Comments by "Laird Cummings" (@lairdcummings9092) on "The BUFF Is Going to Live Forever! The B-52J/K update" video.

Not only three generations flying the B-52, but there are cases of pilots and crew flying the exact same B-52 aircraft their fathers and grandfathers flew. The tradition is going to continue...
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@dystopianlucidity4448 "...one of the best service records on the planet." Fixed that for ya.
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@sealove79able it was an exact duplicate. Same virtues, same vices. Even the instrument labels were copied. The Soviets even built an entire mill to roll out aluminum sheeting in the correct (SAE) guage. Edit: Stalin was terribly frightening; Tupelov had to appeal directly to the Politburo and eventually Stalin, to get permission to substitute superior Soviet 23mm cannon in the turrets.
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@sealove79able actually, it was a precise reverse engineered B-29. It was designed in Seattle. The Russians had to literally build new tooling, as everything they had was Metric, and they had very little SAE standard tooling.
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@sealove79able they didn't avoid the bill. They paid for it in the costs to duplicate the tooling, disassemble and measure EVERYTHING, then assemble the clones. Engineering time, materials costs - including research into materials properties as well as development of tools, machines, foundries, and mills necessary to reproduce those materials - plus flight analysis and assessment - AND dealing with the overhead costs that Soviet bureaucracy inevitably involved, all that was one HELL of a bill. Truthfully, it was a MASTERFUL engineering accomplishment - and completely unnecessary. Soviet aircraft engineers were extremely capable. It would have made more sense, and cost much less, to have simply flown the B-29, noting its performance and capabilities, and build a new aircraft from scratch that could duplicate or exceed its accomplishments. Which, amusingly, is exactly what another design group did, producing a perfectly capable performance match for less cost.
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@plugs313 yes, the exact same airframe.
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@sealove79able the ANT-64. Had it been allowed to continue development (Stalin again!) it would have been designated "TU-10." Instead, a different aircraft was given the TU-10 designation. There's very little Western documentation on the ANT-64. Edit: Development on the ANT-64 was halted in '47, simultaneously with the completion of the TU-4; a shame, as the 64 looks to have been a somewhat superior aircraft, based on what is known.
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Who knows what might get added. Air defense lasers are a thing already. Now, they need to mature enough to be stuffed in an aircraft. The 52 has an advantage, in that it's got LOTS of room and load capacity for an early development system.
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🤣
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@sealove79able propeller-driven, radial engines. Not directly a predecessor to the TU-95, but lessons and skills learned definitely contributed to the Bear.
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@FortuneZer0 pffft. That's not a dynasty. That's an anecdote.
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@Mr.Robert1 there are always outliers - I put enough of their butts on the bus. Or you have families like mine; Father and Sister-in-Law were USAF, Uncles were Army Air Corps, Father- and Uncle-in-Law, plus my wife and myself, were Navy. Not one of the next generation are serving at all. Two-generation cluster, I guess you could call it.
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@brianbrandt25 if you were sufficiently ST:OS geeky, you'd know that's not even a good joke; no one is making antimatter weapons.
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Dragons are real.
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@pennise oh, they had their bean counters, absolutely. No project that large can succeed without bean counters. What they didn't have was mass quantities of regulators. Sure, there were some, but no more than strictly necessary. These days? We've got - literally - regulators regulating other regulators.
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@pennise whistle true, you then have the problem when the Engineers nearly bankrupted Boeing. Because they were shit at counting beans. Bean counters MUST have a seat at the table (and did, except for that - fortunately brief - tenure). Saying there were no bean counters present or involved is factually and functionally wrong.
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@Mr.Robert1 yeah, it's been gussied up. The airframe serial numbers don't change, though.
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