xthetenth

There's seeing, "seeing" and " 'seeing' " (repeat ad nauseum). Knowing there's someone out there, knowing he's out there, knowing who he is, knowing how he's moving, knowing where he is and how he's moving, and your weapons knowing these things are all radically different things and working your way up that scale constrains that someone's options progressively more and more. Frankly I consider it absolutely vitally desperately needed for operating against anybody who can put up an IADS worth the name (and if I remember right this includes such heavyweights as Azerbaijan) without it getting painful.

"Inspiration for a worrying amount of worrying German music"

Yeah, as far as that goes, I have a friend who became basically unemployed once he got out of the lowest bracket, which is a pretty nasty way for a system to develop problems. Considering that in general the older the person the more they need the money, that's incentivizing problems.

Why must the F-104 be so good at killing its own side, why!

It's kind of cool and it's kind of really a great way to fuck people looking for some sort of light employment to let them get through school.

There's been pretty huge avionics improvements especially to get from the original fighters in the 4th gen bucket to what's thrown in the 4.5th bucket, although in fairness some of those planes are using the same airframe. It's probably better to discuss current planes against ones from the 80s than a terminology that seemingly exists to shill lockmart products.

Gotten? I thought partisan debate by people who don't actually like their team but vote for them every time was the default state of existence in the US?

Misplaced when it got swapped over to the J47, thought it stayed on the J35 a bit longer than it did. Even then, the FJ-1 and F-86 are just as much different generations as the F-35 and F-22 (kidding, but come to think of it, internal carriage may make light bomber and top end fighter mutually exclusive for now). Not really clear on where it happened in Russian history even though they went into the jet era with good info on swept wings and a country to license better jets from. I'm not really fond of the terminology either, to be honest, but they're such broad clumps of planes that It's really hard to come up with anybody that's skipped an entire generation. On the other hand 4.5th generation is a bullshit lie coined by LockMart to make their products look shinier as they wrapped the definition of fifth gen around the F-22 and F-35, so I could definitely see some Russian planes that would get labeled as 4.5th gen seeing enough development that engines and avionics wouldn't be too dramatically behind the curve. Honestly it's the avionics that I see being an incredible swine to just skip over. The sort of thing that's getting thrown around requires some serious integration work, and without the sort of foundation given by that, I don't see them taking whatever the next step is. I work in a bit of programming where we deal with standards and different APIs and it's hard not to understate what an incredible nightmare that can be. I can see Russia skipping 5th gen, but I can't see them skipping 5th and 4.5 gen and having a non-hellish time making a 6th gen fighter

Because when in the history of man has anything ever been solved by a thoughtful consideration and reworking of problematic things when you can slap a band-aid over it? Man qua man is an irrational animal not prone to introspection, especially if it brings up the uncomfortable prospect that they benefited from something bad. So try to find the easiest way to link feel-good actions and something that will actually mitigate or avoid structural damage. No it isn't optimal and I'd dearly love to do better, but that's the downside of a society being a continual process, and I don't see any way around that.

Don, I think you're off the mark with conflating reflexive loathing of corporations and minimum wage advocacy. Sure I hate corporations, but that's as much an implementation thing as anything. Market economics are a pretty decent way of levelling out supply and demand in cases where buyers and sellers have similar power. Some times it's the right tool for the job, and that's great. Sometimes it isn't and when it isn't it's tantamount to letting the fox watch the henhouse. If they're placed in an environment where it's profitable to create a ton of tragedies of the commons, they'll do it, just look at China's environment. Because of that, just letting the corporations have free rein to chip away to the least money they can pay at the bottom end of the scale is preposterously immoral based on the suffering it would cause. I really like the mincome idea because first off it's straight out honest. Second, it isn't a byzantine horror show that's going to grow a cancerous bureaucracy to enforce eleventeen thousand rules. Sure it's just handing people money, but from there it's all on the person to do what they can with it, and it's a hell of a lot better than the security theater we put people through now. At the bottom of the class structure labor negotiations are totally messed up, the employer has a huge pool to draw from, while if the worker can't get a job, they're in trouble and hoping welfare can cover the gap. It's a really distorted market, and people having some security to actually try and make more of themselves than they were would be a good thing. I really need to look up the data from the Canadian town that tried it, it was really interesting. Incidentally, the people claiming the increases will be matched exactly by inflation, that's wrong. Doubling the minimum wage isn't a matter of suddenly everyone's income doubles, which is roughly what it would take to match the minimum wage increase with inflation. Inexpensive things would get somewhat more expensive (not twice as much because they're not all labor costs), but suddenly their main customers have a hell of a lot more money. Their dollars wouldn't go quite as far as before but they'd certainly have more purchasing power. Of course it is. It's utterly preposterous. Light everyone responsible for the documentation on fire. Also light whoever coded the bit that misattributed this quote on fire.

I think you mean white. Yes I still think launching standoff munitions at Mach 3+ from 70,000 feet gives some super cool capabilities, why do you ask?

The gap between the FJ-1 and an F-86 is really pretty much that though. Same for an F9F and F9F-6, for example. I wouldn't say it's a bigger gap than between an early and late 4th gen fighter, for example. In each case, the late planes will run roughshod over the early ones, but they're still in the same ballpark for design priorities and technologies.

On the other hand it's a bit weird to discuss just strapping swept wings on planes as a full generational leap. They're still gunfighters with a totally minimal avionics fit even if there's a significant performance boost. I'd imagine something like a late model F-15 up against an F-14A would be a similar mismatch in most any conditions (I'll refrain from making fun of the early model F-16). Similar for the F-102 and F-106.

I'd rather the US not standardize on the USMC's way of avoiding air defenses by looping outside the allowed engagement area for the exercise except for a few seconds to drop munitions if you don't mind. On the other hand, who needs stealthy when you have:

Last I checked the genotypical second gen was afterburning and carried a radar and missiles. The jump to second gen was the jump from the MiG-15 to the MiG-17, and the jump to supersonic fighters especially couldn't have been done easily at all without working with the preceding jets. If you meant going from straight to swept wings, those were two things that could be researched and assembled separately. Similarly, making the jump from 4th to 6th would be pretty hard without getting the experience working with 5th generation tech. (Also Tied, part of the 5th/4th generation divide has been codified by LockMart, so take that as you will with regards to Eurocanards' capabilities).

I like that it's easily affordable, but there should definitely be a high end component to make inspiring shinies.

It seems interesting that materiel the British suffered setbacks in has a poor reputation and the materiel they suffered them to has a great reputation regardless of any qualities of that materiel (see the Bismarck, for one).

Well the US clearly has no idea because right up near the top of the list is actually having combat coded planes.

Role and weapon fit wise, not specifics of operation and basing, I think it is likely to be a long range platform for a disturbingly large missile load.

I wonder how much of it is potentially knowing that it can be done and work well enough that there's a light at the end of the tunnel to get funding for that project. Also, a bit from the wayback machine: Everything I've heard is the US stuff is a bit ahead on performance, but it's maintainability and length between overhauls where they really shine. Potentially, but I'm thinking about the Navy version. A big, long legged, and stealthy missile truck would be absolutely fantastic for a few things I can think might be well worth doing in a showdown with the US. It's looking to me like the stealthy high performance stuff is going to be force multipliers to corset more conventional fighters for a long while, and something you can get the whole production line of (or at least what's ready to fly) over the theater carrying a bunch of missiles is a heck of a problem against a force that's terrified their best fighters can't even carry enough missiles to prevent serious problems in case of an engagement. Something like that would be perfect for setting up hellish attrition rates on the desperately needed less stealthy planes and potentially the heavy and precious support planes. If it can beat an F-35 and tangle with the F-22 as a peer, even if it's a seriously disadvantaged peer, more the better.

A sturmgewehr is what you use to compensate for a zündnadelgewehr.

I wonder if there's any intention to remedy the inherent contradiction of an airframe that can go into danger's way and perform various earth-moving jobs but can't actually do it while carrying the tools to do the job because they aren't stealth, and if so, what timeline a reasonably full set of capabilities will be attained in that regard.

Ahh, a true successor to the BV 141. This is what you get when you tell Germans to make a single engine aircraft with optimal visual characteristics. Of course you need a fully glazed gondola to look out of and for the rear gunner and therefore an asymmetrical design. The best part is that B+V wasn't even invited. It seemed to have been a functional design once fitted with a more powerful engine used by the FW 190. Problem was, the winner was already picked by then and was a perfectly normal looking plane, the Fw 189, which neatly sidestepped the problem that it used two engines by using two engines that nobody really wanted anyway, rather than the same engine as a frontline fighter. It also had the advantage of actually flying well, unlike Arado's entry, which was preferred by the brass until they actually tried flying the thing.

The Euros mostly wrote off the lessons of the ACW as being a bunch of amateurs playing at war. The best though is what the US' glorious longest running ally did. I'll let wiki cover what went down in Morocco because I hurt my hand and typing sucks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco%E2%80%93United_States_relations#American_Civil_War

If anybody can penetrate a shame threshold, it's nerds in the privacy of their own basement.