Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: JCDNWarrior on August 11, 2011, 11:18:16 am
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The US Military has unveiled a new toy, apparently the newest technology around:
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/196227/20110811/falcon-htv-2-fastest-aircraft-military-hypersonic-darpa.htm
It's also dubbed a 'space plane'. Wanted to hear what everyone thinks of this.
According to some, this tech is 30 years old by the way. Not sure what to think of that.
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According to some, this tech is 30 years old by the way. Not sure what to think of that.
Most of the research into hypersonic vehicles was done back then (or earlier). In addition, most of the engine concepts originated in theoretical work from that era.
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Ah, that could explain that claim. It does tend to take a long time from going from theoretic research to deployment of working prototypes. Nonetheless, this is really impressive stuff, it does seem to reinforce the idea that technology itself is far further ahead than we're told.
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Nice, except that...
The Falcon HTV-2 first began in 2003, as part of a U.S. military research project to create a plane that could reach any part of the world in less than an hour, and potentially deliver bombs in under the same amount of time.
...what are the chances it's going to be used for something nice and useful? :nono:
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I'm sure that people in the future would appreciate the capability to get to the other side of the world in less than 15 minutes.
First they'll build a bomber, then the technology might be adapted into civilian transport. If it can carry, say, a ton of bombs, why couldn't it be a ton of something else, after some design changes? Also, it's a major step towards Single Stage To Orbit spaceplanes, which may someday make space travel much more accessible.
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Nice, except that...
The Falcon HTV-2 first began in 2003, as part of a U.S. military research project to create a plane that could reach any part of the world in less than an hour, and potentially deliver bombs in under the same amount of time.
...what are the chances it's going to be used for something nice and useful? :nono:
It took ~15 years for supersonic flight to be used for commercial purposes. Given the constraints of hypersonic flight, this will remain in the military realm for the foreseeable future.
Also, Dragon, a ton of payload really isn't all that much. Concorde had a payload of ~15 tons (IIRC), which was enough for a hundred passengers.
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Nice, except that...
The Falcon HTV-2 first began in 2003, as part of a U.S. military research project to create a plane that could reach any part of the world in less than an hour, and potentially deliver bombs in under the same amount of time.
...what are the chances it's going to be used for something nice and useful? :nono:
Directly... nothing it reads like a concept/technology development vehicle of which the US military has developed a knack for building.
Indirectly you are looking at the parent for combat craft 2-3 generations from now
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Nice, except that...
The Falcon HTV-2 first began in 2003, as part of a U.S. military research project to create a plane that could reach any part of the world in less than an hour, and potentially deliver bombs in under the same amount of time.
...what are the chances it's going to be used for something nice and useful? :nono:
It took ~15 years for supersonic flight to be used for commercial purposes. Given the constraints of hypersonic flight, this will remain in the military realm for the foreseeable future.
Also, Dragon, a ton of payload really isn't all that much.
Hey being able to drop a pickup truck and the Expendables probably would be worth while :D
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Nice, except that...
The Falcon HTV-2 first began in 2003, as part of a U.S. military research project to create a plane that could reach any part of the world in less than an hour, and potentially deliver bombs in under the same amount of time.
...what are the chances it's going to be used for something nice and useful? :nono:
It took ~15 years for supersonic flight to be used for commercial purposes. Given the constraints of hypersonic flight, this will remain in the military realm for the foreseeable future.
Depends on how long this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_SABRE) takes.
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It reminds me of Ayaks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaks), a Russian hypersonic aircraft program. I'm not sure what's to become of it, or if the program actually exists (or existed).
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Nice, except that...
The Falcon HTV-2 first began in 2003, as part of a U.S. military research project to create a plane that could reach any part of the world in less than an hour, and potentially deliver bombs in under the same amount of time.
...what are the chances it's going to be used for something nice and useful? :nono:
Why does the US even need this capability anyway? Aren't we in a budget crisis? I'm not saying this shouldn't be researched, but really, it just seems like the military's just jerking off with technology again. Stuff like this should be done by NASA. :\
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Nice, except that...
The Falcon HTV-2 first began in 2003, as part of a U.S. military research project to create a plane that could reach any part of the world in less than an hour, and potentially deliver bombs in under the same amount of time.
...what are the chances it's going to be used for something nice and useful? :nono:
Why does the US even need this capability anyway? Aren't we in a budget crisis? I'm not saying this shouldn't be researched, but really, it just seems like the military's just jerking off with technology again. Stuff like this should be done by NASA. :\
Budget? Didnt someone say NASA's budget was coming under review soon so is the DoD's
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Yea, and guess which one is way less than the other?
Did you know that the air conditioning for troops in Iraq for a single year is more than NASA's annual operating budget?
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Yea, and guess which one is way less than the other?
Did you know that the air conditioning for troops in Iraq for a single year is more than NASA's annual operating budget?
Yeah well, I consider troops not dying of heat stroke and having some level of comfort while they serve halfway around the world to be more important then visiting the moon. You want to begrudge military expenditures you would do well to look somewhere other then grunts getting a modicum of convenience.
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Why does the US even need this capability anyway? Aren't we in a budget crisis? I'm not saying this shouldn't be researched, but really, it just seems like the military's just jerking off with technology again. Stuff like this should be done by NASA. :\
Yes, science funded by the military isn't proper science. I mean, no DARPA project ever produced benefits for civilians, right?
Oh, wait. Forgot the internet.
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*snrk!* Did someone say ARPANET?
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Yea, and guess which one is way less than the other?
Did you know that the air conditioning for troops in Iraq for a single year is more than NASA's annual operating budget?
Yeah well, I consider troops not dying of heat stroke and having some level of comfort while they serve halfway around the world to be more important then visiting the moon. You want to begrudge military expenditures you would do well to look somewhere other then grunts getting a modicum of convenience.
If we take it as given that we're going to continue to wage war in the Middle East, we should certainly spare no reasonable expense to do so as effectively as possible and lessen the burden on our troops as much as possible.
It we're a brazillion dollars in debt, we shouldn't be taking it as given that we're going to continue to wage war in the Middle East.
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LordPomposity got it. :)
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Trust me, trying to sleep in a summer night with no A/C is impossible, it may be night but the rooms still contain that good 130F+ temperature from being exposed to the sun all day.
And in my year I spent just about the entire summer sleeping A/C-less nights because of the **** power generators.
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LordPomposity got it. :)
No. He didn't. In fact he completely missed it by complaining about existing expenditures for existing commitments as if they were future expenditures for future commitments.
Basic logical failure ahoy.
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Trust me, trying to sleep in a summer night with no A/C is impossible, it may be night but the rooms still contain that good 130F+ temperature from being exposed to the sun all day.
And in my year I spent just about the entire summer sleeping A/C-less nights because of the **** power generators.
Haha, I never said that the troops shouldn't get A/C. The larger point I was trying to make was that this whole war is sucking us dry. I imagine that A/C is not the single largest expenditure of the US military. These sorts of discussions do highlight interesting ways in which we interpret what others say, for those that care to look; I never said half of the stuff people are saying, but they assign it to me because, I think, they must be projecting some sort of internal concern and using me as a podium for said concern. I say that AC for the troops cost a lot, and that advanced technology like this should be researched by NASA, a civilian agency where all it's findings must be available for all, and some people jump on me for saying that military research never benefited civilians or that the troops shouldn't get AC? It's proximity argumentation based on internal fears and preconceptions.
NGTM-1R, do you think that if I said the sky was blue you'd take the stance that it in fact was green? :)
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NGTM-1R, do you think that if I said the sky was blue you'd take the stance that it in fact was green? :)
No, I honestly believe that you'd declare it green in an effort to spite me because that's the level of rationality inherent in your comment.
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On the bright side, the materials technology side of this project is far more interesting, as it should ideally form the basis of a next-generation spaceplane hull. Don't get me wrong, ceramic plates are lovely, but a more uniform, highly durable hull structure is what is needed to ensure a rapid turn-around for ground-to-orbit launches.
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These sorts of discussions do highlight interesting ways in which we interpret what others say...
Quite intentionally, I think.
By the way UT, it's been conclusively proven that Obama was born in the USA. You can stop ranting about Kenya now.
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These sorts of discussions do highlight interesting ways in which we interpret what others say...
Quite intentionally, I think.
By the way UT, it's been conclusively proven that Obama was born in the USA. You can stop ranting about Kenya now.
Eh? I voted for the guy.
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Uh, it was a joke. I responded to a post in which you complained about people ascribing to you positions that you do not actually hold by ascribing to you a particularly absurd position which you do not actually hold.
Lesson, kids: sarcasm really does not survive translation to written media. :p
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Uh, it was a joke. I responded to a post in which you complained about people ascribing to you positions that you do not actually hold by ascribing to you a particularly absurd position which you do not actually hold.
Lesson, kids: sarcasm really does not survive translation to written media. :p
I thought it might be that but I wasn't sure. Cheers man. :D We really do need [sarcasm] tags lol.
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Yeah well, I consider troops not dying of heat stroke and having some level of comfort while they serve halfway around the world to be more important then visiting the moon. You want to begrudge military expenditures you would do well to look somewhere other then grunts getting a modicum of convenience.
Your argument would be a lot more persuasive if we assume our troops should be there in the first place. If we hadn't gone to the middle east at all we would been able to completely fund NASA at current levels for the next 50 years; the war in Iraq and Afghanistan cost far more than the cumulative budget of NASA since its founding. I'm just thankful that some of the military's bloated budget is being allocated for research and engineering projects that will eventually have practical applications for civilians.
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Your argument would be a lot more persuasive if we assume our troops should be there in the first place. If we hadn't gone to the middle east at all we would been able to completely fund NASA at current levels for the next 50 years; the war in Iraq and Afghanistan cost far more than the cumulative budget of NASA since its founding. I'm just thankful that some of the military's bloated budget is being allocated for research and engineering projects that will eventually have practical applications for civilians.
Yes, we just rewrite the past...
It's a bit late to argue we shouldn't have gone.
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Your argument would be a lot more persuasive if we assume our troops should be there in the first place. If we hadn't gone to the middle east at all we would been able to completely fund NASA at current levels for the next 50 years; the war in Iraq and Afghanistan cost far more than the cumulative budget of NASA since its founding. I'm just thankful that some of the military's bloated budget is being allocated for research and engineering projects that will eventually have practical applications for civilians.
Yes, we just rewrite the past...
It's a bit late to argue we shouldn't have gone.
Very true, but I can still be mad. :(
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Edit: on reconsideration, neither myself nor anyone else stands to gain from my completing the process of derailing this thread into an Iraq war argument.
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..... the sky isn't green?....
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Your argument would be a lot more persuasive if we assume our troops should be there in the first place. If we hadn't gone to the middle east at all we would been able to completely fund NASA at current levels for the next 50 years; the war in Iraq and Afghanistan cost far more than the cumulative budget of NASA since its founding. I'm just thankful that some of the military's bloated budget is being allocated for research and engineering projects that will eventually have practical applications for civilians.
Yes, we just rewrite the past...
It's a bit late to argue we shouldn't have gone.
Very true, but I can still be mad. :(
I thought it was a dumb as rocks idea back in 2002 and I too am mad about it. Suffice to say, we are there and those who serve deserve more then they receive from this nation. I also certainly appreciate that the military budget is friggen bloated, however, I personally found that the best thing UT could ***** rant about was something as basic as providing a decent standard of living for our troops in the field to be extremely asinine.
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I also wasn't ranting, I was merely providing an example of just how bloated the military budget is. My logic was that something as basic and relatively small as air conditioning, which one would imagine should be a relatively small amount of money, costs more than, well, all of the duties that NASA is charged with.
I could have said something along the lines of how big our spending is on battleships, or how much a B-2 bomber costs (about $1.01 billion each, I don't know if that includes operating costs), but people expect those things to cost a lot, and thus mentioning them really doesn't prove anything other than we have a lot of expensive toys that cost a lot.
However, talking about air conditioning is a great way of showing just how much equipment and how many personnel we have over there. It's a better example because it gets people to notice the cost of things. :)
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I could have said something along the lines of how big our spending is on battleships
I think you'd be surprised at this one. :p
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Do you have a concrete source for that A/C figure, UT? It sounds an awful lot like one of those "$5000 toilets!" sort of things.
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Yea, and guess which one is way less than the other?
Did you know that the air conditioning for troops in Iraq for a single year is more than NASA's annual operating budget?
Yeah well, I consider troops not dying of heat stroke and having some level of comfort while they serve halfway around the world to be more important then visiting the moon. You want to begrudge military expenditures you would do well to look somewhere other then grunts getting a modicum of convenience.
move to phoenix then. know how many civilians die of heat stroke in that city? seriously if your gonna give the military money, it should be used on weapons so that we can go in, destroy everything that moves and get out as soon as possible, before the effects of heat stroke may take effect. if the rest of the world is gonna call us an evil empire, we should at least act like one.
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inb4 glass parking lot
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..... the sky isn't green?....
only when you look at it with a geiger counter. oh wait, that part of my plan hasn't come to fruition yet, my bad.
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seriously if your gonna give the military money, it should be used on weapons so that we can go in, destroy everything that moves and get out as soon as possible, before the effects of heat stroke may take effect. if the rest of the world is gonna call us an evil empire, we should at least act like one.
Good point. I don't agree that we should act like an evil empire, but it would be totally fun to see what the reaction was if we just decided to say "Nahhh, screw it!" and take over.
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its sad that were poised for world dominion yet we have no ambition for it. if ever theres gonna be a world government, rest assured that it will be made such through war and not through peace. and dont you just want it to be our government?
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It crashed. Hypersonic flight has a way to go yet.
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It crashed. Hypersonic flight has a way to go yet.
Maybe they should have demoed it on KSP first.
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Maybe they should have demoed it on KSP first.
To be fair, it was always going to hit the water, it just did so earlier than planned. They got nine minutes of good data out of it apparently.
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Do you have a concrete source for that A/C figure, UT? It sounds an awful lot like one of those "$5000 toilets!" sort of things.
I was thinking to myself it was also an interesting comment how no one seemed to blink an eye at that claim; has our military become so massive that a claim about it's spending such as the one I made, doesn't raise an eyebrow of incredulity?
That being said, here you go :)
http://gizmodo.com/5813257/air-conditioning-our-military-costs-more-than-nasas-entire-budget
Just Google "military air conditioning nasa" for some other sources.
LordPomposity, I know that we retired most all of our battleships (didn't we? I know they got pressed back into service during Gulf War I, are they officially done now?). :)
Too bad about the experiment. Still, aeronautics can be a pretty trial and error science, especially at the bleeding edge of things.
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Stuff like this should be done by NASA. :\
Something like this WAS done by NASA, but much like during the shuttle design process the military couldn't keep their paws off of it which lead to significant delays. If this project was allowed to run its course as the proof of concept it was intended to be everything would be farther along by now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Aerospace_Plane
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I know you have an axe to grind, but NASA launched their hypersonic flight testbed well before this and your commentary is without factual basis. (Did you even read the page you linked? It states the project came from a DARPA design and NASA developed and canceled it as impractical!)
Behold. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-51)
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I know you have an axe to grind, but NASA launched their hypersonic flight testbed well before this and your commentary is without factual basis. (Did you even read the page you linked? It states the project came from a DARPA design and NASA developed and canceled it as impractical!)
Behold. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-51)
No, first of all the X30 was supposed to be an unmanned proof of concept to advance the technology, but the military wanted a bomber straight away, which required massive redesigns in order to make it man rated. Behold
The Department of Defense wanted it to carry a crew of two and even a small payload. The demands of being a man-rated vehicle, with the instrumentation, environmental control system, and safety equipment, made X-30 larger, heavier, and more expensive than required for a technology demonstrator.
DARPA was involved from the get go, but they weren't the ones who were pushing unrealistic demands. The X51 you presented is actually a step behind the X30, and with the lessons learned from the X30 as it was meant to be the Air Force would have had their precious Falcon years ago.
I'll also point out that in 1993 a number of things were cut because there were some serious all around budget cuts. Behold. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider) All in all these cuts ended up causing some major setbacks to basic R&D in several areas. Practicality wasn't the leading determinant of what got cut.
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Maybe they should have demoed it on KSP first.
To be fair, it was always going to hit the water, it just did so earlier than planned. They got nine minutes of good data out of it apparently.
this is the way testflights usually go. back in the olden days actual pilots flew these flying death traps, and many of them died. and all of them went into it knowing full well things could go wrong, but did it anyway just for the thrill of it. these days while im sure that there are still people willing to take huge personal risks to advance space technology, but the ones calling the shots dont have the balls to actually put people in those situations, and that i think is kinda sad. after all pilots can be grown in a brothel lab.
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I was wondering were my Goa'uld fighter went
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No, first of all the X30 was supposed to be an unmanned proof of concept to advance the technology, but the military wanted a bomber straight away, which required massive redesigns in order to make it man rated.
Irrelevant. It was an unmanned proof of concept for a spaceplane airliner. Cancellation would have come anyways if it was unable to carry humans and payload.
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after all pilots can be grown in a brothel lab.
You had it right the first time! :p
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No, first of all the X30 was supposed to be an unmanned proof of concept to advance the technology, but the military wanted a bomber straight away, which required massive redesigns in order to make it man rated.
Irrelevant. It was an unmanned proof of concept for a spaceplane airliner. Cancellation would have come anyways if it was unable to carry humans and payload.
Not if it met its original project requirements, so not irrelevant. The project would have ended after they have developed working prototypes as a success. That's why it was a tech demonstrator, and not intended for active service.
And I'd like you to explain why it would be important for an unmanned technology proof of concept to carry people.
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I'm sure that people in the future would appreciate the capability to get to the other side of the world in less than 15 minutes.
First they'll build a bomber, then the technology might be adapted into civilian transport. If it can carry, say, a ton of bombs, why couldn't it be a ton of something else, after some design changes? Also, it's a major step towards Single Stage To Orbit spaceplanes, which may someday make space travel much more accessible.
Using a disposable rocket for this purpose is so unbelievably wasteful that the design used for the Falcon HTV-2 is useless except as bragging rights.