The Air Farce wants to re-engine all of their B-52s (comprising less than 10% of original production). It will take seventeen years to do that.
UNSAT, people. It took the USAAF/USAF seventeen years to go from the initial design proposal for the B-52 to shutting down the production line after the final -H model was rolled out.
The Zoomies want to buy 660 engines. Right, and the original fleet took about 6,000 engines, plus spares. So back in the day, they made nearly ten times as many engines and the airplanes to go with them that it'll take just to make the engines.
Something is seriously broken, which can shown by the point that the only tin can that the Navy's shipbuilders and competently make is one they've been making for thirty years.
Christmastoons
2 hours ago
5 comments:
No biggy. But brown people trying to find a better life... that's a REAL national security threat.
Also... who's making those engines? And the steel and alloys for them?
Naval ship design used to make sense. I have all of Norman Friedman's (USN ship type)- An illustrated Design History series, and they are informative and fun.
Now design and procurement is done by idiots who think SSN-21 is the number of the submarine they were designing, not the first SSN project for the 21st century.
Aircraft, being simpler systems wiht shorter cycle times, have been fucked for a longer time.
The average citizen thinks the purpose of our military is defense, or force projection, with graft and corruption os a side effect. It seems to me those roles are reversed, and have been for a long time. We have a system of graft and corruption, which coincidentally lools like a military. The main purpose is to hoover out as much money as possible, for as long as possible. Perhaps that's why we pick fights with mighty military juggernauts like Grenada? If we had to mix it up with, say, China, I shudder to think what would happen to a littoral combat ship, or an F-35.
Military procurement is, largely, a system of corporate welfare and a jobs program that incidentally produces war materiel for the armed forces. In sonebways, it's a cargo cult.
The biggest problem here is that they don't want to change the engine pylons and mounts or the general performance envelope. The TF-33 is a fairly small low-output fanjet by modern standards, having been designed to power the 707 airliner. I don't think there's any off-the-shelf engine right now that has the low performance of the TF-33 in a package that can mount on the existing pylons. Remember that the TF-33's were COTS technology at the time, it appears that the Air Farce has decided that they don't want to go COTS for the re-engine project, based on the stupid criteria they've put forth.
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