Hacker News Reader

It's very weird to me that we could build airplanes at this scale almost a century ago, yet nowadays even the biggest airforces can barely field more than a tousand planes.

It's not like those old machines were primitive, and there have been major breakthroughs in mass-manufacturing.

View on HN

There's some sort of r/k selection effect happening here; modern aircraft have been getting more and more sophisticated to improve survivability, which raises their cost, so there are fewer of them. Things like the stealth bombers are at the far end of that curve.

(the logical end point of that thought process is some kind of Space Battleship Yamato scenario where the designers produce an "invincible" design, but only one of it. Hopefully real planners can be dissuaded from that nonsense, although the Axis were prone to this way of thinking)

I don't think they're limited to "a thousand planes," I think that's just all they need

the capabilities of planes from ww2 and today are almost not worth comparing

Imo the Ukraine war has shown just how inadequate the (relatively large by modern standards) Russian airforce is at serving a front of WW2 proportions.

The F-35 is on back-order to the mid 2030s. Even superpowers can't make more than tens of planes every year.

It's just that the modern world is relatively peaceful, that's why they don't need more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com