Right. I actually quite like the spike SR so long as people don't try to replace jav's with it.

RovingPedant said:

Well, yes, but actually no. At least if you want a weapon that is safe and reliable in all weathers and conditions. You could make a system that works* for a low price but it would be a cheap system. You wouldn’t necessarily know what capabilities** you weren’t getting either. * for a given value of “works” ** things like “functions in the rain”, “doesn’t accidentally go off when you are using your radio” or “doesn’t loop back onto operator”

That's a rather condescending response, while vaguely hand-waving away my point rather than countering with any substance.

If you're asserting that cost reduction on those scales cannot be achieved while simultaneously meeting military specifications, I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree. Cost of hardware (such as thermal sensors) have fallen more than one orders of magnitude since the early 90s, expansion of infrastructure driven by the consumer electronics industry has also driven down costs of hardware, and when combined with advances in software have become capable of incredible things.  There's nothing in there that entails sacrificing safety or reliability, if anything it can be made more reliable.

Refleks said...

That's a rather condescending response, while vaguely hand-waving away my point rather than countering with any substance.

It was intended as a lighter tone than perhaps it came across. Maybe I misread the tone of your initial post which could be taken as accusing every arms manufacturer as incompetent and corrupt, with no more substance than my response.

Refleks said...

Cost of hardware (such as thermal sensors) have fallen more than one orders of magnitude since the early 90s,

You can indeed get surprisingly cheap thermal imagers these days. I have one that clips onto my phone. It’s not a patch on a good (and hence expensive) one, and that goes a long way beyond image quality when new. Operating Temperature range is a big difference between consumer electronics and hardened gear.

As another example, my bargain bin Bresser binoculars aren’t nearly as good as my Zeiss ones, but they do more or less the same job.

Refleks said...

expansion of infrastructure driven by the consumer electronics industry has also driven down costs of hardware, and when combined with advances in software have become capable of incredible things.  There's nothing in there that entails sacrificing safety or reliability, if anything it can be made more reliable.

When all this hardware is designed for consumer use, there are many factors that impact safety or reliability. Part of the improvements in performance is down to making parts of the hardware smaller, which directly impacts physical and EMI robustness.

My point, as much as anything, is that you can make a cheap guided munition that will work in certain situations but there are reasons, which are not immediately apparent, why military stuff is expensive. If you could convince contracting militaries to accept less evidence of safety then you could bring the price down, but many of those requirements are hard won, in both materiel and human cost.