Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "Curious Droid"
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Daniel Filippus - The SR-71 flew across the Soviet Union at very high altitude at mach 4 LENGTHWISE. Soviet SAMs, including some very big ones, could never shoot it down, nor could Soviet aircraft intercept it. If it was doing this with leaky tanks, it was definitely some badass tech.
Concerning the Concorde I am an American, and I say the Concorde was awesome and cool and a technological marvel whether it was profitable or not (not that I approve of government subsidies of commercial enterprises, if any). The bans on supersonic flight over land were in effect in US & Europe when the Concorde was operational, and they did not kill it. If you want to know what killed it, you must look at what CHANGED.
1. A crash
2. 911
3. Fuel prices
For the record, even though I suspect I would never have had a chance to ride on it anyway, I'm sorry it died.
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Barrie Rodliffe - (about WW2 military aircraft) - When the US entered the war, US B-17 and the UK Lancaster, besides being capable of other missions, were the only bombers capable of bombing targets deep in Germany from bases in the UK. No 2 man bombers available at the time could perform this mission. The vital difference was that the B-17 was tasked with daylight precision bombing of individual specific targets like factories, railroad junctions, oil fields, refineries, etc. , initially without fighter support for the final leg of the mission, because no fighters had the range to escort that far. The Lancaster was employed in night raids on cities, targets large enough that you could position yourself to attack them closely enough by celestial navigation, without having to try to see invisible landmarks in a blacked-out city. The Lancaster's inferior defensive armament was not relevant to night bombing, because at this stage Germany did not have night fighters and they faced only flack (on clear nights when the searchlights got lucky). Obviously, a ton of bombs delivered on a specific chosen target is worth more than a ton of bombs labelled "To whom it may concern". These precise daylight raid targets usually were surrounded by infrastructure, worker residential areas, etc., so on the whole, the daylight bombing raid's "misses" had about the same material effect on the war as the nightly bombing raids "hits". By your account, when the UK considered getting into the daylight bombing action, they considered doing it with B-17s, not with Lancasters, because Lancasters did not have the defensive firepower that mission required. It is meaningless to compare any other contemporary allied bomber with the B-17 series, because it was (and is) conceded that no other contemporary bomber could perform it's primary mission (until the introduction of the B-29).
After the introduction of the P-51, and before advances on the western European front made forward fighter bases possible, for the first time it became possible for fighters, in shifts, to escort bombers all the way to Germany from bases in the UK. The Spitfire had a role in this rotation, but no fighter could stay WITH the bomber formation all the way because the bomber's cruising speed at load was less than any fighter's ferry speed so a fighter escorting heavy bombers guzzled fuel. So the escort was arranged in shifts throughout the raid, each subsequent shift flying from the UK to a rendezvous at the fighter's ferry speed, slowing to relieve the previous shift in escort . The only fighter capable of escorting the bombers on the crucial farthest leg of the raid from UK bases all the way into Germany and back to a rendezvous with another shift, even with drop tanks, was the P-51 you maligned. The Supermarine Spitfire, an excellent fighter without a doubt, excelled at decimating German fighters and bombers in the Battle of Britain, in a defensive role in which range was largely irrelevant, but as the allies switched to the offensive air war, it was nevertheless largely relegated to the tactical air superiority role because of its limited range. Here are the relevant specs (the range of values is due to variants; both fighters were improved during the war):
Spitfire combat range: 395- 470 mi on internal fuel.
P-51 combat range: 750-1180 mi on internal fuel.
Goering said after the war that he knew the war was lost when he first saw heavy bombers over Germany with fighter escort. For good and sufficient reasons, the bombers he saw were US heavies, and the fighters he saw were P-51s.
The best weapons systems were constantly improved during the war, to the extent that most of the tanks and planes employed at the start could well be considered obsolete by its end. The fact that the B-17 was improved during the war is not, as you implied, evidence that it was bad. The best weapons systems were improved, the worst were discontinued if there was a replacement.
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@christopherbertoli7322 "SpaceX is being run like every other private company: poorly, "
You are either utterly ignorant of the inherent characteristics of private companies compared to government agencies, or you are blowing smoke for partizan political purposes. There is NO effective pressure on government agencies to be efficient, they are in effect rewarded for spending money. Private companies must be efficient or die. The universal results of each mode of operation match this difference. If you don't know this, you don't know anything. If you are looking for an exception to this, look to the "corporate welfare" beneficiaries like the most powerful defense contractors and ULA, which get "cost plus" contracts. Unlike ULA, SpaceX got a relative pittance of R & D money, but his government contracts don't pay up until he delivers. ULA gets paid continuously for stretching out programs, and the gravy train ENDS when they deliver. That's why the Shuttle took so long to develop and there has been no manned replacement, indeed no new vehicle since the 1980s from ULA, despite multiple major contracts. ULA is being payed megabucks to dither, SpaceX is being paid to get the job done, no "cost plus" nonsense. When private companies bid on NASA contracts with no "cost plus" provisions, we will begin to see some cost effectiveness on the vehicle production side. But NASA is still a government agency and will always waste a goodly portion of their budget on red tape and administrative nonsense. Diligence in managing government agencies is vitally important and long overdue, but will always be an incomplete uphill battle. Cutting costs in a government agency is like herding cats (contrary to the nature of cats), but still needs to be continuously attempted.
As for comparing the Challenger accident with the Dragon crash, you're trying to compare an operational failure with multiple fatalities FAVORABLY to a failure in an unmanned test flight. This makes no sense. Any failure is suboptimal, but compared with operational failures, a test failure is pretty much what tests are for. Far better to have your failures in the test program so you can fix them before you are carrying a valuable payload.
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