Polaris is about .8 degrees away from the celestial North pole, so using it alone can give a reading off by .8 degrees, and the orientation in the photo is actually nearing the worst case.

The horizon doesn't appear in the photo. I have done celestial navigation strictly as a hobby for fun, and using a sextant without a visible horizon results in a few degrees of error at best. And that's with the benefit of the sensation of gravity helping you estimate. It is theoretically possible to estimate the horizon using the man made parallel horizontal lines in the image, but the author doesn't give any indication he did that.

Additionally, the author used the angle measurement tool in Stellarium to measure the distance to another ambiguous horizon. This is incredibly odd, as just clicking on Polaris in Stellarium will tell you its elevation. But even more odd, is he would have had to explicitly set his latitude in the app in order to get that screenshot.

1. Extraneous details about satellites not being overhead at night -- as if government spy satellites operate on the same schedule with the same priorities as publicly known satellites.

2. Mentions things like them not scrubbing the EXIF data was a "mistake". How could it be a mistake if this was public information?

3. Says at the end "(this data is all public now)". Making it sound like he made the data public through his top notch sleuthing. It should read "this data was all public a week prior to my analysis".

This bit, at least, is more or less the case. Even if you spend some fuel to alter your orbit and throw people off for a bit, you can't do anything major over the course of a few hours without sci-fi engines.

It's basically impossible to hide things in orbit. Hobbyists have been able to track the Misty spy satellite that has an inflatable cone to mask its optical signature. The major powers all operate space tracking radars that can spot anything up there bigger than about a baseball.

Also nearly all optical imaging sats are in sun synchronous orbits because it maximizes power generation vs solar panel size as well allows comparison of multiple days images with the same shadow angles.

> How could it be a mistake if this was public information?

Well they scrubbed the data from the website so that's a pretty clear indication it was a mistake. You're oversimplifying this into a binary thing, whereas a lot of security is more of the form "this isn't foolproof but there's no need for us to make it this easy."

Not to pile on, but the government releases info by mistake all the time. Even simple things like doing a crappy job redacting court filings. It's just people doing this stuff, and people make mistakes all.the.time.

It's been that way for a long time. The whole "UFO movement" had it's flames fanned by agents of foreign power who literally salivate at how many useful idiots will do the work their analysts would have done.

Some officer in the Russian equivalent of the NRO is probably gonna take that post and run with it.

You can bet that the US, China and Russia know about at least the orbital data of all satellites that the other nations put up.

> 2. Mentions things like them not scrubbing the EXIF data was a "mistake". How could it be a mistake if this was public information?

Because even what otherwise should be public domain under US copyright rules can still be censored for national security reasons - precisely to avoid OSINT research like this. What some random Twitter hobby astronomy researcher can do in their free time with basic tools, Russian and Chinese secret services can do as well.

Another fine example just how important attention to detail is with maintaining operational security.

Of course, but I think they would refrain from publishing that information? Unless they want to make sure that "they know that we know"...

Here's the real situation. All of the superpowers have some level of kinetic anti-satellite weapons capability and have conducted a few isolated tests against their own satellites. The X-37B drone spaceplane may have some anti-satellite role but has never been used operationally in that capacity.

(I worked with many sat engs from Loral and another quiet facility called Lokheed (Also you shouls look into BALL ((the actual Mason Jar company - and see how many spy sats they make)))

-

Anyway, I think that DEFCON needs to break this shit open....

Read all the lines, then read all the ones in-betweeen....

Serious.

> The press conference to reveal the aircraft was held here last week so we can confirm the location. A guess likely would have landed someone in the same location but fun anyway to star match. I'm sure this entire process could be done with just stars and no google maps as well

I'd be interested to see what others get. For those not familiar with the stars, Polaris is just a few pixels from the top edge, nearly dead center (it's close enough to the top that you can just use the top edge of the photo as a reference). If you start with a photo the same size I did (4096x2731), you can just crop the photo from top down to where you think the horizon is, then look at the size of the resulting image, multiply the vertical pixels by .0161, and post the answer below.

(god i hope you get this joke)

If they flew one to some air base outside DC for the roll out the author would be shooting from the hip and who knows what facility he'd have zero'd in on. Sure it might have been the same one because "the same facility as the B2" is an easy just-so story but you don't really know with any certainty.

I wonder if it’s made out of proper material and not just some clay concept

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/new-russian-submarine-s...

Even if only 10% of Russia's strategic nuclear weapons work correctly that can still make for a really bad day.

(Cannot remember if I saw this procedure on a film narrated by von Braun himself, but I doubt it; I think I saw him in a Disney)

Some modern ICBMs might also have some limited terminal guidance capacity but there's not much public information on that subject.

This was useful because inertial navigation in the submarines was imperfect, but having a precise location fix for the submarine was important if you wanted to shoot at things precisely. Of course with ICBMs launched from fixed silos, the origin point was precisely known from the onset.

And yet the war is ~8 months long and counting. "The other guy's military is trash." propaganda happens in every war, and on both sides, if you've studied even a few. We just cleared the sale of 116 Abrams tanks to Poland: https://www.defensenews.com/land/2022/12/07/us-state-dept-cl...

From the article:

>Polish defense officials have said the acquisition will enable the country’s military to counter Russia’s flagship T-14 Armata tank. The procurement will also allow Warsaw to replace its outdated Soviet-designed T-72 and PT-91 tanks with a new tracked vehicle platform.

The people on the ground conducting the war don't seem to think they've been "effectively demilitarized".

“Drones” covers a wide range of things, from a Tu-141 to a Shahed-136 to a improvised grenade-dropping quadcopter to the MQ-1/9/20 Predator/Reaper/Avenger series to tbe X-47B and the (maybe soon) unmanned operation capacity of the B-21.

Some capability sets are widely enough available to be seen as commodities, some are available on the export market, but from a narrow range of suppliers who provide them very selectively, and some represent unique capacities.

!!!

That's the point! There are a hell of a lot of "unhardened" targets and using a full scale aircraft as a drone is missing the point about cost. I mean, there's not just the news from Ukraine, but also this:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/us/power-outage-moore-county-...

...and it looks like a classic case of "disruptive technology" syndrome, where the incumbents dismiss the upstart as inadequate for their sophisticated customers - justifiably as far as it goes - until all of a sudden the tsunami arrives because the new tech has been iterating until it can address the high end.

I read the original book defining the phenomenon in my university library around the time it came out, and it's interesting how describing the problem manifestly hasn't created a solution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

Camera: Nikon D5 F-stop: f/2.8 Exposure time: 5 sec. Focal length: 28mm Max aperture: 3

I don't think it's a safe assumption that there is a linear relationship between the angles. Like, two pairs of objects in the image, in which the angles subtended by each pair relative to the viewer are the same in real life, may not be separated by the same number of pixels in image space depending on the lens used.

Furthermore, this could be thrown off by even a small hill or mountain obscuring the astronomical horizon.

So any view of the sky is an approximation, and will introduce subtle errors that make it harder to pin down an exact location.

They probably won't be huge areas, but this would be a harder problem if the time and longitude had to be exact with no existing guesses.

How does it work? astrometry.net uses 4-star combinations to define codes, then indexes the codes on the celestial sphere. The particulars of each of these phases matter, but that's the basic idea.

Fast forwarding a few years, we started using it at SOFIA Observatory to help speed up telescope acquisitions.

https://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2233

Plus when I show them plate solving their minds are blown. Hugely useful tool.

0. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/09/20/251965...

Because I guarantee there are going to be a hundred clickbait articles by various 'news' sites now in the next few days about the MASSIVE SECURITY BREACH of the USAF and how US SECRETS have been EXPOSED so and and so forth. When nothing about this is actually the case.

Even as a joking kind of thing, the opposite has been done. There's a famous exchange between Neil DeGrasse Tyson and James Cameron about how the sky in the movie Titanic was wrong. Cameron accepted the challenge, and on a remastered version had the sky replaced to be historically accurate.

It's a game to some people. It's a challenge. It's self rewarding in this case, sometimes there might be actual rewards of sorts. Hell, I've spent more hours than I'd like to admit on Nasa's website where you use the images taken by the astronauts on the space station and align them on the globe. I got nothing out of it other than being entertained by the challenge, learned about some new places on the globe when I would try to find out why that place was interesting to the astronaut to snap that particular image, etc.

Very interesting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B6jSfRuptY&t=110s

(Interesting comment for a number of reasons. Thanks!)

And for some, it crosses all lines of ethics and morals, like the stalker that deduced the location of a pop idol by looking at the reflection of a building in her eyes [1]. That's utterly crazy.

[1] https://sea.mashable.com/article/6776/a-stalker-found-a-japa...

GeoWizard on youtube has a whole series where he tries to pinpoint the exact locations of pictures sent to him by fans. Pretty fun to watch:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_japiE6QKWqMVC3JbyONau_0...

The livestream event itself mentioned it was taking place at the Northrop facility in Palmdale.

This author is not responsible for what clickbait farms do.

Aside: I'm not even sure this plane will end up doing flight testing somewhere secret in Nevada. They may just do it out of Edwards South Base, which is an "interesting" location not many in the public know about.

Off topic, but it would be really cool if someone build a hobbyist astronavigationsystem using a something like a Raspberry Pi and a camera with a fisheye lens. Sort of an amateur https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/nortronics....

But ... it's been 11 years, kids these days, etc.

Auxiliary Base South is probably less known.

But that's not the point of the article. The point of the article was to reveal the location of the hanger using the stars and other metadata, and to explain how that was done. The journey was the story, not the destination.

And that's where the disagreement is. It implied a secret by the nature of the object, enough so that the fact it wasn't needed to be clarified - but at the end. You only publicly reveal something once, and this already had been.

But then, those aren't his words and it's implicit so this is a grey area and not a huge deal. But I still think leaving the clarification to the end was deliberate.

https://youtu.be/vw9zyxm860Q

https://imgur.com/N7DwWP1?r

For the browsing in Firefox, there's multiple extensions you can use to add the referrer and get the image directly instead of a redirect (see [2], though I'm not sure if it works on mobile)

Alternatively, use Rimgo[3], an alternative frontend to imgur. This page also lists several ways to automate redirects from imgur domains.

[1] https://github.com/SpartanJ/ImgurViewer [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/referercontro... [3] https://codeberg.org/video-prize-ranch/rimgo

- Desktop mode

- Change the TLD back to ".com"

- tap image with finger

Sounds simple, but I figured it out only after running into 3 or 4 other dead ends. For example, desktop mode needs to be in place for forcing the TLD to stick on my phone.

Fantastic.

If they are so terrible, there should be no need to invent stuff.

When people read something like this post, and they are predisposed to the idea, it’ll reinforce their skepticism of „the mainstream media“. If you want to test yourself, make a bet of how many media outlets will run with the story in the manner outlined above, then check in a few days. My prediction: you won’t see it in the NYT, WSJ, BBC, or on CNN.

It is very interesting--and newsworthy--how difficult it is to be anonymous on the internet. Any person, place, or thing can be "doxxed" by seemingly innocuous background details.

That's because, while no individual star is visible, the exact angles between all stars is fixed, so you can do a brute force search of all possible orientations of the sky to find a matching one. In a 6 megapixel image of half blue sky, you effectively get an oversampling ratio of 3 million:1, so even with very bright sunlight obscuring the stars to the naked eye, your algorithm will pick them out.

But even in the general case, smallish image patches don't have enough distortion to matter, while still having plenty of oversampling, and only have 3 unknowns. You can probably do some kind of fft trickery to reduce it to 1 unknown. And you can probably use some kind of hill-climbing to further reduce the search effort.

Even if your image patch is small, without previous images to compare, you need to brute force the entire sky?

And how can "fft trickery" reduce the attitude state to 1 unknown ? 1 unknown with what units ?

Sorry but I suspect you are making all these up.

This is a scenario with extremely high coding gain[1]. The DC value of the sky can be removed by high pass filtering. Finding the rigid transform (rotation+translation) between two images captured by the same camera, assuming no distortion[2], assuming the image pair has substantial intersection, doesn't require calibration.

Dropping the "same camera" and "substantial intersection" assumptions requires searching the entire sky and also finding an unknown scaling factor. It all comes down to the images having low enough noise and high enough resolution, relative to the search space. The math is sound.

You're not entitled to a tutorial in signal processing, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_gain

[2] Astronomy lenses have very small FOV and very small distortion.

The concept here is processing gain, which is algorithmic. It's what enables the miracle of GPS, even though satellites are 20000km far away, there may be clouds, rain, etc and your phone doesn't come with a satellite dish. Also used in CDMA radio for civilian and military communications, it allows reliable transmission at negative SNR by spreading the message over a huge space. In the case of GPS/radio, the space is frequency. Here, the message is coordinates of a rectangular crop of the sky, encoded in the (huge) space of few million pixels. On a per-pixel basis, the SNR can be negative -- looking at a single pixel I can't tell you with confidence if it contains a star, because the shade of blue is just too close to average. But correlating the entire image against the correct "code" (a clean star field), tells me whether I got the location of the sky correctly. Intuitively: accumulated over the entire image, the noise statistics are such that the noise stays bounded, and the tiny amount of signal adds up.

Appropriate optics will increase the SNR so that bright stars can actually become visible. Per the link above, mag 2-3 stars are visible with a 10cm telescope (looking through the eyepiece; no filters or digital sensors needed). So if the conditions are right and the optics are good, you may actually see a few stars reliably, and the scenario reduces to the B-21 hangar scenario.

Finally, it's worth noting that even a consumer grade CMOS sensor will sample at 12 bits per pixel (4096 linear levels) with low noise. The human eye cannot discriminate a luminance difference of 1/4096 relative to full scale, not even close. Using the naked eye for intuition here is misleading, because this is a scenario where a sensor is far better at registering the small additive contribution of a star under daylight, and this is the key to enabling the processing gain through math.

If you have 3 million pixels of sky, and 3 variables to find, then you have oversampled by 1 million times.

In the ideal noise-free world with no other unknowns, any 3 of those pixels would be enough to solve the problem perfectly.

I have been working fine so far in startrackers for spacecraft without your tutorial in signal processing, but thanks for the offer

This doesn't make any sense. Even if one could estimate ground truth DC, removing it would leave noise at every other frequency bin.

But this is beside the point. Your questioning isn't coming from a place of curiosity.

I direct you to the HN guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

It's a well defined problem of taking star positions and pinpointing its celestial coordinates. There's even a term for being able to do that without knowing anything about the camera, telescope or distortion, it's called blind solving. Plenty of tools to do it are available online and they're an essential part of an astrophotographers tools.

Fun fact, most of our ICBMs rely on plate solving to navigate so they can hit their targets even when GPS signals are disrupted.

If you don't already know a star location, I'm sure you could construct a very sensitive camera and some noise reduction and do this with short exposures without any rotation.

"On March 8, the artists, abandoning the idea of a public webcam, raised a white flag, emblazoned with the words “He Will Not Divide Us,” in an “unknown location.” The livestream showed only the flag and the expanse of sky behind it. 4Chan and 8Chan (the forum where discussions that are banned from 4Chan go) snapped into action.... They used the star patterns visible behind the flag at night and the paths of planes flying overhead to confirm the location. A troll who lived nearby drove around honking until the noise was audible on the livestream. On the night of March 10, a group raided the site, took down the flag, and replaced it with a Pepe the Frog T-shirt and a “Make America Great Again” hat. The stream soon went dark again."

Though, if you would have asked me, I would have guessed Lancaster/Palmdale, because I know (a) That's where the unveiling was (b) I have seen B-1's fly over me while driving in Palmdale and (c) I know Edwards and a bunch of other spacey stuff is there. I feel like Captain Kirk looking for whales and saying "I think we'll find what we're looking for at the Cetacean Institute in Sausalito" - a far less methodical or impressive approach.

If you always wipe exif data, and don’t investigate your pictures, then you will eventually neglect some combination of data points someone could use to infer richer context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif

Which I think is also why the thread is so X-marks-the-spot / parallel-reconstruction-y. I think it's more of a "here's the kind of thing we can do with these star-matching tools, applied to an interesting image as an example" than an expose.

They probably want it to feel vaguely spacey for the sci-fi vibes.

They’ve got at least as good star charts as the rest of us, so if they really wanted to be jokers they could photoshop some stars in, make it look like it is flying over an adversary’s country…

It is the unveiling of a bomber, with the national anthem sung by an employee of the company who built it, as in a proper performance, while more bombers fly ahead so loudly he has to stop. Then it proceeds to have the CEO read an engineered speech from a teleprompter, completely devoid of her own existence. Followed by a hollywood action movie style reveal, with the attendees going wild, clapping and shouting for the new, shiny bomber. It is a gift that keeps on giving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chJlJgrvfBY

Procedure is as follows:

Right ascension of the culminating star ("celestial longitude", taken from the star catalog/star map, of any star which is right above the celestial pole/"Polar star"), is the stellar time.

Knowing date (from EXIF), you get local solar time (which is equal to the stellar time on the spring solstice day, then makes a 24 hour loop over the year).

Difference between local time found this way and UTC time (taken from EXIF), gives longitude, because the Earth is round.

If EXIF does not contain the time zone, that gives 3 points in the U.S., one for each time zone, but it must be super easy to pick one. But most probably, EXIF contains the time zone.

But is that a very strong confirming factor? Is it likely that NG / USAF would be actively avoiding the potential for satellite imagery? Does it mean all the time it was being built, they avoided having it outside during the daytime?

During the Cold War black projects like the F-117 did exactly that. IIRC they weren't necessarily limited to being out side only at night, but they were very careful about satellite orbits to make sure the secret aircraft wouldn't be caught on camera.

When the B-2 bomber was unveiled, the USAF didn't really want people to get good photos of the wing's shape due to some of the stealth technology incorporated into it. Aviation Week famously [0] got the drop on them by flying a Cessna right over the rollout. Considering how many very high quality cameras are in orbit today I imagine they put some thought into preventing Russia, China, etc. from getting good photos of the B-21.

0: https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/s...

When I was in the 82nd Airborne we had days where we didn’t do any outside training because the Soviet spy satellites were overhead. Estimated troop strength, deployment schedules, blada, blada.

Kind of nice because they generally left us alone as long as we stayed out of sight.

That comment was after mentioning how the "super sonic" plane built for the latest Top Gun was probably left out, on purpose, so it'd confuse adversaries on what the US is actually working on.

Aren't airplanes built entirely in a hangar? Especially secret ones?

Maybe it’s not a strong factor here, because it was a few days before public announcement anyway. But you’d expect them to follow the same protocol or at least pick a more convenient time than 1:30am if they were not.

Yes, we still haven't seen the back of the B-21 (those at the unveiling could only view it from the front). There was also an incident when the B-2 was unveiled and a photographer flew over and got pictures of it.

* he got the approximate latitude from the stars (34 or 35)

* independently, he found the most plausible airbase based on other information and then noticed that the base is indeed around that latitude

If you say tic-tac was lens-flare, the Chinese govt will figure out how to obsolete the F22 targeting system in a week :-)

Hyperbole for sure but amazing how much info you can get from seemingly innocent data leaks.

Loose lips sink ships...

"Stealth" has such a limited life span of utility. Even in the 90s Serbian air defence managed to acquire and shoot down "stealth" aircraft. It required humint but that's part of a real theatre of war.

The fact of the matter is, stealth technology means that an aircraft needs to be significantly closer to a radar for it to be detected compared to a normal aircraft. That also means it has to be closer still for a threat radar to develop a weapons quality track. Theres not really any known radar technology that can mitigate this, it’s basic physics. It’s much easier to see an object on radar that returns orders of magnitude more energy to the radar.

Stealth does not a limited utility. In fact it’s rapidly going to become an absolute bare minimum for any tactical aircraft.

Even if, for arguments sake, the aircraft is at the moment leaps and bounds ahead of the nearest peer competitor military there is going to be limit to how effective a new coat of paint will be for the B-21 in 10 years time.

To get your monies worth from this thing you'd want a lot greater effective service life than that and without stealth the B-21 would have dramatically diminished it's dollar to effectiveness ratio.

If I can remember that, from 30+ years ago, I'm pretty sure the russians/chinese/whateverese also know.

F117 was a dark skunk project shown years after being operational. That made sense to me for a super secret project with wildly new technologies and capabilities.

I don't understand the announcements of such projects from the vision stage, with the details of capability, purpose, strategy, photos,etc.

Is it commoditized sufficiently? Is it deterrence? Is there enough misinformation?

  Kirk: Bones, did you ever hear of a doomsday machine?

  McCoy: No. I'm a doctor, not a mechanic.

  Kirk: It's a weapon built primarily as a bluff. It's never meant to be used. So strong, it 
  could destroy both sides in a war. Something like the old H-Bomb was supposed to be. 
  That's what I think this is. A doomsday machine that somebody used in a war uncounted 
  years ago. They don't exist anymore, but the machine is still destroying.

  — Star Trek: The Original Series, "The Doomsday Machine"

  Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it 
  a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?!!

  Russian Ambassador Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you 
  know, the Premier loves surprises.

  — Dr. Strangelove

Part of it is probably also that this is a refinement of an existing aircraft and not anything with drastically different capabilities-- if you're planning on war with the US, you're probably already thinking about B-2s, and if you're worried about B-2s then a B-21 isn't that different.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-flash_white

- They plan on operating it during the day as well as night, so they need better protection against visual observation?

- The B2 was much darker due to the coating technology it used wasn't compatible with lighter grays? And operating only at night it didn't really matter?

Because trying to hide the existence of strategic bombers is expensive, ineffective, and not particularly helpful to keeping the actually secret technology they use secret.

> F117 was a dark skunk project shown years after being operational

With the F-117, the shape was part of the secret sauce. The B-21 doesn’t seem to be a big departure that way.

> I don't understand the announcements of such projects from the vision stage,

This wasn't announced in the vision stage, except that a new strategic bomber was being developed. The unveiling was well past vision, and competition, stages.

> Is it commoditized sufficiently? Is it deterrence? Is there enough misinformation?

Deterrence is a big consideration,

The world has also changed substantially. When the F-117 was developed, being able to simulate the RF interactions with faceted geometry was ground breaking stuff. Now anyone that can afford an ANSYS license can simulate that with far, far, greater fidelity against much more complex shapes.

There were only 21 B-2s ever built. The Air Force has already ordered 100 B-21s.

Planned, not ordered. Just like they initially planned 130+ B-2s, which Congress eventually cut to 21.

If true, then yes, the B-21 has potential to be relatively cheap to build and operate.

The B-21 is different in two important ways.

First, the B-21s stealth tech is derived from lessons learned from the F-35 program. The F-35 is a tactical fighter which the US and most of its allies are buying in very large numbers. They need to be stationed just about anywhere and can't require ridiculous maintenance to keep their skin from falling off. That would be impractical for a large fleet of aircraft. As such, a lot of work went into making the radar absorbent material used on the F-35 dramatically more durable. The B-21 gets to piggyback off of that and as a result it will be much more feasible to actually have a large fleet of them.

Second, there's a new cold war heating up with China. Anyone whose ever looked at the Pacific ocean might notice that it's kind of large. This makes range a major concern for combat aircraft. A medium stealth bomber with extreme range is essentially perfect for this environment because it can reach anywhere and is very hard to actually find once in flight. If you are a surface warship force, being hunted by a bunch of nearly undetectable aircraft which can be anywhere at anytime and can each carry more than a dozen large anti-ship missiles is going keep you up at night. The B-21 will likely end up being a very important piece in the US naval strategy in the pacific.

I wouldn't be surprised to see significantly more than 100 get built.

Oh, you can use them just as they were used - to do the things B-52, or hell, even B-29 could do. /snark

> being hunted by a bunch of nearly undetectable aircraft which can be anywhere at anytime and can each carry more than a dozen large anti-ship missiles

Now this is a question. My memory was rusty so I consulted Wikipedia and looks like there is not that many options.

SM6 is too weak and doesn't yet have AS capability, LRASM exists with a proper qualities (speed and payload) but is quite big even for B-1. And Tomahawk with no AS cap. and ... not fast.

So there is a question about "a dozen large anti-ship missiles" though it can be mitigated with a sheer numbers, which is probably the way it is designed.

> I wouldn't be surprised to see significantly more than 100 get built.

Depends on what would happen in tjhe world the next 10 years.

The security situation in the Pacific is also very unlikely to improve over the next 10 years.

1. I'm aware the F-35 development program itself was a boondoggle, but there are still building a ton of them right now.

Maybe. “Designed to accommodate unmannef operations” is... fairly vague as a description.

Now do it without using a computer, the old fashioned way, with books, paper maps, star charts, slide rulers, sextants, compasses, and pens. I'm sure some people would be able to.