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Alaan posted:That's why I prefer a free range strategic bomber. Haha.
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Apr 8, 2015 19:43
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I definitely prefer my missiles uncaged.
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Apr 8, 2015 19:46
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evil_bunnY posted:It was probably just glue and epoxy fumes, so nothing you want to breathe, but probably not superfund-nasty either. Frozen Horse posted:Thinking about submarines, nuclear weapons, and mishaps, is the U.S. navy's ballistic missile submarine program as much of a terrible place where careers go to die as land-based missiles? If not, why not? Also, it's easier to sweep your mistakes under the rug when you're hidden by 200 fathoms of water.
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Apr 8, 2015 20:28
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Frozen Horse posted:Thinking about submarines, nuclear weapons, and mishaps, is the U.S. navy's ballistic missile submarine program as much of a terrible place where careers go to die as land-based missiles? If not, why not? There are few jobs on a submarine that can't be easily translated into real-world employment, even if you don't advance through the ranks. Reactor wonks are going to have skills that are necessary and highly-marketable until they die, desalinization and hydrolysis knowledge will be valuable, not only the military uses sonar, and even the general mechanics are so well-trained they can pretty much spec out on anything for the rest of their lives. Hell, even the guy who cleans the toilets is trained in rudimentary firefighting to the point where he could *probably* stand a decent chance at becoming a firefighter provided he (and somewhat soon, *she*) kept in shape. Then of course, you have the fact that all of these guys were able - if not always particularly happy to - be away from their families for weeks/months at a time with little to no contact, proving that they're consistently willing to put the job first. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Apr 8, 2015 |
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Apr 8, 2015 20:31
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Submarine Officer 101: Too fat for SEALS, too socially awkward for Pilot
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Apr 8, 2015 20:51
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BIG HEADLINE posted:There are few jobs on a submarine that can't be easily translated into real-world employment, even if you don't advance through the ranks. Reactor wonks are going to have skills that are necessary and highly-marketable until they die, desalinization and hydrolysis knowledge will be valuable, not only the military uses sonar, and even the general mechanics are so well-trained they can pretty much spec out on anything for the rest of their lives. Hell, even the guy who cleans the toilets is trained in rudimentary firefighting to the point where he could *probably* stand a decent chance at becoming a firefighter provided he (and somewhat soon, *she*) kept in shape. I knew a guy who was an AC tech on subs, and didn't care for it. His job after he left the service? Working as a contractor on AC units on subs. It turns out that all of his training was nearly useless for shoreside HVAC, where most systems don't care about scrubbing CO2, running off of waste steam from a nuclear plant, or running very quietly without vibration.
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Apr 8, 2015 21:07
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He probably could've spend 6 months' of his GI Bill at a votech school like every other civilian HVAC tech.
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Apr 8, 2015 21:10
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PCjr sidecar posted:I knew a guy who was an AC tech on subs, and didn't care for it. His job after he left the service? Working as a contractor on AC units on subs. It turns out that all of his training was nearly useless for shoreside HVAC, where most systems don't care about scrubbing CO2, running off of waste steam from a nuclear plant, or running very quietly without vibration. Woe to him for working the same job but now 9-5 M-F and for triple the pay.
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Apr 8, 2015 21:57
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Frozen Horse posted:Thinking about submarines, nuclear weapons, and mishaps, is the U.S. navy's ballistic missile submarine program as much of a terrible place where careers go to die as land-based missiles? If not, why not? You'll never see an Air Force missile guy be Chief of Staff, but every admiral who rose out of the submarine community wears a pin from a tour on a boomer. A quick check found that all of the major sub figures in the Navy right now (4 stars, major commanders) had their CO tour in fast attacks, though. I don't know if there's a fast attack mafia or if it's a coincidence. Here, have a crappy video of what the end of the world would almost look like; a test launch of the 15A15 (SS-18 Satan). These once carried 20 megaton warheads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CesOCasyy-c
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Apr 8, 2015 22:02
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Alaan posted:You could not pay me enough to work on a Russian submarine. Yes, one could.
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Apr 8, 2015 22:30
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Red Crown posted:You'll never see an Air Force missile guy be Chief of Staff, but every admiral who rose out of the submarine community wears a pin from a tour on a boomer. A quick check found that all of the major sub figures in the Navy right now (4 stars, major commanders) had their CO tour in fast attacks, though. I don't know if there's a fast attack mafia or if it's a coincidence. Was the CEP on Soviet ICBM's significantly larger than Western ones? I think I heard (maybe in this thread even) that there is a big diminishing-returns factor with nukes past a certain size and the Russian ones tried to compensate for a larger CEP footprint by instead using a larger-than-optimum nuke size. It had nothing to do with their weird tendency to build large bombs just because they like to claim they did while the country crumbles. Nooooothing at all to do with that. Not a thing.
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Apr 8, 2015 22:48
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The real way to measure
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Apr 8, 2015 22:51
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Dandywalken posted:Was the CEP on Soviet ICBM's significantly larger than Western ones? I think I heard (maybe in this thread even) that there is a big diminishing-returns factor with nukes past a certain size and the Russian ones tried to compensate for a larger CEP footprint by instead using a larger-than-optimum nuke size. The diminishing returns are simply the inverese square law; the amount of (omnidirectional) energy needed to generate the same effect goes up exponentially with distance.
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Apr 9, 2015 00:52
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Here's some mid-Cold War civil defense photos that were posted by the City of Boston today. It's a staged photo op where civil defense volunteers load supplies down into an unused tunnel in Boston's subway. Photogenically multi-ethnic, I guess this is before everyone went crazy during bussing.   Postscript: some of the the supplies are still down there as recently as 2014.   
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Apr 9, 2015 01:17
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Dandywalken posted:Was the CEP on Soviet ICBM's significantly larger than Western ones? I think I heard (maybe in this thread even) that there is a big diminishing-returns factor with nukes past a certain size and the Russian ones tried to compensate for a larger CEP footprint by instead using a larger-than-optimum nuke size. One of the stories in "Dead Hand" involves how much needless military spending their was in the Soviet Union. While the number of replacement missiles per boomer tends be something like 1.5 in the west, every SSBN the Soviets sailed had six or seven replacements per tube. In the 1980s during Gorbachev's reforms, one of his advisers was on a Typhoon during a missile test. After launching a missile as part of the training exercise, he asked the captain "So that missile cost the same as an entire block of flats for like 200 families. Was using a missile really necessary?" And the Captain thinks about it for a sec, and replies "Yeah, I guess we just could have used a concrete dummy missile."
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Apr 9, 2015 01:36
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Russia's T-14 tank may not be all it's cracked up to be (surprise surprise  ), two of them broke down during a practice Victory parade.
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Apr 9, 2015 07:41
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Despite all the paper projects, what Russia's actually *trying* to do with their military is pretty ambitious. Too bad it's sort of like they're JSFing every single thing in their inventory. "One tank chassis to rule them all (Armata), one plane to fly them (the PAK series), one missile to nuke them all (Topol/Bulava series), and on the balance sheets break them."
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Apr 9, 2015 07:53
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BIG HEADLINE posted:"One tank chassis to rule them all (Armata), one plane to fly them (the PAK series), one missile to nuke them all (Topol/Bulava series), and on the balance sheets break them." lmao Even if all those projects turn out to be unfixable, unmitigated poo poo, they've still gone out of their way to keep the MIC rolling. Shows you what the real priorities are these days, and how much more budgetary leeway they have (had?) compared to the nineties.
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Apr 9, 2015 08:22
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Despite all the paper projects, what Russia's actually *trying* to do with their military is pretty ambitious. Too bad it's sort of like they're JSFing every single thing in their inventory. So everything will actually turn out all right since there is no Russian USMC to demand nonsensical capabilities?
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Apr 9, 2015 08:33
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Godholio posted:He probably could've spend 6 months' of his GI Bill at a votech school like every other civilian HVAC tech. No idea why they don't include some regular HVAC training for the navy guys. It's the same in Australia, the company I worked for had one guy going to Garden Is. and other docks for small ships every day, doing refrig cabinet repairs and other basic HVAC stuff because it seems no one trains mechs on boats. Which is strange since they all have food storage fridges and freezers. This includes the RAN, I had to help out my coworker on a few frigates and collins subs. Normal HVAC and refrig is pretty easy unless looking into the engineering and design side. It's just basic soldering, electric, electronic and normal troubleshooting skills. Fo3 fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 08:34
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Fo3 posted:No idea why they don't include some regular HVAC training for the navy guys. It's the same in Australia, the company I worked for had one guy going to Garden Is. and other docks for small ships every day, doing refrig cabinet repairs and other basic HVAC stuff because it seems no one trains mechs on boats. Which is strange since they all have food storage fridges and freezers. He got the same HVAC training I did: Basic refrig theory + troubleshooting procedures. If you can't turn that into a productive career on the outside, then there's probably a reason the Navy didn't want to keep you, either. This is a common complaint with ex-military. "The [army/navy/air force/marines/coast guard/etc] didn't train me for this!" Agreed, they didn't give you a Personnel Qualification Standard for each specific task of your new job, but they taught you how to think on your feet and use basic systems knowledge to solve problems of a general sort. At some point, they also taught you how to shut up, stop whining, and just do the job. I've worked with Supply Clerks and office staff who've gotten their EPA cert for free using Tuition Assistance and used it to moonlight as HVAC techs on weekends for beer money. Their schools didn't even give them basic troubleshooting skills: just discipline and dedication.
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Apr 9, 2015 12:37
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babyeatingpsychopath posted:This is a common complaint with ex-military. "The [army/navy/air force/marines/coast guard/etc] didn't train me for this!" Agreed, they didn't give you a Personnel Qualification Standard for each specific task of your new job, but they taught you how to think on your feet and use basic systems knowledge to solve problems of a general sort. My experience with recent USAF short-timers would like to argue this point. I know some retired career Air Force maintainers that were borderline-wizards, but some of the single-enlistment people I've worked with have been loving dangerously incompetent. Like, can't be trusted to perform simple tasks unsupervised, even after repeated instruction levels of bad.
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Apr 9, 2015 12:58
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Throatwarbler posted:So everything will actually turn out all right since there is no Russian USMC to demand nonsensical capabilities? It's better to consider that all their armed forces branches are Russian USMC.
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Apr 9, 2015 13:23
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The Marines' boondoggles don't hold a candle to the weird poo poo the Soviets built or tried to build, like airborne amphibious IFVs. e: It's a bit illuminating that the VDV's tank destroyer thing, the 2S25, was abandoned after it caught fire during the Moscow victory day parade. Not the fact that it caught fire, but the fact that the issue went unnoticed until the vehicle was on parade, which suggests that's all they ever used it for. Mortabis fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 14:11
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Throatwarbler posted:So everything will actually turn out all right since there is no Russian USMC to demand nonsensical capabilities? That'd be the vdv.
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Apr 9, 2015 14:25
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*screams* Desantniki!!! *bunch of overweight dudes start emerging from public square fountain, wearing skin tight blue-white shirts, drinking wodka from a capless bottle, commence to harass women and assaulting the lone tajik streetsweeper* Aww yeahhh
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Apr 9, 2015 16:57
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Koesj posted:*screams* Desantniki!!! Or, if one is more receptive to Russian Govt. PR - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAHrHd2lcw
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Apr 9, 2015 17:05
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I want to say that the Russian marines probably want to re-fight the siege of Sevastapol, but they just....did that IRL? I don't know how the joke would work anymore.
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Apr 9, 2015 17:06
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MrYenko posted:My experience with recent USAF short-timers would like to argue this point. I know some retired career Air Force maintainers that were borderline-wizards, but some of the single-enlistment people I've worked with have been loving dangerously incompetent. Like, can't be trusted to perform simple tasks unsupervised, even after repeated instruction levels of bad. It doesn't mean their schools didn't teach it, just that it didn't stick. People get pushed through the class unless they are literally a nonstop danger to themselves and others. Unmitigated screwups? That's fine, as long as they're not DANGEROUS.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:11
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For a country with 1/7 of the USA military spending, the equipment and performance of the Russian military is pretty decent. Who cares if some of their stuff doesn't work? If it scares the Nato enough that Russia can take Crimea without the need to fire a single bullet, it's certainly money well spent. Besides, there will never be a hot war between two nuclear superpowers.
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Apr 9, 2015 22:55
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No one cares, Cip.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:05
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Cippalippus posted:Besides, there will never be a hot war between two nuclear superpowers. How hot are we talking? India and Pakistan have had at least one war since they got nukes, right?
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Apr 9, 2015 23:05
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Also, Russia's not a superpower.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:07
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US military spending is a bit misleading because just how much money gets extracted out of it by the MIC.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:10
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Taerkar posted:US military spending is a bit misleading because just how much money gets extracted out of it by the MIC. No, that doesn't even make sense, for two reasons: no money is being "extracted," firstly, and second, the Russian government buys its stuff from private (or partly private) companies too.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:13
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How able is the US w/r/t fighting the rooskies anyway? Some extremely half-assed googling implies Congress' constant slapfights re: funding are loving with Army readiness but it's not like I know anything or can find sources that don't seem like either clickbait or PR campaigns to up defense spending.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:17
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We're pretty much good I think but let me check the latest intel on youtube video comments about the F-35 and PAK-FA.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:21
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Davin Valkri posted:India and Pakistan have had at least one war since they got nukes, right? Also the USSR and PRC had at least one border conflict in which people died.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:22
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Probably not very good. We've spent the last decade fighting a low intensity occupation / counter-insurgency against idiot children who can't hit back. Not sure if Ol' Vlad has enough armored divisions around to try and have a go at Western Europe but if he did we'd be sorely out of shape.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:24
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INTJ Mastermind posted:Probably not very good. We've spent the last decade fighting a low intensity occupation / counter-insurgency against idiot children who can't hit back. Not sure if Ol' Vlad has enough armored divisions around to try and have a go at Western Europe but if he did we'd be sorely out of shape. lol The Russians struggle to project force in their own backyard and you expect to see T14s in Paris?
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Apr 9, 2015 23:38
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