Yep, my theory is since our taxes paying for it they make the shittiest stuff possible, pocket the rest and put it out. Not a disaster but what's intended.
Hey now it's too soon to dismiss the other military industrial grifters
I'm sure Raytheon or Boeing or someone else could come up with even better grifts
the cold war never ended, it was just privatized
That fancy helmet has all kinds of advanced features like a built-in HUD and the ability to control "high off-boresight" air to air missiles, which will be endlessly useful in a hypothetical war with a vague, theoretical enemy... It also breaks the neck of the pilot if she ever needs to eject.
Meanwhile we are told that price controls and subsidies for insulin, nationalized production of vaccines and PPE, emergency construction of hospital facilities, and public healthcare in general are economically infeasible, even while a real biological enemy stalks the streets and over half a million people die avoidable deaths while the rest are left maimed possibly for life... Let alone the mass deaths due to vaccine apartheid
Then it's bailouts, subsidies, and no-compete contracts for the precious capitalists... and austerity for families that are forced to "temporarily camp out" in their cars because they can no longer afford to live anywhere after their house burned down—federalism for states that burn worse and get drier year after year...
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.
Did they ever fix that issue where ejecting would snap the pilot's neck due to the helmet being too heavy?
I think they made it so it is no longer fatal, but iirc it still exists. It has a few other issues as well
As an aside, the F35 has been around as a prototype or something or other for decades. When I was a kid, I had a little metal miniature that had YF35 emblazoned on it, I think symbolizing that it was a miniature prototype of a jet (which looked veeeeery similar to the F35 iirc); this was roughly 20 years ago.
literally everything the government contracts out is a scam. nuts and bolts costing 20x the actual cost. I understand paying slightly more to ensure the quality will all be up to spec and be reliable. But mfers make bank off scamming them because once the budget is approved they just go hog wild and milk every single dime. And it doesn't matter too, they can go over budget and now sunken cost fallacy kicks in and they know they'll approve more and more. I mean shit the so called defense budget increases in the billions every budget.
you hear a price like that and imedi8ly want 2 steel but the resale is probably so goddamm low, how are logistics theives supposed to make a living these days
That claim has since been debunked and that makes sense, but it doesn’t make it much better when you find out they actually ended spending over $125 per pencil
FML steal 400k hud helmet, closed source operation system, doesn't even work with steam play.
This shit is like the US spending millions of dollars to invent a pen that works in outer space while the USSR just used pencils.
That claim has since been debunked and that makes sense, but it doesn’t make it much better when you find out they actually ended spending over $125 per pencil
well acktually you see the reason the pencils cost $125 each is because they have to be manufactured to the tightest tolerances and using the highest quality materials...
-liberals
It costs like $500 to send something that weights as much as an average pencil to ISS so a $125 high-tech pencil that is two times lighter would still save money.
Thanks to supreme Soviet technology the pencils cost mere pennies
Soviet space pencils are an urban legend. Pencils generate a lot of dust when you sharpen them and write with them, it would be a nightmare in zero G.
Yeah I did say it was debunked but both the US and USSR used pencils in space at some point
The marines having a space program sounds like a terrible idea though
Does the helmet have a Bluetooth speaker? Those cost like at least $10 on aliexpress
For 400k I could pay off the mortgage, fix up the house, upgrade to some solar/wind electrical generation and still have 200k to live off of for my last 20 to 30 years of life.
No but I'd gladly cut a basket ball into a helmet shape, spray paint it black, glue on some wires and tubes, shove in some light bright pegs and call it "good enough" for 400k.
To be fair it was hard to design a helmet which survives after the pilot is decapitated.
that state-of-the-art anti-decapitation technology don't come cheap
:ancap-good: There should be one for every amazon air base tm
