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From: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: B2 vs. F117A
Message-ID: <1991Feb18.062014.14787@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 18 Feb 91 06:20:14 GMT
References: <1991Feb15.073214.12423@cbnews.att.com>
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From: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny)

In article <1991Feb15.073214.12423@cbnews.att.com> carroll@cs.uiuc.edu (Alan M. Carroll) writes:
>Having seen the cost for the F117A, I have to wonder: what's
>the point of the B2? At ~$40M / F117A vs. ~ $600M / B2, you get 15
>F117A / 1 B2. This is worse if the B2 end up (as is likely) at
>~$1000M. What can 1 B2 do that 15 F117A's can't, especially with
>respect to dropping nuclear weapons?

Fly farther, one supposes. I suspect the Soviets will take a dim view 
to having KC-135's on station in a chain leading to Moscow and back :-)

Also, the B2 will probably haul a load of bombs comparable to 15
F117A's. The B2 can't be 15 places at once, but it will probably
carry stand-off weapons that the F117A may not.

However, I can't see much point in building a single airplane that
costs as much as a whole aircraft carrier used to. (What do they 
say, a billion dollars just doesn't go as far as it once did? :-)
I think the military could get a lot more bang for its buck by
building lots of cheap platforms. The problem with a massive,
everything-including-the-military-kitchen-sink project like the B2
is that they build so few of them that the manufacturers don't 
benefit from institutional learning. I.e., if you build thousands
of an item instead of tens, then you work most of the bugs out in
the first few hundred, and the bulk of your run can improve in
quality and efficiency.

Why doesn't the military build cheap, long-loiter RPV's that cost
less than a SAM? Then you could flood the enemy's airspace with them, 
and bankrupt his military with the need to shoot them all down.
Or at least try to keep an eye on all of them, to decide which ones
are threats.

The technology should exist to build an RPV that could stay aloft
for days. Build it like a sailplane with a 40:1 glide ratio. Put
a small motor on it and a big gas tank. Cover the wings and 
fuselage with thin-film solar cells, with an auxilliary electric
motor to spare the gas motor when the sun is out. With a good
enough glide ratio, the craft might be able to gain almost enough
altitude by day to glide down slowly at night, and not hit the
ground before dawn. (Actually, this sounds a little far-fetched.
With a 1 foot/sec sink rate, it would glide down from 20,000 feet
in about 5 1/2 hours. So it would probably have to run the gas motor
at night, unless it caught a thermal :-)

How much would it cost to build such a plane? $100,000 maybe? For
$1,000,000,000 you could have ten thousand of them, then. (And you
will get economy of scale, so the unit price will drop farther the
more you build, which doesn't happen with the B2.) Can
any air defense system out there cope with ten thousand simultaneous
threats? With all that junk in the sky, you could probably get to
Moscow in a B-17.

But whether piloted or not, shouldn't the military planners be a
little wary about building a billion dollar airplane? It will
wind up being so expensive that they won't want to send it into
battle. Think of it---you're going to send this piece of equipment
into hostile territory, when it costs more than a medium-sized
city?

Or what if a saboteur sneaks onto the base with a few pounds of
plastique? Bang, there goes one billion dollars. Sheesh. A robust
system distributes its strength over many moldules, such that the
system as a whole does not feel so much the failure of any one module.


--
Dan Mocsny				
Internet: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu