>decades of prior wind tunnel testing on the folding rotor concept

Oof, I wish I had a job like that.

The V280 is designed to be cheap (a very relative term here).

Reading between the lines, I suspect "fast, but also expensive" was a design option that popped up and was not chosen earlier in the V280 program and now Darpa wants to pay to see where it goes.

it also has stealth. This is a complete disaster. The only purpose of this stealth ship is to steal leaders and or go inside cave lairs and blow them up.

16 hull losses per ~400 units built is not exactly a stellar safety record.

Or I guess you mean /stellar?

It's not a tactical choice- it's strategic deterrence, and it's not insane at all!

The US has always had a policy of messaging programs, with a lean toward classifying some percentage of the specific capabilities.

There's a reason that F-35 program was publicized by the US government as the program was under development. It makes the US air force even scarier, which discourages adversaries from thinking about conventional warfare with America.

That said- you won't see any detailed pics of the inside of an F35 cockpit, or a detailed look at the heads up display in the fancy helmet. That's top secret, because those making those details public don't offer enough additional deterrence to justify the risk to the program.

This isn't a new weapon, this is a test platform for various ideas, none of which are new or secret. Also, there are not many groundbreaking advancements left in military aviation. Most are just fairly incremental engineering or manufacturing improvements. (Military space technology might be a different story, though.)

The only other nation with the potential to develop a high-tech military plane that could rival US technology would be China. But if we ever got into a war with China, they wouldn't need superior technology to win. They could win via superior manufacturing capacity and the sheer number of people they can draft into service at a moment's notice.

I think they just show what it can be seen, like any country with advance military developments.

They won't show you everything.

Have you ever heard about those sound/sonic (or something similar) weapons the US used in Maduro's kidnap operation? Venezuelan soldiers said (pero some publications on the internet) that they never saw anything alike, leaving them completely disoriented and helpless?

Soldiers now can even see thermal figures through walls or solid materiales, and the same time, bacome invisibles.

It's more than sci-fi.

Usually with these programs, they just commission an artist with some vague description, like they tell him to draw a futuristic VTOL aircraft, these pics have zero bearing on what gets delivered.

Sometimes they even take the piss with this, like in this video for a next-gen engine, where you can see their engine doesn't even fit in their fantasy aircraft:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCHun6rxQm0

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stealth