Chemical rockets are just not cost efficient enough. also people are studying nuclear engineering all around the world . its better these people are kept busy designing power plants for on earth and off earth applications than nuclear bombs. Just my opinion.
There seems to be some confusion on the Christian Majority issue. Its true that Christianity has existed in India from the time of Christ(In Kerala on the west coast) but it was never a big religion. There were roughly the same number of Zoroastrians, Jews, Jains as Christians. This was possible as India never had a monoculture of a single religion and diversity was tolerated.
This is different from the situation in the north eastern states where Nagaland and I think Manipur or Meghalaya are almost completely Christian states.
These states were converted only over the last 100 years or so by Christian missionaries from both the US and Britain.
Before they became Christians these tribes were following traditional animistic traditions mixed with some Hindu rituals but it would be difficult to say if they considered themselves Hindu.
This is always difficult as Hinduism has number of shades from Fundamentalism to a way of life and its always difficult to say who is and who is not Hindu.
In fact it was the entry of rigid religions like Christianity and Islam into India which clearly specified a person has only one religion which led to the outgrowth of the current mainstream Hindu religion as Hindus relaized ther was a need to specify what gods you believe in. Before that it was mostly a case of pick and choose what god you want to believe in from the pantheon. This is true of most of the worlds original religions though Hinduism is the only one to survive (The Greek,Norse,Roman pantheons dont have active belivers anymore)
On a related note the Nagas have been fighting for an independent country for very long. Sometimes this takes on communal tones as they are mostly Christians in a Hindu India. But this is not really valid as the Nagas were fighting to be independent from the British even before they were Christians. In fact a lot of places in India had active armed rebel movements against the British (The role of Gandhi and non-violence in India's independence is greatly overestimated) The difference is after the British left most rebels stopped fighting and became part of the government of Independent India. The nagas and a few other North-Eastern states believed they could achieve real independence and kept fighting.
Its more like a technology demonstrator but given that ISRO runs on a shoestirng budget as the govt. has social priorities, the launch has to be justified using a socially usefull purpose. As for spying on Pakistan India already gets all it wants from its existing satellites as well as US owned satellites. The US is pretty friendly with India and more than happy to hand over imagery e.g. During the Kargill conflict the US provided satellite images of Pakistani intruders on Indian soil to the Indian air Force so they could better target their (US provided) smart bombs .
Its pretty obvious you are the illiterate one as you cant understand the parent post. The poster means the technologically inclined and highly educated scientists would emigrate if there was no research funding in their own country. As to where let me ask you a question what was the last big invention in the US which did not have a first generation immigrant behind it? Who writes the code at Microsoft? Who developed the Linux kernel? Who leads Intel? All first generation immigrants. Most US born people would prefer going to Law and Medicine which is where the money is. The only US born people who come to Engineering are those with a passion for it or much more commonly those who cant make it to Law school or Med School. The US engineering and technology industry runs on the labor of first generation immigrants. So I dont think the US is closing the door anytime soon.
Not everybody in the US has a college education. Are you proposing the US should stop working on space technologies till everyone does? In every capitalist society some people are at a more advanced state than others. Are you proposing India should become Communist?
I have lived in Europe Canada and the US and I have seen many more panhandlers in the US. Does that mean the US is less advanced in Space technology? Get real and stop comparing apples to oranges. At least in India the space agency doesnt waste its money on gimmicks like manned flight and concentrate on using the money for usefull mapping applications which can help the Indian poor get out of poverty.
India doesnt receive much direct aid from the US . Indian poor do receive a large amount of money from US based evangelical groups trying to promote Christianity in India (pretty successfully too Already 2 Indian states have become Christian Majority over the last 50 years ) India keeps losing it best people to the US but now slowly more and more people are staying back and using their brains to run ISRO and DAE (department of Atomic Energy) instead of enriching the shareholders of IBM and Microsoft. There is great emphasis on tech in India . Engineers are much more respected in society than doctors or lawyers in contrast to the US so a lot of the top brains go to Engineering.
BVR missiles are usefull if you are fighting police actions against tinpot dictators with 10 aircrafts and pilots with little training.
Fighting against a country like India which could send upto 500 frontline aircraft in a wave against your carrier and whose pilots are trained to outrun or outmaneavour BVR missiles it basically comes down to dogfights.
Also given the Indians have a supersonic cruise missile if it ever came to war they would not even send up planes but rather just sink the carrier. The US navy has no suitable protection against supersonic cruise missiles.
They were 3:1 not 10:1 ratio. Yet this is what the US would face unless it were fighting a war on US soil. e.g. The Chinese have over a million men in their airforce (the army is much bigger). They have depending on various sources from 1000 to a 5000 planes. In comparison if the US went to war to protect Taiwan the total number of planes they could bring into play would be about two carriers worth as well as Taiwanese local support so about 300 planes.
So US pilots have to be able to fight 4:1 odds so that the US can be a global cop.
Indian pilots on the other hand are only interested in defence of the homeland so they can always be assured of overwhelming dominance in numbers.
Unless you are willing to admit the USAF is only to be used for defense and not overseas you have to face and beat these odds
I read on the Airbus site that given the higher fuel efficiency of the A380 it can break even with 66% full passenger load whereas the 747 needs to fly at least 75% full to break even. What this means in terms of passenger the 747 needs at least 350 passengers on board while the A380 needs 360 passengers. Not much of a difference in the downside. However on the upside the A A380 can fly 550 passengers thats 190 passengers over breakeven while the 747 can only fly 450 passengers 100 over breakeven. So the potential profit is almost double while the breakeven point is almost the same. Which would you choose if you were buying planes for your airline?
Within the US with large number of regional airports the dreamliner makes more sense. Across oceans on transatlantic and trnaspacific flights the A380 makes more sense. But the jey question is what makes more sense within Asia as that is where the future market is. As Asians become richer they will fly more and when it comes to number of possible passengers Asia beats the world hands down
Only at the beginning did India assemble from kits. There has been a long tradition of technology transfer from Russia to India and now both the Mig and the SU are manufactured locally under license. India even has the right to sell these to third party countrie. It is something like the arrangement US has with Israel. Also for the SU 30MKI Indians actually developed the onboard avionics with Israeli help and installed French weapons with the net result that the Su planes India has are actually superior to the ones Russia itself has. India also has developed its own helicopter,light fighter plane and light transport aircrafts.
Granted by todays standards the Mig 21 is not cuutting edge but its still a mean plane when used in the role the Indians use it for i.e. the second wave. The SU 31 and the Mirage go ahead and sweep the air of enemy aircraft and then the huge numbers of Mig 21 go in and play hell with the enemy ground troops and facilities.
In any long war the top of the line planes are going to get used up soon and the rank and file planes will do most of the fighting.
Given the fact that Chinese and Indians are getting richer all the time and have a lot of people to fly around as wel big countries to fly them around they should be having an exploding demand for planes. Russia too is still the biggest country in the world. Basically if you took Russia into two it would still be the biggest country in the world and the second biggest country would be the other part of Russia. And they have an extremely low population density which makes air travel attractive unlike in Europe and the coastal areas of US where the high population density makes train travel more feasible.
Also I have travelled on European "state owned" airlines flying Boeings and US planes flying "Airbuses"
The reason for Boeing/Airbus dominance of these markets has more to do with the third world still not having got over its hangup of being dominated and still somewhere inside think whites are superior and their technology must be superior. But the Chinese and Indians are overcoming these hangups and are even rediscovering their national pride. Soon a time will come when this national pride demands they buy locally made planes. Hopefully by that time Boeing and Airbus will both be local companies. (Not so unfeasible . The doors for the Airbus and the software for the Dreamliner are manufactured in India)
I am not sure about the A380 but the A320 has control yokes stowed below the control panel which can be swung into steering wheel position if required. I havnt actually heard of them being used. Given that hydraulic yokes can fail just as motorized systems controlled by computers.
The SU 30MKI can spank anything the US has or will fly in 10 years including the F22. If you want more proof you can see this article on the spanking the US Air Force got from the Indian airforce when they had joint exercises and the Indians did not even bring their latest MKI planes just the SU 30K older version.
The 380 requires less fuel than the 747 as by using composites instead of metal they have held down the weight and the engines of course are newer and more efficient
Nobody says these systems are bug free. Hence the manual backups. In military planes where space is at a premium it makes sense to not have manual backups as in any case the pilot has an ejection seat. Also military planes do crazy stuff like flying aerodynamically unstable configurations( The Indian Light Combat Aircraft is an example) so yes they might not be able to fly without the computers. Passenger airliners on the other hand are a different breed of animal. There passenger safety is paramount. BTW if quorum is lost the pilot should shift over to manual. The important thing is pilots should continue to train flying in manual/hydraulic mode even if they fly all their flights by wire. I have studied Fault Tolerant Computing. No I havnt administered clusters.
India and China both manufacture their own versions of the MIG. Also they are both developing their own fighter jets prototypes of which are already flying. Brazil Canada and Ukraine have strong regional jets. So it is not so much of a stretch for them to shift over to widebody jets especially given their domestic airlines are buying so many of these jets anyway. For that matter even the Japanese and Korean are great shipbuilders and plane building and ship building a lot similar in that they are both piecework and they require highly advanced metal working tech. So they too could come into the picture. Its probably the strong brand leadership of Airbus and Boeing combined with the government subsidies which they get which keeps them on top. But I expect at least the Chinese government to subsidize its own manufacturer
What I really meant was when will these planes have a market share comparable to Airbus and Boing? I am a little surprised as everyone knows the Russians have always been ahead of the west in fighter plane technology just like the west has been ahead in aircraft carriers( For the patriotic its not about brains its about funding priorities). Given this lead in fighter tech the fact that Russia/Ukraine/other ex-SSRs are not able to market their planes abroad better
The flaw in that argument is that once the planes become so large you are spending a lot longer on boarding and deboarding and blocking up the equivalent of 2 slots. So you may be saving on runway slots but you run into the bottleneck of teminal slots. The fuel efficiency is a valid argument but it will be very pissy to have to wait an hour after landing to get off the plane as first class and business class disembark first .
Most fly by wire planes have manual backups. These backups will let you fly the plane just as safely but not as fuel efficiently so that fear is a bit overblown. Its like saying you wont use a car with fuel injection as it uses microchips. The kind of computers you and me work with are much different from what goes into automobiles and planes. For one thing most of these systems are designed as fault tolerant using voting systems of multiple computers doing the same calculation and the decision being taken by majority vote.
Well there are two sides to this story. I used to travel a lot on company business and always preferref direct trips where available. However a lot of times the airlines are already using a hub and spoke system and you have to make connections in any case. This being the case I would welcome the cheaper tickets made possible by the higher fuel efficiency of the A380. This is doubly true when planning personal trips. On the other hand flying without having to make connections is so much better and I would really wish more airlines shift to the Boing model and use the 7E7 for direct flights.
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so when Earth gets demolished will the wreckers run on nuclear on improbability propulsion
Chemical rockets are just not cost efficient enough.
also people are studying nuclear engineering all around the world . its better these people are kept busy designing power plants for on earth and off earth applications than nuclear bombs. Just my opinion.
There seems to be some confusion on the Christian Majority issue. Its true that Christianity has existed in India from the time of Christ(In Kerala on the west coast) but it was never a big religion. There were roughly the same number of Zoroastrians, Jews, Jains as Christians. This was possible as India never had a monoculture of a single religion and diversity was tolerated.
This is different from the situation in the north eastern states where Nagaland and I think Manipur or Meghalaya are almost completely Christian states.
These states were converted only over the last 100 years or so by Christian missionaries from both the US and Britain.
Before they became Christians these tribes were following traditional animistic traditions mixed with some Hindu rituals but it would be difficult to say if they considered themselves Hindu.
This is always difficult as Hinduism has number of shades from Fundamentalism to a way of life and its always difficult to say who is and who is not Hindu.
In fact it was the entry of rigid religions like Christianity and Islam into India which clearly specified a person has only one religion which led to the outgrowth of the current mainstream Hindu religion as Hindus relaized ther was a need to specify what gods you believe in. Before that it was mostly a case of pick and choose what god you want to believe in from the pantheon. This is true of most of the worlds original religions though Hinduism is the only one to survive (The Greek,Norse,Roman pantheons dont have active belivers anymore)
On a related note the Nagas have been fighting for an independent country for very long. Sometimes this takes on communal tones as they are mostly Christians in a Hindu India. But this is not really valid as the Nagas were fighting to be independent from the British even before they were Christians. In fact a lot of places in India had active armed rebel movements against the British (The role of Gandhi and non-violence in India's independence is greatly overestimated) The difference is after the British left most rebels stopped fighting and became part of the government of Independent India. The nagas and a few other North-Eastern states believed they could achieve real independence and kept fighting.
Its more like a technology demonstrator but given that ISRO runs on a shoestirng budget as the govt. has social priorities, the launch has to be justified using a socially usefull purpose. As for spying on Pakistan India already gets all it wants from its existing satellites as well as US owned satellites. The US is pretty friendly with India and more than happy to hand over imagery e.g. During the Kargill conflict the US provided satellite images of Pakistani intruders on Indian soil to the Indian air Force so they could better target their (US provided) smart bombs .
Its pretty obvious you are the illiterate one as you cant understand the parent post. The poster means the technologically inclined and highly educated scientists would emigrate if there was no research funding in their own country. As to where let me ask you a question what was the last big invention in the US which did not have a first generation immigrant behind it? Who writes the code at Microsoft? Who developed the Linux kernel? Who leads Intel? All first generation immigrants. Most US born people would prefer going to Law and Medicine which is where the money is. The only US born people who come to Engineering are those with a passion for it or much more commonly those who cant make it to Law school or Med School. The US engineering and technology industry runs on the labor of first generation immigrants. So I dont think the US is closing the door anytime soon.
Not everybody in the US has a college education. Are you proposing the US should stop working on space technologies till everyone does?
In every capitalist society some people are at a more advanced state than others. Are you proposing India should become Communist?
I have lived in Europe Canada and the US and I have seen many more panhandlers in the US. Does that mean the US is less advanced in Space technology? Get real and stop comparing apples to oranges.
At least in India the space agency doesnt waste its money on gimmicks like manned flight and concentrate on using the money for usefull mapping applications which can help the Indian poor get out of poverty.
India doesnt receive much direct aid from the US . Indian poor do receive a large amount of money from US based evangelical groups trying to promote Christianity in India (pretty successfully too Already 2 Indian states have become Christian Majority over the last 50 years )
India keeps losing it best people to the US but now slowly more and more people are staying back and using their brains to run ISRO and DAE (department of Atomic Energy) instead of enriching the shareholders of IBM and Microsoft.
There is great emphasis on tech in India . Engineers are much more respected in society than doctors or lawyers in contrast to the US so a lot of the top brains go to Engineering.
BVR missiles are usefull if you are fighting police actions against tinpot dictators with 10 aircrafts and pilots with little training.
Fighting against a country like India which could send upto 500 frontline aircraft in a wave against your carrier and whose pilots are trained to outrun or outmaneavour BVR missiles it basically comes down to dogfights.
Also given the Indians have a supersonic cruise missile if it ever came to war they would not even send up planes but rather just sink the carrier. The US navy has no suitable protection against supersonic cruise missiles.
They were 3:1 not 10:1 ratio. Yet this is what the US would face unless it were fighting a war on US soil. e.g. The Chinese have over a million men in their airforce (the army is much bigger). They have depending on various sources from 1000 to a 5000 planes.
In comparison if the US went to war to protect Taiwan the total number of planes they could bring into play would be about two carriers worth as well as Taiwanese local support so about 300 planes.
So US pilots have to be able to fight 4:1 odds so that the US can be a global cop.
Indian pilots on the other hand are only interested in defence of the homeland so they can always be assured of overwhelming dominance in numbers.
Unless you are willing to admit the USAF is only to be used for defense and not overseas you have to face and beat these odds
I read on the Airbus site that given the higher fuel efficiency of the A380 it can break even with 66% full passenger load whereas the 747 needs to fly at least 75% full to break even. What this means in terms of passenger the 747 needs at least 350 passengers on board while the A380 needs 360 passengers. Not much of a difference in the downside. However on the upside the A A380 can fly 550 passengers thats 190 passengers over breakeven while the 747 can only fly 450 passengers 100 over breakeven. So the potential profit is almost double while the breakeven point is almost the same. Which would you choose if you were buying planes for your airline?
Within the US with large number of regional airports the dreamliner makes more sense.
Across oceans on transatlantic and trnaspacific flights the A380 makes more sense.
But the jey question is what makes more sense within Asia as that is where the future market is. As Asians become richer they will fly more and when it comes to number of possible passengers Asia beats the world hands down
"747 and MD-11 have been replaced with A380, 777, 757 and 767."
I wasnt aware the A 380 was flying commercially yet
Only at the beginning did India assemble from kits. There has been a long tradition of technology transfer from Russia to India and now both the Mig and the SU are manufactured locally under license. India even has the right to sell these to third party countrie. It is something like the arrangement US has with Israel.
.
Also for the SU 30MKI Indians actually developed the onboard avionics with Israeli help and installed French weapons with the net result that the Su planes India has are actually superior to the ones Russia itself has.
India also has developed its own helicopter,light fighter plane and light transport aircrafts.
Granted by todays standards the Mig 21 is not cuutting edge but its still a mean plane when used in the role the Indians use it for i.e. the second wave. The SU 31 and the Mirage go ahead and sweep the air of enemy aircraft and then the huge numbers of Mig 21 go in and play hell with the enemy ground troops and facilities
In any long war the top of the line planes are going to get used up soon and the rank and file planes will do most of the fighting.
Given the fact that Chinese and Indians are getting richer all the time and have a lot of people to fly around as wel big countries to fly them around they should be having an exploding demand for planes. Russia too is still the biggest country in the world. Basically if you took Russia into two it would still be the biggest country in the world and the second biggest country would be the other part of Russia. And they have an extremely low population density which makes air travel attractive unlike in Europe and the coastal areas of US where the high population density makes train travel more feasible.
Also I have travelled on European "state owned" airlines flying Boeings and US planes flying "Airbuses"
The reason for Boeing/Airbus dominance of these markets has more to do with the third world still not having got over its hangup of being dominated and still somewhere inside think whites are superior and their technology must be superior. But the Chinese and Indians are overcoming these hangups and are even rediscovering their national pride. Soon a time will come when this national pride demands they buy locally made planes. Hopefully by that time Boeing and Airbus will both be local companies. (Not so unfeasible . The doors for the Airbus and the software for the Dreamliner are manufactured in India)
I am not sure about the A380 but the A320 has control yokes stowed below the control panel which can be swung into steering wheel position if required. I havnt actually heard of them being used.
Given that hydraulic yokes can fail just as motorized systems controlled by computers.
My links dont seem to work . So here are the links3 0-1.html
SU 30 MKI http://vayu-sena.tripod.com/comparison-f16-f18-su
Article
http://www.afa.org/magazine/Oct2004/1004train.asp
The
SU 30MKI can spank anything the US has or will fly in 10 years including the F22. If you want more proof you can see
this article on the spanking the US Air Force got from the Indian airforce when they had joint exercises and the Indians did not even bring their latest MKI planes just the SU 30K older version.
The 380 requires less fuel than the 747 as by using composites instead of metal they have held down the weight and the engines of course are newer and more efficient
Nobody says these systems are bug free. Hence the manual backups. In military planes where space is at a premium it makes sense to not have manual backups as in any case the pilot has an ejection seat. Also military planes do crazy stuff like flying aerodynamically unstable configurations( The Indian Light Combat Aircraft is an example) so yes they might not be able to fly without the computers. Passenger airliners on the other hand are a different breed of animal. There passenger safety is paramount. BTW if quorum is lost the pilot should shift over to manual. The important thing is pilots should continue to train flying in manual/hydraulic mode even if they fly all their flights by wire.
I have studied Fault Tolerant Computing. No I havnt administered clusters.
India and China both manufacture their own versions of the MIG. Also they are both developing their own fighter jets prototypes of which are already flying. Brazil Canada and Ukraine have strong regional jets. So it is not so much of a stretch for them to shift over to widebody jets especially given their domestic airlines are buying so many of these jets anyway. For that matter even the Japanese and Korean are great shipbuilders and plane building and ship building a lot similar in that they are both piecework and they require highly advanced metal working tech. So they too could come into the picture. Its probably the strong brand leadership of Airbus and Boeing combined with the government subsidies which they get which keeps them on top. But I expect at least the Chinese government to subsidize its own manufacturer
What I really meant was when will these planes have a market share comparable to Airbus and Boing? I am a little surprised as everyone knows the Russians have always been ahead of the west in fighter plane technology just like the west has been ahead in aircraft carriers( For the patriotic its not about brains its about funding priorities).
Given this lead in fighter tech the fact that Russia/Ukraine/other ex-SSRs are not able to market their planes abroad better
The flaw in that argument is that once the planes become so large you are spending a lot longer on boarding and deboarding and blocking up the equivalent of 2 slots. So you may be saving on runway slots but you run into the bottleneck of teminal slots.
The fuel efficiency is a valid argument but it will be very pissy to have to wait an hour after landing to get off the plane as first class and business class disembark first .
Most fly by wire planes have manual backups. These backups will let you fly the plane just as safely but not as fuel efficiently so that fear is a bit overblown. Its like saying you wont use a car with fuel injection as it uses microchips. The kind of computers you and me work with are much different from what goes into automobiles and planes. For one thing most of these systems are designed as fault tolerant using voting systems of multiple computers doing the same calculation and the decision being taken by majority vote.
Well there are two sides to this story. I used to travel a lot on company business and always preferref direct trips where available. However a lot of times the airlines are already using a hub and spoke system and you have to make connections in any case. This being the case I would welcome the cheaper tickets made possible by the higher fuel efficiency of the A380. This is doubly true when planning personal trips.
On the other hand flying without having to make connections is so much better and I would really wish more airlines shift to the Boing model and use the 7E7 for direct flights.