Good to hear that the DoD's new contract with OpenAI is solving all the most important problems...

It's a quote from someone...?

It feels like DARPA has fallen so far. In a post-Salt Typhoon era it's really hard to imagine them as dynamic, best-in-class innovators anymore.

I think I'd rather have them working on airplane tech rather than writing airplane tech press releases. With this approach, it's not just a tactical thing; it's relieving the burden of wordsmithing from technical people.

I'm quite fond of the caption, which describes a "a proof-of-concept technology demonstrator that aims to demonstrate technologies and concepts"

The V280 is designed to be cheap (a very relative term here).

Reading between the lines, I suspect "fast, but also expensive" was a design option that popped up and was not chosen earlier in the V280 program and now Darpa wants to pay to see where it goes.

it also has stealth. This is a complete disaster. The only purpose of this stealth ship is to steal leaders and or go inside cave lairs and blow them up.

Usually with these programs, they just commission an artist with some vague description, like they tell him to draw a futuristic VTOL aircraft, these pics have zero bearing on what gets delivered.

Sometimes they even take the piss with this, like in this video for a next-gen engine, where you can see their engine doesn't even fit in their fantasy aircraft:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCHun6rxQm0

+50% top speed over the V280. Bell offered it as an alternative to the V280 in the early stage of the contract, but it was judged too experimental (and probably too expensive). Apparently DARPA is funding further development of the concept.

>decades of prior wind tunnel testing on the folding rotor concept

Oof, I wish I had a job like that.

Can it hover?

I suppose the argument is that X-76 could work in environments without roads. But that also implies without fuel or any other support on the ground.

stealth

I can access it from the UK

Still up here in the US

https://web.archive.org/web/20260309171633/https://www.darpa... might work

The Osprey killed a lot of Marines over the past decades. It took a while to work out the issues. Hopefully we will remember what the Osprey taught us.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think whatever is negotiated with Iran's current regime would actually be honored by them. They may commit something to get their leader back, but won't be keeping the promises.

Their self stated goal is destruction of Israel and US. They could have chosen peace and not have funded proxies across the middle east. Their choice of aggression by whatever means they have at their disposal just shows what their long term strategy would be.

They have shown the intend. They just didn't have the capacity to follow through. Once they gain the capacity, they could go extreme lengths. Just see how they attacked their neighbors who were not party to the war.

Where do the 14 soldiers sit in the Gripen?

It's not a tactical choice- it's strategic deterrence, and it's not insane at all!

The US has always had a policy of messaging programs, with a lean toward classifying some percentage of the specific capabilities.

There's a reason that F-35 program was publicized by the US government as the program was under development. It makes the US air force even scarier, which discourages adversaries from thinking about conventional warfare with America.

That said- you won't see any detailed pics of the inside of an F35 cockpit, or a detailed look at the heads up display in the fancy helmet. That's top secret, because those making those details public don't offer enough additional deterrence to justify the risk to the program.

This isn't a new weapon, this is a test platform for various ideas, none of which are new or secret. Also, there are not many groundbreaking advancements left in military aviation. Most are just fairly incremental engineering or manufacturing improvements. (Military space technology might be a different story, though.)

The only other nation with the potential to develop a high-tech military plane that could rival US technology would be China. But if we ever got into a war with China, they wouldn't need superior technology to win. They could win via superior manufacturing capacity and the sheer number of people they can draft into service at a moment's notice.

I think they just show what it can be seen, like any country with advance military developments.

They won't show you everything.

Have you ever heard about those sound/sonic (or something similar) weapons the US used in Maduro's kidnap operation? Venezuelan soldiers said (pero some publications on the internet) that they never saw anything alike, leaving them completely disoriented and helpless?

Soldiers now can even see thermal figures through walls or solid materiales, and the same time, bacome invisibles.

It's more than sci-fi.

16 hull losses per ~400 units built is not exactly a stellar safety record.

Or I guess you mean /stellar?