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I dunno about the Drakens intercepting the SR-71's, never heard that one before. Viggens doing it is well established though, there are many independent accounts of it (I've read one where the SR-71 got engine problems and attracted attention from Soviet fighters, which the Viggens then got to intercept instead). Mikael Holmström claims in his book Den dolda alliansen ("the hidden alliance"; it covers the clandestine Swedish NATO connections during the cold war and is a very interesting book that I thoroughly recommend) that the Swedish air force HQ was usually informed of the exact time and route for the flight weeks in advance, which made the intercepts much easier. Then again the route was usually the same anyway, and the intercepts were all in about the same place: the narrow strip of international waters between Öland and Gotland. The JA 37 (the fighter version of the Viggen) was a pretty drat good aircraft for its time; when it entered service in 1979 it was one of the first western fighter aircraft with fully digital avionics and an early version of a glass cockpit, featuring both a big radar screen as well as a "tactical indicator screen" that was highly sophisticated for its time and normally featured an electronic map with information from the plane's own radar, ground-based C&C installations and other fighters (a software update in 1985 gave the JA 37 an encrypted fighter-to-fighter datalink, allowing up to four aircraft to share radar information and even radar locks with each other). If you can read Swedish and want to nerd out about Viggen technical stuff, I highly recommend this seminar transcript: http://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:13266 Bonus images and videos below. JA 37 Viggen cockpit:  Radar in the center, map on the right. This is a modernized JA 37D where the map screen has been replaced with a color LCD; originally it was a smaller monochrome CRT, like in this otherwise really lovely image that's the only one I can find. F-16A cockpit:  Radar screen between the pilot's legs; the small screen to the left shows weapon stores. F-15 cockpit in 1980:  Technology moves fast, F/A-18 (introduced in '83) cockpit is in a different class:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNGLQZEPekA The Viggen has a few unique party tricks to bring to the table at air shows; here's one of them (landing, stopping in a bizarrely short distance on a wet runway, reversing, turning around by itself and taking off again in the same direction it came from). I can sperg out for much longer about Swedish cold war stuff if you guys are interested, I've read way more than what's really healthy about it. The civil defense part is at least as interesting to me as the military part; there was this prevailing fear of The Bomb that made the government build so many underground facilities that half the country seems like a swiss cheese. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Mar 31, 2013 |
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Mar 31, 2013 00:42
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A lot of Swedish Cold War military spending was of a similar character; it would look very appropriate in an action movie but ended up being of questionable utility. Take a look at this place:      Muskö naval base, constructed in an era when nobody could imagine a GBU-28. The place is absolutely gigantic and cost absolutely astronomical sums during the 20 years it took to complete. Among other things it features three underground dry docks, two of them big enough to take destroyer-sized ships (the two larger docks are 140 meters long; with the connecting tunnels the entire thing is some 250 meters) and the third intended for submarines. The place was intended to serve as the headquarters for most of the Swedish navy and seems to be constructed with built-in delusions of grandeur: its kitchen has capacity for 2000 meals at a time and addition to lodging for the dock workers, offices for the military staff, storage areas etc etc there's a complete military hospital with hundreds of beds down there. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Mar 31, 2013 |
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Mar 31, 2013 20:04
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That's an awesome find. Thanks! I went to poke around some more and found this BBC report from 1959, which is similar. Some of those places mentioned are still intact (like Muskö naval base, although these days it's only used by commercial interests), while others have been sealed and forgotten. Saab's underground aircraft factory (measuring 21000 square meters and located some 30 meters below the surface) has not been in use for over a decade, but is still open and the air filtering and water pumps were still active as of last year. It's unfortunately not open to the public and is only remaining open by virtue of Saab's will to preserve their own history (and it's gotta be pretty expensive to keep it dehumidified). There are several huge underground parking garages beneath the Stockholm inner city that were originally built to double as bomb shelters for the civilian population; this one was designed for 15000 people and has several highly surprising entrances from places I pass by weekly but never knew about. Here's a late 50's silent video showing an evacuation exercise involving a similar shelter. Another notable preserved underground facility is "Elefanten", which was a command bunker for the civil defense (including offices for the state-owned public radio and TV broadcasting), that was completed in 1977 and decommissioned in 1998 and then left intact. There are some photos here and even more here. Everything is still there: boxes with air filters marked "only for use after NBC weapons have been deployed", steel helmets, buttons for triggering air raid sirens in the entire greater Stockholm area, 50's vintage phone switchboards, etc etc. One of the underground hangars has been converted to a military aviation museum, and is a great place to spend an afternoon if you ever find yourself passing by Gothenburg. Many other of these have either been sold off (mostly for use as server halls) or just emptied and sealed up. Which is a pity, since I'm just fascinated by bunkers. 
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 17:23
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Yeah, there are a lot of them and most of the ones in densely populated areas have been repurposed rather than sealed. It's both fascinating and deeply unnerving how everyone was so convinced that the bomb was going to drop one of these days. I guess I should actually go read this entire thread before I post anything else, so I don't sperg out too much about things that have already been covered in detail. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 18:15
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Snowdens Secret posted:It seems less an issue with the airframes and more the weapon systems themselves. .50 cals were obviously obsolete by war's end, and even 20mm cannon are of middling use at jet intercept speeds. Plus trying to take down a bomber wing by hosing them down one by one is time consuming and dangerous. Effective air-air guided missiles were decades off. Nukes (the eventual fix) weren't small enough. So mounting a big rack of unguided rockets seemed like the best hope. Unguided air-to-air rocket systems were developed further in the 60's in some places. One of the primary weapon systems for the Swedish J 35 Draken interceptor (other than first generation Sidewinders and AIM-4's without the nuclear warhead) was a pod that contained nineteen 75mm air-to-air rockets. The plane had a fairly complex analog sighting mechanism that could present an appropriate aiming point based on a lot of inputs such as the aircraft's speed and altitude, the distance to the target, the target's speed, the ballistics of the selected weapon (guns or the unguided rockets) so the pilot had a lot of help with lining up an appropriate intercept. The trigger mechanism for the rocket pod could also be slaved to the aircraft's FCS, so the entire 19-rocket salvo could be fired automatically when the FCS thought it had a good enough firing solution (usually the distance when firing was between 600 and 1000 meters). Most of these things had previously been tried in the US, but I don't know of any operational USAF aircraft with this kind of armament.
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Jul 28, 2013 16:32
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Did someone say Gripen?  Truly a shame this paint scheme isn't used anymore (The aircraft in question was the last Gripen A to be operated anywhere and was painted this way to celebrate its last flight.) TheFluff fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Aug 8, 2013 |
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Aug 8, 2013 12:29
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david_a posted:I don't know how "multi" multirole has to be or what exactly qualifies as a "huge" success, but how did the Viggen fare? The Viggen wasn't a multirole plane, really. There was a strike version (AJ 37) and a fighter version (JA 37) with ten years in between them; the former could carry Sidewinders and the latter could carry unguided 135mm rockets, and that was about as multi-role as it ever got. They shared a very similar (but not identical) airframe, but the avionics and radar were completely different (the AJ had analog avionics and an analog onboard computer until the 90's, while the JA entered service in 1979 with completely digital avionics and was thus much easier to upgrade). It's sorta like the F-15A -> F-15E development but in reverse. Now, the Gripen was intended to merge the capabilities of those two into a single aircraft that could do the AJ's job (firing anti-ship missiles and dropping the occasional bomb), the JA's job (shooting down enemy planes) and double as a recon plane as well, but whether it was successful or not I'll leave unsaid. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Aug 23, 2013 |
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Aug 23, 2013 01:07
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:Ironically, it's the opposite of what's happening in Sweden. See, we did this with the wharf industry 25y ago, and it was so catastrophic that government subsidy of a failing business is almost taboo now. We even had an interesting 'test' a couple years ago; Saab-supporters (the car one) who wanted government intervention where not taken seriously by anyone, and rightly so in my opinion. If someone says 'Jobs Program' now it's honest-to-god meant as a accusation. Actually, both Saab (the Gripen one) and the Swedish military is regularly accused of being unnecessary jobs programs, and morally UNJUST Well, one of the stated intentions with sticking with indigenous fighter designs despite the cost was (and is) to maintain domestic engineering competence in the field, which in turn was originally motivated by post-WW2 paranoia about being isolated and unable to buy from the shelf. Then again the Gripen project only gained parliamentary approval back in the 80's on the condition that there would be no more indigenous fighter designs after it, since developing such things seemed to have become unreasonably expensive. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Aug 23, 2013 |
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Aug 23, 2013 15:05
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Perhaps they have a point...
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Here are some pictures and videos of the Swedish air force doing things.   The man in the canoe reportedly did not stay around in the canoe for very long after this picture was taken. Sweden is pretty sparsely populated outside a few areas in the southern parts of the country; for comparison, Sweden is slightly bigger than the state of California but with a population of only 7-8 million people during the Cold War. Thus, for many years the general rule for all Swedish military aircraft was that over most of the country it was perfectly okay to fly around at an eyeballed 20 meters above ground (trees don't count as ground), or 10 meters above water. This did lead to an unpleasant number of accidents, however, and after one notable incident where a Viggen caught a phone line between two islands at 8 meters above the water and came back to base with several hundred meters of cable trailing from the drop tank (the pilot got away with it since 8 meters was close enough to an eyeballed 10), the rule was changed to 30 meters above ground and 20 meters above water, except for light aircraft:  If the Russians are coming you use all you have, including flight instructors and other "spare" pilots, who got the honorable duty of manning light strike squadrons equipped with the SK 60 trainer aircraft. If you think the A-10 wouldn't be survivable enough in WW3, try an unarmored subsonic trainer with no radar warning equipment, no countermeasures and no terrain-following radar. Better stay lower than low if you wanna live; these guys were known for flowing well below the treetops in river valleys, firebreaks etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPrnc8GNPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZkYnr58DOw Here's a pair of videos featuring Viggens operating from road bases. The name "road base" is a bit of a misnomer though since the runways usually weren't roads, just small ordinary air strips (800 x 17 meters); it's the taxi ways that tended to be "shared" with public roads. Many stretches of public roads were made wider and straighter than usual though, so they could be used as emergency runways at need, but these weren't really intended as full bases. The Viggen had a number of design features that made it possible to operate from such small strips with a relatively big and heavy jet fighter without using arrestor wires. It was equipped with a thrust reverser that could be set to engage automatically when the nose wheel hit the ground, and the main gear had an unusual bogie layout (two wheels in a row rather than mounted on the same axis) that helped straighten up the aircraft in crosswind landings. The landing gear was strengthened like on a carrier fighter in order to allow sink rates of up to 15 m/s (3000 feet/minute) at touchdown. In winter, military runways were not de-iced, just de-snowed. The thrust reverser could also be used to actually reverse the plane on the ground if necessary, but you had to be careful because using the wheel brakes while reversing could easily result in the plane planting itself on its rear end.  Viggen taxiing on a public road.  Lansen and a farmer with some milk jars. The exact spot where this was taken can be seen on Google Street view. Finally, here's a Sea Knight with a Christmas tree in tow. 
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Sep 27, 2013 |
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Sep 27, 2013 20:27
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Everyone had their dirty fingers in the northern Finland pie, it seems. The Soviets are claimed to have constructed a number of gas stations along certain very low-traffic roads up there, via an apparently independent commercial petroleum company. The Swedish militia battalion commanders along the Swedish-Finnish borders had rather close contacts with their Finnish counterparts (it's the usual thing up there, what's said in the sauna stays in the sauna), to the point that there are stories about some visiting brass from Stockholm asking a militia commander what his intentions for the companies in his battalion are when the Russians come rolling over the border, and he goes: - Sir, 1st company at this place, 2nd company at that place, 3rd company at some other place, 4th company- - Hold on, hold on, your battalion only has three companies! - Well, if the Russians are at the border, the neighbors will be here before them... Probably a story to be taken with about a kilo of table salt, but still. Tangentially related, during WW2 and up until the 50's the Swedish military intelligence repeatedly attempted to land spies (mostly exiled Estonians that fled to Sweden during the war) in the Baltic countries via torpedo boat, but most (all?) of them got caught. Overall the Swedish military was extremely aggressive vs the Soviets in the 50's. "Provocations" doesn't even begin to cover it; in the late 40's and early 50's most of the east block's sea ports around the Baltic Sea were repeatedly photographed with recon Spitfires, which naturally violated Soviet air space. At one point the air force flew a recon Spitfire with the national roundels painted over all the way to Kandalaksha on the Kola peninsula and back (naturally violating Finnish airspace as well). All of this eventually led to the Russians finally losing their patience and shooting down a SIGINT DC-3 in what became known as the Catalina affair. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Oct 29, 2013 |
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Oct 29, 2013 11:22
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I saw this document collection linked elsewhere and thought it would be interesting to the kind of people who read this thread. Not sure how much of it is actually new though. Document 50 regarding the Have Doughnut trials of MiG-21's seems interesting.
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Nov 5, 2013 18:11
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The Viggen had a few mysterious accidents early in its career where it seemed like the aircraft just broke apart in flight. When two accidents happened within four days of each other in October of 1975 they grounded the entire fleet and eventually traced the problem to a wing spar that was too weak for the loads involved; when it broke, the entire wing broke loose which just made the entire aircraft pretty much fall apart. They reinforced the spar and then continued flying nap-of-the-earth with it for the rest of its career; of course there were a lot of controlled flight into terrain accidents. Regarding the Soviet SIGINT trawlers, those were common in the Baltic too. Just as other western air forces, the Swedish air force made it their business to mess with them. Stories (should be taken with the usual salt, of course) include doing a supersonic curve around them with a Draken (apparently this makes the sonic boom hit from several different direction at once; supposedly very unpleasant), flying over them at extremely low altitude only to pull up with full afterburner right on top of them, and doing practice bombing runs at them. In at least one case, that last one almost caused a nasty accident: the aircraft was loaded with inert practice bombs, and the ground crew had accidentally set the onboard computers to "live mode" when they were supposed to be set to simulation only. The pilot did his practice bombing run, hit the bomb release button and sure enough, he got an unpleasant surprise as all sixteen bombs dropped. Fortunately the bomb sight was calibrated for full-weight bombs (the inert practice ones weighed substantially less) and the entire load missed the trawler and went into the sea.
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Nov 11, 2013 15:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:As a regional force that could gently caress poo poo up in the Baltic or pose a local threat on their Pacific coast? gently caress, they had that poo poo under the Tsars. The Tsarist Baltic fleet was never something to completely ignore and they had a pretty credible Pacific squadron out around Vladivostok. They weren't going to challenge the Royal Navy or anything, but on paper they were certainly a match for the US, Japanese, and German navies of the late 19th/early 20th C. The Russian Baltic fleet has pretty much been the Swedish arch-nemesis since they plundered the Swedish east coast in 1719. That right there basically marks the end of the time of Sweden as big player in Europe. Later on the same fleet (and its Polish and East German partners in crime) would be the reason the strike part of the Swedish air force was so focused on ASM's and anti-ship operations in general and so indifferent to CAS operations. If you discount German radio-controlled glide bombs in WW2, the two first air-launched ASM's west of the iron curtain were Swedish (rb 04, 1962) and Norwegian (Penguin, 1971) respectively, just because of the Soviet amphibious bogeyman. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 18:35
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Sperglord Actual posted:So how do we feel about Tora! Tora! Tora! at this point? Apart from it adhering to the party line and absolving the emperor of any responsibility, relying too much on Fuchida's self-aggrandized accounts, etc? It's been many years since I watched it but as far I can recall I thought it was a great movie. I remember really liking the lack of a shoehorned-in love story, the actual Japanese actors that spoke Japanese, and the fact that it was told from the Japanese perspective.
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Nov 25, 2013 20:37
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Orange is pretty much the national color of the Netherlands for some reason. The Czech fly Gripens, which are sometimes tiger themed rather than lion themed. 
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Dec 10, 2013 |
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Dec 10, 2013 00:56
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Huh, apparently the RAAF evaluated the Saab 35 Draken in 1960. I had no idea! You can read the evaluation here, page 74 and on; the test pilot's report (which is the most interesting part, at least to me) starts on page 84.
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Dec 12, 2013 00:58
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They made that thing to test the cranked arrow wing design. Wind tunnel tests seemed to indicate that it would work, but since nobody had flown a tailless delta-winged aircraft (much less a double-delta like the cranked arrow) in Sweden at all before, they wanted to be really sure it would actually fly and built that test rig. The head engineer for the Draken project, Eric Bratt, said at some point that "I wasn't really qualified to design a supersonic aircraft, but then again, at that time, who was?"
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Dec 12, 2013 12:55
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My dad was drafted for a branch of FRA (Försvarets Radioanstalt, the Swedish equivalent of the NSA) back in the 60's. Back then there were conscripts everywhere, even in SIGINT. His unit's job wasn't really listening to the Soviets though, but rather their task was to try to find and triangulate spy transmitters behind their own lines. Since those didn't really exist in peace though they ended up listening to the Soviets anyway; he's told me that while they naturally couldn't understand encrypted transmissions, it was easy to distinguish different stations from each other and especially during exercises in the Baltic Sea it could be very exciting to just try to figure out who was who and triangulating their positions for practice. There were also various numbers stations to keep an ear to, particularly one located in Poland with a stupidly big power output.
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Jan 15, 2014 13:54
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Cardiac posted:Didn't USSR keep a regiment of paratroopers in Kalinigrad? I don't know about VDV, but there was (and probably still is) a naval infantry brigade stationed in Baltiysk. Swedish military planning usually assumed that very highly qualified assets would be used, and in many wargames one of the first things that happened was usually that the naval infantry brigade appeared on Gotland while the 76th VDV division out of Pskov landed near Arlanda (the Stockholm international airport). That said, the real problem area was the far south. Sweden was actually east of the iron curtain in Germany, and even a slow ship can make it from the Polish or East German coasts to Sweden in a few hours at most. Even in the 80's one of the main imagined threats was a huge D-day amphibious landing. That imagined invasion fleet is the main reason for the existence of the Viggen and the Swedish anti-ship missile program.
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Jan 24, 2014 17:39
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When the Gripen program got started back in the 80's one of the key requirements (equally important as the tactical-technical requirements) was that the project must break the trend of ever-increasing costs for fighters, and as far as I can tell for the first production run this goal was actually met (when factoring in lifecycle costs, the plane actually was cheaper than the Viggen it was replacing). This is a big part of the reason why the Gripen is so small and the range and payload (at least for the first versions) is comparatively limited. The air force certainly wouldn't have refused a bigger fighter with longer range and better payload, but they had to live within their means and that meant certain compromises were required. The cost requirement came into being in the first place because the Viggen program had been the largest industrial project ever in Sweden up to that point. There was much complaining from the army about how the air force was gobbling up all the defense spending, and it seemed that keeping up with the increasing cost trends wasn't sustainable. I guess that same conclusion could be drawn from both the Eurofighter and the F-35 projects. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Jan 25, 2014 |
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Jan 25, 2014 00:08
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    Double delta is the best delta. 
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Feb 3, 2014 05:18
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grover posted:What seems especially potent is the 2-ship (or 4-ship) dispersed formation, where one aircraft is radiating, and the others stay silent, stealthy and undetected until BAM, amraams come out of loving nowhere and the target dies, never even having seen the raptor that killed him. The fighter version of the Saab 37 Viggen had this operational except with Skyflash instead of AMRAAM (and without the stealth, of course) in the second half of the 1980's, and I'm pretty sure the Soviets had something similar around the same time. It's not exactly a new idea. That particular fighter-to-fighter datalink feature carried over to the Gripen A and B, which could carry AMRAAM (but not Skyflash). Then everything was supposed to be NATO standardized for interoperability reasons so the Gripen C and D lost the indigenous Swedish data link (that only let you talk to Viggens, other Gripens and Swedish ground installations) in favor of link 16 which let you talk to everyone else, and I'm pretty sure when that happened the capability disappeared, at least for a while. It may or may not be there today, I'm not sure. edit: at the same time (Gripen C/D) they changed the instrumentation from the Swedish air force's traditional metric system to the feet/knots/nautical miles system used literally everywhere else in aviation. Took a while to teach all the old horses new tricks. 
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Feb 5, 2014 |
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Feb 5, 2014 09:35
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Deptfordx posted:Wait, global aviation is still Imperial and not Metric? Yes, but it's not exactly imperial either, it's a weird mix of nautical measurements and imperial. Distances are measured in nautical miles and speeds are in knots, while altitude is in feet or hundreds of nominal feet. Nautical miles and knots (one knot is a nautical mile per hour) are actually sorta sensible units though. A nautical mile is supposed to be a minute-of-arc measured along any meridian of the globe (in other words, a nautical mile in its original definition is 1/5400th - 90*60 - of the distance between the pole and the equator, measured along the surface of the earth). It's a very handy unit for navigation on open sea and in open air, where you work a lot with latitude/longitude positions, great-circles etc. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Feb 6, 2014 |
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Feb 6, 2014 20:29
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The mother of all oil leaks? TheFluff fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 15:43
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Cardiac posted:Also this week, the Swedish Air Force sent Gripen to Gotland, basically just for showing flag. We don't have any meaningful AA or anti-ship missiles though, nor are we likely to get any in the near future. The kind of people who are clamoring for Aster-30 or Patriot are delusional; buying either of those systems would basically require increasing defense spending by 50-100% just for that. Buying a single live Patriot missile requires a seven-figure sum in USD, and the entire Swedish yearly defense budget is only about USD $6 billion. We did have truck-mounted anti-ship missiles though, for a few short years in the 90's. They disappeared again in the early 2000's because they weren't of any use in Afghanistan. Basing fighter jets on Gotland isn't very unusual either, it happens pretty regularly because it really is a very convenient location and it's not like we have any other bases left. Still, Gotland is just as vulnerable to short- and medium-range ballistic missiles with non-nuclear warheads now as it was in 80's. The difference is that in the 80's there were at least two runways and several dispersed basing areas on the island, whereas now everything is just clustered together at the civilian Visby airport, and even if you manage to take off you're within range of S-300 batteries in Kalingrad, not to mention any naval assets in the southern Baltic sea. Also, in 80's, the USSR launching live ballistic missiles is very likely to have made everyone else with nukes extremely nervous and prone to start fingering the Big Red Button, so the reluctance to use such weapons may actually be smaller now than back then. Either way the island is basically impossible to defend against a determined attacker with Russia's capabilities, then as now. At least in the 80's doctrine said we had to try and make it prohibitively expensive, though. Bonus for nerds (from 1975, though):  To give you an idea of scale, Gotland is a bit smaller than Long Island; about 1200 sq miles to Long Island's 1400. The population is about 57,000, to Long Island's 7.5 million. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Mar 6, 2014 |
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Mar 6, 2014 11:33
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Thief posted:
I've always been a bit mystified by the USN habit of painting not only squadron numbers and callsigns but also huge squadron insignia, carrier identification and even the names of pilots on their aircraft. I guess with today's weapon ranges it doesn't really matter, but still, as far as I can tell they were doing that even in Vietnam and it just seems a bit odd to me. Were there plans to paint that stuff over in case of WW3? I mean, the other guy is probably going to find out which carrier is in the vicinity pretty soon anyway, but still, there's no reason to give away freebies in war. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 16:32
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That's not a cobra maneuver, that's a controlled entry into a superstall and then an immediate exit from it. edit: Draken had the best stall warning system, it was literally a stick that rapped you across the knuckles when you approached dangerous angles of attack TheFluff fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 12:02
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ArchangeI posted:I thought the Leo 1 suffered pretty badly from the "any tank that gets hit will be destroyed by a HEAT shell anyway, so lets not armor it much and rely on speed"? Of course, the Leo 1 never faced enemy MBTs in the open field so we will never know how it would have done. It really did. In its initial mid-60's incarnation the Leopard 1 was by far the worst of its Western contemporaries (basically Chieftain, M60, Strv 103). It had no meaningful amount of armor (basically, it was only protected against small arms fire and various small-caliber autocannons) and wasn't really all that more mobile than the Chieftain in difficult terrain (although on good surfaces it was a lot faster). It also had the main ammo storage immediately behind the very thin (70 mm steel) front glacis, making it highly susceptible to catastrophic ammo rack fires. Its big strength was that it was incredibly much more reliable than the Chieftain (which in its early version had a horrible engine that died all the time) and the Strv 103, and one hell of a lot easier to maintain. Switching out the power pack (engine, etc) on a Leopard 1 took less than 10 minutes in the field; on the Strv 103 with its twin engines hidden under the front glacis, it was about 8-12 hours of work even with trained mechanics. Later on though the Germans upgraded their Leopards a lot; at some point they replaced the turrets with ones that had a lot better protection (composite armor, etc). Meanwhile the Soviets were like a good ten years ahead of the curve with their late-60's T-64, which had a lot of features western tanks would only get in the late 70's (like smoothbore guns and composite armor). I've been visiting the national Swedish military archives regularly in the last six months or so, and if you're a horrible nerd like me it's really pretty interesting reading. I keep thinking I should do some writeups on this poo poo but I'm way too lazy to get off the ground. I have several hundred words about the development of the Saab 35 Draken sitting open in Notepad right now, but that post hasn't gotten anywhere in weeks. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 00:05
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Slamburger posted:Its been mentioned before in this thread, but the first nuclear reactor was created in downtown Chicago, unshielded, and uncooled. The first Swedish nuclear reactor was located 27 meters underground on the campus of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, which isn't exactly downtown, but it's sorta close to it and it's definitely in the middle of a dense urban area. One of the subsequent early-60's production plants was built under a mountain (seeing a pattern here? cold war Sweden loved building things underground) in a Stockholm suburb. Sorta unusually it wasn't primarily an electric plant, but rather mostly intended to produce district heating for the surrounding suburbs. It had a sorta scary incident with a mis-installed valve and a subsequent water leak and power short-circuit in the late 60's and it was shut down in 1974. The site still exists today though, and the exterior of it looks pretty cool.  Control room, as it looked in the 60's.  Main entrance at the bottom of the mountain.  External buildings at the bottom of the mountain; you can see the cooling tower on top of the mountain just above the top of the trees.  Cooling tower on top of the mountain.  Under the cooling tower. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5faxjZQMHIY Fly-around of the site with a quadcopter.
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Apr 30, 2014 22:06
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"It's a nice aircraft, but can it operate from a bad 800 meter strip above the arctic circle in winter at -45 degrees Celsius?" is one of those things that has constantly been used as a reason for sticking with indigenous designs over here. ~Swedish conditions~ are the specialest snowflake. Then again the capability was actually there, it worked and it was used in practice. The Gripen can still operate from those 800m strips, even in wet or icy conditions, but there's rarely a reason to do it these days.
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May 1, 2014 00:10
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spankmeister posted:Do you know what reactor type it was? (BWR or PWR or something else) PWR with heavy water as the moderator. The fuel was unenriched uranium oxide, which theoretically could be mined domestically. In the late 50's/early 60's the nuclear hype was fairly big in Sweden too and the idea was that we should become energy independent by building lots of nuclear reactors that could use our own uranium. There was a rather serious nuclear weapons program too but the entire thing was cancelled in the late 60's for political reasons and while the reactor intended to produce weapons grade plutonium was completed, it was never loaded and started. The reactor vessel still exists today and has apparently been used for various failure simulations.
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May 2, 2014 20:30
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Groda posted:You're probably refering to Marviken (R4) here, but it was a legitimate reactor design which was planned to be a pre-pilot plant of a domestically designed nuclear fuel cycle (mine -> plant -> reprocessing) without enrichment facilities or imports for commercial power production. The intention to build pure plutonium producing plants had been nixed (public source, holocaust bloopers has made enough opsec violations for this thread) in the 1950's. I'm sorry, it wasn't a very coherent post. I was talking about both Ågesta and Marviken in the same post (basically most of the post is about Ågesta but the last half of the last sentence is talking about Marviken). As far as I understood it at the time of writing the post, Marviken/R4 was the plant that was intended to produce weaponized plutonium at a large scale (while also being a power plant). Unlike Ågesta/R3, which was run for commercial heat production for about a decade, Marviken/R4 was never loaded and started, and they did those tests you refer to on it instead. I didn't know Ågesta actually produced plutonium. Thanks for the links and the info! edit: that article in Ny Teknik is particularly interesting, I knew FOA was close to having a nuke ready but not how close (for non-Swedish readers, FOA = Försvarets Forskningsanstalt, the Defense Research Agency, and apparently all the bomb components were ready, all that was needed was sufficient amounts of plutonium and political approval). I really should go pick up Agrell's book on the subject at the library one of these days. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 23:57 on May 2, 2014 |
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May 2, 2014 23:43
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david_a posted:Anybody knows how the Gripen compares in this area? My understanding is that ease of maintenance was a priority for SAAB fighters. Correct, ease of maintenance in the field with conscripted mechanics making up the bulk of the available personnel has been a very important requirement for all Saab military jets since the Tunnan. The Viggen could be turned around (complete refueling and rearmament, given a basic inspection, upload new mission parameters to the onboard computers etc) in less than ten minutes by a crew consisting of seven conscripts and one career mechanic. On the Gripen they reduced this maintenance crew to five conscripts and one career mechanic while the book time remained the same (for air-to-air missions at least; for air-to-ground I think you need more time to handle the bulky weapons). Since we don't have conscripts anymore, these days they do the turnarounds with four career mechanics instead and allow it to take a bit longer. If you feel like really nerding out you can compare the conscript days (note: marketing video) with the Libya campaign (note: in Swedish). As far as "real" maintenance goes, basically they tried to make swapping big modular parts out as easy as possible in the field (field being defined as one of the dispersed bases with no real infrastructure to speak of beyond the stuff you could roll around with on a truck). The main purpose of the air force was to keep the Soviets from crossing the Baltic Sea for a few days so the army would have time to mobilize, and after that it was kinda "mission complete" and it didn't matter how long it would take to fix things because the Soviets would have air superiority by then anyway and we'd have to either get NATO to bail us out or fight the long and bitter guerrilla war. Hence, on the Gripen you can replace the engine in under an hour (also seen claims of 45 minutes) without any fixed infrastructure in place, and on the Viggen you could replace the entire onboard computer system in a few hours. I don't have hard numbers for other subsystems but the design principles were the same for the entire aircraft.
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May 14, 2014 18:33
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Craptacular posted:So what you're saying is, the ground crew doesn't have much reason for gripe'n?  Davin Valkri posted:Boooo! The road base system no longer exists, really. We have three remaining fighter wings and they operate almost exclusively from their peacetime bases. There's a single maintenance depot for the entire country that is supposed to take care of all "level 2" issues. Historically though, the Swedish dispersed basing system had at least two distinct generations. Bas 60 was the first step, initially conceived in the early 50's as an alternative response to the question "what if they nuke our airfields?" (the initial response had been "use fortified hangars"; these were actually built at five air wings before the project was cancelled for various reasons - one of them is a pretty awesome museum these days) and formally approved by a parliamentary decision in 1958. At this point (early 60's) we had 15 air wings (an air wing typically consisted of 2-4 squadrons, where each squadron had at least 16 aircraft). There were no STOL aircraft yet, though, so the typical base consisted of: - one main permanent 2000m runway - a fortified (mostly) nuke-proof command bunker a few kilometers from the main runway (usually built under a mountain of some kind, where else) - two turnaround/readiness areas for four aircraft each at high readiness, next to the main runway (one at each end). On bases that were used often, these usually had some kind of primitive rain shelters (like this). - a separate turnaround area with space for 10-15 lower priority aircraft, located 2-3 kilometers from the main runway - a maintenance area with space for 20-30 aircraft, located 8-10 kilometers from the main runway - at least one "extra" runway, usually about 2000m long but with some variations (these were usually stretches of public road, but in some cases they could also be civilian airfields) At both turnaround areas there were connections to a local telephone network, at least two underground 100 cubic meter fuel tanks (although these were usually a fair distance away from the actual turnaround area) and bomb shelters for the ground crews. Air traffic control could be done either from the command bunker or from a charming little portable "tower":  Each such basing area was served by a base battalion which numbered about 1200-1500 men. The "extra" runways could be located pretty far away from the main runway (the guideline was "not more than an hour's drive away", which could translate into up to 70 kilometers or so as the bird flies) and in peacetime they only had the closer turnaround areas in place. Fuel, ammunition etc had to be trucked in from the main base and usually some field work (such as laying telephone cable and cutting down inconvenient trees) would be required before the runway could be in full operative use. The initial plan was to build about 70 such bases but in the end only about 50 were completed (the entire system was basically complete in the mid 70's). Typically there'd be one base per operative squadron. Bas 90 was basically a modernization of bas 60, initially conceived in part as a reaction to the successes of the Israeli air force with conventional weapons in the six-day war in 1967, and in part as a way to utilize the STOL capabilities of the new Viggen aircraft. It mostly expanded on the old bas 60 system by adding several 800 meter public road strips around the main runway and dispersing the aircraft turnaround areas even more (preferably at least 500 meters of separation between each aircraft). The base battalion was reinforced to cope with this dispersal. About 20 of these were completed and work was still ongoing into the 90's when it was suddenly decided that the Russians weren't going to come after all and the entire thing was cancelled and most of the existing bases were sold off or abandoned. Here's a map of a bas 90:  The thick black lines marked B, C, D and H are runways (H being the main runway - H = "huvud" = "head" or "main"), the small squares with numbers next to them are aircraft parking spots, the big triangles called KC and BasC are command bunkers, the small triangles are probably fuel depots, the thin black lines are major public roads doubling as taxiways and the outlined white lines are minor roads. The idea was never to just pick random straight stretches of highway; every potential runway location had at least some rudimentary preparations in peacetime.        Viggens on 800 meter strips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPrnc8GNPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZkYnr58DOw TheFluff fucked around with this message at 04:58 on May 15, 2014 |
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May 14, 2014 21:50
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fuf posted:You accidentally linked the same video twice. Hurr, here's the other one (the one from the conscript days): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49L9BlYQSjw
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May 14, 2014 21:52
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Cardiac posted:Yeah, it is not like they are invisible and the Russians knew exactly where they were. The runways weren't seen as a big deal, there were a lot of assets in place to clear and repair them with. The big selling point of bas 90 was trying to prevent losing the aircraft themselves on the ground. There's a reason there's 50+ parking spots on that map even though the base is only intended to house ~16 aircraft permanently.
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May 15, 2014 12:21
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Dead Reckoning posted:It's TV guided. There is a camera in the nose of the missile which is connected to a screen used by the operator. The operator centers the crosshairs on the target, and the missile flies a profile that keeps the crosshairs centered on whatever is in the middle of the screen. The missile itself does no identification or recognition; it's similar to how a steady-cam works. Well, maybe I've misunderstood the entire thing, but I thought the seeker actually did pattern matching? As in, pilot selects target on TV screen, missile flies at "a thing that looks like this" (based on simple contrast analysis of the image), which means you could, say, pop smoke to fool it? IIRC one of the reasons stated for Sweden to keep an indigenous MCLOS A2G missile (kinda like the AGM-12 Bullpup) in service even after we bought the Maverick in the mid 70's was that the seeker couldn't be trusted in scenarios with things like bright sunlight on water or snow, because the contrast analysis would fail.
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May 15, 2014 18:36
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Dead Reckoning posted:That sort of question (vulnerabilities, limitations, & countermeasures of current weapon systems) is not one that people who know will discuss openly. Is the AGM-65 A/B "current"? (I was talking exclusively about those two, I have no idea how the later models work.) I'm pretty sure I've read an article somewhere that went into pretty extensive detail on the invention and development of the contrast sensitive analog circuits that made the Maverick seeker possible back during the Vietnam war, but I couldn't find it when I made the previous post. I'll look again. edit: it seems I'm actually confusing it with the AGM-62 Walleye, which is similar but lacks propulsion. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 20:58 on May 15, 2014 |
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May 15, 2014 20:38
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May 16, 2014 15:46
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Breaky posted:Why did the gently caress around with SR-71s anyway? The SR-71's usually took a route through the Baltic that led southward between the islands of Gotland and Öland, where's there's a really narrow corridor of international waters/airspace. Sweden being neutral, to maintain appearances (of course we don't let NATO aircraft use our airspace, no sir) there had to be at least token attempts at intercepting even things like SR-71's when it looked like they were going to intrude on our airspace. The Viggen at least had the ability to get a radar lock on the thing, although it's rather unlikely it would've been possible to get a realistic missile firing solution (the Viggen's radar guided weapon was the Skyflash, which is mostly equivalent to the AIM-7M, and the intercepting aircraft was usually several kilometers below the SR-71). Of course, it was also a good exercise opportunity. I really don't think the Viggen has been the only aircraft to get a radar lock on a SR-71 though. Surely the Soviets must've had something that could manage it; the Viggen didn't really have exceptional high speed or high altitude performance.
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May 16, 2014 16:50
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