I wondered when I read of this, that it explained why the F-35 was so unexplainably *expensive* - that in fact they were developing two plains and wanted to keep the specs of the better ones out of FOIA reach.

>>5847 Quite possible, that also mean that foreign buyers got even more screwed with that shit-heap than initially thought.

>>5848 >shit-heap >implying tell us all how you would have done so much better at your personal rendition of Feature-creep, the Plane drama. The engineers aren't the problem, and if you blow off the fact they've actually managed to pull off this wagon-load of legislative pork-barrel compromise and still get the thing to fly, then you delusionally, normal-nigger-esque miss the remarkable accomplishment.

>>5851 The fact that the plane is a shit-heap that kills you when you eject because of politics rather than engineering staff or literal air worthiness certification trannies is irrelevant to whether or not it's actually a shit-heap, which it is. Why it's garbage isn't the point, it's that it's garbage.

Bump

Well yeah, they have to announce it now. This is where the "space force" funding was originally going, so with a huge chunk of secret project funding now going missing, they're being forced to play by the rules and court congress for gibs like the other branches do.

>>5851 >tell us all how you would have done so much better at your personal rendition of Feature-creep, the Plane drama. Not that anon but assuming I had a time machine: take the F-22, pump the best parts of the F-35 into it as per whatever year this change is made and then spend the money that's been pissed away on the F-35 fixing the F-22's issues. We can assume any improvements to other systems the F-35 has just by dint of being newer would also be applied to the F-22. Unit cost would have come down as production ramped up and efficiencies were found ditto with cost per flight hour which has seen a huge drop for the F-35 as it's been in wider use and development has continued. Even if it turns out to be slightly more expensive over the entire lifespan you'll save money by having it in service in proper numbers about a decade earlier so you can retire older planes with their ever-increasing maintenance costs. It would not have been as versatile as the F-35, sure, but frankly jack of all trades, master of none designs are always a disaster in practical use anyway so churn out the F-22 in the best form you can possible make it and then develop a carrier specific design afterwards or whatever else you need and be fucking done with it.

>>5851 >tell us all how you would have done so much better at your personal rendition of Feature-creep, the Plane drama. Not him, but I'd develop three separate planes for different missions and ignore the stupid shit like the $300k helmets. The future of war is missiles anyways, so all you need are "bomber" planes to give explosives a running start towards their target, "fighter" planes that protect those style planes, and "stealth" planes to handle high-altitude missions and other such things. Make "fighter" plane pilots something anyone E-6 or higher can volunteer for (since E5 is the highest the "here for college" folks ever typically make it to) while leaving the "bomber" and "stealth" planes to officers, and just reinvest the trillions saved into next-gen missile and light artillery tech. Problem fucking solved.

>>5932 What do the Marines get for the VTOL replacement?

>>5970 >but muhreens A helicopter.

>>5971 muh jump jet though

>>5970 Something designed from the ground up to be a VTOL, obviously. Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't they still using the Harrier now due to lacking F-35B numbers? If so it doesn't seem like they'll be much worse off. In my timeline they'd be last priority after the F-22 for air superiority, a carrier specific plane for the navy and maybe a ground attack focussed plane designed to be cheaper and for export to less trustworthy/less rich allies (you could delay that since they're still happily buying cheaper stuff now anyway). Alternatively combine the last two since it's not that hard to sacrifice some of the heavier load for whatever relatively minor physical changes you need to handle take off and landing on a carrier: in both cases you're swapping the focus on max speed/max stealth/max manoeuvrability for heavier equipment (payload in one case, landing equipment etc in the other). The F-35 is already essentially just those last two smushed together and with 'pls make VTOL and also be a cheap F-22' slapped on. Once you strip out nonsense like making a VTOL version with wildly different design and the need to be super duper advanced and just accept it as the cheaper workhorse you won't have fags doing things like introducing a whole new HUD alternative because who does that for the second line variant? Bongs would likely want to get involved with a specific VTOL design too due to cuckcarriers so you could offset some of the cost there while also encouraging essentially the only non-USA NATO power that's actually investing in naval power projection. In the UK the whole 'the new carriers have no planes' story has done pretty huge damage to the idea of big military spending projects that will last decades. Basically I'd agree with >>5945 except I'd probably drop the requirement for a dedicated stealth plane since usually the tech is usually outdated in a decade, maybe 15 years anyway so you might as well build aircraft that are functional even when that stops being viable (like the F-22...).

>>5992 Didn't the Marines butting in to the JSF program basically fuck up what could have been something much more straightforward?

Seems like existing F-22 inventories are reaching the end of their service life faster than anticipated.

>>5970 >muhreens gunna jump inna jet for fast extraction Nah. Take an existing design and fix it's flaws, nigger rig it, or outright redesign it to use new materials. They have a perfectly fine VTOL troop transport. osprey or CH-43 They have a perfectly fine VTOL combat platform. apache They stole the designs for a perfectly fine VTOL combat platform. hind variant They have a perfectly fine fast insertion VTOL platform. little bird They have a perfectly fine technical VTOL platform. blackhawk VTOL jets are a meme because they're so maintenance demanding that an environment that demands VTOL is not sufficient to maintain the plane during actual combat. >>5851 See above. The strategy has been shown viable with the F-16 and F-18 variants. >>5945 >Not him, but I'd develop three separate planes for different missions and ignore the stupid shit like the $300k helmets. You could have 300k helmets if you didn't spend 20mil per plane. You could have sacrificial interceptor drones as wingmen for each real pilot. But none of what I said matters, because the entire project was a blank-cheque welfare scam. Getting it to fly or even remotely combat effective were tertiary goals at best.

Is it at least a cool looking plane?

>>6020 It's probably this thing. https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1175379/UFO-alien-news-conspiracy-Area-51-TR-3B-Military-US

>>6022 Could the profile be modified for test flights to disguise its contours?

>>5846 >I only pretended to be retarded

>>6022 Fuck I hope so.

>>6030 >space force intensifies

>>5993 Not sure but that wouldn't surprise me.

>>6030 Looks more like a toy than something that would actually function.

>>5932 So, basically, you want what the F-35 was supposed to be when LockMart originally submitted the designs before Boeing decided to bullshit to congress that their entry could do all three of the airframes' roles? The Original 'F-35' (before it got that number) was supposed to be the F-22, but with improved stealth by fixing the F-22's coating (and better angling) as well as improved engines and open-architecture computer systems. The Airforce then decided they needed an F-16 replacement more, causing the pre-universal F-35 to begin to take shape. The Navy then stepped in and offered to go half-in on the Twin-Engine design if it was redesigned for Carrier Operation, which the Airforce thought was a good idea, so the 'F-35' became the single-engine F-16 replacement and what became the 'F-37' proposal became the twin-engine F-15C/E and F-18E/F replacement. Process being as process is, Congress demanded that the Airforce and Navy hold a competition for the entire thing, and the Marine Aircraft replacement had to be part of the same program - winner take all. The Airforce objected to no avail, since they already decided on the F-35 and F-37, while the Pentagon wanted the Marine aircraft to be made by someone else. Then Boeing, which only had one of the three aircraft designs (the VTOL would-be F-33, ironically the aircraft the Pentagon wanted for the Marines in the first place), panicked and lobbied congress with physically impossible bullshit (claiming their single airframe could do everything), which Congress bought like the idiotic low-IQ fudds they are. And that's how the Joint Strike Fighter came into being. Boeing still lost since LockMart's 'unholy abomination' (which is Skunkworks' name for the F-35) ended up theoretically capable of pulling off the congress mandated bullshit in a vacuum, whereas Boeing's offering failed to even do that. t. side-related industry insider which picked up engineer gossip at the time >>5993 The Marines' component of the program was at the start supposed to be an entirely different aircraft, the F-33 or F-36.

>>6063 You're going to see jets become increasingly more pizza-shaped or more like cones or pyramids over the next few decades because that's the only way to allow for the sorts of maneuvers "next-gen" planes are supposed to make at the speeds they're supposed to make them.

>>5932 >take the F-22, pump the best parts of the F-35 into it That's basically what this will be.

>>6070 >best parts of the F-35 Is there anything worthwhile about that creatura of political engineering that existing NATO fighters haven't done better?

>>6075 The stealth coating baked into the skin is apparently considered state of the art even by European agencies. But really, aside from the engines, that's about it.

>>6063 Lifting bodies have been a thing for at least 50 years. It's only now that we're getting into the realm where they are becoming necessary for basic fighters.

>>6078 Has the European arms industry even produced anything meaningful since the massive demilitarization at the end of the Cold War? Wasn't their last major aerospace project Eurofighter, with its own complement of cost overruns and money laundering for a plane that was longer viewed as critical by politicians?

>>6068 My question is how do they fly at lower speeds? I'm guessing that they'll be 100% fly by wire if not actually partial autonomous but that doesn't change the fact that "wing" designs tend to have an ideal operating speed and lifting bodies have tended not to do well in subsonic flight. >jets become increasingly more pizza-shaped or more like cones or pyramids >pyramids Thas RITE!

>>6084 Ugly, I don't like it.

>>6093 >Ugly Are you talking about >>6030 or are you talking about the classic X planes?

>>6095 I was talking about the classics, but this new one is ugly too.

>>6096 How could you think they look ugly? They're peak space age aesthetic.

>>6084 >Lifting bodies have been a thing for at least 50 years. Nah. Pic related. >>6090 >Has the European arms industry If the rumors are true, the challenger armor. But you're right, I can't think of anything that isn't cold war era. >>6092 >fly by wire Everything is fly by wire now, which is fine because it allows for designs that kill the pilots from maneuvering forces.

Interestingly that flying triangle has a very similar profile to the X-47.

>>6075 Well over the F-22 it had, for example, an improved stealth coating. I assume it has more modern electronics too just because it's newer. >>6066 >So, basically, you want what the F-35 was supposed to be when LockMart originally submitted the designs before Boeing decided to bullshit to congress that their entry could do all three of the airframes' roles? If I'm understanding your post correctly originally then yes, that's what I'm proposing except I think you're saying they still planned to end F-22 production early and introduce three new airframes one for each role I detailed where I'd just propose keeping the F-22 in production since it was a known success (and you can always produce newer incremental models fairly cheaply it if the tooling is still in use vs the cost of restarting produciton), selling it to tier 1 allies if costs/economies of scale are that worrisome, and then only developing only two new designs: the general use ground attack/second-tier fighter/carrier airframe (sub-designs here of course) and the VTOL airframe. Once those two have been finalised then revisit the need for an F-22/high performance fighter replacement as frankly the odds of you using the top-tier shit in combat is minimal vs the very real need to park a carrier off the coast of some shithole and bomb goatfuckers cost-effectively. I assume you could still put funding towards things like improving the F-22's coating on the side since I believe in the actual shitty timeline we're in it's had that retroactively applied anyway. >>6070 Yes but decades late, at a huge cost overrun and after becoming the procurement laughingstock of the world (with the aforementioned knock-on effects to future procurement decisions in allied nations like the UK). I mean it's not INSAS-tier but for the world's leader in military technology other than self propelled howitzers, for some reason the reputational damage is almost as bad as the operational damage of not having the equipment. Empires collapse more often due to losing their reputation for invincibility than through a single military disaster.

>>6098 >>6102 Is there a chance that the mysterious 6th gen fighter might omit cockpit canopy windows in favor of hooking the pilot into a VR setup? That way they could have the pilot lie on his back instead of being seated upright which should help somewhat during high g maneuvering and Lockmart Boomers surely wouldn't mind a helmet setup even more expensive than that of the F-35.

>>6106 >lie on his back That would be incredibly disorienting, VR or not. If you want the pilot lying down then prone would be much better than supine. It's been tried before with early jets, but it never caught on. Even with VR helmets solving the problem of visibility, having the pilot like that would make it impossible to eject. Oh wait, the F-35 already fucking snaps your neck if you eject, so it's no different.

>>6102 The U.S. government isn't capable of groundbreaking research. That's why everything is a knockoff of Third Reich German designs. Pic related. B2 stealth bomber is a knockoff. >>6106 Too much latency right now, even with the 10 year old imaging advancements digital mirror MIT published. The future of "high tech" fighters is a single command and control plane with multiple disposable drones, which means two seaters are going to make a big comeback. https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=TLUS3KlAAvg Why do you think DARPA invested so heavily in autonomous swarm robotics? Lets say you're in a dogfight. There's 4 real planes and 40 UAVs. >Real planes loose their UAV supports as the mission progresses. >UAVs reorganize when VIP pilots loose their support >UAVs autonomously act to defend real pilots when their own support UAVs cannot cope with defense The real future of "high tech" fighters is that they won't be used, because a missile 1/4 the cost can shoot it down. I have the feeling that all the plane development is being tested on human adversaries for use against something else, because of that fact.

>>6112 >The U.S. government isn't capable of groundbreaking research. Is there any government that has good R&D right now?

>>6114 In what discipline? The US has excellent R&D. In social manipulation and control. But you have to realize that nearly everything in the US is a reverse-engineered product, even the social control. LFTR is an actual breakthrough, but look at how long ago that was. Russia has excellent R&D for small arms, and missile defense systems, but most of that is derivative like the US. I don't know what Europe is doing other than fletching invader semen out of their women and wasting a few billion on a particle accelerator that might be outmatched by some canucks with a water tank that fits in a shipping container. But that's just the things we see, and if the old skunkworks man is to be believed, the US has all the revolutionary tech wrapped up in black projects.

>>6105 >(and you can always produce newer incremental models fairly cheaply it if the tooling is still in use vs the cost of restarting produciton) Not with the F-22 you can't, that was the problem. The computer systems of the F-22 were archaic by the time the F-22 actually entered production, in fact the parts manufacturers stopped manufacturing the parts before the first F-22 flew. To add anything to the F-22's systems required rewriting the entire system's code in its archaic and barely understood anymore code base, because none of the modern systems use that code base and the two code bases cannot communicate. It's like a modern Average Joe trying to have a conversation with an Ancient Sumerian, it's not happening without a miracle. >>6112 >That's why everything is a knockoff of Third Reich German designs. Pic related. B2 stealth bomber is a knockoff. That's a commonly claimed 'fact', but in the end it's utter bullshit if you actually know aeronautical engineering. The B-2 and the German Flying Delta have a roughly 2% airframe match. Two whole percent. You're almost (read: I'm exaggerating here) closer to genetically being a knockoff banana than the B-2 is to being a knockoff of that; X and Y just look similar in this case because they are attempting to apply the same concept. Taking a good concept that was executed sub-optimally, saying 'I can do better', and then actually doing so doesn't result in a knockoff.

>>6106 >VR Headset At that point you might as well pilot the thing from the ground at a tenth of the cost. More importantly wouldn't it make more sense to have the pilot on their stomach or suspended in a sling?

>>6112 >The real future of "high tech" fighters is that they won't be used, because a missile 1/4 the cost can shoot it down. Jets are fast enough now that you need to right kind of missile to intercept them, and the internal balancing and directional mechanisms in such missiles are extremely expensive, like the sort of shit you don't waste on a dud. As explosives are expected to become more expensive over time as shortages increase, I'd say that aircraft will be an integral part of any military for some time yet.

>>6120 <and wasting a few billion on a particle accelerator that might be outmatched by some canucks with a water tank that fits in a shipping container. >Looked into it >SNO project and SNO+ >People refuse to label it as a large-scale event like particle accelerator projects elsewhere because it only has about 100 people working on it Holy fuck, CERN and similar agencies refuse to acknowledge its existence, this is fucking hilarious.

>>6120 >>6131 It's a neutrino observatory, not a particle accelerator. They're completely different things looking at completely different phenomena. This is even more of a false equivalence than claiming that the B2 was a ripoff of German flying wings. The only thing they have in common is that they belong to the same broad field.

>>6127 At last someone with engineering knowledge ITT. This isn't the WWII-era many streloks seemed locked into fantasizing about. Without computer software and internal/external digital communications systems you simply don't get a warfighting aircraft. The avionics and control systems of modern jets like the F-35 and beyond are basically staggering in their scope. They have about as much similarity to pre-boomer era tech as the Sumerians carving on stone tablets do to the global satellite comms infrastructures of today.

>>6131 >SNO What the fuck are you on about? I'm talking about self organizing fusion and SAFIRE. And then there's LENR, which the US has renamed "lattice confined fusion". >>6127 >Taking a good concept that was executed sub-optimally, saying 'I can do better', and then actually doing so doesn't result in a knockoff. Okay ching chong. This is actual innovation. https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=aEPf0QHVuMM >>6137 >They have about as much similarity to pre-boomer era tech as the Sumerians carving on stone tablets do to the global satellite comms infrastructures of today. >faster microprocessors >better sensors >more feedback loops >fiber everywhere >more robust silicon >good low level programming The scope isn't staggering. Vid still related.

>>6151 >This is actual innovation. The argument was that something wasn't a knockoff, not that it was true innovation. But then again, you think that WW2 Fighters and modern Fighters are in the same scope, when the superconductor didn't even exist in WW2, and roughly 90% of the sup-components were not even possible with then-extant materials; so you clearly know literally nothing about Engineering. I guess I shouldn't expect someone who got all of his engineering knowledge from /pol/ back in the day to know the difference between a vacuum tube and a superconductor.

>>6171 Clarification since someone is going to be anal about it, by 'the superconductor didn't even exist in WW2', I'm referring specifically to practical mass produced superconductors, which is a 1950s thing.

>>6151 One could certainly argue heavy inspiration if the 229 or it's upscaled version were the sole example of flying wing. Too bad the USAF already had a long range flying wing bomber in development when US entered the war, and it wasn't some secret german concept that the allies only learned after the war.

>>6151 >self organizing fusion and SAFIRE "producing cavitation bubbles with ultrasound" ....sounds like the old cold fusion thing may have been for real.....

>>6215 Have experiments like vidrel ever been independently verified by anons?

>>6230 Cold fusion is almost certainly real whether it's functional at a level where it's useful is the question.

>>6215 Real? likely, in a method that we can explain? Not yet. Remember, they absolutely assassinated the character of Fleischmann and Pons. The Texas A&M researcher (John Bockris) literally got accused of falsifying data and saw the lynch horde so he said that it was likely his setup got "contaminated".

>>6234 Why do (((they))) hate Cold Fusion so much? Sure it'd upend the oil market if widely commercialized so preventing that is understandable but you'd think the Israeli military would've picked up on LENR power generation/rare earth metal production in some fashion given the strategic implications. And if Saudnigs are no longer useful then the Rabbis can always raise Tungsten prices to whatever level necessary to prevent lesser goyim from acting against the interest of the chosen not to mention treating the tech like Nuclear weapons and applying draconian international restrictions with color revolutions/US invasions as punishment for non-compliance. I just hope there is at least one Terry-tier steppe Schizo with a DIY Fusion-powered GNU/carriage out there.

>>6127 >Not with the F-22 you can't, that was the problem. The computer systems of the F-22 were archaic by the time the F-22 actually entered production, in fact the parts manufacturers stopped manufacturing the parts before the first F-22 flew. To add anything to the F-22's systems required rewriting the entire system's code in its archaic and barely understood anymore code base, because none of the modern systems use that code base and the two code bases cannot communicate. It's like a modern Average Joe trying to have a conversation with an Ancient Sumerian, it's not happening without a miracle. If it's really that hard can't you solve it by simply throwing money at people to learn the old system? Or just rewrite it from the ground up anyway and be done with it.

>>6255 Two words: >If it ain't broke >don't fix it! Even banks don't fuck around with 70s-80s-era COBOL code today (it's still in production use). They simply wrapper it as a black box with newer languages and have done with it. The aerospace industry is even more reticent.

>>6256 >The aerospace industry is even more reticent. The aerospace industry are fucking cheapskates that nickel and dime, and throw a bitch fit when you mention you had 0.3% attrition on a part the size of a speck of dust that costs maybe $100 for a reel of 50,000 of them but that they refuse to order in any quantity except exact. The aerospace industry can get bent and I'm happy that SpaceX is basically treating other space object manufacturers and NASA scientists like children.

>>6258 Enjoy your little fit? Heh, you act like some pedantic schoolchild. I'm not defending their asses, simply stating the case.

>>6258 >simply stating the case That's what he did too

>>6237 The most natural explanation would be that they want it for their own secret projects. A bunch of research into fringe shit has been declassified over the past decade or two, most of it almost nonsensical. Obviously, they wouldn't be so keen doing the same with shit that actually works. And it's quite simple really. >get someone doing the research on your side >poison the well by whatever method fits best - like having him publish a paper suddenly discovering that it's all wrong, or having him publish a purposefully wrong paper and leaving the job of "debunking" the whole theory to others >handsomely pay him to do the research privately for you If circumstances around given theory falling into disrepute seem fucky, there's a good chance that glows were involved in some way.

>>6237 Because it challanges the long standing notion that it is impossible to create fusion at low tempatures. Kinda like gallieo and heliocentrisim. To be more precise, cold fusion is extremely controversial due to the Fleischmann and Pons theories being refuted (and likely wrong but more correct in that they acknowledge said fusion DOES exist. Yet, that still does not explain the emission of the Palladium decays routes that are inconsistent with modern day physics. Back then they did not know about what we term as "high temperature" superconductors in solid state physics as well as today. I know someone personally in that field and his explanation to me is that it has to do with fermi levels and the unexpected behaviors at the molecular level. For some reason read: energy sector advocates/angry scientist refusing to realize that their theories that are accepted as "fact" are wrong the us government did not let him continue with the research so he went to china to finish it and now's he's on the list of banned persons from entering the US. Last I checked he's working on making a superconductor that is iron based trying to hit around -30C.

>>6285 >Because it challanges the long standing notion that it is impossible to create fusion at low tempatures. Fusion is the result of probability, not some special low-temperature process. Physicists have known this for years. The long-standing notion is that you can alter probability to produce it reliably without pressure and heat. I have no doubts that cold fusion exists, but like the other anon stated, viability is a big deal. Silica Aerogels exist as well, but it's virtually impossible to get a working lattice structure at an affordable level at the commercial production level. Same with graphene aerogels for superconductors.

>>6330 That you can't alter probability without pressure and heat.*

>>6330 >>6331 A few years ago LockMart announced it would be pursuing a viable nuclear fusion power source. Wonder if anything ever came of it or if it was just another money laundering scheme.

>>6330 Anything usable would probably still be far off. And lets not forget that it wouldn't be the only "virtually impossible" technology that turned out to be quite possible, even if it took a long time.

>>6215 Cold fusion is LENR SAFIRE is a high temperature plasma experiment that produced excess heat and heavy elements. It just so happened to produce outcomes which support the electric universe model.

>>6330 I'm aware of that. But Pons and a few others claims that Pd fusion is possible with hydrogen with minimal pressure and energy changes. >https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01683-9 Looks like google is going into them again, maybe we are not being told something?

>>6370 >electric universe model. Which one? As far as I can see from a quick search, there's at least a dozen versions, some seem extremely..... dumb.

>>6467 >Galactic filaments >dark matter isn't actually exotic but rather non-emissive plasma >the sun isn't pure fusion or fission but rather something else >space isn't empty, it's full of plasma clouds with different charges It supports the idea that everything is the result of plasma interactions and charge differentials. Almost everything else is wushu hypetrain bullshit. Nasa's lattice confined fusion page was updated since I last saw it. https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/science/lattice-confinement-fusion/

>>6237 I guess there's also the danger that if fusion research pays off, not just cold fusion either, then there's the danger that someone could take that and develop pure fusion weapons for the research. Anti-nuclear proliferation works mostly by controlling and limiting access to nuclear materials, which are all fairly exotic and difficult and expensive to acquire. You can't outlaw or limit the possession of hydrogen.

>>6498 >Anti-nuclear proliferation works mostly by controlling and limiting access to nuclear materials, which are all fairly exotic and difficult and expensive to acquire. You can't outlaw or limit the possession of hydrogen. The SAFIRE fags said this outright. But look at what the glowniggers do with ammonia nitrate. OY U GOT A LIOCENS FO THA ELEKTRCITAY? They also hinted that their excess heat was caused by small quantities of radioactive elements being produced on the surface of the core, then rapidly breaking down due to the plasma environment. MIT discovered that radioactive decay can be increased in a hydrogen rich plasma.

>>6498 So, since we already have fusion nuclear weapons, would it really be of much practical interest?

>>6513 That's fission anon. No one has publicly admitted fusion weapons.

>>6520 Not really. Fission is just the trigger to reach the required energy-density for the fusion reaction to go. We've had it since the late 50's Anon, aka Hydrogen Bomb.

>>6522 Irrelevant, that other strelok was talking about pure fusion weapons.

>>6532 The energy output ratio of the fission part is less than 2% of the total. These are fusion bombs. And the 50-megaton yields couldn't care less about pedantic pandering to sci-fi. 40's-era scientists and engineers solved this problem already -- and much cheaper than 'pure' imaginings have to offer tbh.

>>6558 The point is that hydrogen bombs require a regular atomic bomb to squeeze and heat the fuel to touch off fusion. If you had pure fusion, i.e. without the plutonium powered primary, then the entire proliferation landscape changes.

>>6567 If you can make a pure fusion bomb without radioactive elements you just opened up a new age of warfare where countries just fusion bomb the shit out of each other since there's little worry of permanently salting the earth. The current versions are fine and should be the standard, see >>6558

>>6579 >you just opened up a new age of warfare where countries just fusion bomb the shit out of each other Yeah, that's the point.

>>6285 Alright which one of you fags works at MIT: >Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant. Now, after many months of intensive research and engineering work, the researchers charged with defining and refining the physics behind the ambitious tokamak design have published a series of papers summarizing the progress they have made and outlining the key research questions SPARC will enable. >Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and one of the project’s lead scientists, says the work is progressing smoothly and on track. This series of papers provides a high level of confidence in the plasma physics and the performance predictions for SPARC, he says. No unexpected impediments or surprises have shown up, and the remaining challenges appear to be manageable. This sets a solid basis for the device’s operation once constructed, according to Greenwald. >SPARC is planned to be the first experimental device ever to achieve a “burning plasma” — that is, a self-sustaining fusion reaction in which different isotopes of the element hydrogen fuse together to form helium, without the need for any further input of energy. Studying the behavior of this burning plasma — something never before seen on Earth in a controlled fashion — is seen as crucial information for developing the next step, a working prototype of a practical, power-generating power plant. >"The MIT group is pursuing a very compelling approach to fusion energy." says Chris Hegna, a professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not connected to this work. "They realized the emergence of high-temperature superconducting technology enables a high magnetic field approach to producing net energy gain from a magnetic confinement system. This work is a potential game-changer for the international fusion program​." >The SPARC design, though about the twice the size as MIT’s retired Alcator C-Mod experiment and other similar research machines currently in operation, would be far more powerful, achieving fusion performance comparable to that expected in the much larger ITER tokamak being built in France. The high power in a small size is made possible by advances in superconducting magnets that allow for a much stronger magnetic field to confine the hot plasma. >The analysis done so far shows that the planned fusion energy output of the SPARC tokamak should be able to meet the design specifications with a comfortable margin to spare. It is designed to achieve a Q efficiency factor of at least 2, essentially meaning that twice as much fusion energy is produced as the amount of energy pumped in to generate the reaction. That would be the first time a fusion plasma of any kind has produced more energy than it consumed. >The calculations at this point show that SPARC could actually achieve a Q ratio of 10 or more, according to the new papers. While Greenwald cautions that the team wants to be careful not to overpromise, and much work remains, the results so far indicate that the project will at least achieve its goals, and specifically will meet its key objective of producing a burning plasma, wherein the self-heating dominates the energy balance. >“We’re still aiming for a start of construction in roughly June of ’21,” Greenwald says. “What we’re trying to do is put the project on the firmest possible physics basis, so that we’re confident about how it’s going to perform, and then to provide guidance and answer questions for the engineering design as it proceeds.” >Many of the fine details are still being worked out on the machine design, covering the best ways of getting energy and fuel into the device, getting the power out, dealing with any sudden thermal or power transients, and how and where to measure key parameters in order to monitor the machine’s operation. So far, the diameter of the tokamak has been increased by about 12 percent, but little else has changed, Greenwald says. “There’s always the question of a little more of this, a little less of that, and there’s lots of things that weigh into that, engineering issues, mechanical stresses, thermal stresses, and there’s also the physics — how do you affect the performance of the machine?” >The publication of this special issue of the journal, he says, “represents a summary, a snapshot of the physics basis as it stands today.” Though members of the team have discussed many aspects of it at physics meetings, “this is our first opportunity to tell our story, get it reviewed, get the stamp of approval, and put it out into the community.” >Greenwald says there is still much to be learned, and once this machine is up and running, key information can be gained that will help pave the way to commercial, power-producing fusion devices, whose fuel — deuterium and tritium — can be made available in virtually limitless supplies. https://archive.is/b5RYO

>>6593 My personal take is that SPARC will run into more issues. Possibly with how the new superconductors might pose issues, these are brittle and act like crematics when forming iirc. Question is how long will the YBCO last when its getting blasted by radiation at that intensity? I'm not sure.

>>6617 Ceramic superconductors are fine so long as you don't move them.

F-35 eats shit after (allegedly) suffering mid-air collision with refueler. What the fuck were they doing? Looking forward to billion dollar super planes becoming one with the Earth as well. https://twitter.com/vladwlad777/status/1311349515300024321

>>6624 Ahhh the F-35 in its natural state.

>>5851 >>6643 Reminder

>>6593 >might >may >could >should Until something concrete has been produced, this is all just hypothetical speculation of no value. >>6624 It's called being stealthy. You cannot be detected by air surveillance radars if you become one with the ground.

>>6654 The only reason they would go public with this design is if glow-in-the-darks already have something better in the closet.

>>6583 The proliferation of cold fusion weapons that could produce the same yield as your standard ICBM driven H-Bomb still doesn't get around the fact that other countries wont threaten to permanently salt the earth with their plutonium made bombs. Nowadays proliferation is about how good your delivery mechanism is and not how much yield you can get over the materials needed for a reaction. Which is why the Soviets didn't bother making more Tzar Bombas and everyone has a suit case bomb.

>>6652 >worked on whether or not a plane can fly >it crashes >designed algorithms to protect GEO satellites from hostile action How much do you want to bet that the "algorithms" designed to "protect" geo satellites are nothing more than a case statement of all the conditions in which the satellite would de-orbit. Crash. >The US Air Force has built and flown a mysterious full-scale prototype of its future fighter jet https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-air-force-has-built-and-flown-a-mysterious-full-scale-prototype-of-its-future-fighter-jet/

>>6677 I wonder if the Air Force made this shit in secret to protect it from people like the above.

>>6677 I'm pretty sure the faggot is lying out its ass, since for one thing admitting you did that role in public (if they actually did it) is a multi-million dollar breach of contract for around 30 years after the fact.

Why is the AC-130 still kept around when everyone's wanking over muh stealth? It seems a bit out of place considering the capabilities of current day air defense systems to be employed in a symmetric military conflict.

>>6690 The AC-130 is only for use when friendly Air Superiority (or, more preferred, Air Supremacy) has already been achieved. It's not meant for Air Parity or Air Denial skies.

>>6691 Given the increasing availability of sophisticated MANPADs among sandnegro militias wouldn't it be cheaper and safer to launch a small disposable recon drone or an F-35 if you want to waste shekels to paint targets for Artillery/cruise missiles/A-10s to take down?

>>6691 This. Big parts of America's arsenal are not meant for war, they are for policing already pacified vassal states.

>>6677 >"I don’t think it’s smart thinking to build one and only one aircraft that has to be dominant for all missions in all cases all the time" I had no idea there were such intelligent people in the US military.

>>6695 No, because the AC-130 is fully capable of engaging from 20,000ft or higher and the most prevalent MANPAD families are the 9K38 Igla and FIM-92 Stingers, which have a flight ceiling of 11,000ft (purportedly 15,000ft in the newest iterations) and 12,500ft respectively. It's really only vulnerable to medium and heavy SAMs and ADA, which are a little bit bigger than what manpower can drag around, and human stupidity such as the pilots flying lower than they actually need to.

>>6704 >tfw no Flak 36 technicals in Afghanistan >tfw no airships for gunboat diplomacy I hate this timeline.

>>6285 >>6330 >>6333 I don't know anything about cold fusion, but inertial electrostatic confinement fusion is probably the best route to actually obtain a stationed fusion reaction. The Polywell design for IEC is probably what would get us to fusion power the fastest. It's one of the cheapest avenues to build and test. Costs 100s of thousands instead of 100s of millions/billions like the big toroid faculties cost (like the Tokamak). I think the goal of the Powers That Be is to push us in the LEAST likely and most costly directions for fusion. Forcing us into further debt, but also giving them the opportunity to benefit from the technology that needed to be produced (high powered plasma chambers and the like) in order to even build things like the Tokamak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell NO ONE is funding Polywell fusion, even though it would be the cheapest and even the most likely to give us actual fusion power.

>>6769 >Current research by the University of Sydney seems to show that the design is impractical (or impossible) in practice.

>>6778 There are many who say the opposite, if you look beyond the Wikipedia article. I only posted it as a brief overview.

>>6778 According to the people who actually worked on Polywell, they solved that problem right before the program was shut down. https://archive.fo/PAUW3#78.8%

>>5851 Get bent schlomo.

>>6066 >or F-36. Was that based on the X-36?

>>6171 Nigger are you implying that the B-2 was not a direct aerodynamic derivative of the YB-35/49?

>>6935 No, the B-2 was in fact derived from the YB-35 and YB-49; but the YB-35 design predates the Ho229's by several years. Jack Northrop tried to get Douglas to pursue a flying wing bomber design back when Douglas controlled part of Northrop Corp, submitting a proposal as early as 1933, but Douglas balked at the unconventional design and wouldn't fund it. These designs still exist. When he struck out on his own again in 1939, Northrop once again returned to the eventual YB-35 design, which the US Army officially requested in May of 1941, and Northrop officially submitted - two whole years before the Ho229 was requested. If the YB-35 is directly derived from the Ho229, why is it that the blueprints are older than the Ho229?

>>6947 And just to go farther, the 1933 proto-YB-35 design was directly derived from Northrop's Flying Wing X-216H, which first flew in 1929 - before the Horten brothers successfully built a single large glider. Jack did admit to hearing about the Horten brothers trying finless designs, which sparked his inspiration, but that was the extent of the connection.

Engineering converges much like evolution does. Stuff is built to fit a niche so there's a high chance it will look similar even if designed by two different engineers on opposite sides of the globe if they need to meet the same conditions.

>>6973 I mean, consider a icthyasaur, dolphin/whale, fish, and shark have all converges on the same design in the ocean as a comparison despite being from different families of animals and suddenly stuff looking similar begins to make a lot of sense since it has to all fulfill the same goal.

>>6975 >stuff looking similar begins to make a lot of sense since it has to all fulfill the same goal. Designers often re-use designs and also re-use modular components with slight variations.

Fusion anons, what do you think of the room-temperature superconductor? Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time >Physicists in New York has discovered a material that conducts electricity with perfect efficiency at room temperature — a long-sought scientific milestone. The hydrogen, carbon and sulfur compound operates as a superconductor at up to 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the team reported today in Nature. That’s more than 50 degrees hotter than the previous high-temperature superconductivity record set last year. >“This is the first time we can really claim that room-temperature superconductivity has been found,” said Ion Errea, a condensed matter theorist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. "It’s clearly a landmark,” said Chris Pickard, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge. “That’s a chilly room, maybe a British Victorian cottage.” >Yet while researchers celebrate the achievement, they stress that the newfound compound — created by a team led by Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester — will never find its way into lossless power lines, frictionless high-speed trains, or any of the revolutionary technologies that could become ubiquitous if the fragile quantum effect underlying superconductivity could be maintained in truly ambient conditions. That’s because the substance superconducts at room temperature only while being crushed between a pair of diamonds to pressures roughly 75% as extreme as those found in the Earth’s core. “People have talked about room-temperature superconductivity forever,” Pickard said. “They may not have quite appreciated that when we did it, we were going to do it at such high pressures.” >Materials scientists now face the challenge of discovering a superconductor that operates not only at normal temperatures but under everyday pressures, too. Certain features of the new compound raise hopes that the right blend of atoms could someday be found. >Progress took off in the 2000s, when supercomputer simulations let theorists predict the properties of various hydrides, and the widespread use of compact diamond anvils let experimentalists squeeze the most promising candidates to test their mettle. Suddenly, hydrides started setting records. A team in Germany showed in 2015 that a metallic form of hydrogen sulfide superconducts at −94 F under 1.5 million times the pressure of the atmosphere. Four years later, the same lab used lanthanum hydride to hit −10 degrees under 1.8 million atmospheres, even as another group found evidence for superconductivity in the same compound at 8 degrees. >Dias’ lab in Rochester has now shattered those records. Guided by intuition and rough calculations, the team tested a range of hydrogen compounds searching for the goldilocks ratio of hydrogen. Add too little hydrogen, and a compound won’t superconduct as robustly as metallic hydrogen does. Add too much, and the sample will act too much like metallic hydrogen, metalizing only at pressures that will crack your diamond anvil. Over the course of their research, the team busted many dozens of $3,000 diamond pairs. “That’s the biggest problem with our research, the diamond budget,” Dias said. >The winning recipe proved to be a riff on the 2015 formula. The researchers started with hydrogen sulfide, added methane (a compound of carbon and hydrogen), and baked the concoction with a laser. “We were able to enrich the system and introduce just the right critical amount of hydrogen necessary to maintain these Cooper pairs at very high temperatures,” said Ashkan Salamat, Dias’ collaborator and a condensed matter physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. >But the fine details of the hydrogen-carbon-sulfur potion they’ve cooked up elude them. Hydrogen is too small to show up in traditional probes of lattice structure, so the group doesn’t know how the atoms are arranged, or even the substance’s exact chemical formula. Eva Zurek, a computational chemist at the University at Buffalo, belongs to a group of theorists loosely affiliated with Dias’ lab. Earlier this year they predicted the conditions under which one metal that might have formed between the diamond anvils should superconduct, and they found different behavior. She suspects that high pressures instead transformed Dias’ substance into an unknown form whose superconductivity is especially robust. >Once Dias’ group can figure out exactly what they’ve got on their hands, theorists will build models exploring the features that give this H-C-S mixture its superconducting power, in hopes of further modifying the recipe. Physicists have proved most two-element hydrogen hybrids to be dead ends, but the new three-element blend marks a potentially significant advance into the world of complex chimera materials. One of the elements involved seems particularly promising to some. >“What I like about this work: They bring carbon into the system,” said Mikhail Eremets, an experimentalist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry lab that set the hydride records of 2015 and 2019. https://archive.is/EvV62

>>7481 Cool but useless for now. >That’s because the substance superconducts at room temperature only while being crushed between a pair of diamonds to pressures roughly 75% as extreme as those found in the Earth’s core. Hopefully it leads to better discoveries though.

>>7506 You know, one thing about that doesn't seem to add up to me. How could the localized point temperature of a substance under such tremendous pressure be 'room temperature' (supposedly ~65F) ? Unless the surrounding substrate of the material is cooled with liquid helium, it seems to me the temperature would be thousands of degrees under such pressures.

>>7507 Here's additional detail from the abstract of the paper if it might help: >One of the long-standing challenges in experimental physics is the observation of room-temperature superconductivity1,2. Recently, high-temperature conventional superconductivity in hydrogen-rich materials has been reported in several systems under high pressure3,4,5. An  important discovery leading to room-temperature superconductivity is the pressure-driven disproportionation of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) to H3S, with a confirmed transition temperature of 203 kelvin at 155 gigapascals3,6. Both H2S and CH4 readily mix with hydrogen to form guest–host structures at lower pressures7, and are of  comparable size at 4 gigapascals. By introducing methane at low pressures into the H2S + H2 precursor mixture for H3S, molecular exchange is allowed within a large assemblage of van der Waals solids that are hydrogen-rich with H2 inclusions; these guest–host structures become the building blocks of superconducting compounds at extreme conditions. Here we report superconductivity in a photochemically transformed carbonaceous sulfur hydride system, starting from elemental precursors, with a maximum superconducting transition temperature of 287.7 ± 1.2 kelvin (about 15 degrees Celsius) achieved at 267 ± 10 gigapascals. The superconducting state is observed over a broad pressure range in the diamond anvil cell, from 140 to 275 gigapascals, with a sharp upturn in transition temperature above 220 gigapascals. Superconductivity is established by the observation of zero resistance, a magnetic susceptibility of up to 190 gigapascals, and reduction of the transition temperature under an external magnetic field of up to 9 tesla, with an upper critical magnetic field of about 62 tesla according to the Ginzburg–Landau model at zero temperature. The light, quantum nature of hydrogen limits the structural and stoichiometric determination of the system by X-ray scattering techniques, but Raman spectroscopy is used to probe the chemical and structural transformations before metallization. The introduction of chemical tuning within our ternary system could enable the preservation of the properties of room-temperature superconductivity at lower pressures. https://archive.is/jfrBc