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Stupid…back at the beginning and today

Posted on August 27, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

From StrategyPage.com: The USAF Stands Like A Rock

August 26, 2013: The U.S. Air Force continues to come up short in its effort to supply enough pilots for its growing UAV fleet. Currently the air force has about 1,300 operators for its 280 large UAVs (about half of them Predators, nearly 40 percent Reapers and the rest Global Hawks). UAV operators are now nearly nine percent of all air force pilots, triple the percentage in 2008. But now the air force is unable to get enough manned aircraft pilots to volunteer to do a three year tour as a UAV operator and cannot train non-pilots fast enough to be career UAV operators. Another problem is dissatisfaction with the job. UAV operators leave the air force at three times the rate of pilots of manned aircraft. There are several reasons for this. UAV operators have a heaver workload than pilots of manned aircraft and less time to study and prepare for promotion opportunities. As a result UAV operators are promoted at a rate 13 percent lower than pilots of manned aircraft. Worst of all, UAV operators are not shown the same respect as pilots who go into the air aboard their aircraft. All this would go away if the air force allowed NCOs (sergeants) to be operators of the larger UAVs but the air force leadership is very hostile to that idea.

Absolutely certain that the AirForce and Navy can come up with highly articulate rationales for their systems but it’s all politics and tradition. In the end stupid since it damages the very ‘institutions’ the ‘traditionalists’ think they are protecting.

Sometimes you’ve got to do it yourself to get it right…

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Google is laying the groundwork to build its own self-driving car—without a major auto manufacturer as partner
By Christopher Mims August 23, 2013 Google Ventures reportedly invests $250 million in Uber By Jacob Kastrenakes on August 23, 2013
Just think……

The Tesla Model S Is So Safe It Broke the Crash-Testing Gear
BY DAMON LAVRINC 08.20.13 Tesla California sales beat Chrysler, Volvo, Cadillac, other big names
Electric car maker snatches 12 percent of luxury sports category in first half of 2013.
by Lee Hutchinson – Aug 23 2013 Will the success of Tesla’s Model S speed along a $35k model with a 200-mile range?
By Amir Iliaifar — August 13, 2013

Autonomous electric taxi’s ( call them Charles) can (like a regular taxi) drop off and pick up at the curb, dense pack park, and get a range extending charge…or go pick up another fare, while the original call is shopping, chatting, exercising, etc. They make a huge amount of sense for two user demographics, the elderly who are still able to get around but perhaps are no longer safe drivers or even more likely don’t want to or cannot justify owning a personal vehicle. Second, the urbanite non driver of whom their are many, Charles provides the same service the hordes of yellow taxis do today, with reduced emissions and probably cost along with improved safety. Charles can also provide a vastly more personalized limo type service to elder home clusters in the ‘burbs. Even for suburbanites Charles makes a one car or no car life style thinkable.

Sometimes old & reliable is far better than new and shiney

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

At: http://breakingdefense.com/ Stick With The Tomahawk, Forget LRASM
on July 12, 2013
By Steve Russell

In America’s culture of optimism and innovation, there is always the desire for the better mouse trap. Sometimes, traps are needed to catch rats and not mice, so the mouse traps must be replaced. Sometimes, the existing traps can be modified to more than do the job against the actual threat they face. But we must be intellectually honest and ask, “Can what we have already get it done?”
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For example, the .50 caliber Machine Gun was designed in 1919. That’s right, just after the First World War. It has been successfully upgraded and is still used today by all the armed services. It is efficient, deadly and respected by all of us who have used it in battle to defeat America’s enemies. Why? It simply works. America has protected thousands of lives and saved billions of dollars by resisting the calls for a potentially better mouse trap.

Too many times the urge to build new vs. incremental upgrade is hard to resist especially if a clique of advisors is captured by an aggressive sell of shinny new technology. ( Though alternately it can be hard to tell when an old war horse needs to be put out to pasture.)

But…if the shinny new blivet is only incrementally better and many or all of its advantages can be spun onto the old gray tiger you really have to consider incrementalism.

Speed, stealth or smaller, are often sold as the key advantage of a new frame…but most of the time the advantage so bought costs in $’s and in lost capability, flexibility, or maybe even reluctance to pull the trigger given a fear that the shinny new tech will be revealed to the oppo…

Especially in a world of rapid change the urge for the new is not necessarily a good one. Too many times a brilliant idea today is obsolescent before it’s out of development and can get caught in a horrifically expensive dollar death spiral chasing evolving requirements.

Also remember that the old guard primes have huge infrastructures (and stockholders) they have to support. And upgrading old systems will not fill the pipeline. So they have a strong motivation to denigrate the old and laud the new, so do many in the DoD bureaucracy.

Unfortunately for the new platforms, most technologies coming down the affordability curve are as good for, or better at upgrading older platforms or capabilities, than providing big step changes at the platform level.

Not to say that this won’t doom some old war horses. I’m not confident that the CVN is anything more than an admiral’s yacht and diplomat’s crutch these days.

Dream Chaser you have to like the name

Posted on August 22, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Dream Chaser in a captive carry flight over the Mojave. (Credit: Sierra Nevada Corporation

EDWARDS, Calif. (NASA PR) – NASA partner Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) of Louisville, Colo., successfully completed a captive-carry test of the Dream Chaser spacecraft Thursday, Aug. 22, at the agency’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif.

Trust is the core of America’s strength, to generalize, the wider the circle of trust the richer the society

Posted on August 22, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

At Civil Horizon: Trust

Trust is far more important than law.

Think of it: how many times have you sued somebody, or been sued? Have you ever been arrested? Each of us interacts with many others in numerous ways every day, and recourse to the law is exceptionally rare. Our actions may be constrained by certain laws; but usually they are far more limited by the expectations of those with whom we are dealing.

Great piece! (Edited for clean up)

US Bureaucrat’s are (largely) neither stupid or venal, their bosses, our Politicians on the other hand….

Posted on August 21, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Bad Mandates
Francis Fukuyama at The American Interest

Bureaucratic dysfunctions can almost always be traced back to a badly-conceived mandate from the political principal to the bureaucratic agent, which prevents the agent from exercising an appropriate degree of autonomous judgment.
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Under our system of government, private individuals are given standing in the courts to force agencies to implement laws. If local officials thought wheelchair ramps didn’t make sense, they would face a blizzard of lawsuits like the ones described by Loyola and Epstein, where a single individual named Theodore Pinnock forced every mom-and-pop store in little Julian, California to remodel their facilities to accommodate his wheelchair. So the problem here is not excessive autonomy, it’s complete lack of autonomy in complying with a senseless legislative mandate that takes no account of the need for discretionary tradeoffs against competing goods.

And why does the bureaucracy grow, because the politicians give it more, and more and more, to do….

Puny Titan, giant idea, solar powered pseudo satellite

Posted on August 20, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Artist’s rendering of Solara 50 at high altitude.
Titan Aerospace

The coverage area of a Solara 50, superimposed over New York.

From ars technica:

Almost orbital
Titan’s aircraft plans are … modest and … ambitious at the same time. Solara 50 will have a payload of just 70 pounds—though depending on the time of year and location of the flight, longer daylight hours could sustain flights with heavier payloads. The next design, the Solara 60, will carry up to 250 pounds. Instead of using hydrogen fuel cells, the Solara aircraft use batteries charged from solar panels to power flight at night and provide about 100 watts of power to the aircraft’s payload, as well.

The Solara 50 has a 50 m (164 feet) wingspan. The upper surfaces of its wings and tail are packed with over 3,000 photovoltaic cells capable of generating up to 7 kilowatts. It is launched by catapult and can land (when it has to) by skidding on its Kevlar-coated underside. Unlike the giant flying-wing configurations of the Helios and Zephyr, which had large numbers of propellers, the Solara has a single, high-efficiency motor.

In theory, a solar-powered drone capable of withstanding long flights at high altitude—in what Titan executives call the “sweet spot” in the Earth’s atmosphere between 60,000 and 70,000 feet, above nearly all weather patterns in a zone where winds are typically less than 5 knots (5.75 miles/hour)—would be able to perform tasks usually reserved for satellites at a much lower cost.

Several orders on the books, reasonable objectives, good idea, what’s not to like?

Gartner’s 2013 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, via 3ders

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Gartner’s 2013 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies features Humans and Machines

The cycle is one of those eye opening ideas, a meme that explains while also laying out a way to look forward. Like disruptive vs evolutionary technology, the 80/20 rule and others.

3ders noted it because several things on it this year that are near and dear to their hearts. Personally Gartner’s timeline for consumer 3d printing, from the peak of hype (this years tip) to the plateau of acceptance is to conservative (5-10years). I think more like 3 to 5 years, but we shall just have to wait and see.