5 ms·

And russians still have planes with hydraulic commands from the cold war (50 yo) that outperform F35, F16, F15, F14, B2 :) They even flew near UK exactly one

And russians still have planes with hydraulic commands from the cold war (50 yo) that outperform F35, F16, F15, F14, B2 :) They even flew near UK exactly one year ago with a turbine powered bomber from the 50s and a nuke inside and no planes intercepted it during its 5 hours flight over "modern air farce" doted countries. Notably the UK are lacking interceptors because they planned to replace theirs with the F35.... and the F35 is not there. Does not it sound ridiculous? And the stealth technology are nowhere to be stealth for long. It leaves heat signature, signal distortions. And why do US stealth planes have so much sharp angles when we all know it is bad for being stealth? Because their software don't let them do curbs... To avoid software bugs remove software from where it is not useful

talmand 11y ago
I don't understand the Russian bomber part, did they fail to detect the bomber or failed to intercept due to not having planes? Are you suggesting that the UK totally ditched all of their current interceptors and have their pilots sitting around waiting for the F-35 to show up? Are you saying the existing stealth planes are a money-making scam because we all know they built them wrong? The software doesn't allow... "curves"? Why doesn't it allow curves?
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  Of course it allows curves! It's just that they can't have curvature less than a great circle....~ Due to the way the military produces software specifications, it is very likely that the unbroken chain of subject-matter-experts from the days of ochre pictograms on cave walls to today have ensured that the software program functions exactly the same as drawing lines on charts by hand. Since human navigators did not initially possess the capability to continuously recalculate courses, bearings, and headings, as would be required in a curved flight path, the ground-based and flight computers don't do it now. So planes still keep a fixed heading between a set of points, and any possible roundness is encoded into the turn data or a specialized, predefined pattern.
  - SFjulie1 11y ago
    I was speaking of the angles in the shape of the planes design. Have you ever seen a diffraction pattern caused by any discontinuities? I have seen thousands of them ... the fourier transform of any discrete functions makes very nice detectable pattern that says : "NOT NATURAL". And that what radars are trained for spotting. And the more symmetries the more the pattern reinforce itself saying: human made technology spotted. (Curie principle : symmetry in causes get propagated in the effects) Have you seen a lot of natural object that are both discontinuous and symmetric and the size of a plane? EDIT : I forgot to explain the relationship between convolution of signals and FT but I guess everyone is educated enough to know that convolution of signal is the base of radar detection and that Fourier transform are related to convolution.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      Oh.... I thought you were talking about curves in the routes programmed into the flight computer! AFAIK, stealth planes use all flat surfaces and no curves because a curved surface is more likely to reflect a signal from an active radar beam back in the direction of the detector instead of somewhere else. If you shine a flashlight beam on a reflective sphere, you will always see a tiny spot of reflected light somewhere on the surface. If you shine a light beam on a perfectly flat surface, and it is not angled correctly, you will not see the reflection. So stealth surfaces are designed to be as black (to radar frequencies) as possible, and as flat as possible. And if possible, you should make as many of your flat surfaces parallel to one another as you can manage, because each one sends a reflection of a radar beam to a new spot, and you don't want the spots to be widely dispersed. In order to classify a radar reflection as natural or artificial, you have to detect it first.
      - SFjulie1 11y ago
        As I said. Detection is always a business decision between true/false positive/negative, the costs of sensitivity that is non linear per stage (breakthrough are non predictable) and the costs of stealth. And since science have improved at increasing detection by using distributed measures coupled with active correction the detection is getting easier and cheaper. There is a pace at which technology are cheap and efficient. And money (especially when GPB is not growing) is really the nerve of war. Technologies should be used opportunistically according to their costs that can change faster than the design/delivery process. The blindness on the cost efficiency and long term bets is taxing a lot the normal economy that in turns slow down and has difficulties feeding back military with useful cheap innovative realiable real innovations. We cannot predict the future. Especially when it comes to innovation. And look: we rely on the best of our technology to build weapons, but these technologies don't seem to deliver. Maybe the F35 story is an allegory of how our economies are in bad shape. And maybe the greatest military decision would be to diminish the defense/NASA budgets and fix the market and society. PS I insist that these software problems are not unique to USA. Rafale, A400M, Typhoon, probably russian planes have been suffering "outstanding delays" & "budget slip" and software are often involved. I do not think this is only a military problem. Something is rotten in the R&D department. Maybe the way we organize ourselves.
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  UK.. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-31530840 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-31530840 Remember with turbine powered bombers the flight takes 5 hours crossing the aerial zone of at least 5 NATO countries with modern aircraft and radars. And we know it was loaded with nuclear weapons, because of radioactivity. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/26/putin-raf-typhoon-aircraft-russia http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/26/putin-raf-ty... The Typhoon is unable to engage the enemy said by David Cameron to pose the biggest threat to Britain’s security. And it will not be able to do so until 2019 at the earliest. In fact, maybe the paradigm of airplanes is outdated since USSR giving cheap missiles and crude radar to the viet kong have proven that in terms of costs planes can be shot down with a 1/100 ratio in terms of costs. Plus aerian superiority paradigm (a WWII idea) works against developed countries relying on a dense industrial country. But, it does not work against people relying on AK47 and propane bottles coupled with a simple radio system. Money is the nerve of war. Angles: Sorry I can't find the article explaining how the DOD imposed using a software for B2 (and not F35) that limited the possibility to make nice curbs. However just look at the plane. And remember any physics lessons you have been taught : sharp angles make discontinuities. Discontinuities are easy to spot. Stealth anyway is a scam. B2 were spotted by US radars technologies bought by french since 1991 with networked radar (thomson). Validated during 1st iraki war while radar operator could put a name on the weired stuff they were seeing on screen they already saw flying over European space without authorization. (Spying allies is really not nice) You can evade one radar by deflecting signal. But if in a network of radar the signal is reintercepted, then it is bad for the plane. Also since 2000 it has been proven that the flight of a stealth plane above a normal "cellular phone grid" can be detected by the additional energy that it bounces back. Still with networked radar, stealth planes can make "holes" of expected energy. (ionosphere does reflect a little part of energy, and stealth fighter makes "shadows/holes") it may require bigger wavelength though. With IR detection, plane still leaves energy traces (like air friction). Stealthiness only value is in plane vs plane fight to diminish the electronic signature, thus a frontal stealth is more than enough. Stealth is a costly arm race. That is exactly what killed USSR that tried to fight USA IDS program (that was a scam). Strategic thinking must address the costs problems.
  - talmand 11y ago
    Your BBC link says fighters were scrambled to approach the bomber that did not enter sovereign airspace. I'm not sure what your argument is. I would say it's always been cheaper to shoot down an airplane than to build, use, and maintain it. That's nothing new. I don't recall anyone ever claiming that stealth would make the planes undetectable, only harder to detect. You do realize that what we know as stealth technology today was developed 30 to 50 years ago? I would assume new technologies have been developed to defeat it. Even accidentally, such as your cell phone grid example; which did not exist when the stealth technology was developed. Doesn't mean it has always been a scam. Today's planes are "stealth-like" which means they have similar technologies but no one expects them to disappear into the night. As for the cost, I agree. This trend of bigger, better, and more expensive is stupid.
bitmapbrother 11y ago
I'm not so sure about the russians having a plane that can outperform the F-16 in maneuverability, but the f-16 can easily kick the ass of the F-35.
- jinst8gmi 11y ago
  50 years ago is probably an exaggeration, but the Su-27 and its later derivatives Su-35 etc. and the MiG-29 from the 70's are highly maneuverable.
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  Even the typhoon kick the ass of the F35 http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-su-35-fighter-vs-americas-f-16-fighting-falcon-who-13918 http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-su-35-figh... Air Force F-16s are not currently fitted with an AESA and are at a severe disadvantage versus the Su-35 or other advanced Flanker derivatives. Modern F16 inferior to Mig29 ? Very likely. I don't have the time to search for the article about it, but it is a fact acknowledged by benchmarks that US air planes have been slowly gaining mass and loosing maneuverability since decades and they re-evaluated the F16 performance recently. Even F16 vs "old F16". Anyway. Mig29 Su30 are pretty cheap compared to US air planes and roughly close in terms of performance. Maybe a 1v1 scenario favors F16. But in $v$ you can align more Su/Mig per F16. And surviving a 1v1 situation is easier than 3v1.

talmand 11y ago

I don't understand the Russian bomber part, did they fail to detect the bomber or failed to intercept due to not having planes? Are you suggesting that the UK totally ditched all of their current interceptors and have their pilots sitting around waiting for the F-35 to show up? Are you saying the existing stealth planes are a money-making scam because we all know they built them wrong? The software doesn't allow... "curves"? Why doesn't it allow curves?

logfromblammo 11y ago
Of course it allows curves! It's just that they can't have curvature less than a great circle....~ Due to the way the military produces software specifications, it is very likely that the unbroken chain of subject-matter-experts from the days of ochre pictograms on cave walls to today have ensured that the software program functions exactly the same as drawing lines on charts by hand. Since human navigators did not initially possess the capability to continuously recalculate courses, bearings, and headings, as would be required in a curved flight path, the ground-based and flight computers don't do it now. So planes still keep a fixed heading between a set of points, and any possible roundness is encoded into the turn data or a specialized, predefined pattern.
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  I was speaking of the angles in the shape of the planes design. Have you ever seen a diffraction pattern caused by any discontinuities? I have seen thousands of them ... the fourier transform of any discrete functions makes very nice detectable pattern that says : "NOT NATURAL". And that what radars are trained for spotting. And the more symmetries the more the pattern reinforce itself saying: human made technology spotted. (Curie principle : symmetry in causes get propagated in the effects) Have you seen a lot of natural object that are both discontinuous and symmetric and the size of a plane? EDIT : I forgot to explain the relationship between convolution of signals and FT but I guess everyone is educated enough to know that convolution of signal is the base of radar detection and that Fourier transform are related to convolution.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    Oh.... I thought you were talking about curves in the routes programmed into the flight computer! AFAIK, stealth planes use all flat surfaces and no curves because a curved surface is more likely to reflect a signal from an active radar beam back in the direction of the detector instead of somewhere else. If you shine a flashlight beam on a reflective sphere, you will always see a tiny spot of reflected light somewhere on the surface. If you shine a light beam on a perfectly flat surface, and it is not angled correctly, you will not see the reflection. So stealth surfaces are designed to be as black (to radar frequencies) as possible, and as flat as possible. And if possible, you should make as many of your flat surfaces parallel to one another as you can manage, because each one sends a reflection of a radar beam to a new spot, and you don't want the spots to be widely dispersed. In order to classify a radar reflection as natural or artificial, you have to detect it first.
    - SFjulie1 11y ago
      As I said. Detection is always a business decision between true/false positive/negative, the costs of sensitivity that is non linear per stage (breakthrough are non predictable) and the costs of stealth. And since science have improved at increasing detection by using distributed measures coupled with active correction the detection is getting easier and cheaper. There is a pace at which technology are cheap and efficient. And money (especially when GPB is not growing) is really the nerve of war. Technologies should be used opportunistically according to their costs that can change faster than the design/delivery process. The blindness on the cost efficiency and long term bets is taxing a lot the normal economy that in turns slow down and has difficulties feeding back military with useful cheap innovative realiable real innovations. We cannot predict the future. Especially when it comes to innovation. And look: we rely on the best of our technology to build weapons, but these technologies don't seem to deliver. Maybe the F35 story is an allegory of how our economies are in bad shape. And maybe the greatest military decision would be to diminish the defense/NASA budgets and fix the market and society. PS I insist that these software problems are not unique to USA. Rafale, A400M, Typhoon, probably russian planes have been suffering "outstanding delays" & "budget slip" and software are often involved. I do not think this is only a military problem. Something is rotten in the R&D department. Maybe the way we organize ourselves.
SFjulie1 11y ago
UK.. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-31530840 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-31530840 Remember with turbine powered bombers the flight takes 5 hours crossing the aerial zone of at least 5 NATO countries with modern aircraft and radars. And we know it was loaded with nuclear weapons, because of radioactivity. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/26/putin-raf-typhoon-aircraft-russia http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/26/putin-raf-ty... The Typhoon is unable to engage the enemy said by David Cameron to pose the biggest threat to Britain’s security. And it will not be able to do so until 2019 at the earliest. In fact, maybe the paradigm of airplanes is outdated since USSR giving cheap missiles and crude radar to the viet kong have proven that in terms of costs planes can be shot down with a 1/100 ratio in terms of costs. Plus aerian superiority paradigm (a WWII idea) works against developed countries relying on a dense industrial country. But, it does not work against people relying on AK47 and propane bottles coupled with a simple radio system. Money is the nerve of war. Angles: Sorry I can't find the article explaining how the DOD imposed using a software for B2 (and not F35) that limited the possibility to make nice curbs. However just look at the plane. And remember any physics lessons you have been taught : sharp angles make discontinuities. Discontinuities are easy to spot. Stealth anyway is a scam. B2 were spotted by US radars technologies bought by french since 1991 with networked radar (thomson). Validated during 1st iraki war while radar operator could put a name on the weired stuff they were seeing on screen they already saw flying over European space without authorization. (Spying allies is really not nice) You can evade one radar by deflecting signal. But if in a network of radar the signal is reintercepted, then it is bad for the plane. Also since 2000 it has been proven that the flight of a stealth plane above a normal "cellular phone grid" can be detected by the additional energy that it bounces back. Still with networked radar, stealth planes can make "holes" of expected energy. (ionosphere does reflect a little part of energy, and stealth fighter makes "shadows/holes") it may require bigger wavelength though. With IR detection, plane still leaves energy traces (like air friction). Stealthiness only value is in plane vs plane fight to diminish the electronic signature, thus a frontal stealth is more than enough. Stealth is a costly arm race. That is exactly what killed USSR that tried to fight USA IDS program (that was a scam). Strategic thinking must address the costs problems.
- talmand 11y ago
  Your BBC link says fighters were scrambled to approach the bomber that did not enter sovereign airspace. I'm not sure what your argument is. I would say it's always been cheaper to shoot down an airplane than to build, use, and maintain it. That's nothing new. I don't recall anyone ever claiming that stealth would make the planes undetectable, only harder to detect. You do realize that what we know as stealth technology today was developed 30 to 50 years ago? I would assume new technologies have been developed to defeat it. Even accidentally, such as your cell phone grid example; which did not exist when the stealth technology was developed. Doesn't mean it has always been a scam. Today's planes are "stealth-like" which means they have similar technologies but no one expects them to disappear into the night. As for the cost, I agree. This trend of bigger, better, and more expensive is stupid.

bitmapbrother 11y ago

I'm not so sure about the russians having a plane that can outperform the F-16 in maneuverability, but the f-16 can easily kick the ass of the F-35.

jinst8gmi 11y ago
50 years ago is probably an exaggeration, but the Su-27 and its later derivatives Su-35 etc. and the MiG-29 from the 70's are highly maneuverable.
SFjulie1 11y ago
Even the typhoon kick the ass of the F35 http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-su-35-fighter-vs-americas-f-16-fighting-falcon-who-13918 http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-su-35-figh... Air Force F-16s are not currently fitted with an AESA and are at a severe disadvantage versus the Su-35 or other advanced Flanker derivatives. Modern F16 inferior to Mig29 ? Very likely. I don't have the time to search for the article about it, but it is a fact acknowledged by benchmarks that US air planes have been slowly gaining mass and loosing maneuverability since decades and they re-evaluated the F16 performance recently. Even F16 vs "old F16". Anyway. Mig29 Su30 are pretty cheap compared to US air planes and roughly close in terms of performance. Maybe a 1v1 scenario favors F16. But in $v$ you can align more Su/Mig per F16. And surviving a 1v1 situation is easier than 3v1.