#obviously icbms and rockets (which fly at hypersonic speeds) are different

[compacflt]

I know you said that you aren't the pinnacle of military knowledge that people think you are but know a damsite more than I do about the US military than I do, so I have a question. Do you have any idea how long the Darkstar project would've been going on for in canon? It can't have been a few months but I also don't know if it would be years and years? I know Mav has an award for being a test pilot that I think is dated 2007 (I may have imagined that) but that doesn't mean the Darkstar project was going on for over ten years? I think the F-18A took 8 years from testing to being approved, so it can't be far off. Just wanted your opinion. Thanks :-)

awright here’s my opinion (not an expert)

the darkstar is canonically a Lockheed Martin “skunk works” (super duper secret) surveillance and reconnaissance (SR) spyplane, as evidenced by the skunk works logo on the vertical stabilizer (left is darkstar, right is me with the SW logo on the SR-71 blackbird at the udvar-hazy museum this summer).

we can look to see how long other SW projects have taken to develop in the past. the SR-71, for instance, was first suggested as an “undetectable spyplane” idea in 1957. the lockheed A-12 oxcart, which would provide the framework for the SR-71, had its first flight in 1962, five years later. the finished SR-71 was introduced into USAF and CIA service in 1966. so a 9-year development for the fastest-ever air-breathing jet, with 4-ish of those years being flight testing (ish because the A-12 had to be heavily adapted into the SR-71 which had its first flight in 1964).

Lockheed’s been teasing its blackbird successor, the unmanned aerial vehicle the SR-72 “son of blackbird,” on its socials recently. i saw someone say: “soft-launching its new death machine like an instagram influencer with a new boyfriend”

leading many to believe this is what happened

note however that the SR-72 son of blackbird is an UNMANNED aerial vehicle (UAV) which is why in my fic I specifically said this

note also that most of aircraft development is just that—development. Flight testing (i.e. where mav would get hands-on involved) doesn’t come until very very late in the development process. For the plot of my fic’s sake I had mav go out to NAWS china lake in 2003, but in TGM during the Hard Deck scene Penny says something to the effect of “you got sent out to the desert three years ago for pissing off that other admiral” and mav goes “that was three years ago? 😀” (cute!) so that’s the longest mav could’ve canonically been involved with the darkstar project. (For my own purposes i made it like a year, for those two sections of the story to neatly flow into each other—from 2015ish to 2016. I know TGM takes place in 2020 [i know but idfc] Maybe LockMart has had this tech [probably not high hypersonic like in the movie] for that long anyway and it’s just been so heavily classified that we didn’t know about it till very recently. Definitely possible.)