Pentagon grounds entire F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fleet

[_Rick_]

At least you're going to get a working product out of it. The B-70 was essentially all the R&D to get a working prototype, and then it proved to be no longer useful, with all the money (and some of the people) disappearing in a crater in the desert. I suppose some of the R&D could be reused in other military projects, but a lot of stuff may have been classified and thus difficult to transfer from one project to another.

The F-35 currently doesn't look much worse than F-111. The big numbers are also partially because it replaces a whole lot of planes. To me it looks like a military project like any other. Low-ball the initial cost, then claim national security and install a non-functional kitchen sink with exploding costs. Been there done that a thousand times.

As far as I know here is no thrust-vectoring alternative in existence, so y'all gotta suck it up.

 

[ElFenix]

i am very disappoint that the XB-70 was not on display at the air force museum when i went in may. they're preparing a new hangar and it's in there right now.

 

[norseamd]

Why not build intelligence into the drone, so that it could determine it's own targets and fire on them if need be? Perhaps even creating an artificial sentience would serve it well in that case.

The technology for that autonomy is not ready yet and if we try that right now it is only going to result in friendly fire and horrible civilian casualties.

 

[OverVolt]

The F35 program is far, far more expensive, and it's not an X type vehicle. It's in production, but it's still not ready for service.

You know how even if they made a bot ultra difficult in some FPS game you could probably glitch it out and systematically kill it without ever dieing.

Yea thats why.

Iran captured a drone by tricking it into thinking its signal died and it auto landed, or something like that. Then they captured all the technology. Whoops!

 

[Nebor]

I just wanted a Skynet joke, and you guys ruined it.