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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

The SR-71 had a strait forward mission well suited to a specialized airframe, and again you’re focusing on the airframe.

Just the software for the helmet alone provides a huge technical advantage that has little to do with how the aircraft is manufactured other than having the appropriate sensors, communication systems, and computing power. Yet through all that bureaucracy what would normally be 3 different airframes all get to leverage the same systems without the need for retrofits etc. It’s inherently a two step process to figure out what you need before you can finalize the design.

By comparison vs the F-35, the B-2 spirit was vastly more expensive and far more limited. The F-35 also costs less than the more specialized F-22, but that versatility takes time.

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To be fair the F22 would have been closer to the F35 in price if the number produced were larger so that the R&D was spread over a larger number of airframes. Such a pretty plane.

I agree that the F-22 is gorgeous, but it is also extremely expensive to operate, couldn’t be exported, can’t do carrier launch or VTOL so the demand was inherently lower.

That said, we could have made more than 195 of the them, but even at 750 it would have still been significantly more expensive per aircraft than the F-35 and it wouldn’t have let us cancel the F-35 program.

I feel like we got locked into the aerodynamic & airframe structural limitations of a particular CVN format with the USS Enterprise and are doing some wacky things, like not navalizing the F-22 or the C-130 or the B-21, because we can't dream any larger without assuming that such a ship would cost infinity dollars. South Korea, Japan, and China build larger container, tanker, and bulk ships all the time for ~1% of the price of a supercarrier; It's not that adding tens of thousands of tons of steel is going to break the bank, it's that a carrier group encompasses most functions of the military. The larger a ship gets the easier it is to move quickly through the wind, and the slower effective landing approaches are. The longer the catapult, the lower the necessary acceleration. CATOBAR takeoff and landing that works a little more like normal runway takeoff and landing means more of the USAF R&D ends up being projectable power.

It would cost an insane amount of money.... but... It already does cost an insane amount of money, and then we have to run three separate military aviation programs for different regimes.

The US military doesn’t want to sacrifice the capacity to go through the Panama Canal without getting a large benefit.

As to cost, in many ways a cruise ship is a better comparison than a cargo ship. The giant crew needed to maintain and operate a large aircraft fleet themselves need support staff, supplies, housing, etc. Carriers are expensive because of the people and systems onboard not the size of the ship.

Even just moving aircraft up and down from the flight deck requires a massive and thus expensive system. Civilian nuclear reactor are hideously expensive to build and operate let alone a system designed to ramp up and down more quickly, operate on a moving ship etc. Close in weapon systems have limited field of fire when you want a clear flight deck etc.

So sure, in theory you could just say we want a larger flight deck and are going to just have a number of empty components to pad out the ship but it’s not so simple.

The US sacrificed that a long time ago, when it first introduced supercarriers in the 50's. Too tall for the bridges, too wide for anything but the Third Locks era, and then only with some minor alterations.

Now that we do have the Third Locks, I think it would be reasonable to replace the bridges and make the alterations, a rounding error in the CVN budget.

Repositioning is far from the only concern but it is something they care about. For example the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower crossed the Suez Canal in 2021.

The much smaller Wasp-class amphibious assault ship on the other hand can carry as many as 20 F-35B’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp-class_amphibious_assault_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America-class_amphibious_assau...

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