else it will crash with a blue explosion.
I recall seeing a NASA test plane with a swiveling wing at the EAA OSHKOSH airshow back in the early 80's. It was one place, jet powered, and was flown in the airshow with the wing rotated to a fairly steep angle several times. It was a proof of concept to explore control issues and to prove that the wing need not be swept BACK on both sides to improve aerodynamics at high speeds. They referred to is as the AD-1", an oblique wing aircraft.
--
We don't need no stinkin' sig!
So how is this any better than the swing-wing designs of the F-14 and Tornado? I thought the consensus was that moving wings were a Bad Idea?
Stick Men
Here is a link to the NASA page on the AD-1
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I love the smell of burning pork in the morning.
Shapeshifting? Bit rich I think.
Anyway this has been around for 40 years already http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panavia_Tornado Bore Off.
You beat me to Googling this earlier attempt, but what you get from actually RTFA is that they metion this 1979 atempt and it involed none other than Burt Ratan! (SpaceShip One fame)
The 1979 attempt was hard and unintuitive to control, but the drone attempt will not rely on ingrained pilot intincts and automatically control the pitch over that happens when say you nose the plane up.
Letter To Iran
Been hawking videophones, personal fliers and self-cleaning clothes since the fifties. That I know of.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
What's wrong with hooking the guys loitering on the side of the quickie-mart up with a keg full of dynamite & sending them over ?
Jimminy christmas, it's all over the news now, by the time one of theese things gets built, anyone it would be used against is going to have things in place to shoot down suspicious craft on sight.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Britain - 5.1% Portugal - 4.3% Denmark - 4.2% Ireland - 4.2% Austria - 3.9% Luxembourg - 2.6 Netherlands - 2.4
How about adding an option to post as an ignorant math-challenged fascist instead? 4.6 is nowhere near half of 5.1.
As a side note, France and Germany have higher reported unemployment because they don't count part-time minimum wage jobs. HTFH.
This is exciting and all, but when do I get my VF-1 Valkyrie?
In Firefox's Live Bookmark feed, the title says "The Pentagon's Supersonic, Shape-Shifting Ass ..."
Hmmm - NASA had one of those flying back in 1982!
, 949473,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/archive/printout/0,23657
www.sjbaker.org
I have an RSS feed of slashdot, and this topic came up as
"The Pentagon's Supersonic Shape-Shifting Ass..."
And just to be on topic, does anyone know when this goes on ebay?
The RSS title was, "The Pentagons Supersonic, Shape-Shifting Ass.."
That sounds like a much more interesting story.
X-Wing?!
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Funny, I don't recall ever seeing such an inflammatory title on a /. story in years. Just because the plane is a bomber? Come on now, the technology is cool, even if this is a bit outdated (I've got a swing-wing Estes rocket from when I was a kid, sitting on the shelf right over my desk, for crying out loud...). No need to make a political statement like this - let's keep the discussion a bit more civil, please.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
...and lame suckers who bleed everytime America spends a drop of its budget on preserving its superpower position...like nooobody, not China, Europe or the wacko Iranian dictator would do if they wanted to keep dominance eh? For Christ sake, stop your fucking whining and go feed the poor or teach the iliterates that so bothers you!!
While projects like this can easily be seen as waste, they do a couple things.
This money goes to create hi tech jobs, rewarding people for getting engineering/science/sometimes computing degrees, potentially supporting universities themselves.
These projects generate knowledge by testing out technologies and supporting businesses or universities that sponsor research.
In my opinion, this is not waste, even if the end product never comes to be.
Certainly, this can only go so far, you wouldn't want all your money going to high tech / low success projects, but it is reasonable to have money going towards these things.
Somehow, I find my browser's interpretation more fitting...
Having perused the posts that have been made so far, I'm a bit surprised that everyone is concentrating on the aerospace engineering aspects of the plane. To me, the more interesting facet of this is the idea of having a huge supersonic aircraft loaded with cruise missles and potentially nuclear weapons with no one in the cockpit.
I wish articles like this would focus more on the communications, AI, and general catasrophe-tolerance of the systems that go into a craft like this. There have to be some interesting discussions going on right now in a room somewhere underground about how to protect this thing from unauthorized access, what to do if communication goes out, etc.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
Is ingesting Members are
Two quick points.
1. That's CNN's article title, so that's hardly the Slashdot editors' fault.
2. It's unmanned. Unmanned combat aircraft are used almost exclusively for assassinations, at least currently.
I had done a quick google search and used figures brought up by the BBC. European unemployment rates similar to the U.S. unemployment rate:
.7% from last year's rate, compared with the U.S. unemployment rate, which reduced .5%.
Austria - 4.8% Britain - 5.3% Denmark - 4.8% Netherlands - 5.7% Sweden - 5.5% Switzerland - 3.3%
The overall unemployment rate in the Euro zone is 8% (this is in large part due to high reported unemployment in Germany and France, explained above, 11.0% and 9.3% respectively). However, the Euro zone unemployment rate reduced by
Not to be a total jackass, but I really do have to rub this in your face: the Scandinavian countries have historically had the lowest unemployment (historically lower than that of the United States) and STILL have the largest welfare system of all of Europe. If that doesn't provide a counterexample to your nonsensical "Everyone benefits from a dog-eat-dog world" blind faith in Capitalism-as-God, I don't know what does.
Was I the only one that thought the DOD was developing a T1000?
I recall reading about this design in an aircraft book that was published in the late 70s (the F16 was mentioned in it was the brand new mass-production USAF fighter).
Forget the name of the book unfortunately...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Because massive sideway forces that can't possibly be balanced over the whole length of the wing, and asymmetrically applied lifting forces ARE COOL, especially on a plane that has to cover great distances and carry heavy bombs. I have a better idea -- why don't they just fly a bomber sideways?
I am sure, a giant boomerang version of this is in the works, too.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I think when this monster comes screaming in at several times the speed of sound, scattering thousands of pounds of explosives behind it in an orgy of death and destruction, "Silent" is probably not the adjective that the survivors (if any) will use to describe it.
Lock up your energon cubes.
This seems more like the kind of thing that should be developed under a cloak of secrecy at Area 51. My guess is that it's seen as an outside shot by DARPA, and the $10.3m pocket change they're throwing at it convinces me even more that they're just using this as "gosh ain't we high-tech and futuristic" publicity (or propaganda if you'd rather) blurb.
What seals it though is the 1950's Buck Rogers shiny treatment. Any self-respecting supersonic bomber has to have a mat-black paint job, surely?
Why we need something like this? Does the money need to be spent on R&D to fix a problem that isn't a problem? Since when has this new ability been neccesary?
How about upgrading B1-B first? Russians have Tu-160 long range supersonic bomber that's better than B1-B, and has a longer range that even this "far in the future" contraption.
Compared to B1-B, Tu-160 can:
1. Carry more weapons (payload of 40 metric tons, compared to 34 tons)
2. Fly faster (Mach 2.05 compared to Mach 1.25)
3. Carry nucular weapons, including short range nuclear cruise missiles
And it's also "stealth".
There are only a few aircraft currently in service in the Russian army, but you don't need that many of them, and they're making more.
Most if not all F-18 fighters will have the AIM 120 missile which AFAIK has a two phased guidance procedure. The missile get's the target's location and a rough course uploaded to it by the launching aircraft moments prior to launch. After that, during the first guidance phase, the missile only recieves updates which it uses to adjust the initial uploaded course from the launching aircraft. During the second, terminal phase the missiles own radar locks onto the target and the pilot can move on leaving the missile to guide it self. Theoretically the Aim-120 is a fire and forget weapon even at long range but in practice, if the launching aircraft keeps illuminating the target with his radar through out the first phase, the hit probability will increase considerably especially against fast and highly maneuverable targets like Mig-29s, Su-27/30s, J-10s... never mind something like a Trance 3 Eurofighter with thrustvectoring engines. The launch aircraft does not have to illuminate the target until impact. Interestingly enough the F-14 is slated to be replaced by A/F-18 Super Hornet fighters packing the shorter range AIM-120 missile later this year. Even so the F-18/AIM-120 combination is not really a competitor for the F-14 which, combined with it's Phoenix missles, is still a pretty potent weapons that has few if any peers at the moment since the Russians have apparently stopped developing the MiG-31 at the pace that would have been needed to keep it competitive due to the enormous costs and the Eurofighter and F-22 are still being deployed.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Isn't that same idea already applied to the good ol' F14 Tomcat ? Or is it something completely different ?
Compare the fictional Valkyrie specifications with the real one. The XB-70 could take off with a gross weight of 250 tons, and had a range of 8000 kilometers at Mach 3. It had variable geometry too. At subsonic speeds the wings were flat. At supersonic speeds wing tips folded down, to keep the lift constant at all speeds.
Isn't it funny how reality is better than fiction?
...our new supersonic, shapeshifting overlords...
I regret spilling a glass of ginger ale on an achritect!
And you claim to be North American? It's "YEEEEHAAAW!!!"
It was ARPANET when it was first set up. ARPA didn't acquire its ominous D until a little later.
Is amazing...I mean who doesn't want to hear about the pentagon's supersonic shapeshifting ass?
hitter is more like it... Don't ask don't tell...
Interesting that this plane seems to be "outed" before it's even built. I suppose the DOD will go employ the usal Nellis/where ever cloak methods during the sanity-checking phase...
At least the F-14 and F-111 were "supersonic swing-wing" fighter/bomber, respectively.
But, WHO are the supposed targets of THIS technology. Time to start racking the people for more taxes for weapons systems that OUGHT NOT/DON'T need to exist...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This plane is called the scissor wing and it already been flown by NASA in the 1980s. It was a overcomplicated, and like the forward swept wing, and was discarded. Although, maybe with the better computers and composites materials of today, it may be fesable again. Also, the Tu-160 NATO code named Blackjack, is a very big copy of the B-1A. Being big and non-stealthy, it is a very BIG target for SAMs and AAMs. Also, while it is supersonic, it can only do it for a short period of time before it runs out of fuel. Really, you need a hypersonic bomber, or spaceplane, Mach 6 or faster to overcome SAMs, AAMs and AAA.
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/AD-1/Medium /ECN-13302B.jpg
As a Finn I was just wondering, at what time where you in sweden?
;-)
Because when Wartburg was a popular car in Finland, it would date to 1950s, that would make you a really old slashdotter. Mayby you are mixing Wartburg with Lada? Lada was a soviet made car which was also imported to Finland, but it was never popular, and if you mixed those two, then it would date you to 1980s.
Thought, you are quite right about the fact that having and driving a car in both Sweden and Finland is very expensive, but that's because the car taxes double the cars price and gasolines price, which btw. is just right, because personal driving is expensive to goverment (roads) and to enviroment (polution) and thus taxes should be taken to compensate those costs. Now days there thought is talk about moving to strictly taxing gasoline, and not cars, that would be logical, and it would make people think more about having a own car when a liter would cost from 2 to 3. The reason why americans are driving SUVs is because US goverment is subsidizing personal driving, by not taxing car owners the cost that are associated with using cars.
On a note, I too think that scandinavian countries tax too much, and there is too much goverment control, our unemployment rate is too high, and the official numbers are cleaned by putting people in to education and to early pension. Thought, I think that american system isn't the answer, thought it has some good points, the society should take care of it's weaks and unfortunates, and provide a minimum level of living, that is the only way in which we can say that everybody is in the same line in life and that people try and take risk in their lifes, without worrying ending up in the street.
PS. The most popular car in Finland in now days is Toyota, same too in america, or it will be soon
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
That's what they should call that. The leafy bug.
judging by the picture I'm about to give you, the concept UAV talked about above isn't the first "shape shifter" in the military. Just take a look at this Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey.
r craft/images/v-22-dvic281.jpg
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ai
Right before the speed of sound the whole wing swivels 60 degrees? How many times can it do that before failure? Great concept but considering the amount of fraud and waste going on in government projects I sure as hell wouldn't want to fly in one.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Actually, with SUVs no longer being "in vogue" in the U.S. - I think you'll find quite a few people of limited incomes driving them. The used car lots near me are overfilled with early 2000 model mid-sized SUVs that they're more than happy to resell, especially to people with "less than perfect credit".
"Keeping up with the Jones'" doesn't equate to buying some 2001 or 2002 model Mitsubishi or Nissan SUV. Those are purchased today because someone has few options in the "under $15,000" range for a reasonably nice-looking vehicle that has a decent chance of being reliable for a few more years.
If they want something that will fly around for hours and then go quickly to a target why not just carry cruise missiles in a slow plane like they do already?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
But just before the craft breaks the sound barrier, its single wing will swivel around 60 degrees (hence the name) so that one end points forward and the other back.
I'm sure their engineers have worked long and hard, but hey! That should be NINETY degrees to make one end point forward and the other back! NINETY!
What's happening to engineering? This isn't exactly rocket science.
NASA AD-1 - from 19-frigg'n-80 - and *that* aircraft was predated by an RPV from 1976!
Hey, I've got a great idea for a plane that combines forward thrust with a rotary wing that increases lift and reduces fuel consumption. I call it... "the autogyro". I wonder how many the Pentagon will want...
Clear, Dark Skies
The unemployement rate is... semi-useful.
Unemployement can go up, while the unemployement rate goes down.
Basically: Unemployment statistics indicate how many (unemployed) people are seeking employment for pay. This number is only tangentially related to the number of people who do not have jobs.
I'd encourage you to read more about it here
As for Medicare, a quick Google search would show you that the Gov't has cut spending in the past (Feb. 2006-ish) and is currently trying to cut it again.
Last but not least, military spending as a percentage of GDP is much less relevant than military spending as a percentage of government spending.
P.S. Kossack is generally spelled with a "C" Ie "Cossack"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
That's why.
Clear, Dark Skies
Boy, I'm glad I'm not the only one old enough to remember that plane.
Clear, Dark Skies
Oh boy, just what the American taxpayer needs to pay for -- another useless war toy to feed the military-industrial complex and encourage more wars.
:-(
What, are the 50-year old B-52 bombers not capable of dropping bombs? Are the newer B-1 and B-2 bombers inadequate? Why the hell is the US the only country stupid enough to waste their resources on such war toys? Is the fact that the US spends as much on defense[sic] as roughly THE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED not enough?!
Meanwhile, the US runs huge budget deficits, talks about killing (err, I mean "privatizing") social security, and all the time our schools (and economy) deteriorate, and tens of millions of Americans go without health care.
We've got our head stuck up our ass -- and Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and the other military contractors laugh all the way to the bank...
You are correct, this is a sixty-two year old idea: http://www.luft46.com/bv/bvp202.html And NASA had the Oblique Wing aircraft they flight tested in the 1970's: http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/AD-1/
give it up for the military-industrial complex which is making BILLIONS of $$$ building things that blow up. or building things that blow other things up.
oh, it's only 10 million. well, the design anyways. before the bait-and-switch.
> For years, the U.S. military has wanted a plane that could loiter just outside enemy territory for more than a dozen hours and, on command, hurtle toward a target faster than the speed of sound. And then level it.
uh-huh! i want one of them, too!
Free Manning, jail Obama.
"CNN reports that Northrop Grumman is under contract to build a new supersonic, shape-shifting bomber by 2020. The main innovation is in its single, rotating wing. From the article: '[It] will cruise with its 200-foot-long wing perpendicular to its engines like a normal airplane. But just before the craft breaks the sound barrier, its single wing will swivel around 60 degrees (hence the name) so that one end points forward and the other back. This oblique configuration redistributes the shock waves that pile up in front of a plane at Mach speeds and cause drag. When the Switchblade returns to subsonic speeds, the wing will rotate back to perpendicular.'"
Let's change that to read: "its 200-foot-long wing at right angles to its fuselage like a normal airplane". Otherwise I get an image of the wing being in a vertical up and down position relative to the fuselage.
And: "the wing will rotate back to the right angle position".
Writing readable English should not be that difficult.
Fata viam invenient.
You do realize that federal funding of education is only a tiny percentage of total education funding?
Most of the funds for education in the United States come from property taxes.
Clear, Dark Skies
US tops world in school spending.
Clear, Dark Skies
I agree. Our military spending prevented 9/11 from happening. And boy, did we whip bin Laden's ass for even thinking about it! We put his shrunken head on the Washington Monument! Let that shit be a lesson to all you terrorisms!
Put another way: You think Bush dropping his pants and waving his tiny little nuclear warhead around is going to scare the religious jihadists? We're talking RELIGIOUS WINGNUT SUICIDE BOMBERS here. They don't care what happens to the rest of the world after they leave it. They think, for whatever reason, that they're doing the work of their god. Imagine if Hannity had an army of fervent followers who would be willing and eager to literally die for him.
Put down the crack pipe and the Tiger Balm, Rush. Who do you think is buying the debt that is used to pay for our military misadventures? I can't believe it's not
Newsflash, O'Falafel: Thanks to the Bush Administration's wanton spending spree, China could crash our economy into a zillion little shards . They have a strong economic incentive not to do that, but they could if they so chose. Bush and Cheney have given them that power over us.
Shape shifting implies something more complex than rotating parts.
That should read "rotating wing".. I somewhat expected something which turns into a cessna, then a commercial liner, than a wright flyer.. not some dinky rotating wing.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
That is the Scissor Wing Transport.
Amazing, what started out as an efficient way of moving people around the planet has been corrupted into a weapon of war.
WHEN WILL WE EVER LEARN!
Randy
The new Apple laptops have batteries that buldge and lift and seperate, just sitting there without moving! :P
This is the only thing for which a plane like this might have purpose. I mean, assuming they left their photon torpedoes in their other ships.
I appreciate the interesting engineering in this, but in a world which you don't have any real conventional armies to use it against that couldn't be easily decimated with our existing aircraft... well, I guess I just wonder if there wasn't anything else we could've spent the dough on.
Did you know that Lenin was convinced of the inevibility of the world communism, a midget called Napoleon was convinced that he's unbeatable and the sun was never to set over the British Empire? Every superpower has fallen and so will US. History is a bitch that likes to repeat herself, but don't fret the next superpower-to-be is just behind you in that queue.
don't forget about the B-1. it had swing wings too.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Last time I read something about the Switchblade, it was more like a swing-wing design with a wing configuration designed to match the X-29's abilities, now it's a UAV flying wing?
Task Mangler
LOL! http://img60.imageshack.us/img60/1021/ass9sn.jpg
"Also, the "poverty level" is the biggest lie that's come from the Democrats in my lifetime. The poverty level is plenty to afford a car, decent apartment, cable and a cellphone for each kid. There are no poor people in the U.S. or Europe."
You are either trolling, or blindingly ignorant. But i repeat myself.
I make well above the official poverty line, and on my own cannot afford a car, decent apartment, cable and cellphones, much less care and feeding of the implied children.
Popular Science had an article on a supersonic airliner with a scissor wing (one wing tip forward and the other back) in the 1970's. It was a very interesting idea and it is also known as an oblique wing, and you can find a lot of NASA references to it as oblique.m /index.html
. htm
Here are some pictures of the flying prototypes:
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/AD-1/
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/AD-1/Mediu
It even inspired an Estes model rocket design where the wing would deployafter boost and glide back to Earth.
http://www.acsupplyco.com/estes/estes_scissorwing
...well, that is unless you think planes can't go faster than sound.
You'd think that a quaint 50s term like "sound barrier" would have died off by now, but no.
Well, I guess my plane is a shape-shifter too.
Except I call my super-duper morphing acuators "ailerons" and "flaps".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Well, who ever said that there will never be another conventional war?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Do we really need another billion dollar plane? Don't we have Billion dollar bombs? We should be investing more in satilites with bomb dropping capabilties and not more jets.Every country in the world knows we America have nukes, biological, chemical and other nasty bombs, having another jet makes no differnce in my opinon for a deterent.
About 50% of all loans are defunct or bad loans, if major banks fail and billions are lost, China will
be forced to sell the US BONDS to get the cash to prop up the bank again.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"CNN reports that Seagate is under contract to build a new supermegabytic, data-shifting hard disk drive by 2006. The main innovation is in its single, rotating platter. From the article: '[It] will cruise with its 500-gigabyte-long platter perpendicular to the label glued on top like a new and expensive hard drive. But just before the drive breaks the speed barrier, its single platter will swivel around 60 degrees (hence the name) so that one end points forward and the other back. This oblique configuration redistributes the shock waves that pile up in front of a drive at 21,000rpm speeds and cause data loss. When the Switchblade returns to submegabytic speeds, the platter will rotate back to perpendicular. The main challenge will be guessing if the bits are parralel, perpendicular, or plain offtopic.'"
Military overexpenditure will soon be the end of us. See Rome, see Napoleonic France, see Nazi Germany. All empires fall from overextending their military. None have ever survived it.
It's a copy of the BV P202. Here is a link. http://www.luft46.com/bv/bvp202.html
And this should get me something for "informative", if anything does!
I've been working on...
We can barely keep an occupying force together in one country of 24 million.
So fuck off out of that country and stop interfering with other countries, mmmkay?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
"There are many more then 38 Million SUV drivers." - How many? Reference? Actually I'd be interested to know the figure of SUV *owners* because I sat in a friend's Land Rover once and drove it up the drive for 5 minutes so technically I could be described as an "SUV driver (once)" but I don't think we want to include people like me in the stats we're interested in...
Does anyone want to make a bet on the likelihood it will be stolen by a guy called Miles Mayhem?
Sorry, I'm an immature adult.
And what's more, this plane can time-travel back to 1953 where it's relevant.
I want one for Xmas! Or \mas! Or /mas!
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Don't you mean, rather, "If the current U.S. regime decides to invade another country on false pretense?" Or, "If the U.S. has to clean up another mess of it's own making?" Or, "If the president's approval rating drops too low?"
The American people have a right to know WHY we need to spend more on our military than most of the rest of the world combined, and I'm afraid that if we really knew the truth, we wouldn't like it one bit. Yes, in fact I'm quite certain.
We are only reaping what we have sewn in the violence perpetrated against us. The American public is paying the price for the "leadership" we have chosen.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Interesting. Want to know whats worse? The fact of the supposed retirement of the f-14 . But the problem is that all the f-14d's are being sent to the boneyard as is. Not stripped of their electronics. Planes sent there are stripped. Why send the f-14d's there whole and fully operational. I say there is something fishy going on.
Similarly, to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq is an appropriate use of US tax money. However, to rebuild any infrastructure in the US would be socialism.
Similarly, we have a responsibility to free the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's tyranny because those people deserve human rights and we have a leadership role when it comes to human rights in the world. However, we can inprison them indefinitely without trial, and interrogate them with what would be considered torture in the US, because they are not Americans, and it's not the responsibility of the US government to secure human rights for non-Americans.
Keep going over those basic arguments until you've memorized them. It might help to print them out and carry them around with you, in case you don't have 24/7 access to Fox News.
Sorry if this is a late dupe, but Northrop Grumman patented a thing they called Switchblade back in 1999.
Guess that version didn't pan out.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
There's also another factor at work, in my opinion: the US is essentially underwriting the defense of the entire free world, and for good reason. I don't think we're interested in instilling fear in free nations so much as insulating ourselves from their utter fecklessness. If we had to talk the likes of France, Germany, and a number of others into helping us in something vital in their -- much less our -- defense, we'd be making a risky bet. Better to invest in our own ability to project force on their behalf than count on them being there when it really counts. It also has the side benefit of the US being able to project humanitarian aid swiftly and on a global scale. The big tsunami was a good example. The US had a carrier groups there helping rescue, treat, and supply people within 48 hours. The UN was still holding organizing meetings two weeks later (and coincidently taking credit for the help the US military was already delivering). I view the US military, in part, as in-kind foreign aid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-111
XaNk: now I remember why I hated the girls in high school
XaNk: because none of them would talk to me
from the folks who brought you napalm and unmanned predator drones, here is another way to maim brown people in other countries without having to see them.
A lot of writers have missed the point of the proposed vehicle. It is an unmanned vehicle desigend to loiter for long periods of time while having the ability to strike quickly. It will be usefull against conventional as well as unconventional targets. With today's precision munitions it will be able to strike a range of targets based upon the threat. In effect it will do what we are doing today but more efficiently and without the risk to a crew. Saying that money could be better spent elsewhere is rather naive. There will always be a threat somewhere, at least in our lifetime. The article doesn't provide enough information for us to determine if it is a viable and cost effective solution so we can't say for sure if it warrants testing. In theory, this design will allow for a lighter and stronger design than a conventional swing wing design. Being lighter and stronger allows for greater payload and/or range so it may work out well.
"The reason why americans are driving SUVs is because US goverment is subsidizing personal driving, by not taxing car owners the cost that are associated with using cars."
First of all, you equate "not taxing" with "subsidizing". The US definitely has plenty of corporate welfare programs, but not taxing something is not the same thing as subsidizing it.
"that everybody is in the same line in life and that people try and take risk in their lifes, without worrying ending up in the street."
The possibility of ending up on the streets is not only a good motivator for taking risks, it's a good motivator for making those risks pay off. I disagree with your premious that a welfare system encourages people to take risk; I think it does just the opposite. Social safety nets are a good thing, but life-long entitlement systems destroy cultures and remove the need to strive not only for survival, but personal growth.
I guess it's desirable in your country "that everyone is in the same line". I think people in Europe often think of the US as a European country on another continent. This is not true. The US is very diverse, so diverse racially and culturally that there is no possibility of defining a "same line" for everyone to be in. Being forced to be in the "same line" is the reason most of our ancestors left their old countries to come here. I have no desire to be in the "same line" with everyone else, I desire a system that lets me be all I can be and challenges me to become more than I am.
Hint: The parent post has NOTHING to do with the topic at hand, so whoever gave it +Insightful needs to have his/her mod privileges revoked. Moderate and Meta-moderate accordingly.
China? North Korea? Possibly even India down the road? Right now we're already at war with North Korea (okay, there has been a cease-fire for decades now but the war^H^H^Hpolice action is still on) and in a very real economic war with both China and India (in which many Americans are helping us to lose), plus China has been sabre-rattling since the '90s.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
A commercial pizza delivery version would capture the hearts of the overweight American population and seal the deal here...
ROTFLMAO!
My newsfeed truncated the article title to " The Pentagon's Supersonic, Shape-Shifting Ass..."
So that's where all our tax money is going!!!
Outed? The prototype was available for public view from NASA 20 years ago. Saw it in public at Moffet NAS back then. Looked more like a pair of scissors than a knife to me.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Any load that falls far short of that, does very little wear. It's not straining the pavement.
The rest of your post is just oft-repeated chicken littling. You realize the sky is cleaner now then it's been in decades (at least where the economy is strong enough to allow people to run clean engines)?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sure don't need any extra heating there in that cockpit with that laptop there if its a macbook ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
People are saying this isn't new, it was tested by NASA in the 1980s following research in the 1970s. Well, IIRC, It was Barnes Wallis who developed this concept for supersonic aircraft in the 1950s. He was British, which I guess is why you 'mericans pathologically overlook his work. In fact if it wasn't for the Brits handing over all their supersonic research as part of a post-war deal (fair enough I guess, we needed your money to rebuild our country and the rest of Europe), you probably would have been beaten to the punch for breaking the sound barrier in the first place.
Mind you, BW was against the TSR-2 and so lent a lot of clout the US argument against that effort, so he's got some brownie points against him in my book. But that's an argument for another day.
I not only talked to Jones, I got funding mandated to Ames to fund supersonic testing of the oblique all wing design as a consequence of my conversations with him. The poor SOBs at Ames ended up getting some assholes at NASA HQ on a revenge kick by docking their discretionary budget by the amount that congress mandated. R. T. Jones told me, and I believe him, that the eliptical oblique ALL WING (read my fucking response) was proposed almost as soon as the principle of the oblique wing was discovered optimal.
Seastead this.
dont they have enuff of them. and i believe most of them have never been utilized in real situations
What is the purpose of this plane that our existing arsenal is ill-equipped for? In other words, we should be prepared for... what, in your estimation?