7 ms·

The 1,000th F-35 Has Been Built

29 points by clouddrover 3y ago

russellbeattie 3y ago
It's been built but not delivered as its waiting for upgrades. One of the upgrades is the computer - which I had never thought about before. What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use?? Turns out it's a custom CPU/GPU developed by L3Harris [1] running the Green hills Integrity real time OS [2]. It's unsurprising that it's all super custom hardware and software for military use, but conceptually it's like alternative universe of computing. I wonder what it's like to work with. 1. https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/high-performance-integrated-core-processor-icp https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/high-performance-i... 2. https://www.ghs.com/products/rtos/integrity.html https://www.ghs.com/products/rtos/integrity.html
- geoduck14 3y ago
  >What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use?? Pretty sure it isn't Windows CE, but I'm not 100% certain
- Arrath 3y ago
  > What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use? Generally speaking, something older than you might suspect. For instance, while the F-35 officially entered service with various branches of the US armed forces as early as 2015, its first flight was in 2006. The experimental plane first flew in 2000, and the earliest design work began in 1995. Not that the compute/avionics hardware is ever truly locked into stone considering the successive F-35 production Blocks with both iterative software and hardware upgrades that have already been fielded, Service Life Extension Programs that the plane will receive in coming decades, and so on, but expect at least some of the silicon in there to share more with a Pentium 3 than a Ryzen 7.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Wow, 4.5 kW of power draw max for a server with 512 MB of memory and the equivalent computer power of a single x86 core from about 25 years ago! I’m pretty sure an Arduino could run circles around that thing, using a battery.
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    Until you did a high G manuever or was cruising at 45k feet and get hit with a solar flare then your arduino would be rendered useless or at least introduce so many errors the watchdog hw would shutdown your newly acquired paperweight.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      Ordinary consumer electronics can tolerate far higher G forces than the human pilot can. A standard technique is to simply liberally coat the electronics in epoxy resin, but that's only really needed for things like the guidance electronics in artillery shells. E.g.: Here's a drone reaching nearly 13 Gs, which would incapacitate or even injure a human: https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l One recent change is that modern electronics uses mostly surface-mount components, which are not easily dislodged by g forces. Older electronics used large discrete components with wire legs (capacitors, inductors, etc...), which had a tendency to bend back and forth and eventually break off. However, tender requirements aren't changed just because technology has moved on. The paperwork must be completed as specified! The vendors must show that their new technology that doesn't have these problems includes solutions for problems only present in old technology! Etc... This results in 20-30 year old technology being used in new warplanes rolling off the production line today. But rest assured, it's being done properly, with all the correct paperwork filled out! Everything in order. Meanwhile, for the price of one of the two cooling fans on that monstrosity, I could buy half a dozen embedded processors made with silicon-on-insulator technology, which is also rad-hard, and have a 5-way system with majority voting and a hot spare... still running off a battery and cooled passively.
      - dralley 3y ago
        It's not just about g-forces, it's about high temperatures, heating/cooling cycles, vibrations, humidity, EMP resistance, etc. etc. It's cool that your drone can do 13 G's, but the more realistic scenario is doing 5-6 Gs over and over and over and over and over again, sitting out in the sun for weeks, sitting on the deck of a carrier in the tropics, getting launched off a carrier, getting shaken around and exposed to salty air, sitting a few feet from a high power radar - you get the point. Also, god forbid, but these things are designed to drop nukes, so that has to be taken into consideration as well.
- jandrewrogers 3y ago
  A lot of military silicon is, in microarchitectural terms, very old. People overestimate how much CPU is required. For example, reliable hypersonic kinetic intercept of hypersonic targets (i.e. the proverbial bullet shooting down another bullet, where both are hypersonic) can be, and has been, done all day with a MIPS R3000 CPU. The physical limits of materials restrict systems to much lower reaction times than even ancient CPUs are capable of. The advantage of old CPUs is that you can harden the hell out of them and be made to have very predictable properties. Also, the CPUs tend to be for orchestration and control. If you need any kind of heavy exotic processing, there is a dedicated piece of silicon for that purpose. Complex US weapon systems like the F35 are a mixture of silicon that was old before some people here were born and state-of-the-art beyond what is available in commodity systems. They generally use the oldest most reliable tech that won’t compromise requirements for any particular use case.
Kon-Peki 3y ago
Not knowing much about these things, I wondered if 1,000 is a lot or a little. Wikipedia says that it is not very many [1]. But then again, we aren’t in the middle of a world war. Does anyone know what the final production number will be? As in, the vast majority that will ever be produced have already been ordered? Or is the future still wide open? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_aircraft https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_aircra...
- 2trill2spill 3y ago
  For a military, non WW2 plane, 1000 aircraft is a lot. The US government plans on buying around ~1700 F35 and US allies have orders for another ~1000 F35. Overtime I would expect the number of orders for f35 to keep going up.
- neftaly 3y ago
  For a modern fighter jet, it's a lot. It's planned to remain in service till 2070. One of the most important strategic innovations of the F-35 has been economies of scale.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  I don’t have a citation for you at the moment, but I recall reading estimates of something like 4,500 F-35s anticipated to be produced over the program’s lifespan. I think I also recall that being something like a 50/50 split between the United States and the rest of the world, but I’m even hazier on that. Taking a quick glance through the table you linked, the closest equivalent I saw was the F-4, which is a multirole fighter that was used by the US Navy and Air Force as well as broadly around the world. About 5,200 of those were ultimately produced, and that number is close to what I recall reading about anticipated F-35 production. For a variety of reasons, it’s a very different world now from when the F-4 was introduced but on balance a mid-four-figure production run for the F-35 feels about right.
- dharmab 3y ago
  For comparison, the F-16 had about 4,600 built over 50 years, while the F-15 has had maybe 2,000 built over 50 years. 1,000 for a relatively young fighter is a lot.
randcraw 3y ago
1000 aircraft for $1.7 trillion, so each plane costs $1.7 billion. That's nuts.
- 2trill2spill 3y ago
  Umm each plane cost way less than 1.7 Billion. A F35A can be purchased for around $80 million. The 1.7 trillion figure is the cost of research & development, purchasing about 1700 aircraft, and sustaining them for 57 years. So that includes fuel, spare parts, upgrades, pilots, etc, for almost 60 years.
  - nocoiner 3y ago
    To further elaborate on this, it’s something like a few tenths of total GDP over that period. Now, depending on how you look at it, you can consider that either a huge number or eminently affordable - I think both are true - but I think it’s a reasonable price for the roles the aircraft is designed to fill over that period.
  - randcraw 3y ago
    The cost of each product must include a host of costs that fall outside of the simple manufacturing cost of each. These costs are myriad: R&D, engineering, tooling, maintenance program development, documentation, testing, re-designing, etc, etc. Thus the only fair assessment of the cost of each aircraft must be calculated as COST_OF_PROGRAM / NUMBER_OF_AIRCRAFT. This phenomenon has been discussed ad nauseum when pricing the development cost of a new pharmaceutical drug. ALL of a pharma's annual corporate research and development costs must be divided only by the number of new drugs that year. Only THAT accurately accounts for the actual cost of developing each drug, given the number of drug candidates that fail during gestation. Military hardware is no different. Many bids on new contracts fall through. That expense is part of the cost of doing business w/ the military. In fact, if all of Lockheed's many expenditures (productive and unproductive) were divided by the number of its shipped products (w/ cost proportionate to sale price), the actual cost of each shipped product would be substantially higher than is reported. This is an age-old game played by every government contractor to hide the true extent of how much each of their products finally cost the taxpayers. (Not to mention the practice of hiding the high fraction of cost-plus contract overruns in that business.)
impulser_ 3y ago
~500 of them have been to the US so far, more than 2000 still planned for the US alone. The US has 4 of the top 7 largest air forces in the world. 1. US Airforce 2. US Army 4. US Navy 7. US Marines
- knubie 3y ago
  That's interesting, I always thought the Navy was #2.
  - jandrewrogers 3y ago
    The US Army has thousands of helicopters, which count as aircraft. They have a limited inventory of fixed-wing aircraft. Only about a thousand of those helicopters are combat systems (almost entirely AH-64 Apache), there are a few thousand utility and transport helicopters that exist for quickly moving troops and equipment. I always find the absolute numbers of US military systems surprising, particularly considering that they are largely state-of-the-art and continuously upgraded. US equipment inventories are vast, since they were originally trying to maintain parity with Soviet numbers. The situation in Ukraine suggests that the exchange rate is not anything like 1:1 but the equipment is a sunk cost at this point.

29 points by clouddrover 3y ago

It's been built but not delivered as its waiting for upgrades. One of the upgrades is the computer - which I had never thought about before. What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use?? Turns out it's a custom CPU/GPU developed by L3Harris [1] running the Green hills Integrity real time OS [2]. It's unsurprising that it's all super custom hardware and software for military use, but conceptually it's like alternative universe of computing. I wonder what it's like to work with. 1. https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/high-performance-integrated-core-processor-icp https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/high-performance-i... 2. https://www.ghs.com/products/rtos/integrity.html https://www.ghs.com/products/rtos/integrity.html

geoduck14 3y ago
>What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use?? Pretty sure it isn't Windows CE, but I'm not 100% certain
Arrath 3y ago
> What platform does a cutting edge fighter even use? Generally speaking, something older than you might suspect. For instance, while the F-35 officially entered service with various branches of the US armed forces as early as 2015, its first flight was in 2006. The experimental plane first flew in 2000, and the earliest design work began in 1995. Not that the compute/avionics hardware is ever truly locked into stone considering the successive F-35 production Blocks with both iterative software and hardware upgrades that have already been fielded, Service Life Extension Programs that the plane will receive in coming decades, and so on, but expect at least some of the silicon in there to share more with a Pentium 3 than a Ryzen 7.
jiggawatts 3y ago
Wow, 4.5 kW of power draw max for a server with 512 MB of memory and the equivalent computer power of a single x86 core from about 25 years ago! I’m pretty sure an Arduino could run circles around that thing, using a battery.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  Until you did a high G manuever or was cruising at 45k feet and get hit with a solar flare then your arduino would be rendered useless or at least introduce so many errors the watchdog hw would shutdown your newly acquired paperweight.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Ordinary consumer electronics can tolerate far higher G forces than the human pilot can. A standard technique is to simply liberally coat the electronics in epoxy resin, but that's only really needed for things like the guidance electronics in artillery shells. E.g.: Here's a drone reaching nearly 13 Gs, which would incapacitate or even injure a human: https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l One recent change is that modern electronics uses mostly surface-mount components, which are not easily dislodged by g forces. Older electronics used large discrete components with wire legs (capacitors, inductors, etc...), which had a tendency to bend back and forth and eventually break off. However, tender requirements aren't changed just because technology has moved on. The paperwork must be completed as specified! The vendors must show that their new technology that doesn't have these problems includes solutions for problems only present in old technology! Etc... This results in 20-30 year old technology being used in new warplanes rolling off the production line today. But rest assured, it's being done properly, with all the correct paperwork filled out! Everything in order. Meanwhile, for the price of one of the two cooling fans on that monstrosity, I could buy half a dozen embedded processors made with silicon-on-insulator technology, which is also rad-hard, and have a 5-way system with majority voting and a hot spare... still running off a battery and cooled passively.
    - dralley 3y ago
      It's not just about g-forces, it's about high temperatures, heating/cooling cycles, vibrations, humidity, EMP resistance, etc. etc. It's cool that your drone can do 13 G's, but the more realistic scenario is doing 5-6 Gs over and over and over and over and over again, sitting out in the sun for weeks, sitting on the deck of a carrier in the tropics, getting launched off a carrier, getting shaken around and exposed to salty air, sitting a few feet from a high power radar - you get the point. Also, god forbid, but these things are designed to drop nukes, so that has to be taken into consideration as well.
jandrewrogers 3y ago
A lot of military silicon is, in microarchitectural terms, very old. People overestimate how much CPU is required. For example, reliable hypersonic kinetic intercept of hypersonic targets (i.e. the proverbial bullet shooting down another bullet, where both are hypersonic) can be, and has been, done all day with a MIPS R3000 CPU. The physical limits of materials restrict systems to much lower reaction times than even ancient CPUs are capable of. The advantage of old CPUs is that you can harden the hell out of them and be made to have very predictable properties. Also, the CPUs tend to be for orchestration and control. If you need any kind of heavy exotic processing, there is a dedicated piece of silicon for that purpose. Complex US weapon systems like the F35 are a mixture of silicon that was old before some people here were born and state-of-the-art beyond what is available in commodity systems. They generally use the oldest most reliable tech that won’t compromise requirements for any particular use case.

Kon-Peki 3y ago

Not knowing much about these things, I wondered if 1,000 is a lot or a little. Wikipedia says that it is not very many [1]. But then again, we aren’t in the middle of a world war. Does anyone know what the final production number will be? As in, the vast majority that will ever be produced have already been ordered? Or is the future still wide open? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_aircraft https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_aircra...

2trill2spill 3y ago
For a military, non WW2 plane, 1000 aircraft is a lot. The US government plans on buying around ~1700 F35 and US allies have orders for another ~1000 F35. Overtime I would expect the number of orders for f35 to keep going up.
neftaly 3y ago
For a modern fighter jet, it's a lot. It's planned to remain in service till 2070. One of the most important strategic innovations of the F-35 has been economies of scale.
nocoiner 3y ago
I don’t have a citation for you at the moment, but I recall reading estimates of something like 4,500 F-35s anticipated to be produced over the program’s lifespan. I think I also recall that being something like a 50/50 split between the United States and the rest of the world, but I’m even hazier on that. Taking a quick glance through the table you linked, the closest equivalent I saw was the F-4, which is a multirole fighter that was used by the US Navy and Air Force as well as broadly around the world. About 5,200 of those were ultimately produced, and that number is close to what I recall reading about anticipated F-35 production. For a variety of reasons, it’s a very different world now from when the F-4 was introduced but on balance a mid-four-figure production run for the F-35 feels about right.
dharmab 3y ago
For comparison, the F-16 had about 4,600 built over 50 years, while the F-15 has had maybe 2,000 built over 50 years. 1,000 for a relatively young fighter is a lot.

randcraw 3y ago

1000 aircraft for $1.7 trillion, so each plane costs $1.7 billion. That's nuts.

2trill2spill 3y ago
Umm each plane cost way less than 1.7 Billion. A F35A can be purchased for around $80 million. The 1.7 trillion figure is the cost of research & development, purchasing about 1700 aircraft, and sustaining them for 57 years. So that includes fuel, spare parts, upgrades, pilots, etc, for almost 60 years.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  To further elaborate on this, it’s something like a few tenths of total GDP over that period. Now, depending on how you look at it, you can consider that either a huge number or eminently affordable - I think both are true - but I think it’s a reasonable price for the roles the aircraft is designed to fill over that period.
- randcraw 3y ago
  The cost of each product must include a host of costs that fall outside of the simple manufacturing cost of each. These costs are myriad: R&D, engineering, tooling, maintenance program development, documentation, testing, re-designing, etc, etc. Thus the only fair assessment of the cost of each aircraft must be calculated as COST_OF_PROGRAM / NUMBER_OF_AIRCRAFT. This phenomenon has been discussed ad nauseum when pricing the development cost of a new pharmaceutical drug. ALL of a pharma's annual corporate research and development costs must be divided only by the number of new drugs that year. Only THAT accurately accounts for the actual cost of developing each drug, given the number of drug candidates that fail during gestation. Military hardware is no different. Many bids on new contracts fall through. That expense is part of the cost of doing business w/ the military. In fact, if all of Lockheed's many expenditures (productive and unproductive) were divided by the number of its shipped products (w/ cost proportionate to sale price), the actual cost of each shipped product would be substantially higher than is reported. This is an age-old game played by every government contractor to hide the true extent of how much each of their products finally cost the taxpayers. (Not to mention the practice of hiding the high fraction of cost-plus contract overruns in that business.)

impulser_ 3y ago

~500 of them have been to the US so far, more than 2000 still planned for the US alone. The US has 4 of the top 7 largest air forces in the world. 1. US Airforce 2. US Army 4. US Navy 7. US Marines

knubie 3y ago
That's interesting, I always thought the Navy was #2.
- jandrewrogers 3y ago
  The US Army has thousands of helicopters, which count as aircraft. They have a limited inventory of fixed-wing aircraft. Only about a thousand of those helicopters are combat systems (almost entirely AH-64 Apache), there are a few thousand utility and transport helicopters that exist for quickly moving troops and equipment. I always find the absolute numbers of US military systems surprising, particularly considering that they are largely state-of-the-art and continuously upgraded. US equipment inventories are vast, since they were originally trying to maintain parity with Soviet numbers. The situation in Ukraine suggests that the exchange rate is not anything like 1:1 but the equipment is a sunk cost at this point.