America's Air Force Is Having To Reverse Engineer Parts of Its Own Stealth Bomber (thedrive.com) 102
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from The Drive:
In a surprising turn of events, the United States government is calling upon its country's industry to reverse engineer components for the Air Force's B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. An official call for this highly unusual kind of assistance was put out today on the U.S. government's contracting website beta.SAM.gov. Mark Thompson, a national-security analyst at the Project On Government Oversight, brought our attention to the notice, which seeks an engineering effort that will reverse engineer key parts for the B-2's Load Heat Exchangers. While it is not exactly clear what part of the aircraft's many complex and exotic subsystems these heat exchangers relate to, the bomber has no shortage of avionics systems, for example, which could require cooling...
While it's hard to say exactly why this approach is being taken now, it indicates that the original plans for these components are unavailable or the manufacturing processes and tooling used to produce them no longer exists... Indeed, as the average age of the Air Force fleet continues to increase, there are only likely to be more such requirements for parts that are long out of production. Before he stood down, the former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Will Roper, told Air Force Magazine of his desire for a "digital representation of every part in the Air Force inventory...."
All in all, the search for reverse-engineered components for the B-2 fleet is keeping with the Air Force's current trend of moving toward the latest digital engineering and manufacturing techniques to help ensure its aircraft can be sustained not just easier and more cheaply, but in some cases, possibly at all.
While it's hard to say exactly why this approach is being taken now, it indicates that the original plans for these components are unavailable or the manufacturing processes and tooling used to produce them no longer exists... Indeed, as the average age of the Air Force fleet continues to increase, there are only likely to be more such requirements for parts that are long out of production. Before he stood down, the former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Will Roper, told Air Force Magazine of his desire for a "digital representation of every part in the Air Force inventory...."
All in all, the search for reverse-engineered components for the B-2 fleet is keeping with the Air Force's current trend of moving toward the latest digital engineering and manufacturing techniques to help ensure its aircraft can be sustained not just easier and more cheaply, but in some cases, possibly at all.
Just ask the Chinese (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure they have the parts we are looking for.
Re: Just ask the Chinese (Score:5, Funny)
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If not, they would probably reverse engineer it for free.
Yep. Not that the Chinese are really good at this. I would see them as mediocre. That is enough to get the job done, though, and the west is fast getting far, far worse, due to arrogance and a general feeling of entitlement.
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In fact, they likely have done so already!
... or can easily make a duplicate from their copy of the plans.
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Some of these copies, well, they fail in use. Look up the "capacitor plage" from around 2010, when a Chinese component manufacturer hired an engineer who kept designs from his previous job for low-cost capacitors used on thousands if not millions of Dell motherboards, and they all failed over time. Replacing the part was possible, but very difficult, so the motherboards were replaced en masse.
Re:Just ask the Chinese (Score:5, Informative)
Look up the "capacitor plage"
I did, and it's not exactly what you make it out to be. From the Wiki article [wikipedia.org]:
Industrial espionage was implicated in the capacitor plague, in connection with the theft of an electrolyte formula. A materials scientist working for Rubycon in Japan left the company, taking the secret water-based electrolyte formula for Rubycon's ZA and ZL series capacitors[citation needed], and began working for a Chinese company. The scientist then developed a copy of this electrolyte[citation needed]. Then, some staff members who defected from the Chinese company copied an incomplete version of the formula[citation needed] and began to market it to many of the aluminium electrolytic manufacturers in Taiwan, undercutting the prices of the Japanese manufacturers.[1][42] This incomplete electrolyte lacked important proprietary ingredients which were essential to the long-term stability of the capacitors[4][23] and was unstable when packaged in a finished aluminium capacitor. This faulty electrolyte allowed the unimpeded formation of hydroxide and produced hydrogen gas.[36]
It was more the fact someone, or someones, incorrectly copied a formula which caused the capacitors to fail. The capacitors made in China worked, but the ones produced in Taiwan with the wrong formula failed.
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Thank you for actually following up the details, and for not correcting my mis-spelling of the word "plague". There is a subtle issue, however. As far as a short article about foreign parts counterfeiting technology goes, getting into the political details about whether Taiwan is a distinct nation from the People's Republic of China does not matter. To most hardware engineers, the distinction between them does not matter. the tendency to steal technology, and get it *wrong*, does, and it's an infamous probl
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To most hardware engineers, the distinction between them does not matter.
Sorry but that's a load of crap. For not only hardware engineers, but also for national security and governments, as well as people in companies that assess technological capabilities and readiness comparing China to Taiwan is like comparing shit to chocolate. Your knowledge of Taiwan specifically is very lacking.
Your comments are on point about China though.
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From some very painful experiences, the distinction is not enough to judge the risk. _Both_ nations produce an astonishing array of low-cost, intellectual property violating goods of poor quality, goods which are dangerous to life and limb of consumers around the world. Both do have a much smaller number of quality vendors it is worth doing business with, but it takes work and time to evaluate those and assure that your reseller in any nation is not simply lying about their source.
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This is why we need to have the SAT as a requirement for college.
Maybe (disclaimer: I had a GPA of 1.7 and my SAT scores got me accepted into every school that I applied to) but although the SAT is supposedly an "aptitude" test, it doesn't specifically measure aptitude at all (except through inference) but rather accumulated knowledge.
Actual aptitude tests (talk to the Military!) would be more useful in many instances, especially in identifying the kids with impressive brains who aren't fortunate enough to have been read to at a young age and grow up surrounded by book
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it doesn't specifically measure aptitude at all (except through inference) but rather accumulated knowledge
Obviously, it also the ability to utilize said knowledge...
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when a Chinese component manufacturer hired an engineer who kept designs from his previous job for low-cost capacitors
Your own, personal Mandela Effect?? 'Cause that sure as fuck isn't what happened in this universe.
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The Wikipedia reference to the capacitor plague is fairly good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I didn't draw the distinction between Taiwan and China. Drawing that distinction is a major international issue. Frankly, I'd like to see a plague on _both_ their houses for a long history of stealing intellectual property, getting it wrong, and putting equipment and sometimes even lives at risk with the resulting poor quality.
Some vendors in both nations have established better and e
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That's likely convergent engineering. Things that need to do the same thing tend to look similar.
Most stupid "experts" available (Score:1)
You find those are government employees. I mean, loosing the spec for something like this??? It is hard imagining incompetence more gross.
Re:Most stupid "experts" available (Score:5, Funny)
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Isn't your username spelled wrongly too (Google suggests Gwaihir)?
Re:Most stupid "experts" available (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect the specs were carefully archived. But based on my experience, while the archive media were probably not thrown out, they likely lost the cataloging, meaning that they don't know where anything is. The data is likely also on media and in formats that they don't have the hardware and/or software to read. It takes time and money to track this stuff, and if nobody is paying for it, it doesn't get done.
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I suspect the specs were carefully archived. But based on my experience, while the archive media were probably not thrown out, they likely lost the cataloging, meaning that they don't know where anything is. The data is likely also on media and in formats that they don't have the hardware and/or software to read. It takes time and money to track this stuff, and if nobody is paying for it, it doesn't get done.
Probably. Does not make it any better though. Just easier to blame somebody else for this absolutely incredible fuck-up.
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As I said, it costs money to keep archives like this available. I'd bet hard money that the ultimate responsibility traces back to a nontechnical manager who couldn't understand why he should spend some his precious budget on this.
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Re:Most stupid "experts" available (Score:5, Insightful)
You find those are government employees. I mean, loosing the spec for something like this??? It is hard imagining incompetence more gross.
Who manufactured the part(s)? Why don't they have a copy? Or is private industry above incompetence?
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You find those are government employees. I mean, loosing the spec for something like this??? It is hard imagining incompetence more gross.
Who manufactured the part(s)? Why don't they have a copy? Or is private industry above incompetence?
Seriously, cut the crap. Somebody else making mistakes is not an excuse for extreme incompetence and never has been.
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It's hardly just governments that lose things.
I worked for a major telecommunications company for a few years, developing various software. When I left, I carefully archived everything, with documentation, and put it all together on CDs, with printout, and packaged it nicely. I handed this personally to my manager to make sure it was all correct.
They lost it, and several times over the next few years they called me (on contract) in to update things and reinstall things. Yes, I (somewhat illegally) kept copi
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You find those are government employees. I mean, loosing the spec for something like this??? It is hard imagining incompetence more gross.
Who manufactured the part(s)? Why don't they have a copy? Or is private industry above incompetence?
Well, the B2 first flew in 1989. The original parts manufacturers have long since stopped making the parts, and very likely many of them are out of business. And the floppy disks with the details on how to make them are locked away in secure filing cabinets somewhere, but the labels fell off decades ago, and nobody can find a translator for the Pro/ENGINEER files even if the disks were still readable..
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very likely many of them are out of business
Probably most of those have been gobbled up by peripherally-related companies and their pre-acquisition assets discarded.
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It might not be loss of specs or design data, it could be a change in technology and manufacturing infrastructure.
You couldn't build the Rocketdyne F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V today, even if you had the complete design specs and blueprints -- at least not in the US. Those engines were essentially hand-built with obsolete craft skills that are rare or extinct now. You could build a similar engine that was maybe just as good, but you couldn't build *the exact same* one. And for complicated, touch
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They didn't necessarily lose the blueprints (and 40+ years ago they probably were blueprints). Somebody with his thinking cap on at the US Air Force might have a hunch that it would be cheaper to reengineer certain parts rather than try and get them produced from old documents using old tech. They might end up with a considerably better product too.
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Not just blueprints, but design requirements and interface control documents. With well developed documentation it should be relatively easy to do another design iteration with current tech and come up with something that fits the same rack space and does the same job.
The problem with many projects is that design information tends to be done poorly and/or get lost. The deliverable is the design and production articles.
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Design requirements? Who needs those? I know what we talked about in the meeting and more importantly I have a good idea of what the stuff I'm supposed develop should do. It may not be exactly the same idea that other people had, but we can work any issues out later. I know what's best.
One time I had this strange feeling that someone didn't understand the requirements correctly, but he assured me he did. He was a great programmer and his work was flawless, except for one thing. He did not actually un
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Supply chain is a real thing; technology dies if the
"aircraft can be sustained" funny thought that (Score:1)
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Well the idea of maintenance has been around since there was a mechanized military. So someone more likely thought that it was a subcontractor that was going to do the work, and have what was needed.
Re:"aircraft can be sustained" funny thought that (Score:5, Insightful)
Most public servants are dedicated to do a good job and not waste the public's money. Unfortunately they have to put up with eejits like you who talk out of their ass about something they know nothing about.
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For an even more extreme example there's the B-52, produced from 1952-1962 and still the primary nuke carrier for SAC.
Biden - one scandal after another (Score:2)
/sarcasm
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I'm just waiting for the day he wears a tan suit.
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I'm just waiting for the day he wears a tan suit.
Imagine if he got Dijon mustard on it.
This is the strength ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is the strength ... (Score:5, Interesting)
USAF has requested the actual DESTRUCTION of the rigs used to build some of its most advanced aircraft once the orders were complete. This was deliberate to ensure that key features are not reverse engineered from the factory line which made the aircraft.
The following are known examples where the rig was destroyed: SR71 Blackbird, F22 and Surprise, surprise B2.
The article author by the way is an way off. "Cooling Electronics". ROFL. One of the essential features of the B2 which has been only partially replicated in the F22 and is absent in the F35 are the heat exchangers on the engines. This is what the "tender" is asking for. These allow it temporarily to go FULL stealth - in both radar and IR spectrum. The only thing known about this is that they exist (in fact, even that may carry some level of classification). Who made them, what can they do, what are their operational parameters - these are all in the realm of "burn after reading" and the rigs have been destroyed in order to ensure that the secrets do not leak as a result of someone getting their mitts on the industrial process.
I find it interesting that someone is paying interest to that right now.
The only reason one would pay any interest to this is if someone in Air Force command has decided to put them in the firing range of real enemy air defences - what they were designed for in the first place. Considering that the Russians have 3 radars which can see Stealth (Resonans, S400 and Sunflower) and these are being copied by the other usual suspects, the idea of putting the great flying wing white elephant in the line of fire is quite endearing. It will not last long. Even against the Iranian air defence (I am not even talking about the Chinese and the Russians).
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> USAF has requested the actual DESTRUCTION of the rigs used to build some of its most advanced aircraft once the orders were complete.
I may not be a West Point graduate, but the military is sorta competent at moving stuff on trucks and guarding warehouses.
Maybe next time, take ownership of the equipment and store it rather than smashing it?
I know, MIC profits, but c'mon.
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Part of the problem though is that sometimes the motivations have nothing at all to do with security, but are political, or even personal.
Ben Rich's book about his time at Lockheed's Skunk Works is enlightening on the latter. The SR-71's tooling was destroyed on the personal order of Robert McNamara out of pure and simple spite. McNamara resented Kelly Johnson's good relationships with the Air Force and, wanting to insert himself as the middleman into those relationships, felt that the Skunk Works was too
Re: This is the strength ... (Score:1)
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Or Libya.
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Your understanding about the F-22 is wrong - at the completion of the production run, the tooling was mothballed, along with intensive documentation on how to build each part and assemble the aircraft. This included supplier toolings where they were sole use or subsequently retired.
The USAF and Lockheed regularly review the tooling state and train a new set of engineers on the processes, just incase a follow on order of F-22s is required. This will almost certainly change in the near future tho, given the
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Maybe for stealth drone?
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While the plane may be stealthed front and back, and to a lesser extent the side, the bottom can be picked up by analyzing the signals of the cellphone towers it passes over. There was speculation that the F-117 shot down over Yugoslavia was detected this way (turned out to be wrong though).
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When a B-52 is flying at over 50,000 feet, it's difficult to detect due to range and very small slice of the sky even those stratofortresses occupy 10 miles away. When it's scraping grass clippings off the bottom doing their very dangerous but extremely effective low-altitude attacks, it's also difficult to detect because "beneath" it is, effectively, underground.
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This has been going on for most of a CENTURY! (Score:5, Informative)
Military equipment vendors are always going out of business or being incompletely absorbed by other businesses, leaving many key products "orphaned" as a result. This can also happen as key components for existing systems are no longer manufactured, meaning even the original vendor can no longer support the product.
This creates the ever-present and ongoing need to create a NEW products that are "3F Compatible": Form, Fit and Function.
I've worked at several companies where we sought such business for a wide variety of reasons, including:
- We had someone on staff who had worked on the original system.
- We needed "filler" work for engineers between large projects.
- We needed a way to safely and quickly get real-world experience for junior staff.
- We wanted a way to safely "dip our toe" into a new business or technology area.
- These are great ways to train new project and product managers.
- It's just plain fun!
These projects could range from tiny to huge.
Systems using vacuum tubes are a prime example. Once, I helped design an amplifier that had to plug into a tube socket! The tube it replaced was the size of a 16 oz. soda can. The weirdest part was we had to draw enough power to keep the external power supply operating stably, which meant over 50% of the power draw went to a large resistor mounted on top!
Why not replace the whole system? That was in the works, but wouldn't be ready for some time, so a 3F solution was needed to bridge the gap. Most 3F contracts are gap-fillers. From a business perspective, doing 3F work is an EXCELLENT strategy and tactic to pursue to get a foot in the door to bid on system replacement/upgrade work.
The best part of such projects is the testing: The resulting part/equipment had to meet not only the original military test requirements, but also modern ones, and getting the mix right was an art unto itself. Many such 3F contracts are split into two phases: Product definition (design and test documents, with prototypes), then a separate second contract for production and delivery.
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You should hop over to hackaday. Bet they'd appreciate your stories.
Re:This has been going on for most of a CENTURY! (Score:4, Interesting)
I do occasionally comment at HaD, but I still like /. threads a bit better.
The 3F world can get really strange sometimes. One contract involved creating a 3F replacement for a part that was itself a 3F replacement!
The story here was that the planned system replacement had fallen way behind schedule, and the ships themselves (a class of just two ships) were getting older, so the Navy decided to cancel the upgrade and gap-fill them until they got decommissioned.
Then the decommissioning was postponed. Indefinitely. So the gap-fill had to be gap-filled.
Perhaps the best folks alive on the planet doing such work are in Iran: They have kept their F-14 fighters and F-5 trainers (bought in the 1970's during the time of the Shah) flying for decades against all odds, and have used the need to maintain and upgrade them to jump-start a number of domestic industries (including cloning the F-5). Beats even the Cubans keeping their classic cars on the road.
It can happen even if you do have the plans (Score:3)
Back in the late '80s, when I was at IBM, I was responsible for testing components that went into IBM built radar systems going back to the 1950s.
Most of the circuitry was manufactured on 1.5in x 1.0in "paddle cards" which had a 9x2 0.15" connector at one end. Each paddle card had a basic function to it like a single bit AND/OR/NOR gates, simple amplifiers and basic memory functions. There was nothing exotic about the cards they were two sided hand soldered PCBs with 22 gauge wires providing connections
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Yeah, I worked on several small contracts in the 1990s that simply upgraded RTL, DTL and ECL circuits to TTL, and later to CMOS.
Those were the ones we gave to junior engineers, who had to learn how to make TTL accept RTL/DTL/ECL signals, and then output the same.
I worked at one defense contractor when they had an in-house prototyping fab, and we'd make custom "technology-adapted" chips that would drop onto the original circuit board. Charged almost as much for those as we did for space-rated rad-hard chips
33-35 years old (Score:2)
Clicking through some of the other stories linked by TFA, one of them notes the B-2 was unveiled in 1988 (that long ago already!?).
Puts the 'ZOMG they lost information' crowd into perspective a bit.
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I remember when it was unveiled. As a kid I was a big aerospace enthusiast. As soon as I could afford it, I ordered a poster of the unveiling for my wall.
is this what they mean by (Score:2)
The cloud is the solution (Score:2)
I guess it is safe to say they didn't use github to store all the design files.
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I personally don't understand how you can argue that it's desirable to put defense information in a digital form. Yeah paper or film hardcopies are less convenient, but they are also orders of magnitude more difficult to exfiltrate.
Baffling...
The 3D printer is the solution (Score:2)
How else are we going to drive our 3D printers?
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How else are we going to drive our 3D printers?
Shouldn’t have to drive them, that’s what autonomous cars are for.
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I personally don't understand how you can argue that it's desirable to put defense information in a digital form. Yeah paper or film hardcopies are less convenient, but they are also orders of magnitude more difficult to exfiltrate.
Baffling...
This is true for the parts of your plane that are novel and top secret designs. This is a heat exchanger. Is it a new kind of never before seen heat exchanger, or just a regular one that is bespoke to this plane? I'm guessing it is the latter and won't be much use to the Chinese or Russians unless they are fitting it to a copy of the rest of the plane.
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This is a heat exchanger. Is it a new kind of never before seen heat exchanger, or just a regular one that is bespoke to this plane?
I'm guessing it's the latter. Heat exchanger technology isn't all that cutting edge. But what the bespoke design may tell an adversary is the system capabilities. What sort of Delta T can it achieve? What will the resulting IR signature look like?
Some highly classified stuff isn't much more high tech than stuff you could buy at Radio Shack. Well, not any more. I mean buy at Fry's (shit!). Best Buy? It's just that you don't want your enemy to know what RF band and modulation type to look for.
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Kinda funny when that applies to the people using it too.
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how you can argue that it's desirable to put defense information in a digital form
According to TFS, that's exactly what the Air Force is doing.
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How do you propose getting the archived information back into a digitally-readable form? For text documents paper is usable, but e.g. the CAD data for the aircraft is useless on paper. You'd have to print them all encoded as QR codes, and have a way to scan them all back into a CAD system that understands the data - notoriously difficult when the data is 30 years old.
Paper data requires regular maintenance: I've opened 30 year-old laserprints, they usually have all their pages stuck together so opening the
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Not the first time (Score:2)
This is not a new thing, the same situation happened with the Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engine.
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Well, news articles can be hyperbolic sometimes. In the case of the Rocketdyne F-1 it isn't like we don't have the schematics, it's just that the production processes and materials we use today aren't the same. Let's say you specify to use some bolts which aren't manufactured anymore. Or a production process which uses tools which aren't available anymore. Or metal alloys which aren't available anymore.
I am guessing much the same likely happened here. Northrop likely subcontracted some part of the design ou
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The manufacturing techniques can be a big sticking point. Eventually, the last person who had hands on experience building the thing retires, then you have exact drawings but absolutely no clue how to consistently assemble the parts with the required characteristics.
In other cases, the drawings may clearly specify the part, but since standards have changed, the tooling needed to make the part may not be all that common anymore, so you have to get that out of mothballs too.
This is The Case Here (Score:2)
Well, news articles can be hyperbolic sometimes. In the case of the Rocketdyne F-1 it isn't like we don't have the schematics, it's just that the production processes and materials we use today aren't the same. Let's say you specify to use some bolts which aren't manufactured anymore. Or a production process which uses tools which aren't available anymore. Or metal alloys which aren't available anymore.
I am guessing much the same likely happened here. Northrop likely subcontracted some part of the design out to a contractor which went bankrupt decades ago and all the people who worked on it are likely either retired or dead.
And so it is here. If one read TFA (really everyone here ought to, its interesting) it is exactly the ability to manufacture a complete subsystem that is at issue here. The production system that built it is no more, and must be recreated without useful knowledge of its set-up. And it is very likely the case that materials to the same spec are no longer available.
This is a very common phenomenon. Some years ago FOGBANK (yes, all caps is how it is spelled), a material used in thermonuclear secondaries, was n
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Lost institutional and craft knowledge affect the U.S. nuclear weapons program as well. Here is an account of a program to regain the ability to produce a special material: Fogbank [thedrive.com]
Despite having no clearance, I believe that I worked on the B-2 for around an hour. An avionics company had a small outpost office located near Northrop in Pico Rivera. They were having trouble with a CPU/FPU combination. My company was asked to help. They showed me the prototype, a small circuit board with ceramic flat pac
Restore from backup (Score:2)
Canâ(TM)t we make them by using the, uh, backup copies of the blueprints the Chinese were so kind to have made?
Lack of manuafcturing (Score:2)
Instructions found in old file cabinet (Score:2)
Section 1: Materials
* 3kg Unobtanium
* 20kg asbestos
* 10L polychlorinated biphenyls
"digital representation of every part in the Air F (Score:2)
200.000 parts (Score:2)
And all of them ordered from the cheapest bidder and 50.000 of them went bankrupt.
The term... on a wing and a prayer... come to mind (Score:1)
Apparently itâ(TM)s policy to neglect Air Force inventory and manufacturing these days. Specifications? Designs? Manufacturing requirements? Nah mate, go digital! No need to care about the fleet, thatâ(TM)s someone elseâ(TM)s problem. It probably explains the F-35 debacle too.
Not uncommon on big high tech systems (Score:3)
Reverse-engineering: Three reasons (Score:2)
25 or so years ago, I worked for a company that reverse-engineered integrated circuits. There were two reasons companies paid my employer to do this:
1. Competitive intelligence
2. Looking for patent infringement
After a conference I attended in 1998, I learned about a third reason:
3. Allow the re-production of old integrated circuits used in military avionics from the 60s and 70s.
Of course, there are nefarious reasons for reverse-engineering too, such as trying to find a security weakness, but the above
Patterns in the Data? (Score:2)
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...even that it must have an anti-gravity capability on the basis that it weighs more than the engines could in theory lift.
Anti-gravitons FTW! I hadn't heard about that one. With a thrust/weight of .2, I can see why some WAGs might be driven to say "It's physics! Fact!" when conspiricizing about it. I imagine that a lot of them would be incapable of considering the advantages of a flying wing and wind loading, nor, probably, how an airfoil works.
Obviously we have to conclude that most of this is either baseless rumor or deliberate misinformation, so it will be interesting to see if this and other early stealth designs are ever de-classified in the future. I doubt it, but you just never know.
New Theory: Elon is working with anti-gravitons, too, and is just trolling everybody about using hydrogen for his blimps. You never know.
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As we've been told for decades, private companies always provide better products than government controlled manufacturing facilities. Right?
You decide. This is an example of government controlled manufacturing. Government contract. Government rules on data and classification. They have strict laws about disclosure and data retention. Once the contract ends you're supposed to destroy any data related to it. That's in the contract. So let's put the blame where it belongs - with the Government. They lost the data. That's one of the dangers of what they do.
Ironically Russia or China probably has all the specifications to that plane.
What's the worst
The Low Production, Low Flighttime Problem (Score:2)
More proof... (Score:2)
More proof that the term 'military intelligence' is an oxymoron.