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Things like this are done for good reasons. It's fair to say, the engineering minds at work here have reasons. Reasons that would survive this armchair whatab

Things like this are done for good reasons. It's fair to say, the engineering minds at work here have reasons. Reasons that would survive this armchair whataboutism.

jiggawatts 3y ago
There is no evidence of these "good reasons". In fact, there are many new articles bemoaning cost overruns, delays, poor performance, and more. From what I've experienced first-hand with government tender processes, engineering considerations are a distant third on the priority list at best. That's how you end up with the SLS using rocket engines from the Shuttle that cost more than an entire Falcon 9 rocket. Except that the the SLS uses 5 of these single-use engines, but the Falcon 9 is reusable dozens of times. There really are situations that are this absurd, and the military industrial complex is notorious for them. I would argue that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why F-35 jets are using hardware 100-1,000x worse in ever metric. Also please demonstrate why it uses bizarre non-standard CPUs instead of CotS hardware as seen in civilian avionics, SpaceX rockets, automotive ECUs, or pretty much anywhere else for that matter.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  The evidence is 1000 operational planes
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    1,000 operational planes with cost overruns and persistent issues decades into the program — most of which are related to the avionics and their associated software! The F-35 planes are a success despite the avionics, not because of them. The upgrade to Apple Watch levels of computing has notably been delayed by a year into mid-2024! How is that a successful demonstration of computer engineering?
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      Every single engineering effort of this level and complexity humankind has undertaken in the last 20 years have faced the same challenges. Space shuttle, bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers, planes, trains, on and on.
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        Again, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why the F-35 has such over-priced but under-performing avionics when directly comparable engineering efforts have delivered much better electronics at much lower cost, size, power, etc... I'm comparing the F-35 to projects such as the Falcon 9, commercial avionics, or even just automotive ECUs. All of those outperform the F-35 in every metric, including reliability. Please list the specific engineering hurdles that explain this monstrosity, because I just can't of think of any. However, I can think of dozens of political- and corruption- related reasons for why this came to be. There are news articles and everything...
        iancmceachern 3y ago
        >I'm comparing the F-35 to projects such as the Falcon 9, commercial avionics, or even just automotive ECUs. All of those outperform the F-35 in every metric, including reliability. Apples and oranges. Make any of those things you mention stealth, and armed, and the maintenance requirements will match that of the F-35. Its the needs of the application that are driving many of the challenges you mention, not the implementation. An example - the SR-71. Widely regarded as one of the great engineering feats of human history, a marvel of engineering for any time, but especially that time. It's by all accounts a maintenance nightmare. Not because it's not amazing, but because the specifics of the application demand so. Its not easy to mass manufacture the most capable airframe in the world.
        jiggawatts 3y ago
        > Make any of those things you mention stealth, and armed, and the maintenance requirements will match that of the F-35. You're conflating the attributes of the plane with the attributes of the components that make it up. The buttons in cockpit are not "stealth". You don't shoot the pilot seat out of the cannon. Etc... Just because the plane is stealth and armed, doesn't impose any special requirements on the computers! They're on the inside of the plane, whereas the military nature of fighter jets is mostly relevant to the outside: stealth shape, stealth coatings, armor, etc... Similarly, the special maintenance requirements of fighter jets are mostly to do with the high performance engines and physical stresses imposed on their airframe by high-G manoeuvrers. They're nothing to do with the computers, which have no moving parts and generally are serviced infrequently. This whole discussion reminds me of how many people don't realise that many things are fungible and are designed to be fungible. There's this tendency to "label" things so as to break this mental model on purpose. The most common example is OPEX versus CAPEX -- it's all just money! A more directly relevant example is a customer that was grumbling about how their email was slow to sync to their phones. They were blaming the phones, because they knew in their gut that "phones have slow CPUs", right? Meanwhile, the primary mail server had about 1/3rd the computer power of the phone it was synchronising to! Literally a fraction of the CPU power, memory capacity, and even disk capacity throughput. It was hilarious. What had happened is that they "invested" a lot of money ($50K) on a big and important rack mount server... 15 years ago. The purpose of the server is critical to the business. They mentally labelled it as "production", "enterprise", "server grade", "highly available", and so forth. That's the box they put the thing into in their brain because that's the purpose the thing served. Never mind that after more than a decade, the phone in their pocket outperformed the server in every metric! They had mentally labelled those devices as "consumer", "gadget", "end user", etc... These are just human labels. They don't affect the metrics, the objective measurements of reliability. The "enterprise grade" server had been crashing weekly. It had disk reliability issues (old mechanical drives!). It had capacity issues. Etc... It was labelled as reliable, but it was basically a worthless anchor on the organisation. If they had replaced it with a $500 laptop, they would have been measurably and objectively better off as a business! They just couldn't bring themselves to this realisation. It just wasn't "clicking" in their brain that it doesn't matter how much money they spent, or how flashy the sales presentation was, or what the purpose of it all is. To me, this whole thread is that story all over again. Everyone here keeps going on about how the F-35 has "this" or "that" attribute that consumer electronics don't, while completely ignoring the fact that its computers are crazy slow and out-dated even when compared to directly comparable fighter jet aircraft such as the F-18! PS: After doing even more research, I'm starting to suspect that the cause of the suckiness of the F-35 computers is that the tender requirements probably included "must be entirely manufactured in the US by US citizens", which is a common clause in military contracts. That would dramatically shrink the pool of options, reducing the performance and quality that is available. Similar issues occur with Russian military procurement, because their internal chip fab capability is much worse than what the US can produce.

Things like this are done for good reasons. It's fair to say, the engineering minds at work here have reasons. Reasons that would survive this armchair whataboutism.

jiggawatts 3y ago

There is no evidence of these "good reasons". In fact, there are many new articles bemoaning cost overruns, delays, poor performance, and more. From what I've experienced first-hand with government tender processes, engineering considerations are a distant third on the priority list at best. That's how you end up with the SLS using rocket engines from the Shuttle that cost more than an entire Falcon 9 rocket. Except that the the SLS uses 5 of these single-use engines, but the Falcon 9 is reusable dozens of times. There really are situations that are this absurd, and the military industrial complex is notorious for them. I would argue that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why F-35 jets are using hardware 100-1,000x worse in ever metric. Also please demonstrate why it uses bizarre non-standard CPUs instead of CotS hardware as seen in civilian avionics, SpaceX rockets, automotive ECUs, or pretty much anywhere else for that matter.

iancmceachern 3y ago
The evidence is 1000 operational planes
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  1,000 operational planes with cost overruns and persistent issues decades into the program — most of which are related to the avionics and their associated software! The F-35 planes are a success despite the avionics, not because of them. The upgrade to Apple Watch levels of computing has notably been delayed by a year into mid-2024! How is that a successful demonstration of computer engineering?
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    Every single engineering effort of this level and complexity humankind has undertaken in the last 20 years have faced the same challenges. Space shuttle, bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers, planes, trains, on and on.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      Again, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why the F-35 has such over-priced but under-performing avionics when directly comparable engineering efforts have delivered much better electronics at much lower cost, size, power, etc... I'm comparing the F-35 to projects such as the Falcon 9, commercial avionics, or even just automotive ECUs. All of those outperform the F-35 in every metric, including reliability. Please list the specific engineering hurdles that explain this monstrosity, because I just can't of think of any. However, I can think of dozens of political- and corruption- related reasons for why this came to be. There are news articles and everything...
      - iancmceachern 3y ago
        >I'm comparing the F-35 to projects such as the Falcon 9, commercial avionics, or even just automotive ECUs. All of those outperform the F-35 in every metric, including reliability. Apples and oranges. Make any of those things you mention stealth, and armed, and the maintenance requirements will match that of the F-35. Its the needs of the application that are driving many of the challenges you mention, not the implementation. An example - the SR-71. Widely regarded as one of the great engineering feats of human history, a marvel of engineering for any time, but especially that time. It's by all accounts a maintenance nightmare. Not because it's not amazing, but because the specifics of the application demand so. Its not easy to mass manufacture the most capable airframe in the world.
        jiggawatts 3y ago
        > Make any of those things you mention stealth, and armed, and the maintenance requirements will match that of the F-35. You're conflating the attributes of the plane with the attributes of the components that make it up. The buttons in cockpit are not "stealth". You don't shoot the pilot seat out of the cannon. Etc... Just because the plane is stealth and armed, doesn't impose any special requirements on the computers! They're on the inside of the plane, whereas the military nature of fighter jets is mostly relevant to the outside: stealth shape, stealth coatings, armor, etc... Similarly, the special maintenance requirements of fighter jets are mostly to do with the high performance engines and physical stresses imposed on their airframe by high-G manoeuvrers. They're nothing to do with the computers, which have no moving parts and generally are serviced infrequently. This whole discussion reminds me of how many people don't realise that many things are fungible and are designed to be fungible. There's this tendency to "label" things so as to break this mental model on purpose. The most common example is OPEX versus CAPEX -- it's all just money! A more directly relevant example is a customer that was grumbling about how their email was slow to sync to their phones. They were blaming the phones, because they knew in their gut that "phones have slow CPUs", right? Meanwhile, the primary mail server had about 1/3rd the computer power of the phone it was synchronising to! Literally a fraction of the CPU power, memory capacity, and even disk capacity throughput. It was hilarious. What had happened is that they "invested" a lot of money ($50K) on a big and important rack mount server... 15 years ago. The purpose of the server is critical to the business. They mentally labelled it as "production", "enterprise", "server grade", "highly available", and so forth. That's the box they put the thing into in their brain because that's the purpose the thing served. Never mind that after more than a decade, the phone in their pocket outperformed the server in every metric! They had mentally labelled those devices as "consumer", "gadget", "end user", etc... These are just human labels. They don't affect the metrics, the objective measurements of reliability. The "enterprise grade" server had been crashing weekly. It had disk reliability issues (old mechanical drives!). It had capacity issues. Etc... It was labelled as reliable, but it was basically a worthless anchor on the organisation. If they had replaced it with a $500 laptop, they would have been measurably and objectively better off as a business! They just couldn't bring themselves to this realisation. It just wasn't "clicking" in their brain that it doesn't matter how much money they spent, or how flashy the sales presentation was, or what the purpose of it all is. To me, this whole thread is that story all over again. Everyone here keeps going on about how the F-35 has "this" or "that" attribute that consumer electronics don't, while completely ignoring the fact that its computers are crazy slow and out-dated even when compared to directly comparable fighter jet aircraft such as the F-18! PS: After doing even more research, I'm starting to suspect that the cause of the suckiness of the F-35 computers is that the tender requirements probably included "must be entirely manufactured in the US by US citizens", which is a common clause in military contracts. That would dramatically shrink the pool of options, reducing the performance and quality that is available. Similar issues occur with Russian military procurement, because their internal chip fab capability is much worse than what the US can produce.