Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Okay, so I'll attempt to start writing again. Of course the easiest thing to do is to complain.
I signed up for google news alerts a long time ago. Just one mind you, and just for the keyword 'UAV'. So this morning I received a reference to an article about 'Lockheed Martin Tests Folding Plane'. In this article is wonderful evidence of the real speed of aerospace development. Early in the document they say, 'Ooh, we heard a customer (i.e. US Military) say they could use a better way to bomb the sh*t out of somebody (i.e. duh..) and we thought hey, we'll make the wings fold and it will get better strike performance. So we sent some engineers to Skunk works and we had a prototype in a couple of months.'
Yeah, right. A large military aerospace company doing something on it's own coin within a couple of months? Come on, this is real science fiction. Am I reading the correct article, or some crackpot blog?
Later in the article, the truth is revealed. The dudes, take their baby out for some ground tests and they run into a ditch and bust a landing gear. That's okay they'll just fix it with some cunning Skunk Works genius right... no. It takes a year for a replacement to arrive. What happened to four months to build the freaking prototype?
Then it says, 'Lockheed will replace the landing gear with their own money'. The project is actually funded by DARPA. Huh, didn't the original Lockheed dude imply that they did this development because they 'heard' about a need, implying they were all gung-ho and audacious? There is only one audacious UAV company that I've heard of. I'm just a little annoyed they want to have so many humans in the loop.
So, how is that? I'd love to talk about my work like John Carmack does, but I wouldn't feel very comfortable. There is a neat photo blog from the Mojave Desert, but I took my digital camera apart a little while ago. Then I'd need all that disk space.
I signed up for google news alerts a long time ago. Just one mind you, and just for the keyword 'UAV'. So this morning I received a reference to an article about 'Lockheed Martin Tests Folding Plane'. In this article is wonderful evidence of the real speed of aerospace development. Early in the document they say, 'Ooh, we heard a customer (i.e. US Military) say they could use a better way to bomb the sh*t out of somebody (i.e. duh..) and we thought hey, we'll make the wings fold and it will get better strike performance. So we sent some engineers to Skunk works and we had a prototype in a couple of months.'
Yeah, right. A large military aerospace company doing something on it's own coin within a couple of months? Come on, this is real science fiction. Am I reading the correct article, or some crackpot blog?
Later in the article, the truth is revealed. The dudes, take their baby out for some ground tests and they run into a ditch and bust a landing gear. That's okay they'll just fix it with some cunning Skunk Works genius right... no. It takes a year for a replacement to arrive. What happened to four months to build the freaking prototype?
Then it says, 'Lockheed will replace the landing gear with their own money'. The project is actually funded by DARPA. Huh, didn't the original Lockheed dude imply that they did this development because they 'heard' about a need, implying they were all gung-ho and audacious? There is only one audacious UAV company that I've heard of. I'm just a little annoyed they want to have so many humans in the loop.
So, how is that? I'd love to talk about my work like John Carmack does, but I wouldn't feel very comfortable. There is a neat photo blog from the Mojave Desert, but I took my digital camera apart a little while ago. Then I'd need all that disk space.
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