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Indonesia wants to buy Austria's Eurofighters?


Slater

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Apologies in advance, for the thread drift...

BB sez (and yes, he admits to being biased) that there was nothing better than the ol' Tracker and Viking!

Maybe the Aurora.

 

S-2E_Tracker_of_VS-32_dropping_torpedo_c

 

S-3A_VS-30_dropping_Mk_46_torpedo_1982.j

 

tracker6.jpg

 

Edited by Blimpyboy
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8 hours ago, Calum said:

There are no old P-8A's.  The P-8A is the current production version.


NZ ihas ordered 4 P-8A's . Work is underway on their new facilities at the moment 

You're right, of course. For some reason I had "P-3A" on the brain.

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1 hour ago, Calum said:

But sensible 

Oh we will see ...i would say its going to prove hugely expensive...not anti American or the kit they produce....but boy they can eak out every last cent out of a contract and they know how to write them 

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3 hours ago, junglierating said:

Oh we will see ...i would say its going to prove hugely expensive...not anti American or the kit they produce....but boy they can eak out every last cent out of a contract and they know how to write them 

 

 

I wish they would teach our MOD people how to then.....

 

It always seems that they spend large sums of money on not getting very much if anything at all at times.  

 

Back on the OP  - Austria seems to be worried about the ongoing costs of the Typhoon.  That seems fair enough but if changing horses they will have the costs of that exercise to offset against the savings a new type might bring them.   I wonder how the numbers crunch.  And they will have to watch out for creative accounting as well. 

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On 7/31/2020 at 10:18 PM, junglierating said:

Oh we will see ...i would say its going to prove hugely expensive...not anti American or the kit they produce....but boy they can eak out every last cent out of a contract and they know how to write them 

That Japanese machine would be much more expensive . At least the P-8 has a reasonable number of platforms in service and I assume the UK will maintain the aircraft at close to the same configuration as the USN (and other operators) aircraft which will also be less expensive in the long run.

 

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4 hours ago, Calum said:

That Japanese machine would be much more expensive . At least the P-8 has a reasonable number of platforms in service and I assume the UK will maintain the aircraft at close to the same configuration as the USN (and other operators) aircraft which will also be less expensive in the long run.

 

Hmm no doubt no doubt but it wont be cheap ...Im working with a sovereign bit of kit but American test equipment....you want changes you pay big dollar .

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32 minutes ago, junglierating said:

Hmm no doubt no doubt but it wont be cheap ...Im working with a sovereign bit of kit but American test equipment....you want changes you pay big dollar .

Yep. Just look at drilling extra holes in a Chinook..................

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On 7/29/2020 at 6:07 PM, Jure Miljevic said:

Agreed, that modern combat aircraft are becoming increasingly expensive. However, something does not add up here. How comes, that during the (first) Cold war every self-respecting country counted pieces of its heavy military hardware like combat aircraft and helicopters, MBT-s, APC-s and other stuff in hundreds if not in thousands and still maintained fairly decent standard of living of its population? Cheers

Jure

It's the costs. A Hawker Hunter cost £100,000 (£2.5 million today) in the fifties. (I looked it up). £2.5 mil would barely buy a light turbo prop trainer now. What's the unit cost of a Typhoon? F35? Even the F16. Costs don't stop there either. You  could probably acquire dozens of Hunters for the price of one Typhoon in todays money.

 

Effectively smaller countries are priced out of the market. Economic disarmament as Learstang puts it. There's nothing new about this. The F5A, F5E and even the F16 were attempts to  make fighters affordable. 

 

When even large countries feel the sting of acquiring jets. Smaller countries have no chance.

 

 

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11 hours ago, junglierating said:

Hmm no doubt no doubt but it wont be cheap ...Im working with a sovereign bit of kit but American test equipment....you want changes you pay big dollar .

 The trick is to not want to many changes (or for the operators to not think they are that different that they need something 'special".. that is the challenge in my experience) . 

 

As you must be aware uniqueness in equipment is bad (expensive)

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20 hours ago, Calum said:

That Japanese machine would be much more expensive


I've read that the P-1 unit cost is 125 million-to-168 million, vice the P-8's 90 million-to-200 million.

 

I would think that the P-8 gives you a larger (global) user base and a lot of sub-system commonality that would be easier to fix/standardise, especially over early iterations of the P-1.

Mind you, I guess it depends what you buy to put in/on it...

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On 29/07/2020 at 18:07, Jure Miljevic said:

How comes, that during the (first) Cold war every self-respecting country counted pieces of its heavy military hardware like combat aircraft and helicopters, MBT-s, APC-s and other stuff in hundreds if not in thousands and still maintained fairly decent standard of living of its population?

It could be argued that that was a war waged by economic means and that the collapse of Soviet Communism was due to the failure to provide that “fairly decent standard of living”. Even from the winning side we racked up public debt, ruinous environmental and social damage and forwent investment into healthcare, education etc. to pay for it. 

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15 hours ago, noelh said:

It's the costs.

There’s lots of designs have been proposed in the last 20 years dusting off the venerable W. Petter’s rationale behind the gnat and proposing small, subsonic light jet attack aircraft but no buyers. 

 

I imagine that drone warfare and AI will make any predictions about the future uses of expensive fighters seem silly in hindsight. If you look at how machine learning has revolutionised the play of chess and go in the last couple of years it meant people having to completely rethink how the games are played with machines making baffling plays, sacrifices and positions that humans would never have made. An AI using antagonist with expendable cloud networked drones might make top-line fighters redundant sooner than we expect and mean that the arms race is all on AI.

 

Deep Blue in the mid 90s managed to beat Kasparov but cost some $55M, was enormous and a 1 of a kind. 20 years later the Playstation 4 was launched as a toy that was is twice as fast. Between that rate of advance and the speeds of 5G wireless connectivity I can’t see how drone aircraft won’t utterly change the strategic landacape

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31 minutes ago, LostCosmonauts said:

 

I imagine that drone warfare and AI will make any predictions about the future uses of expensive fighters seem silly in hindsight. If you look at how machine learning has revolutionised the play of chess and go in the last couple of years it meant people having to completely rethink how the games are played with machines making baffling plays, sacrifices and positions that humans would never have made.

But the key question is When?  AI is one of those technologies that is always just 10 years in the future, and large flexible platforms still have advantages - hence the lack of interest in lightweight fighters.  They're OK if you don't have to go anywhere or hang around or carry much - for which precision weapons have been a great leveller-down!  The larger the platforms, the proportionally less the penalty for the human element.  And if AI can come with moves in limited-law games that humans wouldn't think of, they can also come up with "solutions" that no human would want!

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Modern aircraft too expensive.  Well we have warbird restoration companies basically building Mosquito and Spitfire from near scratch.  We just need to start building new engines as well.

 

Affordable and fly past/air shows with lots of Merlins will sound much nicer than screaming jet engines 😃😃  

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I have two questions that no one seems able to answer at the present time.

1. What happens to all these drones / robots when the communications back to base go down? Jamming, hacking, solar flares are all potential sources of damage to communications whether deliberate, accidental of natural phenomena. If this year has taught us anything, it is perhaps that nature is our biggest enemy. To which everyone says make them autonomous, which may only be a partial solution anyway, but which leads to the second question.

2. Autonomous drones for reconnaissance, towing sonar arrays etc are one thing. But are we anywhere near ready, as a society, to turn loose a drone / robot, call it what you will, with the power to kill and with us humans not having ultimate control in real time over who they will kill.

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40 minutes ago, Graham Boak said:

And if AI can come with moves in limited-law games that humans wouldn't think of, they can also come up with "solutions" that no human would want!

AI is already doing rapid stock trading and in vehicles so rather than 10 years away arguably already here.

 

True, given enough operational leeway they even might enact a solution before a human observer could intervene. Automated trading bot flash crashes can and have wiped out real fortunes and livelihoods and yet their use is growing and growing

 

 

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27 minutes ago, EwenS said:

Jamming, hacking, solar flares are all potential sources of damage to communications whether deliberate, accidental of natural phenomena

You could argue that any or all of the above could cripple any 5th generation fighter and put it on a level playing field with some 3rd gen. types 

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20 minutes ago, EwenS said:

I have two questions that no one seems able to answer at the present time.

 

They are good questions, and I think the issues you mention are some of the key impediments to actually bringing such things into service.

 

With regard to question #1, I would suggest (quite simplistically) that these issues pose the same problems for manned elements. To overcome these, there are procedural reversions that enable the crew to continue or abort the mission as required. For machines, these would be the same go/no-go criteria programmed into a control sub-system.

 

As for question #2, we do have some weapons capable of autonomous operation (albeit, mostly 'defensive' systems such as CIWS), we just apply man-in-the loop C2 as a doctrinal holdover at the very least.

Also, I don't think AI and autonomous weapons will actually be free from human control - when you think about it, an infantry section commander/fighter pilot has battlefield autonomy, but is controlled by higher-echelon C2/CONOPS/RoE, etc. Therefore, there will be a measure of man-in-the-loop C2 that governs battlefield operations (he said, hopefully...) in the same way that the autonomy of manned elements is governed.

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7 minutes ago, Blimpyboy said:

 

They are good questions, and I think the issues you mention are some of the key impediments to actually bringing such things into service.

 

With regard to question #1, I would suggest (quite simplistically) that these issues pose the same problems for manned elements. To overcome these, there are procedural reversions that enable the crew to continue or abort the mission as required. For machines, these would be the same go/no-go criteria programmed into a control sub-system.

 

As for question #2, we do have some weapons capable of autonomous operation (albeit, mostly 'defensive' systems such as CIWS), we just apply man-in-the loop C2 as a doctrinal holdover at the very least.

Also, I don't think AI and autonomous weapons will actually be free from human control - when you think about it, an infantry section commander/fighter pilot has battlefield autonomy, but is controlled by higher-echelon C2/CONOPS/RoE, etc. Therefore, there will be a measure of man-in-the-loop C2 that governs battlefield operations (he said, hopefully...) in the same way that the autonomy of manned elements is governed.

If you were a smaller nation with less resources then you’d likely be at a materiel and computation speed disadvantage. Where every fraction of a second is a tactical edge a big power might keep a person in the loop but a desperate smaller nation’s best chance to get an edge would be to cut the person out entirely

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7 minutes ago, LostCosmonauts said:

a desperate smaller nation’s best chance to get an edge would be to cut the person out entirely

Yeah, that's a particularly nasty thing to consider, isn't it? Not everybody fights a war according to the 'rules'!

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