Occasionally, the Royal Air Force needs a Corvette. Occasionally they need an F-150. But they can’t afford both. They buy an SVT Raptor as a compromise. Nobody is happy, but nobody is that upset.

I think its principle design concept was flawed. The F/A-18 needed to be multirole because the Navy has crippling space constraints. The F-16 is could be multirole because many each of its principal functions were already covered by existing USAF aircraft, and moreover it was intended, explicitly, to be built for…

The Manhattan Project didn’t cost much. $30B maybe ($2B in the 40s). The scientific hurdles of nuclear weapons were much greater than the engineering problems; the opposite is true of the F-35. Science is cheap; engineering is expensive.

I suppose that depends what you mean by ‘works’. A small air force like the Netherlands can’t afford to have one supersonic bomber, one stealth bomber, a fixed wing attack aircraft, an electronic warfare aircraft, and SEAD aircraft, an air superiority fighter, and a lightweight fighter. They have to settle for one…

Need some \mathrm{} in those subscripts, bro.

Porsche Holdings owns a majority of the Volkswagen Group, which in turn owns both the Volkswagen and Porsche automotive brands. Although the idea of recursive ownership is cute.

Porsche owns 50.7% of VAG, but less than 50% of the voting power. Other major owners are the State of Lower Saxony (20%), and the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar (17%).

Right. And I was pointing out that the Land Cruiser 200 available in North America is a completely different vehicle from the Land Cruiser 70 that the others were discussing, and so your point is completely irrelevant. Tell me what that Bentley SUV costs, for all it matters to the discussion. They’re talking about a…

The point they were making was with respect to the Land Cruiser 70 as available in Australia and similar markets, not the Land Cruiser 200 as available in North America. The 70 is a no-compromises off-road vehicle, that comes from the factory with a winch, brush guard, and snorkel. V8 diesel is the only engine option,…

If I could be pedantic for a second: steel is a crystal in general. Most large steel parts will be formed from many adjacent crystals, and the size and shape of these crystals, and the structure they form is a major component of the mechanical properties of the steel, called the microstructure. Turbine blades will…

I was referring specifically to the French Mirage III incident at Le Bourget to capture flow-vis images of the Tu’s unique canards through clouds, which the French government now concedes. Of course, this isn’t sending spies into Moscow to steal blueprints or something, but it did kill eight people just for some…

Keep in mind that while Soviet engineering was far out-paced by the West, Soviet science and mathematics were absolutely at the cutting edge. For instance, it was a Soviet scientist, at a Soviet university, publishing in Soviet journals, that developed the physical theory that stealth aircraft are based on. (P.Ya.…

Its interesting to think that the Tu-144 was the product of industrial espionage in totality when both its program launch and first flight occurred before that of Concorde. And so too the attention that the French gave to investigating the canards of Soviet aircraft when it visited Le Bourget. Certainly there is…

The Cold War was a proxy battle fought in the battlefield of deficit spending. Not only did this innovation result in less human death, but was much more brutally total in the conquering of the enemy; unlike in many wars where the losing country still exists in a subdued form, the Soviet Union was outspent into…

Think of a perfectly round pair of wheels. If any load is applied to the axle, the wheel will cease to be perfectly round: it will deform. This strain requires a certain amount of energy, supplied by the mass of the load dropping in height (potential energy of the load is converted into strain energy). Now if you…

The speed of the jet guarantees that the flow around it is turbulent. However, as there is an obvious strong repeating frequency, the diffraction that you see is not caused by this turbulence. Turbulence is the highly chaotic and irregular transmission of energy from large coherent structures into smaller ones, and…

Nikon, the camera and optics company, is part of the Mitsubishi empire and known for its quality. They also build a large fraction of Japan's launch vehicles and satellites, including the Kibo module on the ISS (joint venture with Boeing). They have a joint venture in place to build new nuclear reactors, and another…