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You are awesome, this thread is awesome. I haven't read a long-rear end post that informative in goddamned forever. As for your next entry, the story of the Tu-4 is always hilarious and worth reading. Oh Soviet Russia, you were such scamps 
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Dec 15, 2010 11:15
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All I know is that your damned computers replaced this: <  >Look at that guy in the background there? See how loving smug he looks? It's because he gets to spend his day as an officer in the wartime RAF knee deep in some pretty decent looking chicks wearing not unattractive uniforms rather than being shot at by the Luftwaffe. Oh, but the computers are more efficient! Oh, but they're faster at plotting intercepts! Oh but it's all automated! gently caress your fancy light guns and tubes and transistors. < >
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Dec 15, 2010 15:55
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NosmoKing posted:^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ See, I'm a child of the late cold war, so nothing gives me Aerospace wood quite like the motherfucking B2. It's big, it costs more than most countries make in a year, it's loving invisible, and it will poo poo a completely insane tonnage of whatever we want it to poo poo all over you. Only one has ever been lost, and that was due to a crash. Each one of those things cost ONE loving BILLION DOLLARS in today's money. It's also awesome because it's development history goes all the way back to world war loving two and it wasn't until the early 80s that they even began to develop the tech to make the dream a reality. You want to talk about early-mid Cold War tech? Well, start with the Horten brothers in Germany and the Ho229 prototype. Then, move on up to some classic American items like the Northrop N9M, the YB-35 and the YB-49. They were in love with the performance and the low radar signature, but couldn't really achieve everything they wanted so the AF went with more traditional designs. Until the loving B2, which was heavily influenced by those earlier attempts by Northrop. Goddamn, I do love me some flying wings. Eat a dick you Nazi-rear end Horton brothers, we finally got it to work. 
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Dec 15, 2010 17:08
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Armyman25 posted:I met a woman in Rome and during our conversation this came up. She was pretty incredulous as the idea that the US just had random bomb shelters in all the cities. She thought I was making it up to and couldn't wrap her head around the idea that this was actually thought to be a good idea at some point. The Swiss still have those bomb shelters. They're still pretty well maintained and used for poo poo. In fact, I was just in one a week or so ago, listening to a middle aged Swiss Civil Defense guy tell me how much his civil defense shelter owned, and how much the German ones sucked. He did seem to have respect for the Chinese, mostly because they've allegedly got some monster in Shanghai that can house something like 200,000 people. So, yeah. If you're ever in Zürich, apparently a bunch of the parking garages are still working bomb shelters.
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Dec 16, 2010 11:20
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McNally posted:You mean other than Korea and Vietnam? And Afghanistan, plus easily half a dozen small African conflicts where each side was sponsoring someone or the other (although this is really more Brits vs. E. Germans). Oh, and if we're just going to talk equipment and logistics we can't forget Israel vs. everyone around Israel. A whole poo poo ton of NATO equipment blew up an awful lot of Com Bloc equipment out in the Sinai and around the Dead Sea. Plus there were a few times where US and Soviets were actively shooting at each other, even ignoring stuff like advisors offing each other while pretending the other person was really Korean/Vietnamese/whatever. That U2 pilot who got shot down over Russia is a good example. My favorite cold war poo poo is the completely crazy technical stuff that various countries did to gently caress with each other. Like that time the US rigged up a fake cargo transport into a mobile salvage vessel to steal the middle (ie important) section of a Soviet submarine that sank in really deep water due to technical problems. edit: yes, "steal" is the right word. Salvage law gets all kinds of hosed up when you're talking about warships.
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Dec 16, 2010 12:27
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NosmoKing posted:Now are you talking blast shelter or fallout shelter. Well, I know the one we were in was built during World War II, but was rated for kiloton-range poo poo and kept active until basically today. From what the guy was saying, they still use it for "mass casualty" type events (it was originally a bunker hospital) like drug freakouts at music festivals and the like, and it's still stocked with all of the water purification stuff, it still has the oil bunkers kept up to date, all the machinery is maintained, and there's food and water supplies down there. It was located under a public park, and the general construction was silo-shaped (old WW2 style for deflecting direct hits by AP bombs). I know I'm butchering the numbers, but from what I recall of the tour it was something like 3 meters of reinforced concrete up top buried under 3 or 4 meters of dirt. Then there was all the other crazy poo poo, like how there's about a dozen or so public wells that are drilled down into the aquifer and, in some kind of emergency that either fucks up the local water supply (poison, radiation, etc) or destroys water purification they can distribute water to basically everyone in the city. We saw a couple when we were there - they kind of look like big, sort of hosed up waste paper baskets (the ones with the round tops and the swinging door that you put garbage in). He also mentioned a bunch of others to us that were all variations on the theme "hardened as gently caress building put under a convenient hill/mountain/city." Reforger pointed out one to me while we were driving around that he said had recently been taken over by some branch of the Swiss military and you could see the blast doors. Basically the guy was an old civil defense employee who just LOVED his organization and openly mocked similar organizations in other countries, especially Germany. If you're curious I might be able to come up with some other stuff, but it was a couple weeks ago, it was in German, and I was doing my best to not only listen to him but translate for my wife at the same time. So, yeah, I'm sure none of that poo poo is going to take a Tsara Bomba landing on top of it, but suffice it to say that the Swiss are still dug in like motherfuckers up there in their Alpine hidey holes. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Dec 16, 2010 |
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Dec 16, 2010 15:52
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iyaayas01 posted:I'll go ahead and tell the history behind that picture...the contrails in the foreground are of a couple of F-15s operating out of Elmendorf. The contrails in the background are of a couple of MiG-29s...that were on their way over to an airshow in BC...in 1989. So while the Cold War was still going on, the Soviets sent a couple of their top of the line fighters to an airshow in a NATO country. To top it all off, the aircraft stopped over at Elmendorf to top off their fuel tanks before continuing on to BC. The irony there can't be understated; Elmendorf was probably neck and neck with Keflavik in Iceland for sheer number of interception sorties launched from there (and the other satellite airfields, like King Salmon and Galena). My family was living in Anacortes, WA at the time and a seven year old me who was totally in love with all things airplanes dragged my parents to the airshow that they were flying to. It was right across the border in BC. I thought it was pretty loving cool, and my parents say that it was quite the mind-gently caress for their baby-boomer brains to be that close to Soviet military hardware. I distinctly remember asking my dad why they had black coverings over the cockpits (it was some kind of tarp thing that just covered the glass) because it irked me that part of it was covered up. As I recall they also had some hilariously huge as gently caress Soviet transport aircraft at that airshow. I remember being rather disappointed that it wasn't a bomber or something cool.
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Dec 16, 2010 22:43
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Is anyone interested on a writeup of the flying-wing dead end in cold war aviation? The YB-49 and weird poo poo like that which partially fed into the eventual B2 program?
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Dec 18, 2010 18:23
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GreglFaggins posted:As someone who's had to grade a gently caress ton of hilariously lovely freshman history papers, I have to say that this would almost certainly get an A from me in any Cold War or post-'45 World History course that I worked in. That, people, is how you do an informative effort post on an interesting topic.
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Dec 22, 2010 12:49
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NosmoKing posted:Rocket fun time! THe most terrifying thing about all of this is that THIS was the vehicle that we used to get the first Americans into space with. I can't even begin to imagine how crazy you have to be, and how goddamned massive your balls have to be, to sit on top of a tube full of liquid O2 and other crazy rocket fuels - a tube that doesn't even have an internal structure and has an entire blooper reel of first-gen mislaunches that destroyed entire launch complexes - and let that fucker carry you in the general direction of "up." I mean, goddamn. Of everything abut the Cold War, the best part is probably the space race and everything that we got largely because a bunch of insane loving test pilots got into a competitive, international dick waving contest and dragged a bunch of engineering geeks along for the ride.
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Dec 23, 2010 16:31
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NosmoKing posted:They had a big throw weigh, but not a bunch of smarts in terms of how to get the warhead down, so they wrapped a 15 megaton warhead in laminated plywood and said "It'll ablate just fine, and smell like burning pine right before we blow poo poo up a few miles from the DGZ." Did. . . . did this actually work as intended? If so I am yet again in awe of Russian make-shift engineering prowess. Also, I'm LOVING the missile discussion, but can some of the acronyms get broken down a bit? A lot of it I've been able to just figure out (TBM = Theater Ballistic Missile, yes?), but some of it I'm having trouble with (what the gently caress's an ARM?) Remember, not all of us went to fancy-schmancy rocket guy classes.
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Dec 24, 2010 15:53
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The Proc posted:Jesus. You know intellectually, that somewhere, in a real factory,real people actually had to turn turn the wrenches and wire the harnesses and reticulate the splines to build those but to actually see it! Keeping a project of that scale secret is as huge an achievement as the aircraft itself. Basically, if you get a wrench-turner who can be cleared up through top-secret and then pay him more than a brain surgeon, you can get yourself a gently caress load of "not talking about my latest project." That reminds me of a semi-cold war related anecdote. A few months ago my wife and I were on a mini-vacation in Dublin, and ended up cooling our heels in the hotel bar one night. There was an older american guy there who was obviously drinking alone and we ended up shooting the poo poo with him. Turned out that he was an air conditioner and central heating servicer. This didn't seem like a normal profession to be flying out on business to Dublin for, but he explained: he worked for the US State Department, and flew around fixing central air for the US government. For obvious reasons involving espionage, surveillance, and the dead-spaces in walls and the like the government can't just call some local repair guy if the AC in some embassy or military base or whatever goes on the fritz, so they've got their own cadre of guys in the states who are cleared to do that stuff and spend most of the year flying from city to city to repair thermostats and the like. Apparently all of the embassies and whatnot have two identical central air rigs set up, so that if/when one conks out they can just switch over to the other and wait for a repair guy from the states to come and look at the other one. Interesting guy. He said it paid "way more than I ever thought I'd make at this job" but it hosed with his personal life something fierce due to all the travel: he was on wife number 4. Incidentally, he said that there's a similar bunch of construction guys who get involved whenever there's a high profile construction project in the US. Airplane just flew into the Pentagon and now you've got to rebuild a wing? Or you just want to knock down a few walls and change the internal floor layout a bit? You need to be damned sure that the people laying the drywall aren't putting a microphone or something back there - those guys have the kind of access to internal spaces that could permit them to install poo poo that would, at best, be really damned difficult to find.
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Jan 21, 2011 13:09
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NosmoKing posted:So happy this thread popped back up! Quote this if you had the ever loving gently caress freaked out of you by watching "The Day After" at too young of an age. No, it wasn't when it was broadcast - I'm not quite NosmoKing levels of old here - but it was on VHS and it was back when Soviets were still scary. such a fun movie to watch while drunk now, though
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Jan 21, 2011 14:06
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Flanker posted:Where were their major plants? Like Mauser and Walther etc? Were any on the east German side? If they started from scratch under the Russians it made sense to just copy their stuff. The Russians also preferred that and weren't thrilled with the Czechs making their own superior small arms designs. Eh, it's a TAD bit more complex than that. If we were looking at a map of Pre-War or WW2 era Germany you'd see a poo poo-ton of arms plants in what later became E. Germany, along with an almost equal number in the west. Small arms production isn't exactly heavy industry, so you don't need massive infrastructure to have even a big factory. Hell, the original Mauser plant is in Oberndorf am Neckar, which was (and still is) a loving tiny cow-town of about 50,000 people. Off the top of my head, you've got a bunch of plants in and around berlin (Berlin Luebecker and Berlin Borsigwalde just for K98ks, pretty sure Spreewerke was in the city or the 'burbs for P38s as well), a bunch down in Thuringia near the Czech border (JP Sauer & Sohn in Suhl, ERMA in Erfurt, Walther in Zella-Mehlis, and Gustloff Werke in Weimar to name a few biggies), plus a handful up north along the coast. Then you've also got a few concentration camp factories, of which the productive ones tended to be in the eastern half of the country. After the war, however, almost all that poo poo - both in the east and the west - got totally torn down by Allies who wanted to completely dismantle the German arms industry. Mauser Oberndorf ceased to exist over night and most of their machines were sent to France, JP Sauer & Sohn had their poo poo sent to the USSR, etc. A lot of those companies re-founded a few years later when people figured the Germans needed to start making guns again because they were worried about those OTHER Germans getting armed. The thing is, you'll notice that a LOT of the companies re-founded in the West, even the ones that were originally in the East. Walther re-located to Ulm, JP Sauer re-located to Eckernförde, and a bunch of Mauser engineers founded HK right next door to the old Mauser plant in Oberndorf. The reason for this is that a LOT of engineers made a goddamned bee-line for the west with blueprints and plans when poo poo started falling apart, so most of Germany's small arms designing community ended up in the west. The machinery and buildings could be replaced, but the brains couldn't. So, we get a domestic industry in Germany that ends up having the same Mr. Heckler and Mr. Koch who worked on machine gun designs in the 40s making ugly guns for the W. German military in the 50s-60s. On the other hand, the engineers who the soviets DID manage to snag were all "relocated" to the USSR as "work volunteers" so that they could aid in Soviet arms design. One of the big names who they nabbed was Schmeisser, a guy who was basically a genius at figuring out how to make stamped metal guns and largely responsible for the switch-over to stamped from milled for post-1939 German SMG and LMG designs. Rather than designing new, E. German guns in the 50s, Schmeisser was outside of Moscow, helping Kalishnakov perfect a stamped metal production process for the AK.
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Feb 10, 2011 12:02
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NosmoKing posted:I find it interesting to look back and see that you can see how the NATO forces were worried about tanks, so they built and tested piles of different anti-tank systems and the USSR was worried about aircraft, so they built mobile AA like crazy fuckers. You really have to look at their respective WW2 era experiences for this. In both cases the people who were commanding the armies through the cold war were officers in WW2. Hell, I think the last WW2 vet command rank officers didn't retire from the US military until the 80s or so, although most of those guys were junior officers when they first saw combat. Basically, the German airforce was a constant pain in the rear end for the Red Army. Even as late as the Battle of Berlin the Germans still had the ability to wrest (very) local control of the skies away from the Red Air Force and bring in some fairly devastating tactical air support. Having something on the ground to at least make airplanes maneuver around and gently caress up their aim while they worried about return fire was a flat out necessity. Meanwhile, the USAAF ran roughshod over the Luftwaffe after early 1944, to the point where air attacks against ground forces were a pretty loving huge exception to the general rule. THe only time when the Luftwaffe was ever really being regularly used in a tactical role against the US military was during some of the early stages of the Italian/Sicilian campaign. Institutionally this lead to a generation of officers who had vastly different memories. For one the sound of an airplane meant you had to look up and make sure it was friendly if not just dive in a ditch on general principle, while for the other airplane motors almost universally meant that the proverbial cavalry had arrived and that bunker/tiger tank/whatever that was giving you trouble was about to get blown the gently caress up. Really, tactical air superiority is something that the US has taken for granted ever since WW2 in a way that Russia never has.
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Feb 10, 2011 14:19
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Senor Science posted:This may be a more esoteric question, but how strictly regimented was life in the Soviet army in the Eastern Bloc? I'm sure they didn't go off base as much or had their needs catered as well as the US forces in Europe had it. Depends on when you're talking about. RIGHT after the war (we're talking May, June, July '45 here) they basically were running rampant over the country side and there were some BAD problems. Like, "entire villages full of women gang-raped" type bad problems, along with systematic looting that was so out of control that soviet authorities were having trouble keeping them from stealing poo poo that the Soviets wanted to "procure" to send back to the USSR - specialty lab equipment, lenses, etc. This was such an issue that they started getting MASSIVE complaints from returning pre-war communists who had been in hiding during Hitler's reign, especially in Poland and Germany. Basically, the Red Army were being such dicks that the locals were thinking the problem was with Communists in general. This quickly lead to some hard-core base lockdown for a few years where occupation troops basically never went off post, ever, except for officers (and even then we're talking more Major and above than the platoon LT). Get into the 60s and you start to see off-base leave and the like, but even into the 80s they were more restricted in their movements than American soldiers were. A lot of the later reasoning for this had to do with poo poo like the Prague Spring and the 17. June uprising in E. Berlin - if they half expected to need to use those troops to put down the locals they didn't want them going out and becoming all buddy-buddy with them.
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Feb 11, 2011 13:46
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Flanker posted:My two cents: Well, yes and no. Beginning at least in the 30s, if not before then, the Red Army was organized into various "lines," generally according to political reliability and the quality and training of the troops. There were sub-groupings too, but generally you had (and remember I'm way more familiar with the WW2 era organization): First Line - These were generally drawn from ethnic russians and had what was generally considered to be quality equipment. At the top end of this you've got stuff like Armored Guards divisions which were straight up elite soldiers equipped with the best kit and with excellent support, while the "average" was still pretty well trained, decently equipped, and had fairly good support apparatuses. These were the fist units to get new equipment as it was developed. Second Line - less dependable for whatever reason. Crappier kit. Crappier support. Not terrible soldiers, but kind of unreliable. These are the guys who were still rocking Mosins and up-gunned T34s in the mid-50s. These guys would be good enough to not be totally embarrassing if you threw them against NATO forces in the 70s or 80s, but you probably wouldn't use them to put down a political uprising or something like that. Pretty much the bulk of the Red Army, generally at least "european" in ethnicity, if not Russian. Third Line - this is your real poo poo-grade human-wave type formations, and I"m not even entirely sure that the Soviets kept any on the books after WW2. When you read about the Soviets sending conscript battalions of mongolians through known German minefields to blow them up with their feet before sending in the Red Army Guards, that's these guys. I'm pretty sure this is also where the penal batallions figured in. Basically no equipment or support. If the cold war had gone hot in the 70s or 80s, these are the poor SOBs who would have been handed all those RC K98ks, refurbed Mosins, and mothballed T34s in the hopes that they could at least slow down NATO forces, if only by forcing them to take the time to shoot them. Generally speaking if they were drawing conscripts from their "colonial" possessions (the various *stan countries, Soviet East Asia, etc) this is where they ended up. In WW2 these poor bastards looked closer to Korean War-era Chinese formations than the late-war Red Army. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Feb 11, 2011 |
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Feb 11, 2011 19:12
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Agustin Cienfuegos posted:
Is Russian edition of Ghost By Alexi Ringoski!
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Feb 11, 2011 21:42
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ming-the-mazdaless posted:They could always hit Dassault up for some carrier variant Rafales. I was about to say. Anyone who thinks that the RN would ever be in a situation where they actually have modern, deployable carriers and no planes to put on them is loving high as poo poo. Worst case the US will just flat out GIVE them a bunch of old carrier planes. And let's face it, if the RN is designing and building a new generation of carriers that can't launch and recover American naval aircraft they're loving morons.
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Feb 27, 2011 19:51
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I also see SAAB was getting speculative with a carrier variant of the Gripen at one stage. I guess if the UK carriers ever get commissioned and it happens before the JSF outcome is known, then theyhave no lack of options for building an effective strike wing.
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From what I remember hearing back when the Harrier carriers got the axe in the last budget cut, the Brits are talking about "sharing" a boat with the French for the purpose of keeping a core cadre of the whole laundry list of support staff, boat crews, flight deck, etc. at least somewhat together for when the time comes to train new guys up on new boats. That said, who only knows how that will work. The current french and british governments are pretty friendly, but all it takes is one minor diplomatic tiff (say the brits helping the US in some deployment that the french are opposed to, or whatever) and those sorts of deals are the first things on the chopping block. Plus, it puts the RN in the rather embarrassing position of essentially renting ship time from the French Navy.
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Feb 28, 2011 13:44
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Pablo Bluth posted:..but we're talking about the French. Candy from a baby. </1815> Can you even imagine being the poor SOB who did that? Dude thinks he's shooting at some Libyan AF rear end in a top hat getting ready to go bomb protestors or something, and then finds out he took a potshot at the loving RAF. oops.
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Feb 28, 2011 21:13
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mikerock posted:There's merit in this argument though. You look at what the US went into WW1 and WW2 with in terms of standing army vs. air force/navy and you have what Gates is talking about. This wasn't a detriment to your country's ability to raise a large and capable fighting force because the industrial base existed (and still exists) to expand rapidly to meet the needs of a large army. There's two big problems with the "we can expand rapidly like we did after Dec 7" argument, though, and one loving massive one. First the simply "big" problems: 1) Even basic as poo poo infantry training is a lot more complex and involved than it was 60 years ago, especially if you're training to a level of competence that the US likes to have these days. Put simply, WW2 was a battle mostly fought by conscript soldiers where high casualties were not only acceptable but expected. People were more or less thrilled that it didn't degenerate into WW1-style pointless slaughter (at least in most US operational areas), and the few times it did (Tarawa, Pelilu, a few other real cluster gently caress pacific landings) they were notable for their relative uncommonness. Short of the US actually being in a life-or-death struggle on the N. American continent I really don't see conscript armies operating with WW2 levels of training, and the losses that would entail, being politically palatable to the American public. Also, against any modern military force that kind of military is going to take even worse casualties. Almost EVERYONE (well, at least countries of any size - I'm not going to talk about the tiny ones) gave that style of quantity-over-quality training up in the 60s precisely because of just how much more even modestly well trained soldiers are, and those who didn't suffered terribly at the hands of those who did (see: Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, and later Iraq at the hands of the US for two telling examples of how differing levels of training make huge differences in relative combat effectiveness and raw body counts). 2) On the industrial end, poo poo is just a LOT more complex and time consuming to make now. A Sherman tank is basically a bunch of cast-iron components welded together over the guts of a tractor, with a fairly basic gun and aiming systems that are about as complex as a nice rifle scope thrown in. A modern Abrams has more computational power on board than the loving space shuttle and involves all sorts of expensive and time-consuming production techniques. You simply can't churn out modern military assets the way you could WW2-era ones, especially at short notice. THis is further complicated by the fact that industry has become ever more specialized in production techniques over the last 50 years, so even if we had the dormant heavy industry capability to simply start churning out Abrams from 100 places at once (we don't - a lot of the old factories simply aren't there any more), it's not like we can just re-purpose car plants like we did during WW2. The processes used to make a car and those used to make an armored fighting vehicle are so different today that the factories are almost completely unsuited for re-tooling for one from the other. gently caress, given the emphasis on welded, light weight frames and such, modern car plants would probably have a better go of mass-producing cheap aircraft. And now for the huge goddamned elephant in the room: WE NEVER ACTUALLY DID A GIANT COLT START "OH gently caress" ECONOMIC AND MILITARY MOBILIZATION. That is one of the greatest myths in American history. Roosevelt saw what was coming down the pipe after Hitler started his poo poo and got things moving in a HUGE way as early as the beginning of 1940. First he re-instituted the draft and made the funded the volunteer army to be MUCH larger and better paid. THis was a huge and expensive program for which he took a LOT of political poo poo and, more or less, rebuilt the US military from the depths of what it sunk to in the 20s to something half-way respectable long before the Japanese attacked. Of course it expanded a gently caress-load more during the war, but the worst of the heavy lifting in that regard was done during peace time. As for the production and such, even back then it was a lot easier to change over various types of tanks and other heavy vehicles being produced than to make a cold jump from Ford making trucks to Ford making tanks. This is where those tens of thousands of Lees and early Shermans that we sent the Brits and Soviets come in - in early 1941 they were getting the first fruits of an economic mobilization that had begun in late 1939 and early 1940. Sorry, but the idea of the "great American mobilization" for WW2 is just as much a part of our (well, maybe not our, person-who-lives-in-our-hat  )national mythology (and just as full of poo poo) as the idea that minutemen and colonial militias won the Revolution.
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Mar 1, 2011 10:28
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Laser Cow posted:That would make me sad. Also why did Russia do this? What was going to happen exactly? Why did Russia do what? Put the Bear up and drive it near someone else's airspace? Dozens of potential reasons, ranging from "Putin being a dick and wanting to flex some muscle to remind everyone they're still there" down to "routine testing of response times of nearby fighter defenses by the Russian Air Force." gently caress, for all I know they could have some of those bears kitted out with electronic surveillance equipment and be using them the same way that we do similar aircraft, like the one that got hit by that Chinese fighter a few years ago. Regardless, Bear intercepts are a long and noble tradition. Assuming you were from a family with a tradition of fighter pilot service, it would be quite possible for a grandfather, father, and son to have all intercepted Bears.
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Mar 2, 2011 10:31
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Sunday Punch posted:Well it was more like they identified the major issue with why tailsitters were a failure in the past as the impossibility of seeing what the gently caress you were doing when taking off and landing, and trying to come up with a way to fix that. And the concept tests pretty much did their job by determining that it was indeed needlessly complex, and therefore avoided creating an expensive failure by never building anything more expensive than the scale models! That looks like the sort of thing I"d doodle in my trapper keeper when I was 12.
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Mar 2, 2011 17:58
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poo poo, the whole "turrets on fighters" concept was largely abandoned by just about everyone in the 30s because of issues having one guy aim the damned things while the other was maneuvering around enough to keep them alive. The RAF's early-WW2 Boulton Paul Defiant is a good example of this - it got loving SAVAGED during the Battle of France and was quickly relegated to night interception duties during the Blitz, since there wasn't much maneuvering involved in that, and spotlighted bombers at night are easier prey than maneuvering fighters during the day. It's also worth noting that the P-61 was built from the ground up as a night fighter as well, and also had the turret commanded by secondary crew (either the gunner or the radar operator - both had controls for it). Hell, the P-61 was a fighter in the most technical sense - it closer resembled a stripped down medium bomber with a bunch of early radar equipment rather than payload capacity. Anything else you care to name that's even vaguely "fighter-ish" and has a non-forward firing MG is basically a ground attack aircraft with a tail gunner. By the time that computers got small enough to handle auto-aiming turrets and taking out the need for multi-crew aircraft for them things had long sense moved on to missiles. Interestingly enough, now we're kind of drifting back the other way, with some of the more advanced gun systems in modern fighters being able to slew the gun in a cone-shaped arc to make fine aiming adjustments using the on-board aiming devices (radar, forward tracking IR, whatever the gently caress the airplane's slinging) to maximize lead on target during dogfights, ground attacks, etc. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Mar 3, 2011 |
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Mar 3, 2011 00:42
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Wouldn't mounting external stores on it like that effectively gently caress its low-profile radar signature straight to hell, though? I mean, what's the point in having a next-gen stealth fighter if you're just going to load a bunch of last-gen weapons on hardpoints on the outside and gently caress up its radar profile? Wouldn't it be way more effective to just keep using dedicated ground attack aircraft based around current airframes like the F-15 with large external stores?
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Mar 8, 2011 15:23
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Armyman25 posted:Have you checked out the F-35 thread in GiP? I don't go around GiP much. Worth a read I take it?
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Mar 8, 2011 15:45
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The forum's fine, but I think Armyman is looking for recruits in his ongoing "fold the Marines into the Army" talking point crusade. Ah, OK. Yeah, I just generally sort of stay out of there on the grounds that I don't have too much to offer, having never served in any kind of military or police capacity, and I spend enough time reading forums that I can contribute to that I don't think I need to be reading forums that I can't really contribute to in any meaningful way. Only exception to this is a very small handful of way, way upper-level milsurp forums I lurk in, and my constant hovering at the edge of H-Net moderated conversations, but both of those cover topics I find inherently interesting and theoretically COULD contribute to if it wasn't for the fact that in all those settings I'm very much the dumb rear end scrub and I'm smart enough to keep my trap shut when people who Seriously Know Their poo poo are talking.
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Mar 8, 2011 17:32
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Everyone talking about "safer" ways to put together a shuttle launch needs to remember one big thing: When it comes to failure modes for any kind of orbital space flight they all pretty much begin and end with the phrase "catastrophic." The "oh gently caress" failure mode for the old Mercury through Apollo missions basically involved the control tower punching the final stage under the crew pod while it was still on the pad and praying that it had enough time to get out of the way of everything below it before it blew the gently caress up. Recovery after that fact? gently caress man, just hope the chutes deploy in their suddenly very-sub-orbital ballistic arc, which they're in no way guaranteed to due to the relatively low altitudes involved. You're putting manned vehicles on top of hundreds of thousands of gallons or pounds of propellant that is, at best, fairly unstable. gently caress, ever heard of the PEPCON disaster? THe factory in Nevada that made the aluminum perchlorate explosive/rocket fuel used in (among other things) the solid boosters for the shuttle blew the gently caress up. Here's a video of the explosion that eventually wiped out the plant after it caught fire. NOtice the visible shock wave traveling across the desert and just how loving LONG it takes between the explosion and the "boom" noise reaching the camera. That camera was WAY the gently caress away from the plant. That fire at the beginning? A loving ridiculous sized inferno. That explosion registered on seismographs and we had to get on the phone to all the various test ban treaty countries and explain that we had a loving rocket fuel plant blow up rather than being some kind of open air test. Yeah. That's the poo poo that they're sitting on, and JUST in the solid stage rockets. There's no "bailing out" if you're in a shuttle and poo poo goes bad. You're strapped to a giant tank of LOX/H2 which is itself strapped to two giant bombs. If poo poo goes bad after ignition? gently caress you, the g-forces involved mean you're not going to even begin to think about bailing out. Here's a grizzly little fact from Challenger: The initial explosion basically blew the fuel tank apart and sent the boosters careening in crazy directions away from the orbiter. What ripped the orbiter apart was the fact that it was knocked into a funky direction on its vertical axis, so all of a sudden it was basically traveling up, but kind of sideways. This shearing force pretty much cut it in half. The crew compartment was contained in one chunk that remained relatively intact and eventually crashed into the ocean off Florida. When they recovered the wreckage they found the emergency O2 bottles had their nozzles turned to the "open" position, something that the flight engineer (who sits behind the pilots at launch" is trained to do in event of a disaster-type situation. So yeah, at lest one of the crew members was alive post-explosion and probably lived up until the crew compartment hit the water. gently caress, most of them probably were, because the explosion didn't catastrophically shred that compartment. Space flight: no second chances, no parachutes, little hope of recovery. If this poo poo don't work just right, you're pretty much gonna die. edit: by means of citation, I'm getting a lot of this from my wife's . . . well, whatever the gently caress Chuck is. He married her grandmother about 8 years back so . . . step-grandfather? The guy's about 85 years old and was an engineer working with NASA from pre-Mercury through just after the first shuttle launches. He's got all sorts of crazy memorabilia and poo poo from his days there, and was part of the ground control staff for Apollo 11. He also was one of the trainers/handlers for one of the chimps that went up in a bunch of rockets. That chimp was retired to some zoo somewhere (DC I think?) and last i heard it was still alive. My wife's got a story about chuck visiting it back in the early 00s when he was in better health and the (very old, almost as run down as Chuck) chimp recognizing his voice and coming over to say high and try to codger a banana out of him. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Apr 9, 2011 |
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Apr 9, 2011 17:54
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Shnitzel posted:Reading about Gagarin lead me to the sad story of his homeboy Komarov taking one for the team Honestly? While I'd take it with a grain of salt, it's not really beyond the scope of reason or possibility. Things you have to remember about the USSR: 1) they did some things that, in retrospect, are almost incomprehensibly insane. You had poo poo going on at the very top levels, ESPECIALLY under Brezhnev (which is when a lot of the space race poo poo was going full-bore) that you woudln't loving believe. A lot of those top level Politburo guys were stone cold crazy and behaved in ways that can be described as "erratic" at best. 2) For historians the USSR has always been a black box. It's probably the most important government that we know next to nothing about. All through its existence their archives were locked up tighter than tight. After the collapse we got a few interesting things out, but now things have locked up almost as bad as they were pre-Gorbechev. I've got a buddy who was out in Russia doing doctoral dissertation research last year and some of the stories he has about making requests in teh Russian archives are loving insane. You have to be HYPER specific in your requests (which really kills research to begin with) and then you'll get crazy poo poo like filing a big request and getting literally five sheets of paper, almost all of which is blacked out. That's a real story of his. He had that happen. He expected 4 or 5 big volumes of documents but, nope, they decided he could only have 5 sheets of mostly censored paper. The guy works on loving agricultural policy. This is all stuff that in any other country wouldn't be secret in any way, shape, or form. Now, start looking at stuff that was actually secret, or projects that have some kind of national pride component? gently caress me. For all we know they could have killed off 50 cosmonauts a week. I'm not trying to put on the  conspiracy brigade hat here, but we JUST DONT KNOW. Case in point: about three months ago there were articles in Berlin newspapers about a cold-war era submarine that was recently found off the coast of Norway or Sweeden, sunk in fairly deep waters in the Baltic. THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHOSE SUB IT IS. From the design experts were saying probably Russian or Polish and from the mid-70s. The Poles are insisting it isn't one of theirs, and the Russians simply said "we have no record of any submarine losses in that area during that time." gently caress me, how about Hitler's fate? For half a century the whole world sat around playing guessing games about what happened to Adolph's body after he killed himself. Just last year (maybe a year and a half ago) the Russians admitted they loving found the body, buried it at an Soviet military base in E. Germany, then dug it back up in the 70s when they handed over the base to the Germans, burned it (a second time - it was partially burned by the Germans), ground the ashes up into even finer ashes, and dumped the whole mess in the River Spree, all so that Hitler's grave wouldn't become some kind of neo-Nazi shrine. A year or so ago. They admit this A YEAR OR SO AGO. TWENTY loving PLUS YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF COMMUNISM. ADOLPH HITLER'S BODY'S WHEREABOUTS. gently caress me. And it's all legit. Right there in the FSS archives they had the old NKVD, SMAD and KGB documents about Adolph's body, both burials, photos of it, copies of the orders, etc. They were even kind enough to release a handful of them so everyone knew they were on teh up and up about this. From what I recall they only did that much because that particular juicy bit got leaked or they needed to make a political point about something or some kind of bizarre as gently caress Russian rationalization. So, yeah. Russian archives. I'd loving believe it if you told me they had drat near anything in there at this point, or at the very least wouldn't completely disbelieve it. Terrifying Effigies posted:April 12th, 1861: Fort Sumter is fired upon All this is also why the Russians started putting a shotgun in their space capsules. Not as part of anything to do with space, but because there was a very real possibility of them being, quite literally, surrounded by hungry wolves upon landing. Some soviet era space poo poo is just loving mind boggling. Scratch Monkey posted:Why the hell would they have an open loving casket funeral for that dude?! Read the comments on the page. Eventually you get some actual historians of the soviet space agency in there, although as I've alluded to above doing history on anything Soviet is kind of like reading tea leaves through a telescope. Regardless "open casket funeral" is probably a bit strong. Supposedly those guys are all really high ranking members of the Soviet space program and it's a viewing in a morgue. You'll also notice that a couple of them look loving HORRIFIED. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Apr 12, 2011 |
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Apr 12, 2011 17:22
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Flikken posted:I don't know what all goes into converting a bomber from nuclear to conventional and then back but I imagine it would be cheaper than doing the same on a sub or deactivating and reactivating a missile force. I'm not 100% on this, but I'm pretty sure that as far as today's arsenals go the same bombers which are capable of deploying nuclear weapons are the exact same ones that currently deploy our conventional munitions. In other words, what you are arguing for is scrapping large bombers, period, and I think there's still a need for B2s and B52s in our conventional arsenal.
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Aug 24, 2011 01:14
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Mr. Despair posted:Because it's quicker to get a B-52 or B-1 or B-2 loaded with cruise missiles in range of some place than it is to move a sub into position. More or less this. It's useful to have the capacity to load a bunch of poo poo up on an aircraft in Missouri and have it go blow poo poo up basically anywhere in the world within the day.
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Aug 24, 2011 03:19
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thesurlyspringKAA posted:That's not how I read it. Where did he indicate that? Have you read any of his previous posts on this kind of stuff in the past year or so? The dude writes like he's putting together a policy paper as part of an officer training program, or a grad student sitting his comps in mil hist. His entire schtick is explaining the way that military policies and procedures work from a textbook/procedural/policy standpoint, whether you're talking about the way ammo gets uploaded to chain guns in fighters or cold-war era NATO contingency planning. You'll know when he's indicating his own personal opinion because he usually flags them in hilariously obvious ways.
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Aug 24, 2011 06:46
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Chantilly Say posted:Watch the movie Dr. Strangelove; it's a very black comedy that's also a sharp critique of the American approach to the concepts of nuclear war and deterrence during the Cold War. No offense, but for the sake of whoever is grading your class, don't do this. Don't get me wrong - Dr. Strangelove is a great, hilarious movie and you should watch it just because of that. Even so, every semester there are a bunch of students who want to use it as the linchpin of their paper on the Cold War and I want to  . It's kind of the Cold War version of trying to base your Holocaust paper off of Schindler's List.
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Aug 24, 2011 21:15
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iyaayas01 posted:Of course, I'd be fine if we stopped giving Israel $3 billion in arms for free every year too. Or at the very least use it for leverage to get them to tone down the seriously problematic poo poo. Back before the Egyptian revolution (probably post-revolution too, to be honest, although that still needs to shake out) we basically gave them $1B a year in military aid with the understanding that they needed to play nice with Israel or the gravy train would end. I see NO goddamned reason why we can't tell the Israelis that we'll yank their $3B/year free ride if they don't stop plopping settlers everywhere.
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Oct 16, 2011 21:17
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Snowdens Secret posted:There are Israeli stories of zooming past Egyptian tanks in the Sinai that they thought were abandoned/destroyed, but in fact the crews were paralyzed without the orders to shoot. Then again, this is also part of the American soldier mythos about how we would crush the Commies in WWIII, and if it's just rah-rah Tom Clancy nonsense I'd love to read more sober analysis. I'm loving FAR from an expert on this stuff, and haven't actively even read up on it in an enthusiast way since basically forever, but from what I do recall this idea of small unit, low-level leadership being one of the core differences between western militaries and others (with the latter always being bound up and restricted by near-suicidal dependance on higher authority) is kind of bullshit. I know that specifically in the Soviet case the only period where you can really talk about that kind of leadership paralysis is during the worst part of the Stalinist years - think the Winter War and the early days of Barbarossa. A huge part of why the Red Army was able to rebuild and turn poo poo around in '42 was a package of reforms that started all the way back in 1940 right after the Winter War and which got accelerated to a huge degree by the German invasion. A major part of that was essentially castrating the political commissars and making it so that local officers could make military decisions without fear of being accused of treason for doing something like retreating out of a field and onto a hill or something else equally stupid. A big part of this idea of the enemies of the US/West/whatever being unable to make decisions without the local officer literally telling them to fire their guns seems to come out of a lot of US propaganda from WW2, which unfortunately still permeates a lot of Borders-level military history books. Steven Ambrose was loving terrible about this. I'm pretty sure it's Citizen Soldiers where his entire core thesis is that small unit leadership that didn't rely on higher authority for every little thing was amazing in the US and non-existant in the Germans, and that this was the direct result of one group of people growing up in a democracy and the others growing up under Fascism. Don't even get me started on his reading of the Führerprinzip - he's so wrong it defies description. What makes this school of thought especially egregious is the fact that the Germans, not the Americans or British, were the ones who loving CAME UP WITH what we today clump under the heading of "decentralized command" or "mission-based tactics." Hell, the latter term is actually a direct translation of the German original - Auftragstaktik. The basic idea is that at the very top you have some guy in charge who sets broad goals ("Capture Paris") which are then passed to lower level guys who make the decisions appropriate at their level (head of Army Group says "advance westward across the Belgian plains"), and their underlings make yet more local decisions (corps command says "set one division to keep the fortress at Liege bottled up, have the others flow around it and continue moving westward") all the way down to the junior officer level. At that level it's basically leaving tactical decisions up to the guys on the ground. Everyone is given a task and everyone solves their individual problem however they best see fit. . . . and all of this was developed by the loving PRUSSIANS of all people under one of the more extreme 19th century absolutist monarchies. The very concept of letting the LT who knows what the gently caress the local situation is figure out how to seize that blockhouse rather than just rigidly following whatever grand tactic the COL way behind the lines spouted doesn't come from a democratic tradition of individual agency and ruggedly individualistic decision making, it comes from a process of professionalization of soldiering (especially at the level of officers) and the understanding that trained professionals work better if they are left alone to do their loving job. poo poo, some of the worst problems suffered by the US in WW2 were directly caused by the fact that, by 1944, a lot of the guys filling in for people who died earlier weren't trained all that great and were doing by-rote tactics taking straight out of training manuals (mostly really crude, simple variants on "fix, flank, gently caress."). It was a lack of professionalization on the junior officer level that most hampered the US Army by late 1944-45, and one of the BIG lessons they learned from that war was to emphasize junior officer training. tl;dr - Cyrano is incredibly skeptical of any military anecdote that has the "stupid brown/communist/third world conscripts" so terrified of loving up and facing consequences from their leaders that they don't engage in the most basic of military activities without direct orders. A lot of this comes from WW2 era propaganda painting the "enemies of Democracy" as a bunch of automatons who we would crush due to our superior way of government. Propaganda which, in the early cold war period, was re-purposed VERY quickly to describe our new communist adversaries. Also, Stephen Ambrose didn't know gently caress for poo poo if he wasn't commenting directly on the daily, lived experiences of veterans. Every time that man tried to make a bigger point he re-hashed some tired old saw of a thesis that was usually discredited by everyone who knew better back in the 50s.
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Oct 17, 2011 18:14
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Scratch Monkey posted:The German talent for gathering men and using them to create out of whole cloth effective fighting groups is testament enough to their field level officers' ability to think on their feet. Even the general officers in the Wehrmacht, the guys who talked to Hitler on a regular basis, had relatively little trouble ignoring him when they knew that his new dumb plan or order would get them all killed. Weeeeeeeel. . . I don't want to derail this thread into WW2 chat, but there were a lot of times where the general staff followed "no retreat" orders of Hitlers that were flat suicidal. It worked in the winter of '41 outside moscow, didn't work out quite so well a year later in the south. Past that and you're into the whole "crazy Hitler" period of '43 until his death.
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Oct 18, 2011 00:01
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SyHopeful posted:Did you forget what you did on the very first goddamn page of this thread? No, and I still don't loving care what you think. Believe it or not, talking about the aerospace advances of late WW2 and how they were utilized by the cold war antagonists in the early phases of that cluster gently caress is appropriate to this thread. Trying to talk about US or Soviet aeronautics and rocketry in the 50s without mentioning Nazis is goddamned retarded. The part where I try to avoid a huge loving derail on how much or how little German generals followed Hitler's orders would be appropriate because, hey, not cold war.
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Oct 18, 2011 04:03
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priznat posted:Dynamix sims were awesome. FTFY. "Aces of/over [place]" pretty much defined my childhood. Microprose does get an honorable mention for their B-17 game, though. Only game I've ever played that managed to make flying a bomber fun.
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Nov 4, 2011 19:14
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Lobster God posted:Did someone say Gannet? That is the sassiest looking airplane ever. edit: 
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Nov 6, 2011 23:14
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