>>6188411 lb re F-117 still in service.

The F-117 is unique among other LO aircraft in several ways. I won't go into too many details because of possible opsec concerns, but people often have a distorted belief that all new things are better than old things. While, in many cases, this is true; "they just don't build them like they used to" also applies.

For example, why is it that we have computers that are more powerful than a hundred computers from ten years ago, but web browsers clunk along and chew up more virtual memory than our first computer's whole hard drive?

I am kind of exaggerating - but why do so many web pages want access to my camera and microphone? If I want to talk to my phone like a mouth-breather and have it input what I say into a text field, that is handled by the operating system or another application through the OS, not the web page.

If you crack open the source of most web pages, they are filled with placeholder calls to advertising services (hosted by google, usually). Google changed their motto from "don't be evil", didn't they? We are up against pure evil.

These placeholders can be used for insertion of executable code uses DLLs to run in memory and grant itself admin level permissions. Since it runs only in memory, there will be almost no evidence it was running on the hard drive.

Anyway, Q drops aside, the neat thing about many old devices is that they were built with limitations on their capabilities. It sounds kind of insane, these days, but take ye olde ballistic missile submarine. They have completely self-contained navigation systems that work underwater. They go out to their stations and disappear. That is their job. Only the captain and navigation crew know where they are. Well, and the missiles, once the launch command is given and positional data is dumped to them.

The SR-71 is another interesting example. It had an automated star dome for navigation and could get data accurate enough to land the aircraft off of using the positional data from the dome, alone. If accounts of it are correct. No GPS. No datalink. Just a plane and a destination to say hello to.

Old stuff did what it needed to do in order to fulfill its mission. Bluetooth toasters are kind of cool, I suppose, but when the decepticons are taking over the digital space, a simple fucking toaster is like a ray of divine insight and genius amid a world of toothpicks with embedded supercomputers.