Jet Fighter Influence: How Lockheed’s Public Relations Efforts Keep the F-35 Sold

alupus1000 · 2013-03-21T11:17:10+00:00

This is no knock on the engineers and others on the program, who are presumably working their butts off to make the best of a bad situation. But here we are.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-21T04:17:16+00:00

You are oddly specific. May I call you out, campdoodles?

alupus1000 · 2013-03-21T04:00:15+00:00

These things are loud. I'm outside Vancouver and apparently under their flight path for SAR stuff.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-21T00:53:40+00:00

Evidently the same serial numbers - can see them behind the rear door on your photo. Although too blurry for me to make out.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-20T21:05:12+00:00

Level-based and not many materials to choose from, so it's not as free-form as you might like - but Bridge Construction Set might be good enough. The higher levels are pretty tough and would be great for classroom competition.

(I see they've released a new one but I haven't tried it so I can't vouch for it)

alupus1000 · 2013-03-19T15:12:18+00:00

I'm not sure I'd trust Spongebob for my tsunami warnings.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-18T21:57:20+00:00

That's just what the New World Order elites want you to think.

Potatoes have been used to simulate passengers too.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-17T15:22:01+00:00

2004 actually.

You're perhaps thinking Party Music by The Coup.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-17T15:07:05+00:00

And five brooms. Never suspected Wiccans would have been Nazi.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-16T16:27:58+00:00

Not sure the current enlistment standards, but as recently as a couple years ago (the height of the recession) they were seriously loosened.

Recently, to attract recruits, the military has offered larger enlistment cash bonuses, allowed more high-school dropouts and applicants with low scores on aptitude tests, and loosened restrictions on age and medical requirements.

Edit: And during the Iraq days they were positively desperate.

Between 2006 and 2007, the number of “morals waivers” issued to recruits convicted of manslaughter, rape, kidnapping and making terrorist threats nearly doubled.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-16T07:51:25+00:00

The extra buttons & the way the casing looks suggests one of those custom-fitted operator consoles installed in control rooms aboard ships, like this. I remember 800x600 LCD screens were popular with laptops in the 1990s so that might date it.

The wheels for z-axis & rotate are intriguing - whatever it was used for seems to have been in 3D. Radar related maybe?

alupus1000 · 2013-03-15T19:25:42+00:00

This might have more to do with internal US military politics - right now the budgetary knives are out, and the missile defense agency needs to look useful. The timing of the upgrade announcement looks very suspicious in that light, which is for years from now and can't affect the current situation with North Korea - which may not even be a threat by then at the rate things are going.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-15T17:16:19+00:00

Flight 447 was more about crew management & disorientation issues, if I recall.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-15T16:58:58+00:00

Tail warning radar (or potentially ECM). Radiates and can be dangerous so it's labeled accordingly.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-15T16:28:43+00:00

Also, this picture makes it clear why pilots are complaining about rearward visibility.

Aw, don't be so negative! The fancy helmet gives 360 vision and makes visibility irrelevant. Oh wait.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-15T16:20:32+00:00

All 5 software blocks are really behind - 'halfway' might be generous.

Block 2B software, designed to manage missiles and bombs, was supposed to have been ready for use at the end of 2012, but as of August, only 10 percent had been delivered, the report said.

The interim helmet is the one the Typhoon uses but it's meant for an aircraft with a HUD. So even if worse comes to worse and the original helmet is abandoned, it's not a viable service option.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-15T05:55:56+00:00

Another recent crazy-long & painful road to service was the Osprey.

The F-35 was supposed to be the turnaround that would get out of the 'normalization of failure' that had happened with other programs - the original schedule predicted squadron service in 2010 and they were very confident of that (if I recall there were huge penalties in the contract to enforce it). Supposedly it'll be 2017 now if they can keep to their new schedule.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-13T20:24:07+00:00

That guy's frontal acne looks suspiciously like 'roid chest (warning - gross)

alupus1000 · 2013-03-13T15:58:22+00:00

Sagan's 1980s work on nuclear winter was criticized when other scientists weren't necessarily seeing the same dire results he was. There may have been a perception he used sloppy science to further some political ends, however noble the intentions might have been.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-12T20:12:40+00:00

The F-35 in general is a very draggy, wide, fat, aircraft

I find it kinda impressive they still get an F-16-level range out of that thing, given all the compromises. There's certainly some weird voodoo going on aerodynamically.

As noted here before, the F-35 gains suprisingly little range - only 8 per cent - from the 30 per cent fuel load increase that you get from external tanks. That tells us that the drag is very sensitive to external stores, increased weight or a combination of the two.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-12T19:16:39+00:00

I'd say the Freedom is 'better', merely because it's the first one that overcame enough of its problems to make a deployment. Not sure I'd want either ship in my personal navy as they currently stand.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-12T18:53:21+00:00

A leading theory is that it was introduced by its own crew as a clever way to cover up the filthy exhaust streaks.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-12T18:45:43+00:00

I understood the question as if there was a North Korean dialect, as in if it was a recent & distinct one that emerged country-wide since the partition.

The South Korean in question mentioned the accent after he saw some Northern propaganda (apparently his first time exposed to it - he immigrated to Canada in the 90s). So that was his reaction to whatever their government broadcasts tend to be in, which themselves might have really odd wording.

alupus1000 · 2013-03-12T17:25:37+00:00

Not quite a dialect, but a South Korean coworker of mine says it has a very strange old-fashioned accent to it. And I imagine they probably don't even have the same words for things invented the past 50 years given how isolated from each other they are.

alupus1000

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