Is it complex? Yes, but so is the problem it's trying to solve. Is its complexity still nicer and easier to use than the previous generation of multimachine deployment systems? Also yes.

This is well put and it's very similar to the arguments made when comparing programming languages. At the end of the day you can accomplish the same tasks no matter which interface you choose.

Personally I've never found kubernetes that difficult to use[1]. It has some weird, unpredictable bits, but so does sysvinit or docker, that just ends up being whatever you're used to.

[1] except for having to install your own network mesh plugin. That part sucked.

This is a blatant lie.

What a weird lie to parrot.

Just with inflation (6.4m) and number of victims (22?) you get a much larger number real quick.

This is also the result of multiple lost lawsuits as well as additional penalties from not complying with court directives during the cases.

So how are you hunting and finding the carriers in the first place? You can't have it both ways.

> I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.

We're talking about a hypothetical US carrier war against china. Is there something interesting to talk about with regards to iran trying to defend against carriers?

People have been saying this for approximately the last 50 years. Maybe it's true today, but the odds are against it.

It's not impossible to track a carrier group via satellites, but it's not trivial either, you can't just, like, open up your windows gui and click on a satellite and click the button that says "follow this carrier" because like satellites orbit and fly around the earth and the ships can alter course when you don't have eyes on them and so on and so forth.

And yeah, as you point out, there's a big difference between having a satellite picture showing a probable carrier group at X and Y coordinates and being able to actually strike the thing.

I can't comment on how accurate that is, but as for "cheap mass produced shit", I refer you to both times the US invaded iraq. Kill ratios on the order of literally 100 to 1. This is the point at which you can't actually overwhelm better technology with quantity.

Wars are, of course, incredibly more complicated than just measuring kill ratios and highscores as if it were a video game. There's usually multiple factions involved, all with differing objectives and those factions and objectives can change and mutate during the course of the war anyways.

If we look at a war the US unequivocally lost, defending south vietnam from the north vietnam invasion, there are a whole bunch of factors but exactly none of them involved some kind of "high tech too advanced" weapon system being defeated by "lower tech but more mass produced" systems.

Doing some incredibly basic research shows that the actual dollar cost of the vietnam war was, relative to the american economy and so on, pretty small, and not a major factor in the ultimate result of the war. Producing fighter jets or whatever that were 10% cheaper doesn't seem like it would have made much of a difference.

This actually kind of proves my point, we can "go to war" with iraq or iran and as long as we're not implementing literal conscription, the US is willing to maintain those wars for a very long time. There's a gigantic difference in public response between "2 pilots died when f35s were ambushed" and "10,000 american soldiers died in this month's battles around Baghdad". One of those gets you some headlines and a few protests, the other gets you voted out of office.

If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast, what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders and then sail the carriers up?

Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are, right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.

People write some code, test it, ship it, then get some ideas that its too slow and make it faster.

The nice thing about doing it with shipped code is you can actually measure where time is spent insyead of guessing.

I mean, yeah, we're talking about the part of the war that is unrelated to the weapon systems involved.

And nobody is searching them during a state of war?

> A lot of drones have surprisingly long range.

I guarantee a missile launched from a f35 launched from a carrier has a much longer range.

What makes you think they can't?

Ignoring some kind of dedicated anti-drone missile systems that they could equip (if you're just hitting drones you could probably carry like 500 tiny missiles or something, who knows), you can just go and destroy whatever platform is carrying the drones, since your carrier aircraft is pretty much going to outrange it by definition.