euler_angles

Ah, yes, so I was. Sorry to sow the very confusion you're trying to obliterate.

I recently tried to use pdoc on a system that can never have internet connectivity. Looks like pdoc implicitly expects internet connectivity because it wants to get at a bunch of .js and css files online.

Did I just overlook something?

If the tool really does expect connectivity, any plans to inline these resources so pdoc can be fully capable of running on an offline system?

It's so much easier to setup and get going with than Sphinx that it seems a real shame to have to be online.

We aren't allowed to use VGA because it's vulnerable to being sniffed. Everything has to be hdmi or display port/mini display port

Make your own social media service, they said. Where does this end? What's the endgame?

We still do, but it's rarely used in my experience.

The F-35 is to replace some F-15Cs, the legacy Hornet (F-18 A/B/C/D) and the A-10.

The F-15Cs are all pushing 40, Hornets are 30+ and because they're used by the Navy they're used hard, the A-10 is totally obsolete, and no bomber is being replaced by the F-35.

Not sure who bills it as "fighter jet to replace all fighter jets" but that's certainly not what the Operational Requirements Document for F-35 says.

The DoD has done a lot of simulations (some for the purposes of higher fidelity, but that's definitely not the only reason), but this is the first time it's truly tried to fold a simulation into the formal acceptance of an air vehicle, and committed this hard to high fidelity at scale.

Ah, my mistake. Shame to put that much effort into putting something on film and have it look so awful that you think it must be CGI

Yes, I'm aware, I followed the Alpha Dogfight trials closely.

If anyone else is wondering, they used a 3000 foot cone with point at the nose of the simulated aircraft, any time the enemy got within 3000 feet and 1 degree of the boresight of the plane, a certain number of hits per simulated frame were counted as hitting. Get X number of hits, that's a kill. For the livestreams they wonderfully represented this as a health bar.

There was (bad) CGI of an X-35B in that movie.

Real F-35Bs don't have an internal gun, and if they did, the guns wouldn't fire from the intakes, and if the aircraft took a large chunk of concrete directly into the LiftFan it wouldn't shudder and slowly fall out of the sky, it would be a catastrophic and near instantaneous loss of aircraft and likely aircrew life.

...And yet it has served in actual combat with the US, UK, and Israel.

Do you really think that an aircraft not meant to do something would be fielded by those nations and used to do that very thing?

And of course the program has political goals, every defense acquisition program does, to pretend otherwise would be silly.

The direct lift system of the Harrier is simple but not robust. Turbines hate ingesting hot gas, and a Harrier in a descending hover is descending straight into its own hot exhaust. This can and did cause "pop stalls" which led to an abrupt loss of thrust just when you want consistent thrust, near the ground in a hover.

The LiftFan of the F-35B serves to shield the front intakes of the engine from ingesting hot gas, plus there is an auxiliary air inlet on the top of the plane that opens up and allows cold air from above to get sucked straight into the front face of the engine.

The 3 Bearing Swivel Nozzle (main engine nozzle pivoting down and somewhat steerable) combined with roll posts in the wings that can give translational thrust/roll control, and a Variable Aperture Vane Box Nozzle (VAVBN) under the lift fan all combine to give high control authority in the hover, and the flight control system has special modes to make controlling the F-35B simpler. Harriers required constant adjustment in the hover to keep from losing control. In the F-35B, once the altitude and attitude in the hover are set, the jet will maintain that as long as there's fuel remaining, without corrective pilot inputs required.

Oh this is far from a weird theory. I've spoken to people who worked on the program during the fly-off in 2000/2001 and every single one of them say something like "We would never have chosen the Boeing entry because just look at it"

To give a serious answer, as in a stealthy animal that stalks its prey unseen until the final, decisive moment and then can exit the situation with haste.

In case someone reads this comment and wonders what the actual names of this aircraft are:

The official name is the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. It comes in three variants:

* F-35A (Conventional TakeOff/Landing - CTOL)

* F-35B (Short TakeOff/Vertical Landing - STOVL)

* F-35C (Carrier Variant - CV)

While an unofficial nickname hasn't solidly grabbed on, I think, given that USAF Fighter Weapons School calls it the "Panther", that will probably be what holds at least in the US.

Simulators are used quite regularly to practice combat tactics! In fact, that's one of the intended uses of the Joint Simulation Environment that the article discusses.

DCS's missile simulation models are so far from the real thing that DCS is what simulation engineers refer to as "negative training". That is, if you train to fight using DCS, you're training to fight within DCS, not training in a way that's going to carry over to the real world. DCS is fine for what it is -- a simulation that reflects as much of the pilot/vehicle interface of various aircraft as is possible. But when it comes to sensors and weapons, it's very far from reality.

The Alpha Dogfight trials were a PR stunt but they were also a part of a larger program to see how AI technology can assist human pilots. Alpha Dogfight is akin to things like Deep Blue/Alpha Go in that it has opened up a whole domain to further research and deployment of AI systems to assist humans.

I'm really surprised on a forum like HN that there isn't more questioning of what the Joint Simulation Environment is really supposed to do and why the development of a simulation should hold up the full production of a tactical aircraft.

JSE is really interesting, it's meant to be a high-fidelity electronic warfare simulation with actual aircraft software in the simulation loop. The F-35 that's present in the JSE is the same code that is running on a real jet, with sensor models specifically developed by all the sensor vendors. All this is fed with the latest intelligence data on threat aircraft and emitters. The point of all this is, the US should be able to better develop the aircraft -- and other aircraft types -- in the future if it has a high tech digital testing ground that it can step through iterations with very quickly.

As far as I can tell nothing like this has been done before so it's no wonder that it's taking a while.

Here's a US Navy PDF briefing on the JSE: https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/ndia/2018/te...

A-29 was being looked into and the US even had a couple (I saw one up close once) but a diplomatic tiff with Brazil (home of the Tucano's manufacturer) about a decade ago meant that the whole effort was CANX

I could easily flip the question around:

Who are these people both smart enough and dumb enough to work at FAANG companies?

> My understanding is that if you take away the stealth aspect the F-35 is a sluggish fighter bomber that would be outperformed by most 4th gens. Considering an F-35 is nearly the price of 10 4th gen fighters the choice to "upgrade" becomes pretty suspect for a lot of Nato partners.

First, "4th generation" can mean anything from an F-16A from 1978 to an F-16V of today. An F-16V is actually more expensive than an F-35A.

Second, if you take away the stealth of the F-35 it still has:

* A highly capable APG-81 radar with features like low-probability of intercept transmission modes, electronic attack (jamming) capability, multi-target track, ground moving target indication/track, synthetic aperture radar mapping, and passive (receive only) track capability

* Integrated electro-optical targeting pod with laser designator and range finder.

* Integrated software defined radio that can handle communications on UHF, VHF, Link-16, and inter-flight MADL

* 4 pi steradian awareness Distributed Aperture System that's a mid-wave IRST and missile launch/missile warning system

* Integrated Electronic Support Measures suite that provides Band 4/Band 5 detection and single ship rangefinding of incoming RF

F-16V has most of this same stuff or functional equivalents, but you pay tens of millions more to get it.

>I have no idea what happened here – why some people decided to use a code that was, apparently, written to protect people from sexism, violence, racism, and intimidation, in this way.

"I didn't think the leopard would eat my face".

Jeremy seems like a very kind, passionate, driven, smart guy. Unfortunately I think his innate kindness and sense that people should follow the rules has failed him here. CoCs are so often wielded in this way that I'm honestly surprised that anyone believes that they'll be used otherwise.

This kind of positive assertion handover of control is still standard for very good reasons.

Our modern world is so tightly coupled that lots of us are working in professions where mistakes can cost lives.

I see now. Thank you.

I'm sorry, the double negative there is making it very difficult for me to parse and understand the distinction you're pointing out.

Many tactical aircraft to this day use their fuel for the same purposes. I know the F-35 uses its fuel as a heat sink. The F-35B variant specifically uses fuel as the hydraulic working fluid (aka "fueldraulics")for much of the work of the 3 bearing swivel nozzle.

I am a parent and I can confirm. Most of my 4 year old son's toys were purchased for him by grandparents, friends, etc. We've bought almost none of them. We have bought him a lot of books and good second-hand clothes.

Seems like a lot of people have converged around that.

I had a professor in my undergraduate mechanical engineering classes who used a 4x rule for his exams -- he had to be able to do it in 15 minutes, we had an hour.

There's no one simple reason, but a big contributor is compensation. Government pay for high skill professions like computer programmer, mechanical, electrical, and aerospace engineers, etc is far below what good people in those fields can make working in private industry. Often people in those fields work on government contracts, where the US Govt will pay 3x or more than their already high total compensation for the privilege of their time.

I should know, I'm one of those professionals. I started out working for the government, then eventually became a contractor (doing the exact same job in the exact same building that I had done for the government! for 30% more money!)

It was hard to not take that offer of the additional money, especially when the government would go out of its way to infantilize its employees.