Well There‘s Your Problem - Bonus Episode 45 PREVIEW: Stealth Part 2

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

really hard to see full episode on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/posts/113302251

Ooh, B2 Spirit. Oh, hello. This airframe is the B2 Spirit. It is a beautiful aircraft, and at a steal, at the cost of only 2.5 billion dollars per airframe, you can get four airframes for the price of ending homelessness in the US for an entire year. How many podcasts would I have to start to buy a B2 Spirit? Always, at least one more.

Well, what's the cost of a used one, that's the real question. I do like pre-owned B2 spirit. ALWAYS. At least one more. Well, what's the cost of a used one, that's the real question. I do like pre-owned B2 stealth. I do like that if you look on the bottom left by the landing gear they've labeled these two guys, Spirits of Pennsylvania on the right, and on the left you have Ed. Ed, yes. Ed. Well, that's Ed Rendell. Obviously.

Lookin' trim, Ed! Yeah. Demonstrating the Spir trim, Ed! Yeah. Demonstrating the spirit of Pennsylvania. Yeah. What is the spirit of Pennsylvania, if you had to put like a sort of vibe on it? What is... Probably Rittenhouse Rye. Yeah, well, they don't make it in Pennsylvania, but...

Oh, damn. For a while you couldn't even buy it in Pennsylvania, you had to SLO it from the liquor store, but that's beyond the point. The spirit of Pennsylvania is walking into his sheets, It is 1230 in the morning. You are already drunk. You have you have walks there. This podcast is not condoned drunk driving. You walk to the sheets on Queen Street like I used to do. You go in there and you buy a roller coat. And then at some point, someone from a rival school says something mean that hurts your feelings and you start throwing hands at a Sheets parking lot and at some point your

hoodie comes off and you're just shirtless in a Sheets parking lot. It's 12.45 a.m. You've got a wad of coke and you don't know where you are. That's the spirit of Pennsylvania. You're wearing basketball shorts this entire time. I just rewrote this for those of you listening on audio only, to say, fine wine and good spirits of Pennsylvania. SEAN Thank you.

Can you get it in... alright, I'm gonna do some live on air research, everybody hang tight. Oh shut up. JUSTIN Can you order a B2 through the state store? SEAN Can you imagine, man? That would be awesome! ALICE I once had, cause, like, um, Chris really likes Rittenhouse Rye.

LIAM Yeah, you can get it in store now. ALICE Yeah, it's really good. I had a bottle of it, and I had someone ask me, is this named for Kyle Rittenhouse? LIAM It is not. ALICE And the idea that someone had put out, like, a kind of bottled in bond rye whiskey, named after the like, sort of, doughy fascist murderer kid, and started producing and bottling it well before the incident occurred. SEAN Yeah, it's a four year old rye.

ALICE Strange sort of tenet, you know? JUSTIN Yeah, a little bit of, uh, I'd have some conspiracy theories about that. What did they know? A little bit of, a little bit of, uh, I'd have some conspiracy theories about that. What did they know? Well, it's owned in, uh, it's owned by Heaven Hill. Is it? I believe it is distilled by Heaven Hill, yeah. So I don't know. I believe it is named for Rittenhouse Square, or David Rittenhouse, the early American astronomer.

Okay. The Spirit of Pennsylvania, I can't tell you where I first saw this bird, but I knew that it existed, and I wanted to throw it in the other shoe house. Which, you know, mission fulfilled. They have now done several minutes of authentic Pennsylvania nonsense. I mean, as at, the best modern medical technology turned me into a Philly girl. So I'm gonna leave that there. If you wanna go stealth, go to Philadelphia. So, I'm gonna leave that there. If you wanna go stealth,

let's go to Philadelphia. ALICE Yeah, hoot hoot, motherfucker. RILEY We can either talk about this particular plan some more, or we can go down to the next slide where we are going to pick up about the changes to modern stealth technology after the F-111. Sorry, after the F-117. ALICE I can mention one thing really quickly about the B-2 Spirit, which is that it's crazy how much there's still a bomber mafia in the US Air Force, like, in a way that there isn't in the RAF, really, because there wasn't the numbers or the budget for it, but still having

air-delivered nuclear weapons. Which is one of the things that the B2's meant to do, right? It's like, you know... It was intended as an air defense penetration, yes. There was a very, very stupid book out about how a hypothetical war, nuclear exchange between the US and North Korea might go down. And in that book, just out, I forget the author's name. In that book, one of the dumber things that directly precipitates World War Three is the US retaliating to a North Korean nuclear strike with ICBMs overflying Russia.

Which precipitates a Russian retaliation. I'm sure we have more games to prevent this exact problem. You would hope. But one of the things you also have besides submarines is these things. If anybody is gonna be penetrating North Korean air defense to try and kill Kim Jong-un, it's gonna be these things. So that's gonna be a fun time for everyone concerned, and we hope it never happens. But it's what it's for amongst other things, right? It's like very, very, kind of, contested, defended airspace.

RILEY I am not saying anything for very good reasons. ALICE Hmm. RILEY Nuking North Korea almost sounds unfair. I mean... ALICE I mean, I think nuking anyone is kind of unfair. RILEY Yeah, that's not... I mean, that's why we have the Beasts of the Seas, right? ALICE Unfair at a sort of, like, yeah, it's unfair at, kind of, like, an atomic level, if you like. Yeah, it's like, oh my god, they lobbed their one nuke at us, and I don't know, hit us. That's literally what happens in the book, it's so fucking dumb, I swear to God, they

do a decapitation strike on Washington DC, and then the US tries to nuke North Korea and start World War Three with Russia. It's the dumbest fucking- SEAN I don't understand why we wouldn't just park a submarine and say- DADDY I don't understand why we wouldn't just park a submarine and say- DADDY I don't understand why we wouldn't just

park a submarine and say- DADDY I don't understand why we wouldn't just park a submarine and say- DADDY I don't understand why we wouldn't just park a submarine and say- DADDY I don't understand why we wouldn't just park a submarine and say- DADDY I don't understand why we wouldn't just

park a submarine and say- DADDY I don't understand why we wouldn't just park a submarine and say- SEAN Iran's ICBMs are launched from continental US anyway, due to one of our... this is speculation warning. You want one of our unmanned drone submarines armed with nuclear weapons to launch them, say, the Bering Strait. ALICE So the North Korean ICBMs have that kind of range. I'm imagining more of a situation where they take out the cannery in American Samoa. ALICE I mean, basically, like...

LIAM The North Korean cannery! ALICE It's, y'know, the kind of thing where you might start sweating a bit more if you're on Guam, but like... I dunno, we'll see. We'll see. I have a slide, and this is slide 47. JUSTIN They actually take out the ocean about 60 miles offshore of the Canary in American Samoa. ALICE Slide 47 is where I'm gonna do all my rampant speculation. If we go to the next slide we can talk more about the B2.

JUSTIN Disrupts some fishing grounds for a few weeks. SEAN We're gonna do Operation Paul Bunyan 2. Operation harder. RILEY Changes in modern stealth technology. You'll notice that the B2 does not look like the F117. Which, correcting an additional, not in errata, but I didn't have the number for you off the top of my head of the picture. If you go back to the previous episode, just rewatch it for the YouTube metrics, go back to the previous episode

and look when we're talking about satellite imagery of Edwards Air Force Base, there was a white plane on the tarmac with swing wings. That was the F117, sorry, F111. That was the precursor swing wing to the F14 Tomcat, which you know from Top Gun. Back to this slide, the changes to stellar technology were less of the angles

because angles were bad for air. We went to very smooth top and bottom surfaces and tried to minimize the back reflections by having sharper, but not sharp themselves leading edges. And we can have sharp trailing edges, air is fine with that. Because of those design constraints, it actually opened up a lot of aerodynamic performance.

And we'll see this design persists into the modern era with the next slide, which we're not going to yet. Which we're not going to yet. ALICE I reacted too quick. Yeah, we solved it, this is the shape that it is. RILEY This is the shape that carries heavy things and is reasonably stealthy. You get these zigzaggy back edges because you kind of want to make a triangle

but you don't want to create new angles. We only have, I'm going to say two angles, technically it's four, but you only have two diagonals you're worried about and those two diagonals make a cross. Those two diagonals are about 35 degrees away from the side, not the front. So that's how they're measuring them. I don't

agree with the way they measured them on this chart, but I did not have time to make my own. So you get something measured from the right hand side angle, not the nose of the aircraft, from the nose of the aircraft to the side. It's a 55 degree angle, which is what I'm used to referencing when I was doing things I can't tell you about. This particular design is really good, we'll see it again in the future, it allows for war crimes to be done without anybody knowing about them. Next slide please. ALICE I don't like the aesthetic of this one, it looks too much like the cartoon ghost. LIAM Yeah, I was thinking what if America Bomber, but spookier?

This is the B-21. It is a thing that exists, it should not. When the US Military Acquisitions Department gave the F-35 away to a different group than the group that created the B2 after killing my darling doll, my baby, my F23. They then got into trouble for not giving an aircraft to the makers of the B2 stealth bomber. And so they created a new bomber program. This, my friends, is a B21. This is modern day. It is to my knowledge, redacted. But the B-21 is a very expensive bird. The... ALICE Bommer Mafia, again and again. They caught this, the B-21 Raider, and they got the last surviving do-little raider to come to the ribbon cutting. And it's like, that's a hell of a military tradition to still be dining out on in hopes

that one day you get to, like, glass Pyongyang, you know? ALICE Well, we do know at least... SEAN Yeah, A-10 mafia, man. It's just me. ALICE It's not just you, it is not just you in the house, I was about to say. It's a lot of people, yeah. SEAN What we gotta do, what we gotta do is, you've

heard of depleted uranium munitions, now we're gonna get the active uranium munitions, so I'm gonna make Davy Crockett bullets, and uh... But meanwhile, we spend like... Liam's here angling for another laser pig response video. Jesus. Hey buddy, how's it going? But yeah, you spend like, you know, eleven kajillion dollars to create Casper the Friendly Ghost who thinks only of the Three Gorges Dam, and

you're like, oh, wha- cool. Thanks for this. LIAM What we do know, at least, is that this is nineteen better than the B2. ALICE It's a full twenty better than the B1. Even the B1 with the upgraded engines, which hilariously is genuinely named the B1R or Boner. ALICE & TROY Wow.

I have a proposal for this, right. ZACH Wow. This is a horny joke in 2008 in the barracks. ALICE If the B2s are all spirit of state, I propose that the B21s are named vibes of state, because if something gets to blow up the Three Gorges Dam and drown a bunch of people for next to no reason, and make it so that, like, y'know, World War Three starts and, y'know, everything downstream of that, it should be called Vibes of Pennsylvania.

RILEY I can't argue with that logic. LIAM We like dams here. ALICE Hmm. Just like the plane that takes its shirt off before it starts dropping ordnance. LIAM Okay, well, you know what, I would like to do so. ALICE The first munition that comes out of this has, like, your lucky-I-am-on parole painted on it. JUSTIN It's like we discussed on Ten Thousand Losses, the intercontinental ballistic hoagie,

or multiple hoagie reentry vehicles, this can also deliver hoagies in bomb form. ALICE And to your friends. For National Wednesday. RILEY And it can deliver them without them knowing who the sender was. And to their unsuspecting heads, I'm assuming. ALICE That's Secret Santa.

ALICE Looking at the place where North Korea was, and being like, I wonder who could have done this. STORM So this particular airframe has the optimistic... If you wanted to drop Hokies on your friends, this airframe has the optimistic price of only $700 million per airframe. I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna say that we just simply haven't yet heard of the cost overruns and the budget things, so this is an active stealth aircraft development project, and that if we get out the door for five times that I will consider that a steal. I will also consider it a complete waste of money. But like, you know, you get what you pay for. And if you're paying for genocide, that's what you get. So this the program is budgeted for $203 billion over the

next 30 years. And that is the budget. And as we all know, the U S never goes over budget on large defense spending projects. Yeah, that would, that would be silly and that would be slander. And I couldn't say that in my professional role, even though I am attending as a private citizen in this moment, public procurement is the one thing the United States has down pat. We are great at it in all sectors. So good, dude.

Including the defense, of course. Really enjoying this idea that, like, the first podcast to really start racking up the Hatch Act violations, y'know? So this particular airframe program could basically end homelessness for the entire duration of its existence, that's budgeted for. Instead of doing that, we're gonna have bombers that are never gonna see combat. ALICE I think you'd have a hard time landing munitions on every homeless person.

JUSTIN Jesus Christ. KATE You know, distributed targets are not a stealth bomber's best target option. ALICE Mmhm. If you want to avoid one of these things, just go and stand in a field on your own, and make all of your friends stand in adjacent fields. Just make it not worth the cost of the bomb. The US will drop it anyway, but they will only get like one out of the ten of you, of

your friends standing on that 40-acre field. So. Yeah, and now Afghanistan is an Islamic Emirate, so, y'know, the shit works out, sort of. Exactly. We do what we must because we can. Next slide please. Oh, now we're into the really goofy stuff.