V_Terranova_Jr

19 ms·

1.
by V_Terranova_Jr 6mo ago
There is an element of truth to this. It's also true that the U.S. government is a terrible customer, especially for bespoke or expensive military goods. However, you can see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com&#
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by V_Terranova_Jr 6mo ago
The highest priority in U.S. government acquisitions is to respect the business "rights" of suppliers and potential suppliers. It's hard to understand how tightly this is wound into the very foundations of USG acquisition un
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by V_Terranova_Jr 2y ago
I'm sorry, but this is basically incorrect on every point other than the limited tenure. Source: I work in this sector. PMs often come directly from industry. Once they do, there is a period over which they are not allowed to make di
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by V_Terranova_Jr 2y ago
Replying to finish a discussion no one will probably see, but... > That the original comment I replied to is false: "Good luck designing crash resilient structures without simulating it on FEM based software." In refuting the o
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by V_Terranova_Jr 2y ago
What is your actual assertion? That tools like FEA are needless frippery or that they just dumb down practitioners who could have otherwise accomplished the same things with hand methods? Something else? You're replying to a practic
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by V_Terranova_Jr 2y ago
I don't know about full-on nationalization, but we have plenty of evidence to show the incentives for publicly-owned for-profit companies whose primary customer is the Government are strongly misaligned with the non-economic interests
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by V_Terranova_Jr 2y ago
This is a poor example of "Government innovation". It's more an example of legislative overreach / "pork barrel" politics, and bad acquisition practices. The Government is certainly capable of doing a shitty j
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by V_Terranova_Jr 3y ago
We probably won't get much further going back and forth on this. For what it's worth, you seem very reasonable, I've appreciated your comments for a long time, and I'm sure we'd get along fine if we were to work to
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by V_Terranova_Jr 3y ago
There's more to the Linus-style jerk phenomenon than just telling entitled people to piss off (I would be reluctant to call that being a jerk if that's all it was). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3305890
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by V_Terranova_Jr 3y ago
> ... the idea that Musk hasn’t considered oil panning and should’ve just asked an engineer is ludicrous. The author assumes Musk must be an idiot despite all of the evidence to the contrary. I don't see anything ludicrous in the au
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by V_Terranova_Jr 3y ago
Elon is well-known for firing or sidelining technical staff with whom his intuition disagrees, regardless of his own technical depth in any of those matters. His companies have a lot of success for reasons other than his making the wisest
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by V_Terranova_Jr 3y ago
> I wonder what the situation will be in terms of fuel efficiency. Obviously it will take more energy per second to push through the atmosphere, but that may be defrayed by not having to hold the airplane up as long. The relevant metric
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by V_Terranova_Jr 3y ago
> Give more funding to proper engineers, not physicists/chemists Materials science departments are often called "Materials Science and Engineering". How do they fall in your categorization? Without disrespect intended, yo
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by V_Terranova_Jr 3y ago
> So it makes sense that most researchers are looking for higher efficiency. It makes sense that researchers should be considering metrics other than efficiency as well for new materials or architectures, and there's no reason why t
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by V_Terranova_Jr 3y ago
I've previously written a few relevant comments that hopefully answer in parts: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27386119 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35124271 [3] https:/&#x2
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by V_Terranova_Jr 3y ago
If commercial supersonic flight has any hope of being economically viable, one of the prerequisites will be cruising below Mach 2.
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
> I do wonder how much modern design can overcome, in materials, engines, aerodynamics, and flight controls. The basic physics are arrayed against you. Higher speed cruise flight already means you already fly at higher altitudes or the
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
Carrier catapults violently accelerate aircraft to the point they are going fast enough to lift their own weight, within the takeoff length on the deck. You could likely lessen fuel burn of a supersonic aircraft taking off (as you could wit
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
> then they realized the fuel economy of supersonic aircraft peaks around Mach 3 As I noted in a below comment, there isn't a way for this statement to be accurate without a lot more qualifications. For "equivalent technology
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
> No, it's exceptionally bad to fly close to Mach 1 and you do better if you fly faster up to Mach 3 or so. Where do you get this from? I suspect you are talking about the Breguet range parameter, which is (M / SFC * L /
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
I'm an aerospace engineer and I find the F-15 (esp. the C model) to be a hell of a sexy beast (so to speak), very visually stunning, and the F-35 to be relatively ugly. There's a reason the U.S. fighter community refers to the F-
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
Current military thinking is "No" - the expectation, via lots of simulation, analysis, recent history, large-scale military exercises, and intel is that advanced weapons systems make dogfighting increasingly unlikely. Where it do
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
There is a kernel of truth in what you say, but only that. The article is basically right, but I would argue severely undersells the atrocity of an acquisition the F-35 represents. It's certainly a poorer dogfighter than the equivale
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
Counterpoint: Crichton's Airframe is a great book that illustrates how journalists reporting on complex subjects they don't understand can cause great harm regardless of their intent or convictions.
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
It's an outstanding book about an outstanding man but still a bit of a hagiography when it comes to all the "fighter mafia's" ideas on aircraft design. However, his focus on prioritizing investments in people over weapo
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
Within a given class of system, sometimes rugged, robust, and plentiful does win the day over sophisticated but more fragile and expensive. On the other hand, an advanced military will want advanced capabilities and there is plenty of hist
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
> One wonders if a computer system like what's in the F35 could have worked in the F14 to mitigate the problem with engine failure It could be possible that with full-authority fly-by-wire flight controls, a flight computer could pr
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
> But, the cone of condensation coming off the body of a plane is the supersonic shock wave. And shock surfaces can be present over the body due to local flow speed being supersonic even when the aircraft's velocity vector is strict
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
It's not a design flaw, it's a design choice which was made without the expectation the airframe would be saddled with the awful TF-30s. A very valid design choice at that. If you want to understand more about the genesis of the
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by V_Terranova_Jr 4y ago
It's really for two primary reasons: 1. Storing tooling, especially huge aircraft-sized tooling, has real costs associated with it. There's the physical space it occupies as well as the costs associated with keeping it from degra

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