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Comment by arctor_bob | Hacker News Reader

How do you preserve Abrams building capacity without building new tanks?

They don't want to preserve Abrams building capacity. The Army not only has enough for current needs, they already have enough for every possible contingency, including: "WW3, except for some reason it's not fought with nukes but with gigantic tank battles."

Assuming the Army rotates tanks out of front line service before they are useless, by the time the fleet is too worn out, the Abrams design will be hopelessly obsolete. Not because the design is bad or obsolete, but just because that's how many of them there are.

In contrast, the Army has massive deficiencies with many of their other, lighter vehicles, and has been trying to rectify them for decades now but all the projects have failed, for various reasons. Some of the failures have been the Army's fault, but others can be traced to the Congress deciding that the Army needs more tanks to stockpile instead of, say, armored ambulances.

Honestly, what the army really needs to do is somehow push for a heavy IFV/APC design based on the Abrams chassis, similar to how the Russians have made the T-15. Not because that would be a great match for their needs, but because since the production line is apparently completely impossible to kill, might as well try to have them make something that is even marginally useful, compared to the vehicles they are building right now that just get driven from the factory to permanent stockpile where they will probably sit until they are decommissioned decades in the future.

I think this video sums it up very well, example: Bradley Fighting Vehicle evolution

https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA

Applies very well to the Space Shuttle design, and more recently the F-35 from my understanding of that situation.

Space Shuttle design was very good, overall. Do you mean SLS?

Eh, not really. It's an impressive piece of technology, but in the end it failed to realize the goal of low cost access to space through reusability. It made so many sacrifices to get reusability and the crossrange the air force wanted that it had many single points of failure and very limited abort options. This in turn required a very high degree of confidence that components would function as intended, which drove refurbishment costs through the roof.

Though you are not wrong in details, reality is a bit more complicated than that. The STS (shuttle) was pretty well engineered for the politically-driven requirements it had, and if not for the stupid don't-upgrade-human-rated-design mentality of space operations at NASA post-Challenger, it could have been iterated towards a cost effective solution (e.g. $150M per launch, 90's money). There were plans in place for this--flyback boosters instead of ocean recovery with impact and salt water damage; cross-fed H2/LOX boosters instead of explosion-prone SRBs; insulation-less external tank design; non-crewed variants with more payload to orbit; v2 of the main engine that would have required less refurbishment; etc. They just all got scrapped. Shuttle got expensive because of a bunch of unforeseen stuff that could have been fixed but they decided to work around instead.

For a look at the design itself and how remarkably shuttle achieved its goals, I'd suggest the MIT engineering course that covered it[0]. Also look at Shuttle-C[1] or Magnum[2] for an idea of how things could have gone.

[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-C [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnum_(rocket)

I meant the Shuttle, but not so much in a "it was a terrible design" and more along the lines of "it had its design pulled in a bunch of different directions and ended up being less efficient at any of the tasks" which is what I feel the core of the original video.

The Russian Buran(?) was pretty clearly a better system and if I understand right thats because it wasn't trying to be the catch all system with competing goals from the Air Force, internal NASA goals, and congress/the senate(? not American so not sure which is correct here).

How would you reconcile this claim that Buran was a better system when Buran was stolen Shuttle technology and wasn't reusable? See http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/12/14/buran-shut... among other places for more on NBC's reporting on the theft.

And the US rocket program was "stolen" German technology - even including the scientists and engineers. And Germany "stole" a lot of technology from Britain during the industrial revolution. And somebody "stole" silkworms from China a long time ago. And the recipe for gunpowder. And for porcelain. Writing was invented in only a few places - I bet nobody of those using it where it wasn't invented paid the actual inventors a dime (or whatever the currency was then and there, probably wheat). Everybody "stealing" from everybody.

Oh please. Maybe information should just be shared, especially with those worse off where "you have to pay for it" would not even work, and maybe that "debt" concept is stupid to begin with (you cannot pay - you will be in eternal debt because first you have to pay me back, for more and more stuff, than interest). Maybe humans should just be more open and kind towards one another to begin with, especially when it does not even "cost" them (the counter argument "but they will compete with us" just means that you have to suppress them, because in any scenario where they do get to rise eventually they will compete with you anyway, especially when we are talking about a billion Chinese and the other couple of billions of people in Asia).

Yup.

The reason for IP controls is, and has always been, suppression, because technology is a way you get money and power. It's sad that humans have been doing their best to suppress progress that could benefit everyone just so that they could hold on to their share of the pie.

The orbiter was reusable. As for Energia rocket, it burned up but in reality, Space Shuttle's SRB weren't reusable either (it was much cheaper to make new ones than to recover and refurbish spent boosters), and Energia could at least serve as an independent lifter without Buran.

The Russians may have stolen Space Shuttle design (though no one really cares), but they have definitely improved on it.

Good design how? The Shuttle had a mess of disparate, conflicting requirements that meant it fulfilled none of them well: huge cross-range capability for the sake of an Air Force "capture a satellite in less than 1 orbit" mission that never actually happened (which compromised the design aerodynamics), heavy-lift cargo capability (which meant the SRBs with inherent safety problems), human-only operated (which made it expensive for cargo), reusability that ended up being more expensive than a disposable vehicle...

Depot maintenance. It’s a near full teardown and rebuilding of the platform. How do you think B-52s have been sustained over the past 65 or so years? Long enough that we may have four generations of pilots in one family (I’ve met several B-52 pilots who had a father or grandfather who flew the same airframe).

That's a good question, but one of the most expensive ways to preserve building capacity is to actually build them

Too bad nobody thought about that with the F-22.

Actually it sounds like it’s too bad we didn’t do with the Abrams what we did with the F-22.

You're probably right. Though the unit costs are probably two orders of magnitude difference, the two vehicles should have gotten opposite treatment.

I don’t follow the logic. The vehicles do totally different things. We built enough F-22s and stopped. We built more Abrams than we need and continue to do so. The relative price has nothing to do with the need. Money we spend on building Abrams is wasted and could be spent elsewhere with better effect but not on F-22s which we have enough of.

This is why you buy more than you need, or keep production going, for things that you depend upon:

http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2018/October%20201...

A dozen F-22s were just destroyed by a hurricane, possibly beyond repair.

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