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> continuation of a long-standing design work with Bell.

sunk investment. The success - it made into production in meaningful numbers - of V-22 means that design will be beaten to death.

Even though Bell X-22 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFdV5CVXGGw) was much better as prop VTOL than V-22, and for jet VTOL Ryan XV-5 Vertifan (look how great it is flying https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwvkjFIYWR8 ) was much better than F-35 has been and X-76 will be.

And giving pilotless future of combat air, a tail sitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail-sitter will work great in pilotless version not needing all that folding/tilting hardware. A pilotless would also not have to have at least double engines/etc for reliability (and the monstrosity of interconnect between those 2 engines like V-22 has and X-76 is bound to have).

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

Oof, I wish I had a job like that.

The Osprey has a reputation, for sure, but it's mid-pack. They called the F-104 the widow maker for a reason, for example. And the F-16 has a fairly high accident rate, too, slightly higher than the Osprey. Though I think the F-16's history is a bit more lopsided, they made some changes after early production airframes proved pretty accident prone.

The Osprey's accident rate is not that bad, and the US Army have ordered a new smaller tiltrotor, the v280.

L PRGB CHIP BURN

Any time there are planetaries or splines attached to jet engines, it's a really weak spot. This holds for ordinary turboprops too.

I was wondering why we’ve already give up on the harrier.

The next generations of accidents are going to be even more looney-tunes in nature.

All military aircraft are maintenance nightmares. They're also extraordinarily loud and devour fuel. These are not intended to entire commercial service where they need to turn a profit for the operators.

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.

The Congressional Country Club doesn't pay for itself, bud.

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.

From recent events, operations like the Maduro extraction could always benefit from technology in the category “helicopter, but faster”.

That background looks like AI for sure though?

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

I'm betting the person who created the "artist rendering" isnt an aeronautical engineer.

Because Sikorski can't make them work. Sure, they can take off and fly fast in a straight line, but they haven't been able to demonstrate sufficient maneuverability due to vibration problems in the rotor head. They are also very tall, prohibitively so for existing shipboard hangar, which would otherwise seem to be their advantage over tiltrotor platforms.

Speed and efficiency I suspect

Targeting a propeller for both raw lifting capacity as well as speed is quite difficult. I suspect they have different geometry as well.

If you spin a propeller fast enough the tips break the speed of sound, from what I recall that knackers the efficency. To generate lots of lift a bigger rotor is more efficient (hence why helicopters have long rotoblades that don't spin at high RPM)

The longer the blades the faster the tips, which means there is a tradeoff between thrust and speed of the air being yeeted out the back

My armchair general understanding: airspeed at blade tip can't be supersonic all the time, and that caps the max forward speed for prop driven aircraft. Same don't apply to jet engines with air intakes that can restrict and slow air flow

stealth

These days my vote would go to a quad. Impeller fore, impeller aft and one in each wing. Behind doors, obviously, like the bays for retractable landing gear - this is a solved problem.

They don't have to be efficient, because how much hovering time would you really need? Battery could even exist only in mission specific pods (internal perhaps, when it's a cargo carrier), trade-off as needed.

I'm quite fond of the caption, which describes a "a proof-of-concept technology demonstrator that aims to demonstrate technologies and concepts"

I think I'd rather have them working on airplane tech rather than writing airplane tech press releases. With this approach, it's not just a tactical thing; it's relieving the burden of wordsmithing from technical people.

Good to hear that the DoD's new contract with OpenAI is solving all the most important problems...

It's a quote from someone...?

It feels like DARPA has fallen so far. In a post-Salt Typhoon era it's really hard to imagine them as dynamic, best-in-class innovators anymore.

+50% top speed over the V280. Bell offered it as an alternative to the V280 in the early stage of the contract, but it was judged too experimental (and probably too expensive). Apparently DARPA is funding further development of the concept.

If you look at the V-22 safety record in the context of the level of technical development, it is pretty good (e.g. compare to helicopters and aircraft from the 60s). The first production generation of a brand new type of vehicle is always going to be complicated, and virtually all of the V-22 mishaps come from the "new" components and procedures.

The fundamental tradeoff with tiltrotor platforms is that you trade significantly increased speed for significantly increased complexity. What that means is your battlefield survivability goes up when dealing with any opponent with meaningful air defenses, but at the cost of increasing your "resting" accident rate when most peacetime accidents are consequences of maintenance and/or procedural issues.

The V-22's safety record is somewhere between a fixed wing aircraft and a helicopter. About what you'd expect.

Flying military aircraft is inherently dangerous. The US Army had 15 Class A mishaps in 2025, the USN 12, the USAF 14, and 6 for the USMC. The Apache (AH-64) led the Army, and this is a mature airframe, but shit happens.

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

Or I guess you mean /stellar?

It will need blades to VTOL.

Running exclusively off jet power would require an extremely (impossibly?) strong compressor stage coupled a powerful APU to generate lift. It's definitely not light enough to take off without tiltrotors.

That doctrine works great for defending your homeland, when you are taking off from your roadside base and coming back home to a road-based airfield already on the map.

My understanding of these VTOL aircraft is they need to travel a long way, quickly, and set down in far less predictable conditions.

I suppose the argument is that X-76 could work in environments without roads. But that also implies without fuel or any other support on the ground.

Can it hover?

https://web.archive.org/web/20260309171633/https://www.darpa... might work

Inaccessible from France. With family.dns.mullvad.net private DNS.

I can access it from the UK

Still up here in the US

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Osprey killed a lot of Marines over the past decades. It took a while to work out the issues. Hopefully we will remember what the Osprey taught us.

I don't think whatever is negotiated with Iran's current regime would actually be honored by them. They may commit something to get their leader back, but won't be keeping the promises.

Their self stated goal is destruction of Israel and US. They could have chosen peace and not have funded proxies across the middle east. Their choice of aggression by whatever means they have at their disposal just shows what their long term strategy would be.

They have shown the intend. They just didn't have the capacity to follow through. Once they gain the capacity, they could go extreme lengths. Just see how they attacked their neighbors who were not party to the war.

> A stealth drop ship like this would have allowed that to happen.

Yeah, I saw that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode too.

Sadly, we might need some more intensive vibranium research before it becomes reality.

Where do the 14 soldiers sit in the Gripen?

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.

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.

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.

Normally these kinds of press releases come out to generate public support for funding. I remember when the B-2 was super, super secret. No photos, "we don't know what you're talking about" answers from the military.

But when it looked like it might get cancelled pictures and exhibitions of it were suddenly everywhere.