Yes and no. While F, B and A designations are all fairly fluid, an A aircraft is usually one whose primary role is close air support, ie precision strikes on targets that are engaging, and thus very close to, friendly troops. To do this you want an aircraft that's maneuverable, not too fast, (usually) lightweight and either cheap or very survivable. It actually wasn't uncommon for larger A-4 pilots to be unable to reach certain switches with the canopy closed because the cockpit was so small. Meanwhile the A-10 is probably the best fixed wing CAS platform ever built and can get shot all day long and keep flying.
On the other hand, the F-111 is big, fast, expensive, carries a ton and can't maneuver to save its life. Back in the 1970s, if you wanted to do CAS with an F-111 you would have found yourself overflying the target at 150-250ft at around 250-300 meters per second, while your Nav tried to drop a dumb bomb without hitting friendlies only perhaps 100m from your target. Good luck with that. And good luck if your complicated swing wing system takes a bullet, because your threshold speed will probably set a land-speed record. Probably more accurate to call it a bomber, although it's at the blurry edge of the three designations.
Yeah, the F-111 was certainly the world's most optimistic fighter program. As Admiral Connolly said, "There isn't enough power in all Christendom to make that airplane what we want!"
Notwithstanding its inability to safely fly off a carrier, both it and the F-14 are a great design for BVR (Beyond Visual Range) Air Superiority missions, but as soon as you get into a dogfight the F-111 is dead and the F-14 is awkwardly big. Even the F-15 is bigger than it should be, although it's a better BVR platform than the F-16.
The funny thing is that these days, we finally are getting to a point where Boyd and dogfighting are obsolete, for real this time. We promise! Unless of course you have two stealth fighters who can't find each other; then it'll be like the days before radar except with 1/20th as many aircraft. Good thing the J-20 can't dogfight for shit.
Defense analysts won't see this as a threat to the F-22 however. The J-20 is more of a stealth bomber, similar to an F-111, and it would be fairly useless as a dogfighter. Certainly, with its stealth characteristics you could use it as a stand-off air superiority platform and fire missiles downrange, but let an F/A-18 or F-16 get within visual range and you're dead.
I also disagree that the US requires more aircraft - the USAF already has a reputation for having a lot of cannon-fodder quality pilots, albeit with a good percentage of very skilled operators. Increasing pilot numbers would be hugely expensive, and only add to the ranks of cannon fodder without increasing the number of top-quality pilots.
Having said that I think the best move (and a politically unlikely one) would be to cancel the F-35 and split its budget between more F-22s to win the first few days of a war and more and better UAVs to handle the war once air superiority has been achieved. UAV squadrons can absorb lower quality pilots more easily anyways; it's easier to keep a cool head in a 1g armchair on autopilot than flying a fuel-guzzling high-g fighter jet.
Yeah, the explanation I've always heard is that because it was difficult to fly and required experience with single-pilot operations (ie no Nav or Co-pilot to share the workload), they needed guys with single-seat fighter jet experience to fly it. However, flying a bomber is career suicide if you're a fighter pilot. Hence, slap an F designation on it and you're good to go.
Not the first time this has happened in the USAF, the F-111 should really have been called a B-111.
I'll probably get shot down for this, but read The Game sometime.
People who haven't read it usually call it misogynistic bullshit, but it makes a lot of good points. Not least of all, that women aren't at all attracted to money. Sure, they're attracted to men with money because they act like alpha males, but that doesn't mean you can't act like an alpha male too.
Yeah, flying without control authority is doable for an experienced human pilot, but it's not easy. Definitely something to practice in the sim for a few hundred hours first. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't...
My favourite quote from the Wikipedia article: "Upon parking at the gate, the crew did another walk around inspection to narrow down the cause of the incident. The inspection revealed that the entire rudder had broken away from the tail of the aircraft."
As a pilot however I can assure you that there are some uhh, minor, safety issues associated with rudderless flight...
In some ways, yes, F-16/18s are a perfectly good replacement for the F-35. However at this point the program really has gone on far too long to be cancelled. Defense doesn't move quickly, and given that most of the US's allies are gearing up to retire their old Hornets and Vipers and eventually take on F-35s it would screw over a lot of American allies to can it.
However, it's nearly impossible to make a reliable projection of what kind of fast jet we should be procuring. Why? Because whatever we buy will be in service well into the 2030s and 2040s, and who knows what UAV technology will look like by then.
Case in point, the F-22. Great aircraft, but can't do Air-to-Ground at all. However, if you're using Predator drones as bomb trucks, maybe all you need is a bunch of F-22s to establish air superiority. In this scenario, F-35s look pretty useless. However, maybe you find yourself up against an enemy with cheap Man Portable radar homing missiles and a system to jam Predator signals. Now your F-16s & 18s are sitting ducks and your Predators are useless. F-22s can take out enemy fighters, but there's probably not any to look for anyways. In such a scenario, the F-35 suddenly looks very useful.
The fact is, fighter procurement is an extremely long-term purchase in an extremely uncertain area. Are we getting it wrong? Probably. But can we say, without a doubt, what we *should* be doing? No way. The best solution, if you have the money, is to hedge your bets with multiple systems. Otherwise, it's just a question of guessing and hoping you get it right.
Really? You really think that evolution is going to work differently on a different planet?
I mean, lets think about that for a moment: evolution works on the principle of competition for scarce resources. It follows principles of game theory that are pretty much universal mathematical concepts. And, lets not forget, somewhat intelligent life has evolved in a number of species on earth.
Humans, sure we cooperate when conditions are favorable, but we'll just as soon murder each other. Dolphins, also quite intelligent, follow a mating strategy of three-man gang rape. Chimpanzees engage in political assassinations.
The fact is, self-replicated organisms will replicate until resources are scarce, and scarce resources lead to zero sum, "what's bad for you is good for me" type behaviors. Any intelligent species will have instincts to take advantage of both these situations, *and* instincts to cooperate in situations where cooperation is useful. Thus, the chances of an evolved, intelligent species being 100% friendly is fairly low.
Now, it's certainly possible that an ecosystem could arise which was so interlinked that any species which preyed on another would itself become extinct. However that's a highly unstable system; the first replicator to start eating it's neighbors would flourish right until the whole system was destroyed. Certainly, it seems awfully unlikely that said ecosystem could survive long enough for intelligent life to evolve.
Remember kids, evolution's not just some fuzzy biology class concept. It's practically physics!
However it wouldn't need to be an amputation. Perhaps a pair of bionic arms with a secure harness-type upper body attachment, controlled by the non-amputees hands. That being said, at this point we're straying into the realm of full-body mech suits. Still, there would be some useful applications out there.
In a world where robots can build robots and perform the same tasks as a person, labor will reach it's own kind of singularity. The only thing of value will become land, natural resources and ideas. The problem here is that only one of these can be produced by people - ideas. Will we turn into an economy based on highly paid knowledge workers, and hordes of unemployed?
Well, actually no. As we all know, you can't sell ideas without stupid restrictive laws and some kind of corporate dictatorship to back them up. Sure, the US is certainly heading in this direction, but what's to stop Swedish robot factories from stealing all their ideas and living in some kind of Arctic paradise?
So no, in the future we might have a dystopia where a small group of very rich individuals enjoy all the wealth. More likely we'll have a truly equal society where robots produce equal amounts of goods for everybody, leaving the rest of us to live in some kind of quasi-primitive society.
People will probably spend all their time playing video games, or sports, or who knows what. It might take a few decades, but it will happen eventually.
It's great that they're looking at ways to increase efficiency of current aircraft, but the question remains: how can we keep increasing our use of air travel without putting out more greenhouse gases. You hear people talking about restrictions on air travel in the future, and I can't understand why we can't find technological solutions.
For example, is anybody doing research on biofuels for turbines? I've heard of the USAF looking into it for greater energy security, but is it a reasonable proposal?
Could we eventually have a prop-powered commercial plane, even one that was electrically powered? Check out the Tu-95 Bear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95 as an example; it's a much more blue sky proposal, but within the realm of possibility.
Reading books on computers isn't much fun, however with usable electronic paper it won't be an issue. Sure, it's not here yet, but on the scale of decades it's a matter of when not if. Books won't go away entirely for a long long time, but for everyday use they will become much less common at some point.
And yes, you're right, it was possible to copy works before, but the fact is it was expensive. Perhaps not in terms of money, but photocopying a book is a time-consuming process. Burning a cd, ditto.
Today, things are different. I can set up a torrent of *every* South Park episode, or *every* Nine Inch Nails song, or *every* Harry Potter book, and tomorrow it will be there. No babysitting, just 3 clicks, leave it overnight and it's there. With the right technology to consume that media (e-paper, Apple TV, an iPod) there is no longer any incentive to pay for it except guilt over screwing the artist.
With the capability to store and share terabytes at a time, it becomes very easy to obtain copies of every major book published in a year, or every book on a topic, or every copy of a magazine or newspaper. Unless that person wants to reimburse you for your efforts, you'll have no way to force them. Remember, this is possible now, easy in a decade, and inevitable with the right tools to consume this media.
Copyright law gives you the right to protect yourself, but without the tools to find and prosecute copyright infringers that right is meaningless. The question is whether we, as a society, want to give copyright holders those tools.
While I have no problems with your arguments there is just one problem. You can't stop the transmission of data. Without a massive invasion of piracy there is simply no way to prevent P2P networks from obsoleting any limits on your right to copy and share.
So what's it going to be? Restrictions on P2P, on wireless network gear, on DRM circumvention? Or the (effective, regardless of what the laws say) abolition of copyright?
In 20 years, when we've all got 10' LCDs, electronic paper, 100+ terabyte (or more) storage systems and gigabit P2P connections there is *no* future for copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. While F, B and A designations are all fairly fluid, an A aircraft is usually one whose primary role is close air support, ie precision strikes on targets that are engaging, and thus very close to, friendly troops. To do this you want an aircraft that's maneuverable, not too fast, (usually) lightweight and either cheap or very survivable. It actually wasn't uncommon for larger A-4 pilots to be unable to reach certain switches with the canopy closed because the cockpit was so small. Meanwhile the A-10 is probably the best fixed wing CAS platform ever built and can get shot all day long and keep flying.
On the other hand, the F-111 is big, fast, expensive, carries a ton and can't maneuver to save its life. Back in the 1970s, if you wanted to do CAS with an F-111 you would have found yourself overflying the target at 150-250ft at around 250-300 meters per second, while your Nav tried to drop a dumb bomb without hitting friendlies only perhaps 100m from your target. Good luck with that. And good luck if your complicated swing wing system takes a bullet, because your threshold speed will probably set a land-speed record. Probably more accurate to call it a bomber, although it's at the blurry edge of the three designations.
Haha very true, cheers buddy
Yeah, the F-111 was certainly the world's most optimistic fighter program. As Admiral Connolly said, "There isn't enough power in all Christendom to make that airplane what we want!"
Notwithstanding its inability to safely fly off a carrier, both it and the F-14 are a great design for BVR (Beyond Visual Range) Air Superiority missions, but as soon as you get into a dogfight the F-111 is dead and the F-14 is awkwardly big. Even the F-15 is bigger than it should be, although it's a better BVR platform than the F-16.
The funny thing is that these days, we finally are getting to a point where Boyd and dogfighting are obsolete, for real this time. We promise! Unless of course you have two stealth fighters who can't find each other; then it'll be like the days before radar except with 1/20th as many aircraft. Good thing the J-20 can't dogfight for shit.
Defense analysts won't see this as a threat to the F-22 however. The J-20 is more of a stealth bomber, similar to an F-111, and it would be fairly useless as a dogfighter. Certainly, with its stealth characteristics you could use it as a stand-off air superiority platform and fire missiles downrange, but let an F/A-18 or F-16 get within visual range and you're dead.
I also disagree that the US requires more aircraft - the USAF already has a reputation for having a lot of cannon-fodder quality pilots, albeit with a good percentage of very skilled operators. Increasing pilot numbers would be hugely expensive, and only add to the ranks of cannon fodder without increasing the number of top-quality pilots.
Having said that I think the best move (and a politically unlikely one) would be to cancel the F-35 and split its budget between more F-22s to win the first few days of a war and more and better UAVs to handle the war once air superiority has been achieved. UAV squadrons can absorb lower quality pilots more easily anyways; it's easier to keep a cool head in a 1g armchair on autopilot than flying a fuel-guzzling high-g fighter jet.
Yeah, the explanation I've always heard is that because it was difficult to fly and required experience with single-pilot operations (ie no Nav or Co-pilot to share the workload), they needed guys with single-seat fighter jet experience to fly it. However, flying a bomber is career suicide if you're a fighter pilot. Hence, slap an F designation on it and you're good to go.
Not the first time this has happened in the USAF, the F-111 should really have been called a B-111.
I'll probably get shot down for this, but read The Game sometime.
People who haven't read it usually call it misogynistic bullshit, but it makes a lot of good points. Not least of all, that women aren't at all attracted to money. Sure, they're attracted to men with money because they act like alpha males, but that doesn't mean you can't act like an alpha male too.
Yeah, flying without control authority is doable for an experienced human pilot, but it's not easy. Definitely something to practice in the sim for a few hundred hours first. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't...
Usually, not always
My favourite quote from the Wikipedia article: "Upon parking at the gate, the crew did another walk around inspection to narrow down the cause of the incident. The inspection revealed that the entire rudder had broken away from the tail of the aircraft."
As a pilot however I can assure you that there are some uhh, minor, safety issues associated with rudderless flight...
In some ways, yes, F-16/18s are a perfectly good replacement for the F-35. However at this point the program really has gone on far too long to be cancelled. Defense doesn't move quickly, and given that most of the US's allies are gearing up to retire their old Hornets and Vipers and eventually take on F-35s it would screw over a lot of American allies to can it.
However, it's nearly impossible to make a reliable projection of what kind of fast jet we should be procuring. Why? Because whatever we buy will be in service well into the 2030s and 2040s, and who knows what UAV technology will look like by then.
Case in point, the F-22. Great aircraft, but can't do Air-to-Ground at all. However, if you're using Predator drones as bomb trucks, maybe all you need is a bunch of F-22s to establish air superiority. In this scenario, F-35s look pretty useless. However, maybe you find yourself up against an enemy with cheap Man Portable radar homing missiles and a system to jam Predator signals. Now your F-16s & 18s are sitting ducks and your Predators are useless. F-22s can take out enemy fighters, but there's probably not any to look for anyways. In such a scenario, the F-35 suddenly looks very useful.
The fact is, fighter procurement is an extremely long-term purchase in an extremely uncertain area. Are we getting it wrong? Probably. But can we say, without a doubt, what we *should* be doing? No way. The best solution, if you have the money, is to hedge your bets with multiple systems. Otherwise, it's just a question of guessing and hoping you get it right.
IAAMP
Really? You really think that evolution is going to work differently on a different planet?
I mean, lets think about that for a moment: evolution works on the principle of competition for scarce resources. It follows principles of game theory that are pretty much universal mathematical concepts. And, lets not forget, somewhat intelligent life has evolved in a number of species on earth.
Humans, sure we cooperate when conditions are favorable, but we'll just as soon murder each other. Dolphins, also quite intelligent, follow a mating strategy of three-man gang rape. Chimpanzees engage in political assassinations.
The fact is, self-replicated organisms will replicate until resources are scarce, and scarce resources lead to zero sum, "what's bad for you is good for me" type behaviors. Any intelligent species will have instincts to take advantage of both these situations, *and* instincts to cooperate in situations where cooperation is useful. Thus, the chances of an evolved, intelligent species being 100% friendly is fairly low.
Now, it's certainly possible that an ecosystem could arise which was so interlinked that any species which preyed on another would itself become extinct. However that's a highly unstable system; the first replicator to start eating it's neighbors would flourish right until the whole system was destroyed. Certainly, it seems awfully unlikely that said ecosystem could survive long enough for intelligent life to evolve.
Remember kids, evolution's not just some fuzzy biology class concept. It's practically physics!
However it wouldn't need to be an amputation. Perhaps a pair of bionic arms with a secure harness-type upper body attachment, controlled by the non-amputees hands. That being said, at this point we're straying into the realm of full-body mech suits. Still, there would be some useful applications out there.
It works fine for me, but I'm in Australia.
It's called the pirate bay, it's not as though anybody's forcing you to pay for stuff.
mod parent up
mod parent up, true and funny
In a world where robots can build robots and perform the same tasks as a person, labor will reach it's own kind of singularity. The only thing of value will become land, natural resources and ideas. The problem here is that only one of these can be produced by people - ideas. Will we turn into an economy based on highly paid knowledge workers, and hordes of unemployed?
Well, actually no. As we all know, you can't sell ideas without stupid restrictive laws and some kind of corporate dictatorship to back them up. Sure, the US is certainly heading in this direction, but what's to stop Swedish robot factories from stealing all their ideas and living in some kind of Arctic paradise?
So no, in the future we might have a dystopia where a small group of very rich individuals enjoy all the wealth. More likely we'll have a truly equal society where robots produce equal amounts of goods for everybody, leaving the rest of us to live in some kind of quasi-primitive society.
People will probably spend all their time playing video games, or sports, or who knows what. It might take a few decades, but it will happen eventually.
It's great that they're looking at ways to increase efficiency of current aircraft, but the question remains: how can we keep increasing our use of air travel without putting out more greenhouse gases. You hear people talking about restrictions on air travel in the future, and I can't understand why we can't find technological solutions.
For example, is anybody doing research on biofuels for turbines? I've heard of the USAF looking into it for greater energy security, but is it a reasonable proposal?
Could we eventually have a prop-powered commercial plane, even one that was electrically powered? Check out the Tu-95 Bear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95 as an example; it's a much more blue sky proposal, but within the realm of possibility.
What I don't understand is that here in Australia, there is no waiting list.
None.
I walked into a store the other day, and asked how long the waiting list was. The reply? About 30 seconds for the credit card to run through.
Reading the comments around here I'm thinking that eBay is looking real good (although I'd need to send a PAL TV with it).
Reading books on computers isn't much fun, however with usable electronic paper it won't be an issue. Sure, it's not here yet, but on the scale of decades it's a matter of when not if. Books won't go away entirely for a long long time, but for everyday use they will become much less common at some point.
m puter_Ebooks
And yes, you're right, it was possible to copy works before, but the fact is it was expensive. Perhaps not in terms of money, but photocopying a book is a time-consuming process. Burning a cd, ditto.
Today, things are different. I can set up a torrent of *every* South Park episode, or *every* Nine Inch Nails song, or *every* Harry Potter book, and tomorrow it will be there. No babysitting, just 3 clicks, leave it overnight and it's there. With the right technology to consume that media (e-paper, Apple TV, an iPod) there is no longer any incentive to pay for it except guilt over screwing the artist.
With the capability to store and share terabytes at a time, it becomes very easy to obtain copies of every major book published in a year, or every book on a topic, or every copy of a magazine or newspaper. Unless that person wants to reimburse you for your efforts, you'll have no way to force them. Remember, this is possible now, easy in a decade, and inevitable with the right tools to consume this media.
So why go to a bookstore when the bookstore can come to you, and for free? Just snoop around the pirate bay for a while, and imagine what this technology could do with an iPod for ebooks. http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3514419/Almost_500_Co
Copyright law gives you the right to protect yourself, but without the tools to find and prosecute copyright infringers that right is meaningless. The question is whether we, as a society, want to give copyright holders those tools.
While I have no problems with your arguments there is just one problem. You can't stop the transmission of data. Without a massive invasion of piracy there is simply no way to prevent P2P networks from obsoleting any limits on your right to copy and share.
So what's it going to be? Restrictions on P2P, on wireless network gear, on DRM circumvention? Or the (effective, regardless of what the laws say) abolition of copyright?
In 20 years, when we've all got 10' LCDs, electronic paper, 100+ terabyte (or more) storage systems and gigabit P2P connections there is *no* future for copyright.