[TrapLord_Rhodo]

lol - wat?

As a former air force contracting specialist... This is completely wrong. Bases are not cheap to build, maintain or defend (Politically, physically and fiscally).

Also, no matter how much money you spend or how many bases you build, you can't get 90 minute asset delivery EVERYWHERE ON EARTH, which is every military strategists' wet dreams since alexander.

Lastly, if you haven't noticed the military doesn't really care about 'Cheap', or they wouldn't have spend ungodly numbers on the f35. They care about effective. The check book is infinite, and slight advantage is everything.

[dragonwriter]

> Lastly, if you haven't noticed the military doesn't really care about 'Cheap', or they wouldn't have spend ungodly numbers on the f35.

Being cheap was the motivation for everything that led to the F-35 being expensive, so, no, this is wrong: the military cares a lot about cheap, they are just very bad at doing it.

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

Being cheap is developing a next generation war-fighter that blows every other aircraft out of the water? next generation halo lenses, with advances stealth, manuverability, and rate of weapon deployment? With multiple different variety's and add ons to enable all weather and VTOL? What is cheap about the initial contraints of the project?

[dragonwriter]

The F-35 (more specifically, the JSF program out of which the F-35 was the successful contender) was conceived as a comparatively cheap multiservice, multirole fighter to reduce both initial development and ongoing operational costs by having a high degree of commonality between the conventional air force model, the CATOBAR navy model, and the STOVL marine corps model; It was also supposed to replace basically every US fighter and strike aircraft except for the F-15 and variants, which the F-22 would replace, and the F-22 itself.

As it turned out “do everything" and “be cheap” turned out to be less compatible goals than originally envisioned.

[bumby]

This is also part of the problem with the shuttle. It was forced to have many masters between the DoD and NASA

[JumpCrisscross]

> completely wrong. Bases are not cheap to build, maintain or defend

Nobody suggested building more bases. The proposed problem was launch reliability. A major reason for launch scrubs is weather.

AustinDev proposed staging in orbit [1]. I said it’s cheaper to have more than one launch location on the ground over more than one launch location in orbit.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35485273

[AustinDev]

You're correct, I know that DARPA is evaluating this same equation right now.

[bumby]

Tbf, DARPA researches all kinds of approaches that never turn operational.