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What with the implosion of the F-35 program due to things like the STOVL requirement, I'd like to note that any aircraft can be short take-off. Witness the zero launch program of the 1950s. We would defend the atomic wasteland that once was America with a fleet of trucks mounting F-84 fighters: This was also tested with the F-100:  The VL part of STOVL is a little trickier, however. Interesting, the British actually used something like this operationally during WW2. Some merchant ships carried a Hurricane fighter that would launch from a catapult then ditch in the sea when it was out of gas.
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Feb 8, 2012 02:05
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Phanatic posted:So did just about every single post-Wright Brothers battleship or cruiser. Heck, they predate the catapults, the early ones had little flight ramps on top of the turrets to take off from. Critically, however, the Hurricanes did not have floats. There was no intention to recover them alongside like a capital ship's scouts. Given that they were used in the North Atlantic it must have taken a pretty big pair to climb into one. Nice little write-up on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAM_ship
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Feb 8, 2012 02:45
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CarterUSM posted:As it turns out, yes it was. There's actually a private company based out of Quincy that contracts with the military to do aggressor/adversary training. I was floored. Must be something in the water in Illinois. Pride Aircraft at the Rockford airport imported two SU-27s from the Ukraine a couple of years ago. They were listed for a while at ten million USD each, then they disappeared. I spoke with an employee last summer, and he said the government bought them and we'd never see them again.   When I was flying out of Aurora airport there was also a Mig-21 operated out of there. Really encouraged you to clear the active when it was on final behind you.
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Feb 13, 2012 07:20
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My favorite Saab aircraft is the Saab-18. It looks very much like the German Ju-88, and was designed during the war. As an example of the delicate situation the Swedes found themselves in, versions of this aircraft used both American radial engines and German inline engines. It served during the 1950s as a maritime patrol aircraft, and I am facinated by the idea of something that looks so much like a WW2 German plane being intercepted by a mig-21.
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Feb 27, 2012 19:33
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Our tolerance for failure with new weapons programs has changed significantly since the 50s and 60s. There were tons of aircraft programs that moved quickly from concept to aircraft in service even though the aircraft had crippling defects that killed people left and right. A program like the F7U Cutlass was rushed into service, even though something like 25% of them eventually crashed. The thinking was that there was a "war" on, and sacrifices had to be made.
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Mar 19, 2012 17:21
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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? I think it is a fantastic movie. It's not very reasonable to expect a movie from 1970 to not reflect the narrative of its time as far as the emperor and Yamamoto are concerned. It incorporates a great collection of anecdotes and personal testimony into the plot, and offers a fairly accurate narrative of events as understood in 1970 (for example, no mention of the mini-subs actually making it into the harbor). Vaguely associated: Of course, there were almost no surviving Japanese aircraft at the time of filming (there are several flying now). Instead, they modified T-6 Texans to be Zeros, and BT-13s to be Vals and Kates. You can still many of them flying together at airshows today. I've seen them flying en-masse and even re-creating the scene where the B-17 gets shot up trying to land with the help of someone's B-17.
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Nov 25, 2013 06:47
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Warbadger posted:So there's a chance I'll end up in Moscow for work at some point. I'll probably hit the Kubinka tank museum, are there any other spots along those lines I should check out? I'm thinking about a quick trip in May. I've penciled in: Monino- pretty much the ultimate cold war aircraft museum. Found a website that detailed how to travel there by yourself. Central Museum of the Armed Forces- nice collection of armor and aircraft, their trophies from WW2, and it will be interesting to see the cold war displays from the other side Park Pobedy/Poklonnya Hill- victory memorial with a naval\aircraft\armor collected to the south of the memorial. Looks like some very well displayed stuff, and also has a huge-assed rail car mounted gun. Space museum- looks dusty and old school, some cool hardware on display There is a submarine and Ekranoplane on display along the river. Have not been myself, this is just the list of things I want to see.
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Dec 13, 2013 15:48
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pkells posted:Craptacular's pic made think of this pic I found of my grandfather's ship when I did some research into it. I still have no idea how this picture was taken. I think the basket transfer and breeches buoy happened amidships, like where the fuel line is in the picture. The picture is from the stern of the cruiser. Perhaps the seaplane crane was swung out over the water and the photographer climbed out on the arm of the crane?
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Jan 17, 2014 20:17
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Does anyone remember a terrible book from the '80s that involve a bunch of world war 2 vets in restored WW2 aircraft taking down US airforce F-5s? Apparently not "Iron Eagle-the book", something else in a similar vein.
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May 20, 2014 22:34
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Party Plane Jones posted:Somebody found a bunch of (license built Spanish) 109Gs that have been in a barn in Texas since the 60s after being used for filming apparently. These actually are cold war aircraft. They are Spanish HA-1112s, an Me-109 with a Merlin engine. The Spanish kept them in service into the early sixties, and the were use in a ground attack role in North Africa. They were acquired for the movie "Battle of Britain", which also made use of their He-111 variant the CASA-2.111. 
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Oct 25, 2014 15:35
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Panzeh posted:The old M113 VADS also lacked any kind of radar system, either, though it saw some service in Vietnam because AA guns have a knack for being useful in ground support roles. I have vaguely wondered why the US never deployed the VADS in a ground support role in Iraq & Afghanistan. Tons of firepower mounted high enough to shoot over everyone's heads, and set up for high angle fire in cities. Were they just too vulnerable?
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Feb 1, 2015 18:58
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Boomerjinks posted:What's the "rate of fire" of a modern supercarrier? Norman Freedman wrote a series of design histories for the different classes of US warships, which are fantastic in detail. I'm very badly paraphrasing, but the major take-away from his book on CV design is that there are huge variations in how fast sorties can be generated by different carrier design details. The US fleet carriers could throw almost their entire complement in one "mission". The smaller carriers could not get an equivalent percentage of even their smaller air-wings spotted at any one time. This was the major hang-up with the 1970s "Sea Control Ship" small carrier, 10% of the sortie generation for half of the weight of a bigger carrier. It is also something overlooked in those discovery channel style shows highlighting how great the British armored decks were: they only carried 30 or 40 aircraft, and could not launch them as quickly as a US carrier could launch 70+. Here is a link to the book, by the way: http://www.amazon.com/U-S-Aircraft-...+design+history
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Mar 27, 2015 16:26
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Mortabis posted:Are there any good military/aviation museums in the San Jose area that I should see? I'll be in and out of there about once a month over the next year, so time's not really an issue. There is a small museum between SFO and Mountainview that has a lot of prototype Hiller stuff. Not a "destination" type museum, but if you are in the area already... Oakland airport has a nice, but small, museum. They have a Sunderland flying boat, a collection of 60s and 70s military stuff, and some interesting maintenance trainers. The maintenance stuff are things like a complete hydraulic circuit streched out over a series of panels, taken apart landing gear, etc. As said, the Hornet is a great museum. If you can stretch to a several hour drive south, the Castle air museum is amazing. They have a B-36 and a lot of other rare stuff. One of the best second tier museums. No comparison to NASM, Dayton, Pima, etc; but worth the drive. Also- keep an eye out for the old airship hangers at Moffett. You can see them from 101.
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Jun 19, 2015 14:39
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B4Ctom1 posted:Hey guys, remember that one time when the US built a 910mm (1 yard) siege mortar in WWII? Me either If you are interested in seeing this, I found it parked at an intersection at the Aberdeen Proving grounds. I think it went down to Ft. Benning with the armor museum.  
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Jan 8, 2016 22:37
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Doctor Grape Ape posted:Did you crawl in it like an adult McDonald's PlayPlace? Yes, but I'm not comfortable posting my 90's mullet on this form. It really was an amazing place before they tore the museum down. Anzio Annie (German rail mounted canon), atomic Annie, little david and the largest conventional bomb the US ever developed, over and above best tank collection this side of the atlantic.
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Jan 8, 2016 23:33
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PittTheElder posted:...and the Iraqi gun cam picture of an American missile like 30 feet away. I don't know this reference, and googling turned up nothing but AH-64 gun camera gore-porn. Also, I was motivated by this thread to finally order "Debrief: a Complete History of U.S. Aerial Engagements - 1981 to the Present". I was actually surprised how many BVR shots were taken in '91. My favorite mention in the book is one of the F-15C helo kills which the fighter community suspects was actually a car on a highway! Shot taken through a solid cloud deck. Reading the accounts from Serbia, it seems that there would have been even more BVR shots taken if the NATO controllers operated more similarly to the USAF ones.
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Mar 3, 2016 23:04
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Munnin The Crab posted:
Per that history of post-Vietnam kills book referenced earlier, this may be two incidents conflated. One of the pilots talks about finding an IL-76 AWACs like aircraft (maybe not a Mainstay, maybe homebrew) on an airfield and being directed to strafe it. They then found some regular IL-76s nearby and strafed them, getting in trouble. A different pilot had a legitimate shoot-down of an IL-76 flying to Iran.
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Mar 8, 2016 17:22
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Perhaps the solution to stopping small UAVs is a small UAV mounting a shotgun?
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Apr 12, 2016 16:29
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The military and government had some crazy and naive plans for atomic bombs in the early '50s. Using the bomb to blast open harbors and tunnel through mountains, MacArthur's proposed light bombing of China, etc. People seemed to look at atomic weapons as just another sort of explosive, part of the normal continuum of destructiveness. If the world did not have the two examples of Japan to drive home the point that nuclear weapons were fundamentally different, in a manner similar to chemical weapons, I wonder if first use would have been an mutual exchange during the cold war.
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Sep 12, 2016 17:19
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Godholio posted:If P-51s and A6M did actually meet, it was a rarity. One of the first deployments of the Mustang was to the China-Burma theater. The awesomely named Air Commando Groups used A/B models, and I think even the A-36 (dive bomber version never actually used as a dive bomber). I think they had several encounters with early A6Ms,
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Sep 15, 2016 15:22
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Phanatic posted:And the British had a submarine which is why they kept their carrier in port. The Argentinian carrier did sail early in the war. At one point it had a strike of A-4s spotted on the deck, ready to launch in conjunction with Etendard fighters flying from the mainland. Between the condition of their boilers and the lack of wind they could not launch with sufficient fuel to reach the British carrier. Still pretty amazing that there was almost a CV/CV battle in the '80. After the light cruiser was sunk the carrier returned to port for the remainder of the war.
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Oct 14, 2016 15:48
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Godholio posted:What is it with Germany smashing its own thumb with a hammer by taking straight-line high performance jets and trying to force them into the ground attack role? Ugh. I've never quite been comfortable with this line. When I was a kid watching documentaries in the early '80s there was always a german dude interviewed saying that Hitler held up development for a year by insisting that they add bomb racks, etc. All his fault, the German high command didn't make any strategic mistakes. Just speculating that by the time production had geared up and the engine reliability issues sorted out to the half-assed degree that they were it was already too late to try for air superiority. The experienced core of pilots was mostly gone, the fuel situation was collapsing, etc. What if they had 400 or 500 fast, low level light bombers to disrupt the Normandy invasion fleet? It is not obvious to me that 500 knot fighters were all that much more effective vs the bombers than 400 knot fighters. Maybe they could ignore the escorts for the first pass, but the jets were not a game-changer. Using them to challenge the D-day invasion as light bombers might not have been a game changer either, but I don't think it was as clear-cut as it is usually presented.
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Oct 23, 2016 22:04
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Baloogan posted:I've thought about MBTs that are able to operate as indirect fire support; every tank battalion an SP Arty battalion. Does the concept make any sense? This was doctrine in the US army during WW2 and Korea. Not sure when they phased it out, but it was a pretty common thing in Korea. 
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Dec 13, 2016 21:35
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mlmp08 posted:Like think about how many cruise missiles and how much ordnance we expend knocking out the comms and defenses of some third-tier country using air and naval power. It's a very large amount. It takes a lot of ordnance to disable a factory. The fixtures and machine tools are tough. They collected machine tools and fixtures from Germany after the war to determine just how close a 500lb GP bomb had to hit, and it was something on the order of single digit feet to demolish things like weld fixtures or mills. You could argue that modern CNC mills are more vulnerable due to the vulnerable electronics and servos. But there are tons of them hidden away in every little mold shop and tool & die shop around the country. Not that big a deal to swap out control systems if damaged (there is a thriving business upgrading old CNC systems with new electronics or even PC's). One sub's worth of cruise missiles is equivalent to a 12 ship F-16 mission (24x1000lb bombs)- enough to slow or stop one factory at best.
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Mar 30, 2017 20:02
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Bacarruda posted:Airpower goons, I've got something you may be able to help me with. I've heard similar about the tank museum at Kubinka. In that case, they seem to be moving much of the armor a couple of miles east to a huge new "Patriot's Park". The new place seems to have a large aircraft contingent as well. Perhaps they are consolidating Monino and Kubinka together? I was going to e-mail one of the professional tour companies for status, but not book with them.
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May 31, 2017 15:42
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Throatwarbler posted:If the Argentinian Excocets had warheads that were just a little more reliable or at least as reliable as they were advertised it would have been Tsushima part deux. I don't think that was the case. They hit with three out of three or four air launched missiles launched, and 1 for 1 with the truck launched one. There were a large number of bombs that did not detonate, and the count of sunk or damaged British ships would have been much higher if their fusing issues were solved.
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Nov 19, 2017 18:23
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Murgos posted:Is there a good book on the development of WWII through Cold War submarines? One that doesn’t focus too much minutia on nuclear propulsion details? They are pricey and hard to find, but Norman Freedman has some amazing books on warship design and development. Really gets down into the weeds one the hows & whys of various design trade-offs. Here is his book on US sub design since 1945: https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Submarines-Since-1945-Illustrated/dp/1557502609/ref=pd_sim_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=HXWR1F77E9B3G47RQ2EH
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Nov 26, 2017 20:43
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Smiling Jack posted:Iran was offered both the F-15 and F-14 and they went with the F-14A. Weren't they getting overflown by Mig-25s and desperate for the AIM-54 to stop them?
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Jan 25, 2018 19:24
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possibly because they wanted that radar / missile combo.
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Arglebargle III posted:Did forging get less good or did machining just push it out of most production techinques? Forging is still a thing where you need the physical properties. Forging also used to be used to "rough in" the profile of complex shapes to reduce the time and complexity of machining on a manual mill, with a guy turning cranks. Now days if you need a complex shape it is simple to whittle a block of material to shape in a CNC work center, and save forging for when you need it.
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Feb 8, 2018 16:03
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Zorak of Michigan posted:Still slightly confused about what this says about forging. Have we lost the forging tech we had 50+ years ago because we forge fewer parts? Or were the yield rates considered fine at the time, but now we wouldn't accept them, and that's why we don't forge those parts anymore? Forging requires expensive and long lead time tooling, and you still have to machine any precision surface afterwards. If you machine up a block of material you pay more for the material, which is sold by weight, and you pay for more machining time because you have to cut more metal. For most parts that will still cost less than paying for the forging dies, and the extra labor that performing a forging and then a machining process step would entail. The automated machining changes the calculation because one person can oversee dozens of parts being machined at one time in one or more CNC work cells. Reducing the machining time by forging the rough shape first becomes less valuable. Also, production runs in aerospace/defense used to be a lot higher. If you have to split the cost of a $100,000 die across 5,000 Phantoms it may be a different calculus than splitting that cost across 173 Raptors. I know the government used to partially subsidize the cost of big forging presses for some major manufacturers just to ensure we had enough around should another war happen... edit: of course Cyrano has the link... winnydpu fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Feb 8, 2018 |
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Feb 8, 2018 16:39
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Q_res posted:Stolen from another forum, but since we're on the subject. One of these guys is probably also operating the two SU-27s that were for sale at Courtesy Aircraft a few years ago. They were listed for sale, displayed at one airshow and then dropped completely out of sight.
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Sep 6, 2018 19:29
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hobbesmaster posted:And the value of that campaign on targets other than oil plants and transportation infrastructure was questionable. One thing that complicates the post-war analysis is that Germany was not on a total war footing until after the American daylight effort was underway. For whatever reason, invading Russia wasn't seen as sufficient reason to rationalize their industry and shift to "war stuff only" production. So that "fighter production actually INCREASED during the bombing effort" thing that gets quoted a lot may be misleading. I've never seen a good analysis that separates the effects of moving to a war footing from the destruction caused by the air campaign. Anecdotally, when you read development and operational histories you keep coming across delays due to prototypes being lost to bombing, attacks launching late due to railyard snarls, production stopped after a sub-contractor's factory was destroyed, etc. I'm not saying it was the best use of manpower, engines and aluminum. However, I doubt the cost in Allied lives would have been lower if the resources were put into tactical aircraft and an earlier invasion. The entire human cost of the air campaign was basically Tuesday on the Russian front.
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Jan 2, 2019 18:27
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A little late, but apparently they've had this capability with SAMs for a while. I first heard about it in 1992 when the USS Saratoga put a seasparrow into a Turkish destroyer by accident during an exercise... Maybe not the best link, but what the hell- "You never said this was an exercise!": https://turkishnavy.net/2013/10/03/lest-we-forget-dm-357-tcg-muavenet-3/ Dante80 posted:Right now, the have converted some SM-6s to dual mode, so they can attack surface targets. I think that this is currently the only supersonic ASuW weapon the USN has, I might be mistaken though.
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Jan 22, 2019 21:19
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I don't see any particular reason for the drone to be in Iranian airspace. If its role was maritime surveillance, and it was operating at altitude at the time of the shoot-down, why would it need to be any closer? Can you resolve small craft hiding in the shadows of the shore if your radar looks straight down? If it was a deliberate provocation by the US, why would they risk a Global Hawk type platform?
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Jun 21, 2019 17:32
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I build industrial automation for a living, and have supplied a number of systems to major defense contractors. In a weird way, missiles and other major aviation components final assembly would ramp up more easily than you might think. Even major programs like Tomahawk or AIM-120 are basically a bunch of people with solder guns hand building components. They don't seem have a lot invested in custom machining centers, everything is done old school in multiple process steps. Trying to double production on a family car would mean huge investment in new assembly lines with a lead-time of several years. Building more missiles would basically be pulling in more labor (and probably accepting higher failure rates by stripping multiple inspection steps, diluting worker skill, etc). I know it gets more complicated at the component/board level, but that is where the US would have more flexibility to draw from other industries. A surprising amount of fussy, high quality components are still made outside of Asia.
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Jul 15, 2019 15:54
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aphid_licker posted:The bubbleshaped things with the holes in them are gas storage tanks, right? Wouldn't it have made a lot of sense to hit the mess of pipes in the upper half of the picture instead? Those seem like they're probably the actual refinery and they did go for the one in the left of the image. That level of targeting accuracy seems like it would be tough for even a tomahawk. I've only seem the one photo of the damage, but wouldn't 2nd tier Iranian cruise missiles basically rain down at random around the whole refinery? It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to imagine that some determined people could sneak into place a few miles away and use shorter range drones with visual targeting.
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Sep 16, 2019 14:48
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