Newsgroup: it.cultura.militare
Titolo: il raptor entra in servizio

The New York Times
Air Superiority at $258 Million a Pop
By TIM WEINER
Published: October 27, 2004
After two decades of struggle, the most expensive fighter jet in history is
ready to become part of the American arsenal.
The F/A-22 fighter, nicknamed the Raptor, is being billed by the Air Force
as a new chapter in the annals of air power, the most technologically
advanced warplane ever built, a stealthy flying antenna that can capture
enemy intelligence as it drops smart bombs while soaring at 1,000 miles an
hour.
Designed at the height of the cold war to penetrate Soviet radars without
being detected and to shoot down Soviet jets in the event of World War III,
the Raptor has taken 23 years to move from the drawing board to the assembly
line and into an Air Force fighter squadron.
It is being born into a world far different from the one in which it was
conceived. American air power is unrivaled; the enemy looks far different
than it did back in 1981. The Raptor program has already survived one bitter
dogfight, five years ago, when Republicans in Congress tried to kill it. Not
until now was it a done deal in the minds of its makers at Lockheed Martin,
the nation's biggest military contractor.
Dain Hancock, Lockheed's executive vice president for aerospace programs,
said the biggest question confronting the Raptor was very basic: "Could you
really make this thing work the way it was supposed to work?"
The other question was money.
At the moment, the Raptor costs $258 million apiece. That is far more than
any fighter jet ever built, nearly four times the cost in today's dollars of
the price tag originally advertised by the Air Force, and about five times
the cost of the F-15, the plane it will replace.
Like many major weapons programs, the Raptor was built on a "cost plus"
contract, meaning the taxpayer, not the contractor, pays for cost overruns.
More than 1,000 subcontractors in 43 states helped build both the plane and
a political constituency for its production.
That $258-million-a-plane figure is based on an overall cost of $71.8
billion and the Air Force's plans to buy 277 Raptors. The price per plane
will go down if the Pentagon buys more Raptors. It would go up if the
military bought fewer, or if the plane needed fine-tuning in the future.
"This was an airplane designed under the cold war environment," said Jacques
Gansler, a former under secretary of defense in the Clinton administration
in charge of buying weapons. "Maximum performance. Push the state of the
art. And, by the way, see how much it costs."
The Soviet jet that Raptor was built to conquer never got off the ground. No
nation now threatening the United States has an air force capable of
fighting the F-15. So "people have questioned whether this is the right
airplane for the future," Mr. Gansler said.
Over the years, the Raptor moved "from the airplane the Air Force was going
to buy in large quantities to a plane too expensive to buy in large
quantities," he said. "It took so long, in part, because it was meant to be
the state of the art in the future."
Lockheed executives said the plane took so long to build because of its
technological sophistication and Congressional fits and starts in paying for
the plane. Twenty years ago, the Air Force planned to buy roughly 760
Raptors, based in part on an original cost estimate of $35 million a plane.
A decade ago, that became 438 planes, then 339 at the end of the 1990's,
then 277 today. Military experts call this the "death spiral," when passing
time and rising costs cut the number of weapons the Pentagon can afford.
Now, Lockheed executives say, the Raptor has pulled out of that plunge,
which in 1999 caused the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee to
threaten to kill the program outright.
They say they had already breathed a sigh of relief earlier this year, when
prototype planes passed some crucial flight tests. Nevertheless, the debut
of the Raptor, scheduled for today, will be toasted happily at the Air Force
and at Lockheed Martin, which yesterday posted a third-quarter earnings
increase of 41 percent and is set to reach sales of about $35 billion this
year.
Lockheed - which also makes the F-16 and is building the F-35, the next
generation of fighter aircraft intended not only for the Air Force, but also
for the Navy and the Marines - is now poised to shoot for "world domination"
in the field of fighter jets, in the words of one of its aerospace
executives.
The Raptor faced a number of technological hurdles this year and last. The
most crucial concerned its avionics, or on-board electronics, designed to
detect enemy fighters far beyond the pilot's field of vision.
The avionics are "orders of magnitude more complicated than any other
plane's," said Ralph Heath, a Lockheed executive vice president and F-22
manager in Fort Worth. The Raptor's electronic brain is based in part on a
32-bit Intel processor, made in the 1990's and now discontinued.
The avionics "did not work as planned and that took us a while to figure
out," Mr. Heath said. As late as last year, the on-board software was
crashing roughly ever two hours in flight tests. Air Force officials said
the unpredictable computer crashes were no surprise, given the complexity of
the systems.
In March, the Government Accountability Office, Congress's budget watchdog,
said flight tests showed that the Raptor "was not meeting its requirements
for a reliable aircraft." Nonetheless, after additional tests, Air Force
officials now say they are confident in the plane's capabilities.
Though testing is still incomplete, "today all the technological challenges
are behind us," said Rob Weiss, a Lockheed deputy vice president for F-22
development. "There's a growing recognition of the need for this plane."
After rolling out of Lockheed's plant in Marietta, Ga., at a precisely
chosen time - 9:27 a.m. today, Oct. 27 - a new Raptor will join the 27th
Fighter Squadron at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. That will be the
moment when the Raptor becomes reality.

 ha scritto nel messaggio
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Interessante soprattutto questi due paragrafi
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 Interessante soprattutto questi due paragrafi
 Interessante soprattutto quando dice che nessun aero sovietico oggi
esistente sarebbe una minaccia per un F-15; già li cominciano a venirti dei
dubbi sul fatto che il giornalista sappia realmente di cosa parli....
Comunque; un piccola nota di grammatica inglese. Quando si usa il suffisso
"did not" seguito da un verbo, in questo caso "work", si indica un'azione
iniziata nel passato e temrinata nel passato.
Il senso della frase è quindi "l'avionica diede in passato dei problemi di
funzionamento e ci abbiamo messo un po' a capire dove stava l'inghippo.
Comunque direi che non c'è nulla di sorprendente, spece considerando le
magagne ben peggiori (anche da un punto di visto dell'avionica) di Rafale e
Typhoon.

 ha scritto nel messaggio
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a dire la verità io parlavo del fatto che la cpu è un 32 bit intel. E
comunque è il ny times

 comunque è il ny times
E si vede ;-)

 aggiornamenti futuri.
si lo so che si pensa ad una sorta di supercomputer e qualcuno ha anche
avanzato le specifiche di 10.2 ghz di clock. Tuttavia si tratterebbe di un
processore molto più potente di qualsiasi cosa disponibile sul mercato
civile (compresi quelli dei supercomputers usati per progettare bombe
atomiche e fare test idrodinamici del lawrence livermore lab o di los
alamos). Mi sembra strano che ci possa essere un divario così ampio. Anche
perchè si tratterebbe di una vera e propria cpu con sistema operativo e
tutti i livelli logici non di un chip magari più semplice dedicato. Insomma
sarebbe una lavoro di ricerca enorme da miliardi e miliardi di dollari visto
e considerato che anche la ricerca sull'itanium (per dirne uno) è stato un
investimento colossale.

 ha scritto nel messaggio
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e inoltre devi pensare che il sistema di combattimento del raptor è stato
pensato negli anni '90 quando una cpu del genere era sicuramente fuori
portata e non credo sia possibile che il sistema sia stato dilazionato così
tanto... Comunque penso che di qui a poco si saprà di più.

 un investimento colossale.
Ogni tanto GLobalsecurity agigorna le pagine, ma quando lo fa lo fa bene :
Common Integrated Processor (CIP)
The Hughes-built Common Integrated Processor (CIP) serve as the "brains" for
the F-22's totally integrated avionics system. CIPs are the central,
networked computers that enable the integration of radar, electronic
warfare, and identification sensor data, as well as communication,
navigation, weapon, and systems status data into coherent, fused information
for communication to the pilot via multi-function displays. Rather than
radar, the electronic warfare system, and the electronic warfare system
having individual processors, the CIP supports all signal and data
processing for all sensors and mission avionics.
The CIP modules have the ability to emulate any of the electronic functions
through automatic reprogramming. For example, if the CIP module that is
acting as radio dies, one of the other modules will automatically reload the
radio program and take over the radio function. This approach to avionics
makes the equipment extremely tolerant to combat damage as well as flexible
from a design upgrade point of view.
There are two CIPs in each F-22, with 66 module slots per CIP. The CIPs
(which is quite literally the size of a oversized bread box) are liquid
cooled avionics racks containing both signal processing and data processing
modules inserted into common backplane. They have identical backplanes, and
all of the F-22's processing requirements can be handled by only seven
different types of processors. There are 33 signal processors and 43 data
processors interconnected via a fault-tolerant network. Each processing
element is manufactured and packaged as an approximately 6x7x3/8ths inch
line replaceable module (LRM) for ease of flightline maintenance.
Each module is limited by design to only 75 percent of its capability, so
the F-22 has 30 percent growth capability with no change to the existing
equipment. Currently, 19 of 66 slots in CIP 1 and 22 of 66 slots in CIP 2
are not populated and are available for growth. There is space, power and
cooling provisions in the aircraft for a third CIP, so the requirement for a
200 percent avionics growth capability in the F-22 can be easily met. There
is coordinated plan for technology growth that will help keep the CIP at
state-of-the-art levels. As electronics continue to get smaller and more
powerful, it is conceivable that there could be 300 percent increase in
avionics capability.
The exponential explosion of computer technology in recent years has allowed
the F-22 team to radically alter every aspect of the program from detailed
design through manufacturing, communication, and into the cockpit itself. An
example of the effect of the advances in computer technology is a comparison
between the computers used in the Lunar Module and those used in the F-22.
The Lunar Module's computers operated at 100,000 operations per second and
had 37 kilobytes of memory. Today, the F-22's Common Integrated Processor
main mission computers operate at 10.5 billion instructions per second and
have 300 megabytes of memory. These numbers represent 100,000 times the
computing speed and 8,000 times the memory of the Apollo moon lander.
Nota in particolare il riferimento a 10,5 GigaMIPS attribuiti a ciascun
processore; ossia oltre *600000* volte la capacità di una CPU PentiumIV di
ultima generazione.

 ultima generazione.
La dice che è 100000 volte più veloce del computer del lem (anche il mio
modesto duron 1.5 ghz magari ha quell'ordine di grandezza di potenza) mentre
la memoria è di "soli" 300 mb (che è moltissima rispetto a tutti gli altri
computer avionici)

 mio modesto duron 1.5 ghz magari ha quell'ordine di grandezza di
Non vorrei deluderti ma un Pentium IV 2,4 Ghz arriva a malapena a 1700 MIPS
(da cui il 600.000 volte più potente di cui sopra).
Il tuo Duron dovrebbe attestarsi intorno agli 800/900 MIPS.
Per quanto riguardi il computer del LEM, non saprei; non ho mai letto le
caratteristiche anche se adesso mi è venuta la curiosità di fare una
ricerca.
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ALTTTT
Ferma tutto!! Mi sono appena accorto di aver fatto un errore enorme.
Il testo parla 10,5 miliardi di operazioni al secondo, non di 10,5 miliardi
di MIPS.
Ossia 10.500 MIPS, che rispetto ai 1700 MIPS di un PentiumIV significa 6
volte tanto; non 600.00 volte tanto.
La cifra mi pareva infatti esagerata......

 ricerca.
Scusa ma qua 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_instructions_per_second
alla fine dice che un pc ordinario oggi (4 agosto 2004) ha una potenza di
18000 mips che corrisponde a 18 giga mips (sarà un itanium)

 ha scritto nel messaggio
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E sei anche ingegnere ;o)  Comunque molto interessante la descrizione. Visto
che ci sei sai dirmi se è un'architettura parallela o vettoriale?

 18000 mips che corrisponde a 18 giga mips (sarà un itanium)
Riga sopra a quella da te citata " The far newer Pentium 4 chip performs at
approximately 1,700 MIPS."
Che è il dato a cui mi riferivo io.
Poi a che PC "ordinario" si riferisca nella riga sotto non saprei.
Comunque tirando le somme il concetto è che una CPU a 32 bit Intel del 90
non può essere il cuore del Raptor visto che 10500MIPS non li raggiunge
proprio. (un Intel 80486 del 90 raggiungeva a malapena i 20 MIPS)

 proprio. (un Intel 80486 del 90 raggiungeva a malapena i 20 MIPS)
Ribadisco: per me stiamo confrontando le mele con le pere.
ciao. dino.
-- 
Remove "no" and "spam" to e-mail

 componentisca COTS.
Sicuro che e' cosi'. Ma se (almeno) una scheda basata su 486 svolgesse la
funzione di busmaster e "supervisore" all'interno del rack del CIP, si
potrebbe in un certo senso dire che il 486 e' la "CPU della CPU del
Raptor"... ;)
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