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dash2 56 minutes ago [-]
“ With SPRINT, we're not just building an X-plane; we're building options”. Found the guy who couldn’t be bothered to write his own press release…
notahacker 52 minutes ago [-]
Good to hear that the DoD's new contract with OpenAI is solving all the most important problems...
irl_zebra 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
bigfishrunning 7 minutes ago [-]
The technical people were never wordsmithing, they just didn't hire a technical writer. Instead of freeing up someone to do more design work, it freed someone to interview for a new job. I hope they get it.
jdiez17 9 minutes ago [-]
You're absolutely right.
O5vYtytb 44 minutes ago [-]
It's a quote from someone...?
jdiez17 40 minutes ago [-]
... who probably wrote their prepared PR statement with an LLM.
esseph 32 minutes ago [-]
I have always talked/written like this. now that LLMs do it in a similar enough way, my own writing gets called AI slop. I just wish my rotator cuffs knew I was a robot.
jacquesm 20 minutes ago [-]
Skimping on the service again, are we?
15 minutes ago [-]
bigyabai 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
mrDmrTmrJ 15 minutes ago [-]
To be clear, this is not a power-point program but a continuation of a long-standing design work with Bell.
The second article covers decades of prior wind tunnel testing on the folding rotor concept.
greatgib 4 minutes ago [-]
I can't access darpa.mil. Was it slashdotted because of the article being posted here, or now it is unavailable outside of US?
bilsbie 5 minutes ago [-]
So it has jet engines that blades unfold and attach to during takeoff and landing? Why not always use the blades?
bilsbie 6 minutes ago [-]
I’d go for simplicity and do a tail lander.
PowerElectronix 49 minutes ago [-]
It looks like a maintenance nightmare with those clutches to decouple the blades and the mechanisms to have them folded during cruising. Does it even improve substantially in anh metric over the V280 to put money into it?
cucumber3732842 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
Zigurd 2 minutes ago [-]
Hard to be more expensive than F-35B.
porphyra 37 minutes ago [-]
Cool, I guess this should be able to hover in much more "austere" environments than the F-35B STOVL and the Harrier Jet. Tiltrotor with folding rotor blades sounds very mechanically complex and challenging though.
ceejayoz 45 minutes ago [-]
So it's an Osprey with a jet in the back?
torginus 37 minutes ago [-]
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:
The swedish gripen can do mach2 (2300km/h) and does not need a traditional runway (500 meters of something "flat enough" will do). I assume its way cheaper than something like this.
RandallBrown 6 minutes ago [-]
Can it hover?
thatmf 23 minutes ago [-]
yet we still don't have universal healthcare
idontwantthis 30 minutes ago [-]
Isn't this need already met by the Bell V280 that the army already selected for it's Blackhawk replacement? What is the big innovation they are going for here?
Tuna-Fish 6 minutes ago [-]
+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.
Two articles that cover this in depth are: 1. Revised Fold-Away Rotor Aircraft Concepts Emerge From Special Operations X-Plane Program. December 2024: https://www.twz.com/air/revised-fold-away-rotor-aircraft-con...
2. Bell’s Plan To Finally Realize A Rotorcraft That Flies Like A Jet But Hovers Like A Helicopter. September 2021: https://www.twz.com/41997/bells-plan-to-finally-realize-a-ro...
The second article covers decades of prior wind tunnel testing on the folding rotor concept.
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.
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