Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "Sandboxx" channel.

  1. The way China describes it, they seem to think Guam is plenty close.
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  2. ​ @crbielert In the 90s after the Soviet collapse, the US Government actually encouraged these mergers of defense companies because of the lack of projects and orders going forward.
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  3. PLA Mighty Dragon: "Our stealthy* profile will make our (American) enemies think twice about coming near our territory*!" *(If you take our claims at face value) USAF Rapid Dragon: "I just got kicked off a cargo plane. So anyways I started shooting..."
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  4. That monopolization came from the end of the Cold War, where the US Government specifically warned about a lack of need going forward and encouraged acquisition over liquidation.
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  5. Those defectors and collaborators have more of that traditional Chinese Race solidarity that Beijing wishes was more widespread, instead of the modern Western mindset that allows separate mental modules for ethnicity and allegiance.
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  6. The "Mare Island Mud Puppy" sank due to miscommunication between construction crews filling ballast tanks for calibration while multiple hatches were open. I'd be curious what sank that new nuclear Zhōu-class boat considering the PRC has spent the last few months denying yet another potentially spreadable incident coming out of Wǔhàn 😂
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  7. South Vietnam’s allies weren’t allowed to have boots on the ground. Bomber raids to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines were considered okay since it wasn’t a direct occupation, and the bombs dropped on the far side of the Laos and Cambodia away from their population centers.
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  8. ...by corporate media. Also known as "marketing".
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  9. ⁠The US Government sounds like it learned the expensive mistake of privatized software access, so for the B21 and other future projects mandated government ownership of the source code.
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  10. ​ @zix_zix_zix Yet China seems to want a number over half of what the US Navy sails literally around the world, despite expressing a much smaller area of concern.
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  11. If you see the pollution and other environmental side effects in Asian cities, you'd know why we're more slow and deliberate about how to build. America is top shelf for lot of things, and among the most prime is in our agriculture and our preservation of nature.
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  12. This is a big reason why government spending is "wasteful" compared to "efficient" private businesses -- there is no JIT for niche but crucial defense platforms, and as with any development process there will be lots of failed experiments. Really the closest equivalent is the corporate pharmaceutical industry, and we're all painfully aware how much we pay for prescriptions that are still under patent.
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  13. Roman concrete also has the advantage of being used in strictly low-pressure compressive architecture, unlike the wide airy tension-required spans and relatively point-loaded truck tires we subject our concrete with today. Plus we don't want to wait months for the concrete to sufficiently set, and we'd like to be able to drill through or knock them down economically when it comes time for after-build modifications.
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  14. A Chinese equivalent would have to get to release range first. More US Navy vessels carry credible air defenses, unlike the PLAN's uparmored fishing boats.
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  15. Unlike the Russian equivalents though, Bradley crew often survive and the hulls are more repairable when recovered. This is even more true with the Abrams, which have proven extremely difficult to destroy even when being scuttled in the field or used as target practice.
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  16. Like Alex was basically saying, the point of such an unrealistically handicapped dogfight was to see at what point the F22 loses its advantage.
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  17. It's not the plane, it's the proprietary kit housed within
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  18. The airfields might be so useful for that long, but the mountains are a great place to base an occupation-defeating insurgency and Taiwan built a substantial tunnel network in it already.
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  19. No it's more the secrets of its exhaust vents and how those would mitigate its thermal and radar signatures.
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  20. The rear exhaust would still be valuable information, as China's new stealth bomber the H-20 seems to be their take on the older B-2. It'll be interesting to discover how much of the Spirit's emissions performance they were able to replicate.
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  21. ​@autobootpilootProduction capacity, but not the guarantee of materials to keep their factories from going idle. China is a net importer of vital resources like food and fuel, which come in by boat straight to their population centers -- no amount of overland alternatives will affordably substitute for the collapse of supplies by sea once the crossfire of anti-ship missiles scares off civilian traffic, the upcharges would bankrupt Beijing.
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  22. The important part is if Chinese blood means Chinese allegiance, which China through the dynasties always assumes but doesn't necessarily get. Clearing this is a case-by-case basis, since each individual has varying degrees of ties to the old country. And then there's non-heritage folks who simply sell out. But definitely what we should not do is agree with China about guaranteed loyalty and do what we had done with our Japanese in WW2.
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  23. I’d think in the case of what a human pilot would eject for in combat, an AI would instead self-destruct its own vital components to prevent reconstruction by the enemy.
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  24. Emergency aid comes to mind. Say a tsunami wipes out an outlying island including the harbor and airport; a couple launches could provide the gear to quickly reestablish communications and give survivors first aid in those vital first hours.
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  25. Some targets (especially fast movers like warships) only have a limited window where they're pinpointed precisely enough for a strike. This is why China keeps touting its DF-ZF "carrier killer".
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  26. Some 90% of new private ventures are out of business within 10 years. Arguably defense spending may be more efficient because its "failures" isn't just routine interior design work that gets demolished into a dumpster when the business goes belly up.
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  27. ​ @recoil53 F35s are what's needed, and the increased production brings down the cost per unit. The F22 ended production because there was only one buyer (by design) who itself was already eyeing the more easily procured and upgraded F35, along with over a dozen other allied militaries.
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  28. We got issued red dots when we deployed in 2012 (also a signal unit so something went very wrong if we were shooting more than comms). Practically guaranteed qualification on the first try, even without magnification. In fact there was a debate about how much better our scores should have been had we not been on a range with stale pop-ups with plenty of prior holes around center mass.
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  29. The civil aviation equivalent would be how Airbus ended production of the A380: yes it's iconic and great to fly in as a passenger, but it operates in a market that isn't so relevant (i.e. hub flights at major Code F airports) and its fundamental design means it can't economically adapt to more profitable layouts outside its original scope (i.e. ferrying airfreight pallets in place of price-sensitive passengers).
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  30. In naval aviation it's range that's the main concern moreso than the redundancy of a second engine. One great powerplant is considerably more fuel efficient than two good ones.
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  31. The general rule would be to withdraw after expending all long range missiles. But chances are still that opposing fighters will still stumble within dogfighting distance more than occasionally.
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  32.  @lannyplans It’d be more if so much of those profits were given to its workers and their communities, not hidden away in tax havens through creative accounting.
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  33. Within the Strait perhaps as minelayers, because otherwise the waters are too shallow to hide in for direct engagements
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  34. Or the H-20 merely copied off the older B-2 design, implementing few if any improvements that the B-21 was designed around.
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  35. F35 isn't designed to dogfight either, but it's good to know it's more nimble if it needs to be (like with trying to dodge missiles) to make up for its relatively shorter legs.
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  36. JDAM bolt-on guided bomb kits recently got an upgrade that allows them to track into naval targets, and most Chinese warships don't come with capable air defenses. We have hundreds of thousands of cheap gravity bombs in stock now, which means we could quickly have the capacity to sink the entire PLA Navy and the Chinese maritime militia fleets and still have ordnance to spare.
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  37. Most of which carry no credible air defenses, so are vulnerable to a Quicksink JDAM that can be bolted on to a standard gravity bomb, which the US has hundreds of thousands of in stock already.
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  38. Well it was at extreme altitude with a single heat-seeking missile that didn't have much heat to home in on. Balloons of that size are actually difficult to deflate short of completely shredding it.
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  39. China would have to get past Indonesia and the Philippines though, who are both neither so disarmed nor deferential.
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  40. The Navy uses F-16s for fighter training, its smaller size and maneuverability simulating a lot of the older MiGs that adversaries still fly. However that smaller size comes at the cost of range and durability that naval aviation demands at sea.
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  41. Depends on the missiles themselves. Stealth ones are designed to be difficult to lock onto.
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  42. Drones will target humans as soon as they run out of robot bandits, and that's true for both sides. This is the danger to us if we fall behind the quality and volume of our drones to keep enemy bots busy.
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  43. Wild Weasel is like countersniping hidden hunters shooting Elephant Guns while riding an elephant 🐘
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  44. The Doolittle Raid took no territory and did only inconvenient amounts of damage. It’s the psychological impact of such a seemingly impossible counterstrike that was more potent in ultimately flipping the momentum.
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  45. Hence why there should always be a mechanical backup to engage/break the link with computerized power. It's already troubling enough that gear shifters are merely mode switches now ("shift to neutral" is no longer a guarantee against a runaway engine), and I certainly would not climb into a vehicle with a fully drive-by-wire brake system.
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  46. It's a pain compared to non-stealth aircraft, but F35 maintainability still presents a dramatic improvement over the older F22 and especially the B2.
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  47.  @xwqi  In a land war there's plenty of opportunities for even casual combatants to perform hidden movements and effective ambushes. That's not the case in the open air or sea where you can't hide indefinitely and technical superiority is what matters. Nobody is aiming to even try invading Mainland China where guerilla tactics become a valid threat again.
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  48. If you're close enough to drop a Quicksink (which is just a JDAM guidance kit screwed onto a simple gravity bomb), a Rapid Dragon deployment box just gets in the way.
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  49. It’s the same with the A-10 “Warthog” Thunderbolt II
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  50. That's what the AIM-260 is asked to achieve. Luckily we're also comparatively swamped with AWACS and other sensor assets so it would take a lot more effort to blind us from the battlespace.
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