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The F-22, Domestic Jobs, and the Military-Industrial Complex
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Boots on the ground, you can't fight a war from 10,000 feet or whatever altitude a drone flies at. Anyway, the drones have a guidance system sort of like an autopilot, they don't directly control them.. they essentially tell it where to go. (the current modern ones use satellites and then pilots at an airbase to directly control them for take off and landing)
When firing off weapons that's a human decision, computer object recognition is probably 20 years if not more behind a human brains ability to recognise and guess what objects are on a ground. i.e. "Is that a terrorist or a civilian", "is that tank a real tank or is it just a fake cardboard tank" etc.
I personally think for those kind of scenarios the humans can never be taken out of the loop, it requires human experience and foresignt into a situation.
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And then we have robots that we have taught to use guns.
That will not end well.
Khavall's Beginner's Guide to Music Everything(Theory Blog)
I'm sure the first two times it will end well, however the third and fourth will be pretty meh.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Yes and people are pointing out that the F-22 is effective but impractical and seems ot be designed for a war that will never happen
I know I've heard this argument before on this forum.
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On the other hand, planes like the F-22, Eurofighter etc are sort of like nuclear weapons (very loosely) in that they act as a deterrent and prevent anyone from getting any ideas.
But then, Americas and Europe's massive technological military technology lead, high quality troops and already excellent weapons do a pretty job too.
The fact that North Korea (for example) hasn't actually tried anything militarily is because they know that the US would annihilate them with conventional weapons alone if they tried it. China isn't even a factor any more, they honestly don't give much of a shit about NK. I could see how planes like the F-22 might give China second thoughts from getting involved, but frankly China cares more about money nowadays than any ideology.
I think ultimately the western arms manufacturers hype them up more than the Russians themselves could ever hope of what they'd actually be capable of. Every single time the west has gotten their hands on Russian aircraft we've discovered every single time about how inferior they are to their western equivalents. Companies like BAE, Lockheed Martin etc. hype up those aircraft as super planes and the idiots believe them because they look good at an air show. The Russians simply don't put the same level of investment into weapons development that they did during the cold war, during the 90's they did pretty much zero development you can't stagnate your R&D for so long without there being consequences.
I'd place good money that if the west got their hands on say an SU-35 and put it up against an F-22, F-35 or a Eurofighter in mock dogfights or in technical analysis of weapons systems, engines etc that those three western planes would walk away winning by bloody miles.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Remember Iraq? You know, when they were the third most powerful military on the planet. Saddam had Mig-29 Fulcrums.
This is what happened when they went up against the (at the time) less capable F-15s
That's a missilecam image of a Mig-29 about 1/10th of a second before it exploded. How fast your fighter can bank doesn't really mean as much as the general public thinks it does.
I've been posting on this forum in an attempt to train myself to resist arguments that make my head explode.
As for the MiG-29 its biggest inovation was its helmet system. It could target enemies without using the HUD. Obvious in hindsight, but completly new when it was first introduced. There are upgrades in the works to give it to 4gen fighters.
The MiG-27 was a joke rethread of the MiG-23.
Except you can't win hearts, minds and a counter-insurgency with an army of drones.
I don't know if you just GISed that image or if you actually read the originating article, but there's a longer story behind that picture:
Owell
Edit: I've been reading up on the Eurofighter, it seems comparable to the F-22 but all the problems it has are more muted, and it's far cheaper. Maybe we should have just bought the design of the eurofighter and gone off of that lol.
Besides, it gives the coming generation of asthmatic fat-asses a chance to serve their country.
Probably will never happen. We hope will never happen. Still, it'd be nice to be able to blow something up with them. I paid for the motherfuckers. Why can't I see it make some shit-shack go boom? I mean... to spend that much money to just look at it because it doesn't like going outside? It's like buying a hooker you never fuck.
Russian boogieman concerns also existed around the MiG-25 (which led to the development of the F-15), the MiG-29, and a little of the MiG-31, though by then the dress had been lifted. The 25, especially, scared the shit out of everyone.
You can't really win them with an army of F-22s either... because they can't actually see you in the cockpit.
Plus a lot of people think of Americas obsession with airpower is a sign of cowardice. They think the US only wants to fight when its completly safe and will recoil of they suffer significant ground losses.
Thats the lesson they drew from Somalia and Bosnia. Thats the lesson Bin Laden preached after Kosovo. That America was scared of going toe to toe with people and only had the courage to bomb people from 30k feet up in the air.
thats gotta be the scariest feeling in the world
It's cheaper? Please provide info. All I know is from Wikipedia. :oops:
Quoth Wikipedia, the source of all human knowledge:
F-22 $137.5MM ("5th Generation Fighter")
Eurofighter Typhoon $114MM ("4.5th Generation Fighter")
The F-22 is not $137.5M. IIRC, that's the original quote, and since then, program costs have run up to something like $270m per plane. That's the point, it's a program that has gone vastly overbudget, and far under-delivered for costs.
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Link please.
I haven't heard of this, BUT if this were the case, then everything makes so much more sense!
Then you really are buying 2 F-35s for the price of a Raptor, and it would explain why a bill for funding 7 additional fighters would run up $1.7 billion dollars!
In other words, I don't know his sources, but I feel convinced that he's speaking the truth.
Incidentally, I do know the F-35 cost estimates are hovering around $100 mil (possibly more at this point), which is beyond the Wikipedia list price.
"Hey Bob, how do you think we should defend our aircraft from missiles? Stealth, chaff, electronic radar jamm-"
"LASERS!"
"But don't those have heat-"
"LIQUID LASERS!"
"Wouldn't that be heavy?"
"POTTERY LIQUID LASERS!"
"Okay..."
Wikipedia is the new Jane's.
Um, one thing people always forget about those neat drones and how than can be flown from the safety of anywhere that's not the battlefield is that someone needs to launch the damn things. And that can't exactly happen in Milwaukee when you want to Nintendo-kill some dudes in Pashtunistan.
I think that's the whole point. We've been focusing on more and better air superiority fighters when what we really need are ground attack planes and mainline bombers. We're still using the ancient B-52, because its successors aren't nearly as good at doing what we actually need done: staying above a battlefield for a long time to deal with emergent threats, and carrying a fuckload of bombs.
The fact that you can tell the difference between a wedding party and a terrorist colum from 30k feet is reason enough. Killing civilians is not the way to go dude.
Plus a reputation for cowardice is bad, when you want deter people from attacking you.
You're right. You have to be in Nevada.
It's terrifyingly Skynet-esque.
GT: batshido Hit me up on ME3.
And that's why we're allies with Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
what
You're saying that the US should instead of low-risk bombing in the event that intel is botched to shit and they have no clue what they're bombing, send in troops on the ground who have about a billion percent increase in chance of troop loss?
And that people will totally attack us all the time if we have a reputation for dropping bombs on them instead of needlessly dying?
Khavall's Beginner's Guide to Music Everything(Theory Blog)
And here I was thinking it was because of our shared ideals and love of cheap gas. :lol:
GT: batshido Hit me up on ME3.
Well I'm sure they're not letting us have airstrips in their country for free. Regardless, the Predator can fly out of Qatar and almost make it to Beijing. That's enough range to keep the crew on the airstrip out of harms way. I still think it's a bad idea to switch to an all unmanned Air Force. We could probably cut back on some of the pilots, but completely unmanned is a bad idea.
I was thinking more of Afghanistan than Iraq, but either way, any long distance travel to a target takes away time on the target for surveillance or strikes. They can stay up there a good long while, but it's better to be close because you don't want the little lawn mower engine to go out when there's no one around to pull the cord.
And I agree - unmanned is best as a partial measure. What would we do in the Air Force if we had no real pilots to worship?
Fun fact: The B-52 has been in service since 1955.
It's only scheduled to leave service in 2040.
That's not a typo. Twenty-fucking-forty.
A plane that entered the design phase in the mid 20th century, just after WW2 -- will only leave service by the middle of the 21st century. How insane is that?
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