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It's very disappointing to see how skeptical HN has become about new technology. Making aircrafts is hard, making supersonic aircraft even harder and making a

• masklinn 4y ago
  > It's very disappointing to see how skeptical HN has become about new technology. Completely made up nonsense with no evidence is not "new technology". > That there's progress by Boom Is there though? PR is not progress.
  • kitd 4y ago
    Completely made up nonsense with no evidence Citation?
    • goodSteveramos 4y ago
      this is a really funny comment if you think about it. Instead of simply presenting the evidence, you demand that he prove there is none. Quite a bold demand. got to respect that on some level. If you disagree, prove there isn't any evidence that Im right.
      • kitd 4y ago
        Not so. He is the one who made the original statement. The onus of proof is on him to show what is "completely made up". It's a fairly extreme statement after all.
        • masklinn 4y ago
          No, the original statement is that there is “new technology” which HN is “skeptical of”. The evidentiary requirements for a dismissal are no higher than what they dismiss. Which in this case is a PR bit completely devoid of evidence, so 0. But if you’ re interested in evidence I actually scratched a bit at one of the names mentioned, and I can’t say I’m impressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33983419#33996877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33983419#33996877
          • kitd 4y ago
            Sorry, but that wasn't his statement. It's quite clear that he states that what is presented as new technology is completely made up nonsense. He may be right, but he needs to show what in the article is completely made up nonsense so that we know if he is.
            • masklinn 4y ago
              > Sorry, but that wasn't his statement. It was my statement, and it was a reply to the previous unsupported assertion which I quoted here. > It's quite clear that he states that what is presented as new technology is completely made up nonsense. Yes. > He may be right, but he needs to show what in the article is completely made up nonsense so that we know if he is. There is jack shit in the article supporting the existence or likelihood of "new technology". It's window dressing, a PR release with no meat or bones promising a bright and spotless future out of essentially nothing. It has as much technological content as Blindsight, Altered Carbon, or I, Robot. Possibly less.
              • kitd 4y ago
                Thank you for replying. And while there is no doubt a lot of PR in the article, PR != "made-up nonsense". I like HN because the standard of discussion > eg reddit. Simply throwing out what are essentially accusations of lies is not good discussion.
                • OnlineGladiator 4y ago
                  > PR != "made-up nonsense" It really is. I've actually argued with people (multiple times in multiple companies) about the press release containing false information, and they told me "that's just what we do." What do you think PR is if not making something up to present a positive story? There isn't even a law that says it has to be truthful, so long as you aren't soliciting something. I can make a claim that I developed a working nuclear fusion reactor and put out a press release for it. Anyone with a brain would know it's bullshit but it's still PR. It's completely legal and standard practice. No offense, but I think you should educate yourself further. https://www.bu.edu/prlab/2020/04/07/is-pr-inherently-unethical-an-investigation-into-black-pr-firms/ https://www.bu.edu/prlab/2020/04/07/is-pr-inherently-unethic...
• julienfr112 4y ago
  HN was very sceptical about blockchain/web3, and recent events show that HN was quite rightly so ...
  • lajosbacs 4y ago
    Counterexample where HN was wrong: the famous Dropbox comment.
    • ksec 4y ago
      Yes. There are far more wrong on HN than right. In fact the Web3 / Crypto example might have been the outliner.
      • rnk 4y ago
        There are random commenters (like me!) saying various things all the time. But there is kind of the weight of the mass of commenters. That's how we got to the semi-consensus (except for the crypto partisans) that web3/crypto seemed to be in a massive bubble with no clear use case and lots of likely fraud. Notice that for the AI boom going on right now this is not going the same was way as web3.
• mmustapic 4y ago
  The technology was already solved decades ago, we had the Concorde. Supersonic flight is well understood. The hard part is to make a supersonic aircraft that's commercially viable. Personally, I'm very skeptical when they say things like "zero carbon" or "anywhere in the world for $100", very difficult to believe them. The only progress they made for now is building a single seat supersonic plane that maybe will fly. We have lots of those already.
  • whinvik 4y ago
    Yes parts of it were solved decades ago but Boom is not doing exactly the same thing. Concorde for example had an afterburner.
    • mmustapic 4y ago
      Concorde used afterburners for take-off and while transitioning to supersonic, then it cruised at Mach 2 without afterburners. The thing with Boom is that they are saying "we are doing this new great thing", and it's not new, Concorde did it. How are they specifically going to be better than Concorde? Just not using afterburners during taking off? Are they going to be cheaper? How? Just by saying they will? That's why I understand that people don't care about this technology, because it's nothing new, and there's no proof Boom is doing something radically different that will solve the main problems of supersonic travel.
      • cycomanic 4y ago
        On top of that nobody needs it. The issue is that supersonic jets are really anachronistic, it's the most wasteful way of flying and it doesn't even buy you much time for most distances because you have to fly subsonic over land.
        • avidphantasm 4y ago
          It feels like Boom is a product of the zero interest rate frothy market, where there was lots of money chasing “disruptive” technologies, which breeds not-so-good ideas. In particular, Boom seems to have attracted investment because it purports to solve a classic rich guy problem: how to fly overseas a bit faster, but at a price premium. They still have some momentum from the zero-interest rate environment, but how long can that last?
• dncornholio 4y ago
  Where's the new technology though? It's just a turbofan engine. We should be super skeptical these days. Too many promises and not enough deliveries. Also, just because something is hard, doesn't mean it shouldn't deserve criticism.
  • masklinn 4y ago
    > Where's the new technology though? It's just a turbofan engine. A supersonic no-afterburner 35000 lbf mid-bypass (whatever they mean by that) turbofan, cheap enough (to build and maintain) for civil variation, designed in two years would be a pretty impressive thing tho. If it existed. Especially from a company whose biggest previous offering is a 900lbf turbofan. The F-35's F135 "only" has 28000lbf dry thrust, and the plane tops out at 1.6, while Overture is supposed to reach 1.7 (and supercruise, which the F-35 can not do). Although in fairness the Tu-144D had engines specced at 54 and (like Concorde) cruised at M2. On the other hand, it was even less efficient and economically justifiable than Concorde, and the entire thing was shuttered in 1983, after only 6 years, and regular groundings (Tu-144 only flew scheduled 103 times before the programme was cancelled, BA alone flew Concorde near 50000 times, and the class logged more than a million flight hours.) But here all that exists is a Boom PR release.
• rgmerk 4y ago
  The point is that there isn’t progress on the most critical part of a viable aircraft - the engine. Some of us who weren’t born yesterday have seen this rodeo before, and when a startup aircraft manufacturer switches engines it tends to indicate their concept isn’t viable. The fact that Boom are proposing to build their own engine, rather than partnering with an established engine manufacturer, tends to suggest that the engine manufacturers don’t think it’s doable either. Sometimes the establishment gets it wrong, but jet engine manufacture is a very mature field, and Boom isn’t proposing to do some radical new engine design. That makes me pretty suspicious.
  • whinvik 4y ago
    Ok I will bite. Commercial engine manufacturers are also an oligopoly so they also have very little incentive to innovate like aircraft manufacturers. The only way to incentivize them is to bring a big pot of gold. I remember Boom tried but one of the engine manufacturers initially signed on then withdrew.
    • hef19898 4y ago
      Both, aircrafy OEMs and engine OEMs, do innovate all the time. Their innovation is of the evolutionary instead of disruptive nature so. And hey, Airbus and Boeing are flying their existings jets with SAF for quite a while now, Airbus did so with the A400M and the A330. No idea why Boom thinks they can be an aircraft and an engine OEM at the same time when already one of things tends on the impossible side of things to begin with.
    • jabl 4y ago
      Sure they have an incentive to innovate, namely taking market share from their competitors. The reason why they want a big pot of gold is that developing a new competitive jet engine is frighteningly expensive. The established vendors, with decades of in-house knowhow, will spend a decade and billions of dollars on a new from scratch engine. It's just not a game where a VC-funded startup with a very limited runway can expect to be successful. But sure, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Not holding my breath waiting though.
    • 4y ago
• syntaxing 4y ago
  I mean, that’s just engineering in general. We’re all mostly pessimistic opportunists. Skeptical of any new technology but get impressed only when they actually deliver. Ideas are cheap (not easy though). Execution is where most ideas die.
• Gatsky 4y ago
  Yeah it seems a bit of a downer, but it’s mostly just noise. How many of us would actually invest money in Boom right now? Basically none. How many of us would short it if we could? Basically none. The fact that Boom exists at all suggests sufficient optimism about new technology is out there somewhere.
• cm277 4y ago
  Hmm, all of these things are hard; they are also fairly easy compared to building your own jet engine. There are a handful of jet engine makers in the world, 2 or 3 that can build passenger-grade engines and 2-3 (small overlap) that can build supersonic jet engines. The physics within a jet engine are basically unknowable. The material science is the hardest we have. The tolerances and margins for error are insane. I wanted Boom to succeed and even believed some of their hype, but this basically means they are dead.
  • constantcrying 4y ago
    Kratos will build the engines. Plane manufacturers usually do not build their own engines.
    • masklinn 4y ago
      And Kratos is currently a minor manufacturer of engines for missiles and expendable drones ("attritable UAVs" in their own words), not a manufacturer of airliner engines, or even bizjet engines.
      • constantcrying 4y ago
        Yeah, apparently actual large scale manufacturers, GE, Honeywell, Safran, etc. have no interest in producing supersonic engines. Gotta take what you can get I guess. Honesty I don't think you are wrong with the scepticism, if some actual large engine company took up the challenge I also would be more confident.
        • hef19898 4y ago
          Rolls Royce, the only company that ever made civilian super-sonic jet engines, for the Concorde, dumped Boom in September. So, it is not tha Boom doesn't have an engine OEM partner. They had, and that partner was not interessted beyond some initial research.
          • 4y ago
• Ekaros 4y ago
  I think NH would laugh out a startup saying we are going to build up and conquer entire world with our new processor architecture or operating system. Not based on existing one such as ARM or Unix.
• rakoo 4y ago
  And making an aircraft that doesn't emit outrageous amounts of CO2 with equal access to everyone, irrespective of the size of their wallet, is the hardestest. Boom doesn't solve this, so why should we praise it ? A technological progress isn't progress if it's a social or environmental regression.
• fakedang 4y ago
  The challenge with supersonic flight is that you not only have to build engines that are capable of pushing your aircraft to the maximum limits of speed, but also it has to be able to carry a proportionate amount of fuel for it to be viable for flight. Supersonic aircraft consume fuel at a much higher rate than normal aircraft, hence you are forced to make a tradeoff between higher aircraft capacity and higher fuel capacity. This is not a problem for current military applications of supersonic flight, but for commercial purposes, it makes it financially unviable. You can only sell a limited number of tickets, which makes the proposition unattractive for large carriers. Thus your market would be limited to niche carriers/charters who cater to carrying a few UNHWs and execs, which in the grand scheme of things isn't a large enough market to recoup your investment. Not to mention, Boom hasn't innovated in any way to solve the two key issues here - they aren't using a significantly lighter fuel to compensate for the tradeoff, nor have they radically changed the engine design to consume less fuel at supersonic speeds. If they did, they would be touting that instead rather than hiding behind a proprietary "superfuel".
• janef0421 4y ago
  Is it progress? I don't think the time required to fly over an ocean is really a major problem. Time-sensitive clients can simply book an overnight flight during time they would be sleeping, and those who would be rich enough to afford supersonic flights can already afford comfortable accommodations on such flights. The benefits would be minimal and would be overwhelmed by the environmental damage and/or waste caused by the high fuel burn.