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Comment by nuisance-bear | Hacker News Reader

Supersonic cruise was an explicit design requirement for the F35, and it has been achieved using materials developed in the 1990s for the F22.

Your problem set sounds super cool, and it would be nice if DOD had a functioning acquisition process that would allow people with interesting tech to out-compete companies whose boards are stacked with current and former public officials. But alas, that's not the world we live in.

The sad thing is, there are probably dozens of proto Kelly Johnson's out there. But they've made defense industries so intolerable that none of them work there.

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Is it the case that the nature of projects in the defence industry is such that companies are prone to consolidation into a few large contractors? In the case of pharma, given the length of time and billions needed to go from drug discovery to market means that only large companies can effectively do R&D. Is it similar for defence i.e., long development times mean only a few large companies can effectively compete? Or is the creation of oligopolies that don't allow for competition a very conscious aspect of government defence policy?

It's extremely easy for the government to accidentally create monopoly suppliers.

If Amazon signs a 5 year contract to get all their delivery trucks from Ford, GM isn't going to go out of business; and when they're re-negotiating the contract in 5 years time there'll still be a vibrant competitive market.

But if you make tanks or jet fighters or railroad rails, you might only have one customer. And if your only customer signs a 5 year deal with someone else, you're out of business.

Most of the consolidation has happened though because of ever more expensive weapons programs. A B52 is a lot dumber than an F35 and costs way less.

Similar trends took place in commercial aviation. There aren’t successful entrants into this market despite a lot of state backing, because it is now very hard and expensive to create an aircraft that matches the performance and efficiency of the latest models of Boeing and Airbus.

I don't think supersonic cruise was a requirement. F35 has to use afterburners to get supersonic.

Drag increases significantly as the speed approaches Mach 1.0 (which is why commercial airliners stay below about Mach 0.8), but decreases significantly after that. So, just because a plane needs afterburners to attain supersonic speed doesn't mean it needs them to remain in supersonic flight.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Qualitiv...

F22 also has a limit on how long the RAM rubber can hold, and relies on constant RAM inspections, and repairs.

F35, as an aircraft created more than a decade later, is supposed to have a much better RAMs.

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