From: skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu To: skunk-works-digest@mail.orst.edu Subject: Skunk Works Digest V5 #361 Reply-To: skunk-works-digest@mail.orst.edu Errors-To: skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu Precedence: bulk Skunk Works Digest Friday, 21 July 1995 Volume 05 : Number 361 In this issue: Senior Citizen gif Stealthy Apache (?) Aurora Pictures Re: Stealthy Apache Re: Stealthy Apache (?) Re: Stealthy Disclosure Mary, et. al. Reference to "Aurora" in St. Louis Post Dispatch B2 Cost (Was: Stealthy Disclosure) Re: Stealthy Disclosure See the end of the digest for information on subscribing to the skunk-works or skunk-works-digest mailing lists and on how to retrieve back issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: seb@tadpole.co.uk (Steven Barber) Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 09:40:12 +0100 Subject: Senior Citizen gif These pictures look very similar to some bomber concept drawings that were in AW&ST in about 1980, when they had an article devoted to aircraft of the next century. One of these also had an infra-red laser mounted in a turret near the rear, to burn out the seeker heads on IR-homing missiles. I always thought that was a neat idea. So it shows that the general outline has been around for a long time - long enough to get into service if anyone came up with the funding... Anyone got access to AW&ST of that era, so they can check my memory? Regards, Steve ------------------------------ From: BaDge Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 09:49:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Stealthy Apache (?) Diverging a bit, a pointer to an interesting, if dated article on the newest LRC 'copter, is in the newest Pop. Mechanics. It's a modified(?) NOTAR, and looks nice! The reviewer got to touch it, too, mentioning that it didn't 'clank', as expected, but had a cushy thump to it. One of the concepts that is different is the hover mode, set up to remain stationary unless the pilot alters the control. Normally it takes constant adj. to remain in hover. Since Pop Mech has a Net site, perhaps they have pics online. Anyone? regards, BaDge ------------------------------ From: adrian mann Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 13:08:21 +0000 Subject: Aurora Pictures Hi all, FYI: Thanks to the efforts of Mike Quinlan, I have posted some of my speculative pictures of "Aurora" on the WWW. Point your browser at: http://www.primenet.com/~mikeq/aurora.html. Thanks again to Mike, and take time to have a look round his SR-71 site ( http://www.primenet.com/~mikeq ) - lots of good pics and info. Have a look at the pics, and get back to the list with any comments/discussion etc. I'm probably fairly wide of the mark, but at least we could move in the right direction, and come up with what this thing actually might look like. Adrian Mann Adrian Mann ------------------------------ From: dougt@u011.oh.vp.com (Doug Tiffany) Date: Thu, 20 Jul 95 10:56:48 EDT Subject: Re: Stealthy Apache > > Diverging a bit, a pointer to an interesting, if dated article on the > newest LRC 'copter, is in the newest Pop. Mechanics. It's a modified(?) > NOTAR, and looks nice! The reviewer got to touch it, too, mentioning that > it didn't 'clank', as expected, but had a cushy thump to it. > > One of the concepts that is different is the hover mode, set up to remain > stationary unless the pilot alters the control. Normally it takes > constant adj. to remain in hover. > > Since Pop Mech has a Net site, perhaps they have pics online. Anyone? > > regards, > > BaDge > > > I didn't see that, but under "Tech Update of the Day", they have a short article about the Heliwing. - -- A hundred years from now, it will not matter what kind of house I live in, how much is in my bank account, or what kind of car I drive, but the world may be a different place because I was important in the life of a child. Douglas J. Tiffany dougt@u011.oh.vp.com Varco-Pruden Buildings Van Wert, Ohio ------------------------------ From: BaDge Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 12:37:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Stealthy Apache (?) Hey! I found it! Look under tech update, and searchable archive, topic "Comanche, looks, brains, and guns" It's the Boeing/Sikorsky RAH-66, first flight May 25, this year. They have a full text of the article, too. http://popularmechanics.com regards, BaDge ------------------------------ From: George Allegrezza 20-Jul-1995 1350 Date: Thu, 20 Jul 95 14:10:52 EDT Subject: Re: Stealthy Disclosure Tim Ottinger writes: >(Bill Nye impersonation:) Consider the Following What a great show. My 3-yr-old loves it. >Labor costs are not constant. They tend to decrease in an assembly line. >20 planes seems just barely enough to consider _not_ having your best >craftsmen hand-tooling parts and throwing the bad attempts away. Once you >have the assembly line moving, the skill levels of the workers change and >costs drop (unless you are on T&M ;-) Costs go down due to two factors: -- as the tasks become more well-documented and repeatable without error, labor fungibility (look that one up you propeller head weenies) increases. You can swap out an experienced worked for a less experienced (and thus less well-paid) worker, reducing the unit cost of labor. -- as the production run increases, you begin to improve the manufacturing process, reducing the total number of labor hours required to make a widget. Otherwise your Ford Escort would have the same unit labor requirement at Job 1,000,000 as it does at Job 1. >Component cost is not a constant. If I order a unique short-order run of >hammers or toilet seats, you've seen what happens. If I order a lot, then >my suppliers (and their suppliers) cut better deals. This has rather a >bit to do with my first point. Component suppliers are affected by the same factors I noted above. >So: > you order a lot of planes, > the component costs drop, > the labor costs drop, and > the research cost is spread across many more seats. :I remember something about the F-22 or F-15... one of them anyway. :The USAF wanted so many. Congress said: That's too expensive, order fewer. :With the way the developmental costs worked out... buying fewer actually :cost more than it would have (total project costs) than they would have spent :had they purchased the original amount. After the Challenger explosion, NASA contracted for a new orbiter. Rockwell had to reconstitute the orbiter production line and get all the subcontractors back up to speed. Rockwell did the numbers and offered to build three orbiters for what Congress had appropriated for one. It turned out that the fixed costs could be amortized over a longer production run, reducing the per-unit (flyaway) costs to the point that the total program costs would be the same. Somebody at NASA rejected this deal. George George Allegrezza | Digital Equipment Corporation | From there to here, from here to there, Mobile Systems Business | Funny things are everywhere. Littleton MA USA | allegrezza@ljsrv2.enet.dec.com | -- Dr. Seuss ------------------------------ From: "RUSSELL.B" Date: 20 Jul 1995 14:55:14 GMT Subject: Mary, et. al. Date: Thursday, 20 July 1995 2:54pm ET To: Internet From: RUSSELL.B@GOMAIL Subject: Mary, et. al. OK, It's been a few years but here goes. Any project has a fixed cost (building, tools, stuff like that) Any project has a variable cost (material for each widget, the labor to produce a widget, the utilities to produce each widget) And then the number of widgets. Therefore, the total cost can be expressed as; Total Cost = Fixed Cost + (Variable Cost * # of Widgets) Very simplistic but that's sort of how it goes. Just another software type question. Bob Russell Systems Programmer State of Georgia, DOAS BBA, Economics 1977 University of Georgia ------------------------------ From: rages@anarchy.arc.nasa.gov (Kathy Rages) Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 12:09:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Reference to "Aurora" in St. Louis Post Dispatch OK, I want to know too, so I am forwarding this message from my brother, who reads this list faithfully and has no trouble sending me mail, but claims he doesn't know how to post here. _________________________________________ Date: Thu, 20 Jul 95 11:07:46 cst From: "DAVID C RAGES" Subject: Aurora in St. Louis Post Dispatch Heh, I have actual "skunk works" material in hand (actually laying on my desk) as I write this. This morning's St. Louis Post Dispatch, page 10A has a 1/2 page congratulations to winners of the 1994 McDonnell Douglas Spirit of Excellence Awards over the headline "Meet a group of people who never learned to color inside the lines." Some of the teams listed are 1. C-17 Fuel System Span Time and Assembly Hour Reduction Team 2. F-15 Airframe Product Team 3. Loral/MDA F/A-18 Supplier Team 4. Aurora Engineering Supplier Team with the name of Frank Penrose listed. Wonder what MAC had to do with Aurora if infact that was what it was. You can send this on if you want, I don't know how and don't know how pertinent it is. But I got a kick out of it. I Do have the hard copy of the paper Dave ____________________________________________ So, does anybody know what this "Aurora" reference is about? Kathy Rages ------------------------------ From: Tim Ottinger Date: Thu, 20 Jul 95 16:07:26 CDT Subject: B2 Cost (Was: Stealthy Disclosure) :OK, It's been a few years but here goes. : Any project has a fixed cost (building, tools, stuff like that) : Any project has a variable cost (material for each widget, the : labor to produce a widget, the utilities to produce each widget) : And then the number of widgets. :Therefore, the total cost can be expressed as; : Total Cost = Fixed Cost + (Variable Cost * # of Widgets) :Very simplistic but that's sort of how it goes. Fixed cost amortizes (per-item share), so more pieces, less cost per piece. Variable cost varies with volume (see previous posts), giving less cost per piece. Making four billion of anything is cheap (per piece). For one unique item, (esp. in the absence of prior art) the cost is always too high. Once again: If we'd ordered only 20 P38s in WWII, Lockheed would have lost their butts on the project, or the Gov would have paid a mint. That's why it hurts Northrup so much to lose a fly-off competition. I'll drop the thread now if you like. I'm done flogging the price issue. I wish there'd been an order for a few hundred "bats from hell" rather than twenty, or that congress would quit brow-beating Northrup for the per-seat cost. Twenty planes. Sheesh! - -- Tim - ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | You aren't an expert until you've done the work. | - ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | Tim Ottinger tottinge@csci.csc.com (217)351-8508x2420 | | CSC CIS Champaign, IL - The Silicon Prairie " -7420(fax) | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ From: dadams@netcom.com (Dean Adams) Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 22:42:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: Stealthy Disclosure > After the Challenger explosion, NASA contracted for a new orbiter. Rockwell had > to reconstitute the orbiter production line and get all the subcontractors back > up to speed. Rockwell did the numbers and offered to build three orbiters for > what Congress had appropriated for one. It turned out that the fixed costs > could be amortized over a longer production run, reducing the per-unit (flyaway) > costs to the point that the total program costs would be the same. Somebody at > NASA rejected this deal. Interesting, I hadn't heard that. BUT its easy to understand why NASA would be forced to reject such a plan, they simply didn't have the budget or infrastructure in place to operate and maintain two additional Shuttles. Also, the way their budget is getting slashed to the bone these days, they will be lucky to even have enough money left to fly the four they have now. ------------------------------ End of Skunk Works Digest V5 #361 ********************************* To subscribe to skunk-works-digest, send the command: subscribe skunk-works-digest in the body of a message to "majordomo@mail.orst.edu". If you want to subscribe something other than the account the mail is coming from, such as a local redistribution list, then append that address to the "subscribe" command; for example, to subscribe "local-skunk-works": subscribe skunk-works-digest local-skunk-works@your.domain.net To unsubscribe, send mail to the same address, with the command: unsubscribe skunk-works-digest in the body. Administrative requests, problems, and other non-list mail can be sent to either "skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu" or, if you don't like to type a lot, "prm@mail.orst.edu A non-digest (direct mail) version of this list is also available; to subscribe to that instead, replace all instances of "skunk-works-digest" in the commands above with "skunk-works". Back issues are available for anonymous FTP from mail.orst.edu, in /pub/skunk-works/digest/vNN.nMMM (where "NN" is the volume number, and "MMM" is the issue number).