The Most Expensive Weapon Ever Built

C

cancel2 2022

Canceled
A pretty devastating indictment of the F-35.

The resulting bastard child was a compromise, not optimum for any one service but good enough for all three. Neither the Air Force nor the Navy liked its stubby design. The F-35C's squat fuselage puts its tailhook close to its landing gear (7 ft., compared with 18 on the F-18 it is replacing), making it tough to grab the arresting cable on an aircraft carrier. Its short range means aircraft carriers ferrying it into battle will have to sail close to enemy shores if the F-35C is to play a role. It can fly without lumbering aerial tankers only by adding external fuel tanks, which erases the stealthiness that is its prime war-fighting asset.
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But military technology has been moving away from manned fighters for years. Drones, standoff weapons and GPS-guided bombs have cut the utility of, and need for, such short-leg piloted planes. Their limits become even more pronounced amid the Pentagon's pivot to the Pacific, where the tyranny of distance makes the F-35's short combat radius (469 miles for the Marines, 584 for the Air Force, 615 for the Navy) a bigger challenge.
Computers are key to flying the plane. But instead of taking advantage of simplicity, the F-35 is heading in the other direction: its complexity can be gleaned from its 24 million lines of computer code, including 9.5 million on board the plane. That's more than six times as much as the Navy F-18 has. The F-35 computer code, government auditors say, is "as complicated as anything on earth."
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A stealthy jet requires sacrifices in range, flying time and weapon-carrying capability--the hat trick of aerial warfare. All those factors have played a role in the fate of the Air Force's F-22 fighter, the nation's only other fifth-generation warplane. It has been sitting on runways around the globe for seven years, pawing at the tarmac as the nation waged wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Yet the F-22, built to fight wars against enemies that have yet to materialize, has yet to fly a single combat mission.
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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136312-6,00.html
 
Lowaicue said:
The most expensive weapon ever created was christianity. It cost part of the wages of most of its adherents, kept millions in a form of slavery and killed more people than all the jet fighters of the world could ever kill.
That is a weapon!
Second most expensive was probably Islam but only because it hasn't been going for so long.
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Well if you are going to fly off at a tangent then it is without doubt Communism. Stalin is good for 50+ million lives and Mao for up to 70 million. Any advance on that?
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
Well if you are going to fly off at a tangent then it is without doubt Communism. Stalin is good for 50+ million lives and Mao for up to 70 million. Any advance on that?
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Not really. Neither Stalin nor Mao were communists. Jesus was more of a communist. Even if you accept the 50 mill and the 70 mill it is as nothing when compared to the numbers killed in the name of christianity. 100 years to 2000 years.
 
Lowaicue said:
Not really. Neither Stalin nor Mao were communists. Jesus was more of a communist. Even if you accept the 50 mill and the 70 mill it is as nothing when compared to the numbers killed in the name of christianity. 100 years to 2000 years.
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Well they sure weren't Buddhists either. Any way Communism managed to kill as many or more people in 70 years as Christianity took 2000 years to so do.
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
Well they sure weren't Buddhists either. Any way Communism managed to kill as many or more people in 70 years as Christianity took 2000 years to so do.
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They were NOT communists. I have no idea whether Stalin had a religion of if Mao followed the teachings of Confucious. Stalin was quite active in his slaughter whereas Mao's millions were caused by poor government policies and an already starving population.
If we take into consideration the number of lives lost as a result of christianity or of the actions of christians the figure is enormous. Dont forget Hitler was a Christian.
Lenin and Max were communists not Stalin. Mao started as a communist but very soon became a communist in name only much as the present government of China is.
Dictators have certainly killed many millions of people, but they have been different dictators, for example Pol Pot did not have the same beliefs as Stalin or Mao. Christians on the other hand are christians because they follow the same teachings. Quite different.
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
Well if you are going to fly off at a tangent then it is without doubt Communism. Stalin is good for 50+ million lives and Mao for up to 70 million. Any advance on that?
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What about ignorance? Gun control laws were the basis of all deaths under both communism and fascism. You know, what you want to do in the US next.
 
SmarterthanYou said:
...with all the waste and inefficiency possible.
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THIS
Government people even admit it. They justify it by calling "economy!".
Obama admits he's not going to balance a budget just for the sake of balancing it. Seriously. WTF? And the lefties who cry deficit whenever a republican is in office stand and cheer. LOL
 
Lowaicue said:
They were NOT communists. I have no idea whether Stalin had a religion of if Mao followed the teachings of Confucious. Stalin was quite active in his slaughter whereas Mao's millions were caused by poor government policies and an already starving population.
If we take into consideration the number of lives lost as a result of christianity or of the actions of christians the figure is enormous. Dont forget Hitler was a Christian.
Lenin and Max were communists not Stalin. Mao started as a communist but very soon became a communist in name only much as the present government of China is.
Dictators have certainly killed many millions of people, but they have been different dictators, for example Pol Pot did not have the same beliefs as Stalin or Mao. Christians on the other hand are christians because they follow the same teachings. Quite different.
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I daresay you were against Tony Blair getting rid of Clause 4.
 
Yeah....this money could be better spent on finding out why lesbians are fat-assed, obese cows.....other than eating too gd much.
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The answer is actually the media and marketing targeting liberals or those whose life is superficial (i.e. advertising on tv and more recently online).

Like this:
-Old Spice Dog
-Burger King - 2 for 222
-The Hurry Cane for geriatrics
-Corona Beer (tastes like piss without half a lime in it)
-Buy this car cuz we're like penicillin for bad credit!
-Perhaps the worst of the group, because it represents a new era of escapism. Escapism right into a commercial.
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Don't know of any marketing techniques for lesbians specifically, but I'd imagine one could come to that conclusion on their own :) . Just a matter of classifying the demographics and then dividing and conquering by selling a dream to each group.
 
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Aoxomoxoa said:
Well if you are going to fly off at a tangent then it is without doubt Communism. Stalin is good for 50+ million lives and Mao for up to 70 million. Any advance on that?
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The Spaniards were good for about those numbers during the conquest of the new world. They, with the sanction of the church annihilated between 20 and 50 million people in Central Mexico alone in one generation.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
The Spaniards were good for about those numbers during the conquest of the new world. They, with the sanction of the church annihilated between 20 and 50 million people in Central Mexico alone in one generation.
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I doubt if anybody knows how many died as they didn't have censuses in those days. Anyway I thought most of the deaths amongst Aztecs, Mayans and Incas were caused by exposure to Western diseases brought over by the Spaniards not by being put to death.
 
Rana said:
Could someone who speaks "stupid", please translate this for me, thanks.
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Nova supports big government and is so incredibly stupid that he does not realize that 1.5 million on an obesity study will not pay for these planes that apparently cost 160 million a piece.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/12/feds-spend-15m-study-lesbian-obesity/

BTW, I think this obesity study asks an interesting question. The right wingers are just seizing on it because they can sensationalize it to the idiot hordes due to its connection to homosexuality.
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
I doubt if anybody knows how many died as they didn't have censuses in those days. Anyway I thought most of the deaths amongst Aztecs, Mayans and Incas were caused by exposure to Western diseases brought over by the Spaniards not by being put to death.
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Yes and no. A very large number died from disease but the Spaniards found out soon about their lack of immunity to these diseases and proactively waged germ warfare upon them. It wasn't like it was an "act of God".

They also enslaved vast numbers after the initial conquest and worked them to death as slaves. It was after millions began to die of these abuses that the Catholic church sent representatives from the Vatican (Bishop Zumarraga) as protectors of the Indians, but largely they failed and the great Spanish estate owners killed millions by enslavement and working them to death.

You're right that there was no census data to work from but historians have estimated that the death toll was somewhere between 20 million (probably to low) and 50 million (probably to high) Central Mexican natives.
 
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