If you are arguing that any substantial number of aircraft use their engines to oppose the weight of the aircraft, I want to see your evidence.
Lift opposes weight. Thrust opposes drag. Maximum climb angle for commercial aircraft is around ten or fifteen degrees, and that means the engine thrust opposing lift is thrust times the sin of 15 degrees, which is a very small fraction of the lift generated by the wings. In cruise, that fraction is REALLY close to zero.
Yes, fuselage bodies generate lift. The F-117 gets a fair amount of lift from its faceted body, which although it is not teardrop shaped, has similar proportions to a NACA flat-bottomed airfoil.
There (note spelling) certainly was much uncertainty (again note spelling) on the 117 program as to whether the aircraft would fly or not. But, lo and behold, a bunch of smart engineers got together, ran the numbers, swore it would work......And they were right. And they gave the Air Force the closest thing the world had ever seen to an invisible airplane. And no, its engines do NOT point at the ground.
My favourite anecdote from that book was the one where they thought the test radar wasn't working, because they weren't getting a return. Then all of a sudden, they got a spike...from the big black bird that had just landed on top of the model.
Hate to burst your bubble, but you're, like, wrong.
Engine provides thrust, not lift. Wings provide lift. No modern fighter uses engine thrust to offset its weight in cruise mode. (Climbing and dogfighting, sure...but it costs fuel like you wouldn't believe).
And all (ALL) airplanes, by definition, have some sort of airfoil. With the F-117, that airfoil happens to be triangular in cross-section instead of the teardrop we're all accustomed to seeing, and many supersonic optimized airfoils look really wacky (do some reading on supercritical wings if you're curious).
In supersonic flight, the airfoil section doesn't matter nearly as much as the shape and area of the wing planform. However, for low to transonic flight, the airfoil design is what you optimize to get the best lift to drag ratio out of your airplane.
No, that's because it has a teeny engine and (probably) no cockpit pressurization. Lots high-speed aircraft work just fine without computer flight controls. (F-15, F-14, SR-71, MiG-21, MiG-27, MiG-29, SU-27 (early variants) etc.)
This is the original Sailor Inhaler, the Chance-Vought A-7 Crusader light attack bomber. It's very similar to the F-8 Crusader in configuration. Both aircraft operated from carriers for a very long time.
Jets eat people if they get too close to them. That means it's a bad idea to get too close to them, not that we need to make jets look different.
Boeing had the better airplane. Especially the Marine Corps/Royal Navy variant. Lockheed is going to have a hell of a time making that lift fan clutch keep working properly under combat conditions.
Since the PlayStation was (and perhaps still is) a loss leader, and we know for CERTAIN the xBox is a loss leader, your statement doesn't make sense.
The thing that hurts Sony is somebody buying an MS game instead of a Sony game. Nobody makes beans on the hardware, and anything that broadens the set of people who buy software is good for the licensor.
Dunno. Why are the F-105 Thunderchief and F-111 Aardvark designated as fighters? I believe the Thud carried a gun and provisions for AA weaponry, but I'm pretty sure the 'Vark was a straight low-level bomber.
Don't worry...the Air Force is pretty clever. They know not to use the airplanes as fighters, even though they're named so confusing-ly.
Wow, skippy, you're right. The state of the art has progressed in the 20 years between the 117's design and the 22's. Who'd a thunk it? As far as "rushed" design, the design followed from one and only one imperative: Stealth. The computers available were not sufficiently powerful to assist the designers in generating compound curved shapes, like you see on the -22 and the B-2 Spirit.
Repeat after me. The F-117 is not an air superiority fighter. It carries two precision-guided 2000lb bombs. No missiles. No guns. Bombs.
Don't know why they gave it an F- designation, but it's no more a fighter than the A-6 Intruder.
The F-117's hit-to-loss ratio is unprecedented. There are zero other aircraft in service today (with the exception of the B-2, which is not typically used in tactical air operations) that can survive in modern air defense environments. The fact that ONE has been shot down, considering the number of sorties the 117 has accomplished with zero losses, is a testament to how effective the system has been.
Yes. They got lucky, and bagged a Nighthawk. Odds are, it would happen someday. Nobody (with the exception of media idiots and anti-military types) thought that the aircraft needed to be invulnerable in order to be useful.
"Flying turd"? Let's see you do better with a slide rule, jackass. That plane is a MIRACLE. It totally revolutionized the force calculus of air power, and it's a master of ragged-edge-of-the-envelope engineering.
Show some respect. The Skunk Works turned in a revolutionary, extraordinarily capable, STUPENDOUSLY RISKY airplane on a shoestring budget. We need more engineers like that.
You're right. Law enforcement promises...Scout's honor...that they're not going to abuse this power. Fortunately, although we know they've abused every other technological advance, we're safe this time...because they PROMISE.
Or if we don't think we're safe, we're obviously terrorists, which makes it easier to justify monitoring us.
They're not just monitoring YOU, they're monitoring EVERYBODY. If that doesn't bother you, there are some pieces of literature I might suggest you read.
Two reasons. Infrastructure, and insurance. Roads aren't uniformly well-marked enough for the vision systems on those cars to work properly, and no insurance company is EVER going to give you a policy that a machine drives. It's hard to sue a machine.
Re:Easy prediction: It'll Never Happen.
on
The Coming Air Age
·
· Score: 1
OK, we'll just make you President for Life and ask you very nicely what you think we should be allowed to do. Freedom is overrated, inna?
I sorta kinda agree, but concepts like "deserve to" don't really apply to corporations. Corporations live and die by their bottom line, and I don't see any reason to judge them any other way. If TiVo can't make money, it doesn't "deserve" bupkis.
Note that I'm not arguing that it needs to be THE BIGGEST or THE MOST PROFITABLE company in order to be successful. Making a good product for a fair price, however many of them you sell, is "success" to me. But, here in America, if you don't have the biggest marketshare, you might as well take your trucks and go home, because you're obviously a big stupid loser and you don't "deserve to" win.
Except for cars. Nobody seems to dog on Mercedes-Benz because their marketshare sucks. Sometimes, I think the "Winner Take All" attitude that seems particularly virulent here in America is really really detrimental. I mean, the article holds up AOL as the local deity of internet service because it happens to be the biggest one out there. Me, I don't CARE if my ISP is big. I care if it gives me reliable service at a fair price, which AOL does not.
I think I'm after a different kind of meritocracy. : )
DVR is a great idea. Random Access TV is an idea whose time has come.
The thing is, those features do not reside exclusively in a TiVo. Or, better to say, TiVo is a brand and a company and has NO RELEVANCE WHATSOEVER to your continued ability to reorganize TV this way. So, if TiVo dies, who cares? Not I, for sure. Their hardware and software may be good, but the cat's out of the bag, and their idea isn't complicated enough to prevent others from implementing it and improving on it.
So who cares if TiVo dies? The people who got rooked into paying the "lifetime" service fee.
You're right, although there's an analogous scale, zeroed at absolute zero, which uses the Fahrenheit degree size. It's called DEGREES Rankine.
Kelvins are just weird. Don't ask me to explain science history...it's FUNKY. Although if I could go back in time and kill the guy who invened the pound mass and the BTU, I would.
Yeah, and my parents' wedding photos were burned up in a fire at the thrice-damned photographers' studio, where he didn't believe in fire safes.
So don't tell me that photographs are magically safe for hundreds of years. Like with any important piece of information, you have to care for it in order to preserve it. Same as with digital data.
That reminds me of a call I took when I was working the phones for Origin Systems.
This dude calls me up because he can't get Privateer to work on his computer, which he called "The Switcher". Now, Privateer was a DOS game, and a pretty well-behaved one at that. If you had DOS drivers for your sound card, you were pretty much OK, so I figured this would be no problem. However, this swiftly turned into a nightmare call, as the guy on the other end of the line told me about the MONSTROSITY he had sitting under his desk.
He had three motherboards in the box. OK, fine, says I...he's built three computers into a custom case. Which one are we using, Chief? Well, he wants to use them all. Simultaneously. He says that he's got Windows set up to have the 286 processor on one mobo run the "low level" instructions, and the AMD386 run the "high level" instructions. He wants me to help him make Privateer do the same thing.
Uh, right. You implemented asymmetrical multiprocessing across two processor families, two motherboards, under WINDOWS 3.1? Right. If you can do THAT, you can figure out how to work the damn game yourself. Dude, get off my phone. You're wasting my time.
Slashdot Mirror
PS/2 is profitable? That's pretty good engineering. Good for Sony.
Have any references I can look into? I'm curious as to how much they're making on the console.
I hope when you deal with this, you spell better.
...And they were right. And they gave the Air Force the closest thing the world had ever seen to an invisible airplane. And no, its engines do NOT point at the ground.
If you are arguing that any substantial number of aircraft use their engines to oppose the weight of the aircraft, I want to see your evidence.
Lift opposes weight. Thrust opposes drag. Maximum climb angle for commercial aircraft is around ten or fifteen degrees, and that means the engine thrust opposing lift is thrust times the sin of 15 degrees, which is a very small fraction of the lift generated by the wings. In cruise, that fraction is REALLY close to zero.
Yes, fuselage bodies generate lift. The F-117 gets a fair amount of lift from its faceted body, which although it is not teardrop shaped, has similar proportions to a NACA flat-bottomed airfoil.
There (note spelling) certainly was much uncertainty (again note spelling) on the 117 program as to whether the aircraft would fly or not. But, lo and behold, a bunch of smart engineers got together, ran the numbers, swore it would work...
My favourite anecdote from that book was the one where they thought the test radar wasn't working, because they weren't getting a return. Then all of a sudden, they got a spike...from the big black bird that had just landed on top of the model.
Beautimous.
Hate to burst your bubble, but you're, like, wrong.
Engine provides thrust, not lift. Wings provide lift. No modern fighter uses engine thrust to offset its weight in cruise mode. (Climbing and dogfighting, sure...but it costs fuel like you wouldn't believe).
And all (ALL) airplanes, by definition, have some sort of airfoil. With the F-117, that airfoil happens to be triangular in cross-section instead of the teardrop we're all accustomed to seeing, and many supersonic optimized airfoils look really wacky (do some reading on supercritical wings if you're curious).
In supersonic flight, the airfoil section doesn't matter nearly as much as the shape and area of the wing planform. However, for low to transonic flight, the airfoil design is what you optimize to get the best lift to drag ratio out of your airplane.
No, that's because it has a teeny engine and (probably) no cockpit pressurization. Lots high-speed aircraft work just fine without computer flight controls. (F-15, F-14, SR-71, MiG-21, MiG-27, MiG-29, SU-27 (early variants) etc.)
Ahh, CRAP. Got ahead of myself. The A-7 was the Corsair II. The F-8 was the Crusader. /me slaps forehead.
This is the original Sailor Inhaler, the Chance-Vought A-7 Crusader light attack bomber. It's very similar to the F-8 Crusader in configuration. Both aircraft operated from carriers for a very long time.
Jets eat people if they get too close to them. That means it's a bad idea to get too close to them, not that we need to make jets look different.
Boeing had the better airplane. Especially the Marine Corps/Royal Navy variant. Lockheed is going to have a hell of a time making that lift fan clutch keep working properly under combat conditions.
Since the PlayStation was (and perhaps still is) a loss leader, and we know for CERTAIN the xBox is a loss leader, your statement doesn't make sense.
The thing that hurts Sony is somebody buying an MS game instead of a Sony game. Nobody makes beans on the hardware, and anything that broadens the set of people who buy software is good for the licensor.
Dunno. Why are the F-105 Thunderchief and F-111 Aardvark designated as fighters? I believe the Thud carried a gun and provisions for AA weaponry, but I'm pretty sure the 'Vark was a straight low-level bomber.
Don't worry...the Air Force is pretty clever. They know not to use the airplanes as fighters, even though they're named so confusing-ly.
Wow, skippy, you're right. The state of the art has progressed in the 20 years between the 117's design and the 22's. Who'd a thunk it? As far as "rushed" design, the design followed from one and only one imperative: Stealth. The computers available were not sufficiently powerful to assist the designers in generating compound curved shapes, like you see on the -22 and the B-2 Spirit.
Repeat after me. The F-117 is not an air superiority fighter. It carries two precision-guided 2000lb bombs. No missiles. No guns. Bombs.
Don't know why they gave it an F- designation, but it's no more a fighter than the A-6 Intruder.
You're either trolling, or ignorant, or both.
If I recall Starfleet Battles correctly, the Romulans also operated Birds of Prey until they got their own shipyards online.
But that would be way too geeky, so I wouldn't say that in public.
Maybe it's just me, but I find that game about as exciting as strained spinach.
The F-117's hit-to-loss ratio is unprecedented. There are zero other aircraft in service today (with the exception of the B-2, which is not typically used in tactical air operations) that can survive in modern air defense environments. The fact that ONE has been shot down, considering the number of sorties the 117 has accomplished with zero losses, is a testament to how effective the system has been.
Yes. They got lucky, and bagged a Nighthawk. Odds are, it would happen someday. Nobody (with the exception of media idiots and anti-military types) thought that the aircraft needed to be invulnerable in order to be useful.
Get some perspective.
"Flying turd"? Let's see you do better with a slide rule, jackass. That plane is a MIRACLE. It totally revolutionized the force calculus of air power, and it's a master of ragged-edge-of-the-envelope engineering.
Show some respect. The Skunk Works turned in a revolutionary, extraordinarily capable, STUPENDOUSLY RISKY airplane on a shoestring budget. We need more engineers like that.
Dunno, I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eatin' crackers. Then again, I am an equal-opportunity lecher.
: )
You're right. Law enforcement promises...Scout's honor...that they're not going to abuse this power. Fortunately, although we know they've abused every other technological advance, we're safe this time...because they PROMISE.
Or if we don't think we're safe, we're obviously terrorists, which makes it easier to justify monitoring us.
They're not just monitoring YOU, they're monitoring EVERYBODY. If that doesn't bother you, there are some pieces of literature I might suggest you read.
Two reasons. Infrastructure, and insurance. Roads aren't uniformly well-marked enough for the vision systems on those cars to work properly, and no insurance company is EVER going to give you a policy that a machine drives. It's hard to sue a machine.
OK, we'll just make you President for Life and ask you very nicely what you think we should be allowed to do. Freedom is overrated, inna?
What if you do know that stuff, and still don't give a teeny fuck? Does that make a difference?
You and every other person who's ever been older than somebody else since the dawn of time.
Race prejudice, class prejudice, age prejudice, it's all the same thing. It's assuming there are substantive differences where there are not.
I sorta kinda agree, but concepts like "deserve to" don't really apply to corporations. Corporations live and die by their bottom line, and I don't see any reason to judge them any other way. If TiVo can't make money, it doesn't "deserve" bupkis.
Note that I'm not arguing that it needs to be THE BIGGEST or THE MOST PROFITABLE company in order to be successful. Making a good product for a fair price, however many of them you sell, is "success" to me. But, here in America, if you don't have the biggest marketshare, you might as well take your trucks and go home, because you're obviously a big stupid loser and you don't "deserve to" win.
Except for cars. Nobody seems to dog on Mercedes-Benz because their marketshare sucks. Sometimes, I think the "Winner Take All" attitude that seems particularly virulent here in America is really really detrimental. I mean, the article holds up AOL as the local deity of internet service because it happens to be the biggest one out there. Me, I don't CARE if my ISP is big. I care if it gives me reliable service at a fair price, which AOL does not.
I think I'm after a different kind of meritocracy. : )
DVR is a great idea. Random Access TV is an idea whose time has come.
The thing is, those features do not reside exclusively in a TiVo. Or, better to say, TiVo is a brand and a company and has NO RELEVANCE WHATSOEVER to your continued ability to reorganize TV this way. So, if TiVo dies, who cares? Not I, for sure. Their hardware and software may be good, but the cat's out of the bag, and their idea isn't complicated enough to prevent others from implementing it and improving on it.
So who cares if TiVo dies? The people who got rooked into paying the "lifetime" service fee.
You're right, although there's an analogous scale, zeroed at absolute zero, which uses the Fahrenheit degree size. It's called DEGREES Rankine.
Kelvins are just weird. Don't ask me to explain science history...it's FUNKY. Although if I could go back in time and kill the guy who invened the pound mass and the BTU, I would.
Dunno, getting rid of the backlight and the two buttons probaly took somebody the better part of an afternoon.
Yeah, and my parents' wedding photos were burned up in a fire at the thrice-damned photographers' studio, where he didn't believe in fire safes.
So don't tell me that photographs are magically safe for hundreds of years. Like with any important piece of information, you have to care for it in order to preserve it. Same as with digital data.
That reminds me of a call I took when I was working the phones for Origin Systems.
This dude calls me up because he can't get Privateer to work on his computer, which he called "The Switcher". Now, Privateer was a DOS game, and a pretty well-behaved one at that. If you had DOS drivers for your sound card, you were pretty much OK, so I figured this would be no problem. However, this swiftly turned into a nightmare call, as the guy on the other end of the line told me about the MONSTROSITY he had sitting under his desk.
He had three motherboards in the box. OK, fine, says I...he's built three computers into a custom case. Which one are we using, Chief? Well, he wants to use them all. Simultaneously. He says that he's got Windows set up to have the 286 processor on one mobo run the "low level" instructions, and the AMD386 run the "high level" instructions. He wants me to help him make Privateer do the same thing.
Uh, right. You implemented asymmetrical multiprocessing across two processor families, two motherboards, under WINDOWS 3.1? Right. If you can do THAT, you can figure out how to work the damn game yourself. Dude, get off my phone. You're wasting my time.