There's loads of examples of tech that is surprisingly long lived, even in the world of aviation and military equipment.
- The B52 bomber was designed and built in the 50's and is slated to keep flying until the middle of this century.
- Britain's (and the world's) first jet bomber the "Canberra" first flew in 1949 and only retired from front line service a few years ago.
- The "M1911" automatic pistol adopted by the US Army in 1911 but designed and developed before then is still being manufactured and used.
- Russian rocket engines designed and built in the 60's were still being used (up until a few days ago when one blew up and they retired the fleet)
First of, I can see how my arguments have no effect and likewise, all of yours have none on me.
Anyhoo, it's interesting to see the passionate examples. I appreciate the community effort - as always.
About techology in general: It never evolves in a linear fashion. Its more like a stair-case thing. The tech breakthroughs come sporadically, but when they do the whole field advances. For example, once the transistor was invented, the computers never went back to using Vacuum tubes, since that, we've had a slightly more linear development of computers using CPUs, then the next step might be the qauntum computer.. and so on..
Also, I get that a pistol from 1911 can still kill a human today.. but so can a spear or bow and arrow, but for various reasons, the bow and arrow were abandoned for that pistol. Particulalrt during war-time it's an arms race. You produce a pistol, I produce a rifle, then you produce body armor and an assault rifle, then you create airplanes and I create radars & missile systems to shoot them down. The you create stealth airplanes, and I create arrays of passive radar or EMP weapons or whatever.. The point is, that once you use techology for fighting, it becomes an arms race and those who dont develop fast enough, die.
With that in mind, lets take a look at the examples you mention.
*B52 ( + the "Canberra"). Ah yes, the good old B52. Still capable of flying and dropping bombs. But would the US ever use it against any kind of modern air-defence system? Its fine to use it when theres no one to strike back. If the US was at war with say Russia, I'm pretty sure they'd be using the B2s or something newer. So yes it flies. No one questions that. But the original post was about the Viper which is the figher craft of choice. A craft that you can die in within seconds if you run into the wrong opposition.
*The 1911 pistol. yes see above for my "bow and arrows" example. its not so much wether the tech itself is still functioning. Its about what the opposition youre fighting has. Would you use the 1911 pistol against an army of mech-warrior robots 100 years from now?
*Old Russian rockets. Yes, in this field, the basic designs have not changed much. But again, we are talking about lifting here. Not a combat vessel. No one is trying to shoot down the lifter rockets on their way to ISS, yet they still have a certain failure rate. Also, once we abandon chemical fuel as our primary propellant, I can promise you that these old rockets wount be retro-fitted with pulsed fusion drives or something, simply because they were never designed for it. It will never be practical to alter a completely different design for a new solution.
Also, we are talking about humanity in the year 3300 where they've colonized 1000s of planets and have enormous amounts of resources at their disposal, so manufacturing would likely use the optimal materials for the job.
Ok, there.. this is my last post in this thread
