Airplanes can already be built that will pull 30+ Gs, that is the easy part... how about 50? 100?
Sound crazy? Not really. How about an airplane without "wings", one with an adaptive surface that can be adjusted by the computer into almost any aerodynamic shape?
Such things have been tested at small scale, they do work, but you could never put a pilot into them. They can change direction on a dime because unlike airplanes with ailerons, rudders, elevators, etc, the whole aircraft can change the shape of its body to produce lift in another direction.
The Russians have shown what fully vectored thrust can do, the F-22 actually doesn't have as good a thrust vector unit as the Russians have, but it has many things they don't, so overall it is a much better package.
What about an airplane that can direct thrust 270 degrees up and down, side to side, that can change its shape, and overall is cheap because there is no pilot?
Look at the Predator and Reaper, they still look like airplanes because the people in charge only know "that" is what an airplane should look like.
Look at the old YF-23, back during the ATF competition. Many say it lost because it didn't "look" like a fighter, it was too "different". Maybe so, but it points out that anything too "different" is looked down on.
Remove the human and aircraft can be many things they are currently not. It will take time and R&D and it will take imagination, but it can be done.
Get the cost down, build them in huge numbers... they can overwhem a superior force, even one with better pilots.
A good example, abit not airplanes, would be the Germans and Americans in WWII. The M4 Sherman tank was CLEARLY outclassed in France in 1944 against the Mark V Panther and Mark VI Tiger tanks, it often took 10 M4 tanks to knock out a single Tiger tank.
The Germans built a few thousand Tigers, we built 44,000 Shermans... We overwhelmed them with numbers and brute force...
Trained pilots and skill account for a lot, but raw numbers can make up for a lot of that.
Helicopters have suffered for a long time from a lack of R&D, but some has been done...
The RAH-66 Comanche would have been wonderful, if it hadn't been killed, it was semi-stealthy and had a superior rotor system that allowed it to do things nothing else the military has can do. But it simply fell victim to budget cuts and a military that loves fast fancy airplanes rather than flingwings...
Will it enter service? Hopefully, it really is pretty cool.
What you think of as limits to airplane performance is true only because of the old thinking of manned airplanes. I am a commercial airplane and helicopter pilot, flight instructor in both, and I see the future is dim for pilots in the air of any kind. Yes, a pilot is superior to programming, but 1 pilot isn't superior to 10 super cheap and super maneuverable drones.
Yes, and the same thing killed the first female naval fighter pilot...
She waved off a carrier landing, yawed the airplane, stalled one engine, gave it full afterburner and rolled the airplane over because it doesn't have enough rudder for the spacing of the engines. The RIO pulled the ejection rope and survived, but because the pilot leaves the plane 0.4 seconds after the RIO (as planned), she ejected right into the water and was killed instantly.
It doesn't help that the F-14A/B has the old Martian Baker GRU-7A ejection seat which sucks compared to the ACES II.
Had she been in an F-15, she would have survived because the ACES II can do an inverted 140ft ejection and thrust vector around to level... The Martian Baker cannot.
---------
Back on point... yes, pilot training matters, a good pilot in an average airplane will beat a poor pilot in the best airplane...
However, given equal pilot skill, the F-14 will lose to most true fighter airplanes from the era, unless in long range engagements using its AIM-154, it was really a bomber interceptor, not a fighter.
True, but an AIM-9 Sidewinder doesn't actually have a very large explosive...
And it wouldn't be that hard to put such an explosive in a drone, and it wouldn't be that hard to put a small rocket motor for a final speed boost on a drone for just such a use.
If you have 10 of them in the sky, the manned fighter can probably dodge 2 or 3 of them... but 5 of them?
One of the things is... an AIM-9 is actually not that hard to dodge... the trick is to dodge two of them...
One of the things they teach is that if you are firing on a highly manouverouble fighter such as a Mig-29, fire one, wait 2 seconds, fire a second... the Mig-29 will use up its energy dodging the first and be unable to avoid the second.
The F-14 was fine for what it was designed for, high speed interception of aircraft and long range engagement using the AIM-154 Phoenix missile.
It was not a dogfighter, regardless of what the movie Top Gun tried to show, it handled like a pig and could not out turn the Mig-29 or Su-27.
The F-16 is a nice airplane, but fragile and has horrible endurance, it has to carry drop tanks to fly any real distance and can't carry many bombs when it does. It is a nice fighter when clean, useless when loaded down with tanks and bombs. It is a bit too small for a multi-roll fighter bomber.
The F-18? Don't even get me started... too small, underpowered, etc... The Super Hornet addressed some of those problems, but frankly the Navy has played second fiddle to the Air Force for a long time.
All too often people can't see the forest for the trees...
With enough cheap drones (cheap compared to the cost of manned fighters), you can simply ram the enemy fighters. Production lines can produce more drones, but it takes years to replace a trained pilot.
The war of the robots is coming, the first nation to field battle ready drones in huge numbers on land, sea, and air, will walk over everyone else.
That's fine, then hit him with the wrench until he tells you were the passwords are written down.
And if he no longer has the passwords, then no, you won't get money, but he'll still end up dead, you would never leave him as a living witness anyway.
So what? You simply don't understand the harm that you'd do to the overall economy, your ideas would cost jobs, destroy wealth, and reduce the standard of living for everyone.
Something is wrong with your numbers... If solar was that cheap, it would be installed everywhere, it would be obvious and cheap and everyone would be doing it.
I've priced solar installed on my home. At my current power rates, the break even ranges from 15 years to never, depending on what assumptions you use.
Solar doesn't cost 4 cents per kWh anywhere, if it did, power stations everywhere would have them very, very quickly.
I would disagree with your idea that subsidies and tax breaks would raise the price of fossil fuels 2-3x.
They are expensive in the rest of the world due to taxes, not because they actually cost all that much.
Coal, oil, and natural gas are cheap, that is all there is to it.
I live in Texas, I'm part of a non-profit electric co-op, I pay 11 cents per kwh for power and get a check at the end of the year for my share of any left over profits, my net cost is actually a tad under 10 cents per kwh after that.
My co-op has installed a limited test solar panel generation facility, they have reported their total cost of power from that facility in 2013 (it was installed in 2012) was 25 cents per kwh.
Solar is not cheap, not by a long shot. Wind is cheaper, but not as cheap as coal is. They are working on it, some day it may well be cheaper than coal, but we aren't there yet.
How you live your life and how capital is invested in companies is not the same thing.
If you take half of a company's profits, then the investors in that company have to decide if the return on investment is still worthwhile. They may well put their money into another company that has no such restrictions and make more profit.
Capital gets invested in projects that return enough in profit to make the investment worthwhile. Take away half that profit and the company may no longer be viable, even if it still makes profits.
Sometimes that is the point of punishment, to get them to change their behavior... but sometimes it isn't...
After all, when you put someone to death, clearly you aren't going to get them to change anything (other than prevent them from doing it again).
And frankly, it doesn't seem to deter much crime either, the general view seems to be that people don't think they'll get caught or don't think it will happen to them. So punishing someone else doesn't seem to do much outside of minor punishments for minor crimes.
Now, that being said, if you want the oil companies to change their behavior, you can do that several ways. One is to change the "rules". After all, if an oil spill happens, that does not mean, by default, that they broke the rules. Accidents happen, it doesn't mean there is always "fault".
One way is to make the punishments harsh for breaking any existing rules... Which is fine, but if you make the punishments too harsh, they either stop being effective or, in the case of large companies, it becomes cheaper to buy off Congress to get their way.
Some 401(k)s are low risk, but plenty are not. After all, in 2009, a whole lot of them went down a lot in value. If they were such low risk, that wouldn't have happened.
Your comment that renewable energy is cheaper than oil and nuclear indicates that you have an agenda... No, they really aren't, if they were, companies would be making money hand over fist with them...
In truth, your comments and views seem to be of a socialist nature... which isn't a crime, but we don't live in a socialist country.
You might be surprised, take a look at some large company 401(k)s. Many of them offer only limited investment choices and some of the larger companies are in most, if not all of them.
Most people who have a 401(k) can't just trade in it like a normal account, they have sometimes 10 or fewer things they can invest in.
As for Exxon going to zero, that would have massive and wide ranging effects, far beyond the value of Exxon stock. That you don't understand this is ok, many people don't understand this... but it means that you shouldn't be talking about such things that you don't understand.
That is a nice idea, but now how the world works...
Your average investor who owns stock via their 401(k) or other mutual fund investment isn't able to make such choices...
You would harm the economy and put investment capital at risk in new ways, the law of unintended consequences applies here. Your ideals are good, but your methods would have results far different from what you intend.
Exxon is publicly owned (and widely held), if you destroy it, then what you're really doing is taking it all out of millions of American's (and people from around the world) savings.
You could, perhaps, make the argument that a privately owned corporation could be put under such rules, but if you go around and start playing whack-a-mole with large public companies, you're really just hurting everyone.
If your bank screws up and moves the decimal place, that can be undone (and will, the laws and history of such mistakes are firmly on your side).
The reason the US Dollar has more "real" value than Bitcoin is not because some fancy pant suit from the Fed or Tresury says so... it has more real value because it is backed by 3 things...
1. The natural resources of the United States of America
2. The productivity and output of the population of the United States of America
3. The military strength of the US armed forces and ability to defend the above 2 items along with our trade routes around the world.
Many people are demanding such things, and have no idea of what would REALLY happen if they got them.
As the old saying goes, "be careful what you wish for, you just might get it".
The idea that only people who pay taxes can vote is not completely stupid, there are way too many uneducated people spouting off nonsense and many of them vote, and frankly, probably shouldn't given that they are clueless about what they vote for.
Slashdot Mirror
We as in the United States of America, as in, without us, Europe would be speaking German right now...
That, and my grandfather fought for the RAF before America was even in the war, he went over and volunteered in 1940.
So yea, we...
Airplanes can already be built that will pull 30+ Gs, that is the easy part... how about 50? 100?
Sound crazy? Not really. How about an airplane without "wings", one with an adaptive surface that can be adjusted by the computer into almost any aerodynamic shape?
Such things have been tested at small scale, they do work, but you could never put a pilot into them. They can change direction on a dime because unlike airplanes with ailerons, rudders, elevators, etc, the whole aircraft can change the shape of its body to produce lift in another direction.
The Russians have shown what fully vectored thrust can do, the F-22 actually doesn't have as good a thrust vector unit as the Russians have, but it has many things they don't, so overall it is a much better package.
What about an airplane that can direct thrust 270 degrees up and down, side to side, that can change its shape, and overall is cheap because there is no pilot?
Look at the Predator and Reaper, they still look like airplanes because the people in charge only know "that" is what an airplane should look like.
Look at the old YF-23, back during the ATF competition. Many say it lost because it didn't "look" like a fighter, it was too "different". Maybe so, but it points out that anything too "different" is looked down on.
Remove the human and aircraft can be many things they are currently not. It will take time and R&D and it will take imagination, but it can be done.
Get the cost down, build them in huge numbers... they can overwhem a superior force, even one with better pilots.
A good example, abit not airplanes, would be the Germans and Americans in WWII. The M4 Sherman tank was CLEARLY outclassed in France in 1944 against the Mark V Panther and Mark VI Tiger tanks, it often took 10 M4 tanks to knock out a single Tiger tank.
The Germans built a few thousand Tigers, we built 44,000 Shermans... We overwhelmed them with numbers and brute force...
Trained pilots and skill account for a lot, but raw numbers can make up for a lot of that.
Helicopters have suffered for a long time from a lack of R&D, but some has been done...
The RAH-66 Comanche would have been wonderful, if it hadn't been killed, it was semi-stealthy and had a superior rotor system that allowed it to do things nothing else the military has can do. But it simply fell victim to budget cuts and a military that loves fast fancy airplanes rather than flingwings...
Want to see a cool advance?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
That uses some new technology that has been developed into this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Will it enter service? Hopefully, it really is pretty cool.
What you think of as limits to airplane performance is true only because of the old thinking of manned airplanes. I am a commercial airplane and helicopter pilot, flight instructor in both, and I see the future is dim for pilots in the air of any kind. Yes, a pilot is superior to programming, but 1 pilot isn't superior to 10 super cheap and super maneuverable drones.
That is the future, like it or not.
Yes, and the same thing killed the first female naval fighter pilot...
She waved off a carrier landing, yawed the airplane, stalled one engine, gave it full afterburner and rolled the airplane over because it doesn't have enough rudder for the spacing of the engines. The RIO pulled the ejection rope and survived, but because the pilot leaves the plane 0.4 seconds after the RIO (as planned), she ejected right into the water and was killed instantly.
It doesn't help that the F-14A/B has the old Martian Baker GRU-7A ejection seat which sucks compared to the ACES II.
Had she been in an F-15, she would have survived because the ACES II can do an inverted 140ft ejection and thrust vector around to level... The Martian Baker cannot.
---------
Back on point... yes, pilot training matters, a good pilot in an average airplane will beat a poor pilot in the best airplane...
However, given equal pilot skill, the F-14 will lose to most true fighter airplanes from the era, unless in long range engagements using its AIM-154, it was really a bomber interceptor, not a fighter.
True, but an AIM-9 Sidewinder doesn't actually have a very large explosive...
And it wouldn't be that hard to put such an explosive in a drone, and it wouldn't be that hard to put a small rocket motor for a final speed boost on a drone for just such a use.
If you have 10 of them in the sky, the manned fighter can probably dodge 2 or 3 of them... but 5 of them?
One of the things is... an AIM-9 is actually not that hard to dodge... the trick is to dodge two of them...
One of the things they teach is that if you are firing on a highly manouverouble fighter such as a Mig-29, fire one, wait 2 seconds, fire a second... the Mig-29 will use up its energy dodging the first and be unable to avoid the second.
The F-14 was fine for what it was designed for, high speed interception of aircraft and long range engagement using the AIM-154 Phoenix missile.
It was not a dogfighter, regardless of what the movie Top Gun tried to show, it handled like a pig and could not out turn the Mig-29 or Su-27.
The F-16 is a nice airplane, but fragile and has horrible endurance, it has to carry drop tanks to fly any real distance and can't carry many bombs when it does. It is a nice fighter when clean, useless when loaded down with tanks and bombs. It is a bit too small for a multi-roll fighter bomber.
The F-18? Don't even get me started... too small, underpowered, etc... The Super Hornet addressed some of those problems, but frankly the Navy has played second fiddle to the Air Force for a long time.
^ This...
All too often people can't see the forest for the trees...
With enough cheap drones (cheap compared to the cost of manned fighters), you can simply ram the enemy fighters. Production lines can produce more drones, but it takes years to replace a trained pilot.
The war of the robots is coming, the first nation to field battle ready drones in huge numbers on land, sea, and air, will walk over everyone else.
People who live below their means... Just because you make 6 figures doesn't mean you have anything at the end of the day.
Try making 6 figures but living on 5 figures, then do that for 20 years, you can retire just fine at 50 doing that (if you start at 30).
He lives with his mother... You don't have to hurt him, you only have to hurt her...
Ask yourself, would you trade your mother's life for any amount of money? I know I wouldn't...
That's fine, then hit him with the wrench until he tells you were the passwords are written down.
And if he no longer has the passwords, then no, you won't get money, but he'll still end up dead, you would never leave him as a living witness anyway.
So what? You simply don't understand the harm that you'd do to the overall economy, your ideas would cost jobs, destroy wealth, and reduce the standard of living for everyone.
Something is wrong with your numbers... If solar was that cheap, it would be installed everywhere, it would be obvious and cheap and everyone would be doing it.
I've priced solar installed on my home. At my current power rates, the break even ranges from 15 years to never, depending on what assumptions you use.
Solar doesn't cost 4 cents per kWh anywhere, if it did, power stations everywhere would have them very, very quickly.
I would disagree with your idea that subsidies and tax breaks would raise the price of fossil fuels 2-3x.
They are expensive in the rest of the world due to taxes, not because they actually cost all that much.
Coal, oil, and natural gas are cheap, that is all there is to it.
I live in Texas, I'm part of a non-profit electric co-op, I pay 11 cents per kwh for power and get a check at the end of the year for my share of any left over profits, my net cost is actually a tad under 10 cents per kwh after that.
My co-op has installed a limited test solar panel generation facility, they have reported their total cost of power from that facility in 2013 (it was installed in 2012) was 25 cents per kwh.
Solar is not cheap, not by a long shot. Wind is cheaper, but not as cheap as coal is. They are working on it, some day it may well be cheaper than coal, but we aren't there yet.
Actually, that isn't true...
How you live your life and how capital is invested in companies is not the same thing.
If you take half of a company's profits, then the investors in that company have to decide if the return on investment is still worthwhile. They may well put their money into another company that has no such restrictions and make more profit.
Capital gets invested in projects that return enough in profit to make the investment worthwhile. Take away half that profit and the company may no longer be viable, even if it still makes profits.
Sometimes that is the point of punishment, to get them to change their behavior... but sometimes it isn't...
After all, when you put someone to death, clearly you aren't going to get them to change anything (other than prevent them from doing it again).
And frankly, it doesn't seem to deter much crime either, the general view seems to be that people don't think they'll get caught or don't think it will happen to them. So punishing someone else doesn't seem to do much outside of minor punishments for minor crimes.
Now, that being said, if you want the oil companies to change their behavior, you can do that several ways. One is to change the "rules". After all, if an oil spill happens, that does not mean, by default, that they broke the rules. Accidents happen, it doesn't mean there is always "fault".
One way is to make the punishments harsh for breaking any existing rules... Which is fine, but if you make the punishments too harsh, they either stop being effective or, in the case of large companies, it becomes cheaper to buy off Congress to get their way.
Yes, and those assessments are often terrible and on larger properties fought in court all the time.
Plus, it is one thing to value land and the improvements on it, it is another thing to value and price a business. That is much harder to do.
Some 401(k)s are low risk, but plenty are not. After all, in 2009, a whole lot of them went down a lot in value. If they were such low risk, that wouldn't have happened.
Your comment that renewable energy is cheaper than oil and nuclear indicates that you have an agenda... No, they really aren't, if they were, companies would be making money hand over fist with them...
In truth, your comments and views seem to be of a socialist nature... which isn't a crime, but we don't live in a socialist country.
You might be surprised, take a look at some large company 401(k)s. Many of them offer only limited investment choices and some of the larger companies are in most, if not all of them.
Most people who have a 401(k) can't just trade in it like a normal account, they have sometimes 10 or fewer things they can invest in.
As for Exxon going to zero, that would have massive and wide ranging effects, far beyond the value of Exxon stock. That you don't understand this is ok, many people don't understand this... but it means that you shouldn't be talking about such things that you don't understand.
Yes, it sure would reorganize the markets...
The question is, do you understand what those markets might look like when that was done?
Do you have any idea of the effects of your ideas? You might find that you make us all poorer in the end for your thinking.
Is the current system perfect? No. But that doesn't mean any change is good by default, and your suggestion would be a disaster for our way of life.
That is a nice idea, but now how the world works...
Your average investor who owns stock via their 401(k) or other mutual fund investment isn't able to make such choices...
You would harm the economy and put investment capital at risk in new ways, the law of unintended consequences applies here. Your ideals are good, but your methods would have results far different from what you intend.
No, that doesn't solve the problem...
Exxon is publicly owned (and widely held), if you destroy it, then what you're really doing is taking it all out of millions of American's (and people from around the world) savings.
You could, perhaps, make the argument that a privately owned corporation could be put under such rules, but if you go around and start playing whack-a-mole with large public companies, you're really just hurting everyone.
Amen... the very young and very old probably need to stay out of such things, as they have delusions of grandeur one way or another...
Amen... currency is just an easy way to keep track of barter, there is a reason we all moved to it...
If your bank screws up and moves the decimal place, that can be undone (and will, the laws and history of such mistakes are firmly on your side).
The reason the US Dollar has more "real" value than Bitcoin is not because some fancy pant suit from the Fed or Tresury says so... it has more real value because it is backed by 3 things...
1. The natural resources of the United States of America
2. The productivity and output of the population of the United States of America
3. The military strength of the US armed forces and ability to defend the above 2 items along with our trade routes around the world.
Bitcoin is missing all that...
Many people are demanding such things, and have no idea of what would REALLY happen if they got them.
As the old saying goes, "be careful what you wish for, you just might get it".
The idea that only people who pay taxes can vote is not completely stupid, there are way too many uneducated people spouting off nonsense and many of them vote, and frankly, probably shouldn't given that they are clueless about what they vote for.