Id be interested in seeing a turboprop that can transition to a turbofan/jet once the prop is folded away. The f-35 was a step in this direction.

They are still very deeply limited by compressor technology, regardless of whether they use combustion or electric propulsion.

There are some rather bizarre examples such as Gaza attacking Israel, despite getting something like 50% of their electricity and 10% of their fresh water from Israel!

Attacking the supplier of critical civilian and industrial inputs would seem like a mistake nobody in their right mind would make, but... there you go.

I wouldn't be surprised if a future conflict with China over Taiwan would be primarily economic.

They threaten to stop shipping, we threaten to cut off the Internet and their banking, etc...

Similarly, the most knowledgeable experts are predicting that China's strategy with Taiwan will be to simply blockade the island and wait for them to capitulate.

Last but not least, this is also Iran's current strategy. By halting shipping through the Straight of Hormuz, they're waging war on the global economy much more effectively than bombing a few small military air strips in the region.

Do technical writers work on press releases? This sounds more like a job for the public relations/corporate communications department.

But those of us who know less don't have that information, and since the comment didn't explicitly deliver it, there's no way to learn from it. What to you is a compressed valid opinion ends up landing like a shallow dismissal.

What works better on HN is for the commenter to share some of what they know, so the rest of us can learn, and so the comment itself becomes substantive with supporting information, details, etc. Then we won't just know that you disapprove of, e.g., a particular aircraft design, but will also have some idea of why.

It can be hard to remember to do this, because most of us take the extra state in our heads for granted.

https://www.twz.com/38435/this-is-all-the-survival-gear-that...

Other european airforces using them were more lucky, IIRC.

That aside, they could be seen as the exported rests of the bargain-basement of the MIC of the USA, when the USAF/Navy already had better options(seen as a whole weapon-system, not a few speed/climb/altitude records(for the initial, only lightly loaded version) which won't matter in real combat).

Not when you simply don't use them for horizontal flight. You just shut the VTOL hatches and forget that you aren't a conventional airplane until you want to land but there isn't an airstrip.

Winged operation has to be efficient, no doubt about that. But hovering does not need much endurance when it's only for getting away from the ground and setting down.

Electric has the power density, even more so when you don't need the power for a long time (heat buildup, no need for an equilibrium). Electric suffers from energy density, but that's where the winged mode comes in (old fashioned jet turbine, with the generator slightly larger than usual so that you'll have full batteries for the short landing hover)

Supply is one part, being able to repair is another. The tiger was a massive pain in the dick to fix. It had a weak gearbox that took _hours_ to get to.

Plus most of the parts were bespoke, which means lots more tooling needed to service everything. The other thing is that germany wasn't actually that mechanised compared to the french, or english

In today's world, the US outspends the next 10 countries combined. In normal times, it values the lives of its servicemen, and is willing to spend quite a bit to ensure dominance. So it will often have boutique gear that other countries could never afford.

Today the US has 55 fast attack submarines, each of which can carry about 50 torpedos at a time. So with 100% of your subs deployed you can sink maybe 250 ships. The US has an inventory of about 1000 torpedos so you can do that about 4 times. Shanghai alone receives 230 ships per day. So The US submarine force is roughly capable of shutting down the equivalent of 1 chinese port for a few days. Realistically, your not even going to get anywhere near that. 30% of your subs are going to be out of service at any given time, more will be transiting between service bases and the war theater, only a portion of those can be spare for commerce raiding, it takes time to locate targets, and you will suffer attrition to ASW. After those first few days it becomes a race between US torpedo production and Chinese ship building. The US can produce 10 torpedos per month; China produces 15 ships per day.

Of course China isn't an island - it can import food from its neighbors by land connections. Nor is it even deficient in domestic food production capability. It grows 700 million tons of grain per year which is enough to sustain 3.8 billion adults. It imports a lot of food in peacetime because people want more than bare subsistence, and certainly interdicting trade will piss them off quite a bit, but it's not going to bring them to their knees.

The idea that in a peer war it will only be them suffering - their trade will be interdicted, their industrial centers will be bombed - and they won't have any means to strike back is exactly the complacency I was referring to. Maybe if war broke out tomorrow it would go that way, but that's merely an argument that China is not yet truly our peer. We must plan under the assumption that somebody, and it might not be China, will in the coming decades reach the point where they can tank a hit from us and hit back.

I would be interested to see how far they've brought the technology in the intervening, uh ... 30 years. Damn. That old computer (old by technology, ours was pretty new in practical terms) was the only mainframe I've ever used. Booted it up by loading a tape reel and programming registers. I still remember that the 'happy' code was something like 0B00BE in between cycles, anything else and it had crashed.

/end trip down memory lane

Wildly dependent on your definition of "modern", which mostly depends on your potential adversary. The Russia/Ukraine, and the new war in the Gulf have shown numerous ways in which 4th generation jets, and more importantly cheaper missiles and even more cheap drones can perform supression of enemy air defences and/or air support. Unless you're fighting the US or China, 4th gen jets are plenty. And even against US and US defended locations, cheap drones and missiles have been able to influct some pretty serious damage to critical infrastructure (like extremely expensive and rare radar systems). An adversary not crippled by extreme sanctions and corruption for decades might have been able to achieve even more, even with the total lack of airpower.

By all accounts the F-35 did fly freely over Iran but the weaponry for killing ground radars are all long-range stand-off weapons so that 4th gen aircraft can use them. Many times those weapons are cued by stealth aircraft within range of the ground radars but launched by 4th gen carrying them from farther away. This is pretty standard US doctrine.

The F-35 specifically was designed for environments like Ukraine. The combat there is shaped by the lack of capability like that from either side.

The burning question is what decision would AI make in Pearl Harbor. Would it have said flock of birds? Would it be keying in on flocks of birds instead?

They're now much closer to $3000 USD+ at the low end for an ISR vehicle. $8000+ for the more capable FPV kamikazes is the estimate for Russian models.

Which is comparable to a 155mm artillery shell. But with a lot less payload.

There's already literally millions of drones being produced and used per year in that conflict - and they've made a big impact, but the stability of the frontline also reveals that the impact of "swarms" is hardly overpowering (the obsession with them is also weird - if you had thousands of assets in the air, the last thing you'd do is put them all close together).