Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Why Retire a 2-Year Old Warship?" video.

  1. Promise a moon, deliver a copy of Skylab after all of the above.
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  2. That's only a small part. We go silver bullet high tech, then try to pack bleeding edge technologies, forgetting that bleeding edge means it's bloody. Your example of the Army's attempt to Star Trek a rifle is an excellent example, as they added a smart grenade that wasn't even a prototype initially and never really got out of alpha test prototype stage at the end. They wanted to replace and update the rifle, they then tried to turn it into a Star Trek version of a Swiss army knife, with all of the attendant failures and overruns, forgetting the base rifle in the process. They lose sight of the overall purpose of the original project, each segment becomes a process queen, turning the whole nine yards into a hanger queen and the damned thing isn't even an aircraft. Build the ship, build the rifle, get it working as a baseline, basic unit, subprojects have to get their components up and interoperating or else they're cancelled. Then integrate the frigging things. Because, what good is ship with photon torpedoes if the propulsion system doesn't work? What good is the rifle is the grenade launcher computer is great, but the rifle can't hit the broad side of a barn from the inside?
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  3.  @clonescope2433  from what I can recall, there are two propulsion systems, so it'd be two sources of input into one output. Which sounds like a huge pain in the ass if they're both inputting at once. I do wonder how they fixed the issue between the steel and aluminum, galvanic reaction between the two are infamous for causing problems in any other structural component scheme. Frankly, new classes of anything have their initial problems, they always have. New technologies, new mixtures of technologies, implementation and maintenance, plus just being new in general all have to get shaken down to see what tries to fall off. I got to test a bunch of brand new Army stuff over the decades, some not ready for prime time, others never fielded and quite a few made it into active usage today.
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  4.  @josephahner3031  there is a wee bit of a difference between a rifle and a warship. Even if the rifle base unit covers rifle, carbine, DMR and MG capabilities, it's still far, far, far simpler than a warship with dozens of subsystems that have to integrate with a dozen or so primary systems just to apply ordinance on target. To more liken the two, we'd need to replace the soldier wielding the rifle with a novel machine, add in additional weapons to it, a butt ton of sensors and we'd still not even be close in complexity. Especially, as that rifle still isn't in production or distribution yet.
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