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gohuskies posted:Mostly because early missiles had very bad guidance systems and planes are tough to hit. If your missile isn't accurate enough to actually hit the target, just make the kill radius bigger. Once guidance systems got good enough to consistently get hits, they stopped using air-to-air nukes. The targeting and guidance system for the AIR-2 was actually the A-4. They made the aircraft as cheap as possible and still big enough to carry the Genie. Nice to note that the early-60s mindset that developing a new manned fighter would be cheaper than developing a guidance system on a nuclear weapon capable of hitting a bomber formation.
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Jul 9, 2012 22:34
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durtan posted:Found this in the AI airplane thread. This aircraft is such a beast. I'm getting a real kick out of reading normal procedures. "Fuel required for a missed approach and instrument go-around (typical GCA pattern) is approximately 3000 pounds. A closed pattern go-around requires approximately 1000 pounds." This thing burns more gas doing go-arounds than many GA planes weigh. Almost its entire flight profile is spent in afterburner of some flavor.
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Nov 22, 2012 18:34
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Nebakenezzer posted:Listen you, just because there is no evidence whatsoever about this magic technology does not mean it does not exist. In fact, it is an argument for its existence, as they are clearly concealing the magic technology from our intelligence sources :is a neocon: Is there any way I can use this threat of their magic technology to re-equip Patriot batteries with Sprint missiles? Perhaps some with a surface-to-surface mode?
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Feb 10, 2013 23:57
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FrozenVent posted:It's not so much in-flight guidance as having the launch position absolutely 100% correct. Ballistic missiles are pretty much unguided after they're launched (They have course keeping gyros or INS or what not, but from what I understand the trajectory is programmed in before launch.) American ballistic missiles have INS, but the roughness of launch may destabilize it, so they have optical star tracking for position fix in midcourse. No GPS needed. Everything I've been able to publicly determine says the TARGET is determined before launch. The INS gets it on a close enough flight path up to its suborbital coast. It does an apoapsis burn that puts it balls on, then does maneuvering burns to get its MIRVs or decoys to time-on-target correctly. None of this, in any way, relies on anything outside of the missile that can be jammed or disabled by enemies, short of making the sun go nova or putting enough optical energy into the troposphere to have it glow brighter than background stars at 1200km altitude.
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Feb 11, 2013 01:33
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grover posted:How would optical star tracking work for guidance? You'd be able to get a directional fix- EG, which direction the spacecraft is pointing. But I'm having a hard time picturing how you'd get a firm fix on position. I know how celestial sea navigation works at sea, with latitude pretty easy, and an accurate clock able to give longitudinal fix, but when altitude becomes a variable as well, wouldn't all that go out the window? Two stars give you a latitude fix; you're projecting the plane of their positions onto the sphere of the globe. The intersection of the two arcs is your latitude. Three stars gives you three planes. Six stars should give you enough angular resolution to get your fix pretty solid. That, plus your super-accurate clock (which launch isn't going to mess up), plus your target's position, and you can get very, very close. The CEP probably comes from the shape of the earth (not perfectly spherical) and the model the missile uses to project the target's lat/lon/alt onto a point at which its trajectory must intersect. At 7km/sec, I don't think variations in the atmosphere are going to play too much of a role.
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Feb 11, 2013 19:42
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hepatizon posted:First, are there examples of a maneuvering fighter being successfully painted with a laser? Second, isn't it much harder to use a laser as a weapon (instead of a designator) since you have to hit a consistent spot on the target? Even a second is enough time for the target plane to roll and spread the beam across its surface. Ok, so I went to high school near White Sands Missile range, and there were some big lasers out there. We got to visit HELSTF and their MIRACL laser around 1993 or so. In front of the building, they had a cubic meter of concrete that they boiled to a depth of about 2" or so with a few pulses. Boiled. Concrete. At 20 miles, so they said. They showed us the tracker, sitting in a 5" mount. They said they were only a couple years away from fitting the whole laser system in the 5" mount, held up only by exhaust venting required because the laser burns some nasty stuff, and emits hydrofluoric acid and heavy water in its exhaust stream. Water vapor was a problem, but not so much as you'd think. A megawatt laser will get a small column of air very very hot, very very fast, and there's no more vapor. Higher power lasers have an audible report, kind of like tasers, as they make thin cylinders of air incredibly hot, incredibly rapidly. So all of this was very badass, and one of my classmates did his science fair project on it. What works better? Mirrors? Flat black? Given our very basic high-school physics of the time, we concluded mirrors would be the worst option, and flat-black paint the best. Mirrors reflect, and require twice as much energy to bounce the beam, flat paint would absorb. Well, he won regionals, and got the attention of the missile range. They did some tests, using his hypothesis, along with those of some of the rocket scientists there. Turns out a full-mirrored target died the quickest, followed by flat black, then one painted in IR-absorbing paint tuned to the wavelength of the laser, then any combination of these when spinning the target. This data, and the awesome videos he got from WSMR got him to Nationals, where I hear he did pretty well. Their targets were 8" sounding rockets, and all were successfully tracked and lased for periods up to fifteen seconds. These rockets are suborbital, and move at very high speeds, and the laser had no problem with them. Think of it this way: if you can get a camera to follow it, you can shoot it with a laser. We had camera systems that would reliably track the highest-performing aircraft at nearly any range in the fifties, using vacuum tubes and mechanical computers. quote:Is HELLADS the candidate system? Have they even gotten that thing up to full power yet? The follow-on to the MIRACL was the MIRACL on a truck (well, several trucks), also known as the MTHEL. It worked like a charm, from the videos I saw. They then made a smaller one, the HELLADS, which the White Sands people says works great.
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Jun 18, 2013 08:47
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mlmp08 posted:
Yes. The idiot finalizing my travel voucher should have just clicked "submit" on all three of my back-to-back-to-back claims. Instead, he put the full amount I owed on my GTCC on all claims. So CitiBank gets triple payment, and I get two travel vouchers for $0. How's two months at $116/day per diem turn into $0 for me? I get a statement from Citi, and they've got a MASSIVE credit on my account. One call to them later, and I have a cashier's check for a couple months of per diem. That was nice of Citi. It's better than last years' travel, though. Instead of putting my GTCC balance on one claim, he put 0 for everything. Now I have to pay two months' lodging and rental out of my pocket, MONTHS after my claim was liquidated, because those bills moved at the speed of mail, instead of electronically, like everything else.
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Jul 10, 2013 16:13
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FrozenVent posted:There might be some political opposition to such reliance on the US for maintenance of national security asset and radiological safety... And I'm not sure the US would be too keen to just hand us classified stuff anyway, even if we're pretty good buddies. The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (NNPI) program is seriously hardcore as to who can see what. EVERYTHING from valve dimensions up to plant diagrams is marked NNPI/NOFORN (no foreign access). They're super serious about it, too. It doesn't matter who they are, if they don't have a red badge, they don't get to see it, no matter how good of an ally they may be.
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Jul 18, 2013 15:45
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Thump! posted:Christ, it's almost like the military has something to do with guns and stuff! I'll say it here publicly. The Air Force hates the idea of armed conflict. Blowing stuff up with missiles is cool. Bombs: cool. Nukes: very cool. Nukes on rockets? BADASS. The concept of an airman with a rifle: terrifying. If it were possible for there to be no small arms in the Air Force, they'd go for that option in a heartbeat. Ideally, the organization, as a whole, would be against the concept of military action in any form, yet wholeheartedly for the violent destruction of America's enemies at the Air Force's hands, solely.
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Aug 5, 2013 22:57
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Looks like more than 9 yards to me.
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Sep 7, 2013 21:22
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Warbadger posted:Yep, and it's why both the US and USSR developed improved radiation-proofing for tanks in the 80s. Yep. The Nevada Test Site was actually in the works (according to our tour guide) to be Nevada and SoCal's point defense ABM system. They'd put all these 200kt bombs at the bottom of mine shafts filled with rocks. The holes would be pointed so they were the general direction of high-value targets. We sense a warhead cloud inbound, we light off the bombs! Your punt gun is pathetic! I SHOOT DOWN FLOCKS OF NUCLEAR MISSILES! He was an odd dude. The reason it was at NTS was because NOBODY would think oddly of us drilling mine shafts at odd angles, dropping in a warhead, then just filling the thing in and forgetting about it. I can see why. Most of those circles happened from 1951-1958.
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Sep 12, 2013 01:06
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Cyrano4747 posted:I have equally no relevant experience by which to judge the stupidity, but the bolded part up there just SEEMS really loving goddamned stupid and not something that should be lauded. Some guy who has highly specialized (and expensive) training in how to fly airplanes and drop bombs on people takes command of a firefighting team? What the gently caress? What does he know about fighting fires? Everyone that gets flight deck pay gets Aircraft Shipboard Firefighting. Officers, enlisted, aircrew, everyone (even contractors, I hear). Five year refresher, too. They put everyone on every spot on the hose, fill this fake airplane up with jet fuel, and light it up. If you can put the fire out, you pass. If you can't, you keep trying until you can. Then you do it again in full flight deck gear (coveralls, jerseys, float coats, cranials). They only hold the classes in the middle of summer, at noon, or the middle of winter, at sunrise. "The trainer is down for maintenance" at all other times, like there can be something fundamentally wrong with a steel tube you put Jet-A in. That said, Battle Stations means everyone does their DC job as they deem fit and doesn't really worry about anyone else. If some random pilot saw a fire party floundering like retards on his way to the ready room, his type-A personality would mean he takes charge. The other pilots and aircrew mustering in the ready room are probably taking muster and going "where's Lt. Bag o'Donuts? Probably exploded, since he's not here, at his assigned muster point." They do not think "I should go out there and help" because literally every breathing form of life on that ship has a place to be, and if you're not in it, you're in the way. babyeatingpsychopath fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Sep 18, 2013 |
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Sep 18, 2013 01:15
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Sir, what are you doing? We are the damage control team. We have trained for exactly this. We know how to put out flaming avgas on a deck full of bombs. We are wearing flame retardant clothing. You are wearing flight gear and are trained to fly airplanes. You know as little about how to keep this ship from sinking as we know about how to drop napalm on the right patch of jungle. 
But I'm . . . . . an OFFICER!
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Groda posted:You know that J58 diagram? That was pretty cool. I had a good idea how it worked just from the diagrams, but didn't know about the centerbody bleed and its system.
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Oct 1, 2014 23:02
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Mortabis posted:The ISS is ~400 tons. It is in low earth orbit. It is presently the most expensive object ever made by mankind by a wide margin. Launching several thousand tons of gravel into LEO would be, mildly put, prohibitively expensive. Sure, if you're using rockets. Nuclear shotguns work great. Dig an appropriately-angled mineshaft, put in nuke. Fill. Detonate nuke. A calculable and nontrivial amount of the fillends up in orbit. On the order of dozens of tons per 100kt.
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Jan 7, 2015 22:24
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Phanatic posted:http://savvyparanoia.com/the-fastest-man-made-object-ever-a-nuclear-powered-manhole-cover-true/ It was also in Nevada, and that whole article is sadly terrible. Try this one: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html#PascalA Scroll down to Pascal-B after you read the great stuff about Pascal-A. quote:The guys had been working trying to get it ready, but there had been a number of troubles. They finally got it down the hole, by my recollection, about ten o'clock or so at night. There wasn't much time to go back to Mercury, go to bed, and get up the next morning to shoot it, so somebody said, "Why don't we just shoot it now, and then go in?" And it was the world's finest Roman candle, because at night it was all visible. Blue fire shot hundreds of feet in the air. Everybody was down in the area, and they all jumped in their cars and drove like crazy, not even counting who was there and who came out of the area. The cold war was AWESOME. edit: I just want to emphasize that the pascal tests were safety verification tests. What would happen to one of our bombs if something bad happened. These were initiated with single detonators instead of symmetric. One would hope (and current safety standards dictate) nothing except a loud bang. What the test guys expected was a nuclear yield in the 1-5lb range. Actual yield was in tens to hundreds of tons. That's a hell of an oops. babyeatingpsychopath fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Jan 8, 2015 |
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Jan 8, 2015 03:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'm not an astrophysicist, but I don't think it works like that. Wouldn't taking the mass-energy content of the observable universe give us the energy released if the Big Bang had involved only that matter and consumed all of it to produce energy? In that scenario wouldn't there be no observable material in the universe, only the released energy from the detonation? That's the thing, though. Until some length of time after the big bang, there WAS NO MATTER. It was all energy. Mass-energy equivalence is exactly what you had. The entire universe was an infinitesimally small point of pure energy, then BOOM and now the point is measurably larger and still pure energy. The universe then expands considerably faster than lightspeed, which lowers the temperature enough to get matter particles to condense out. There's your first 10^-32 seconds. A microsecond later and you get protons. A few seconds later there are enough protons around that the entire universe turns into a ball of fusion. Three minutes later, all observable material in the universe stops fusing (there are still pockets), and the universe is merely expanding at lightspeed. A couple hundred thousand YEARS later, and the universe is finally cooler than the surface of a hydrogen bomb, and visible light begins to shine through, since the universe is now cool enough that a free photon is no longer IMMEDIATELY captured and reemited by the plasma all around it. When the light shines through, it means some stable atoms can finally form, and that's when the first stable hydrogen atom exists. So yeah, 380,000 years hotter than the inside of a hydrogen bomb. It was a big explosion.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:06
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Helter Skelter posted:When it comes to unshielded nuclear ramjets flying at mach 3+ and making GBS threads thermonuclear death all over the place, the question rapidly shifts from whether you have something that can see it to whether you have anything that could catch it. Like, some cranes with nets on them. Preferably in some place you wouldn't mind something like that crashing. Also, unshielded reactors are going to be puking all kinds of wonderful noise all across the EM band, so it's less a matter of knowing it's coming to pinpointing the place to drive your gigantic butterfly net.
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Mar 17, 2015 11:31
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iyaayas01 posted:Hahahahaha...all of these own so much These comics are really good. It seems to me that anyone with half a brain and some actual concern realize the importance of FOD control in general (tool control in specific). Losing hard bits in and around jet engines just seems like a REALLY bad plan.
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Mar 27, 2015 11:31
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B4Ctom1 posted:I already read a bunch of budget proposals where the amount is well double north their estimate and that the total number would be pared down to roughly 45-55% of current to close to 300 total reducing the total MAD levels. They plan to actually break down old bombs using the best of everything left over. Note that the first two nuclear bombs cost significantly more than if their casings were completely full of platinum. Since 100% of the plutonium known to exist on the earth was sitting in one room -- which had cost a measurable fraction of the GDP of the United States to produce. "Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman" has a story about the first plutonium having a ten inch hemisphere of gold as a doorstop. Because compared to the plutonium, 180 pounds of gold is absolutely trivial in price (only about a million bucks), which is why they just had chunks of it lying around.
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Mar 27, 2015 23:49
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Fo3 posted:No idea why they don't include some regular HVAC training for the navy guys. It's the same in Australia, the company I worked for had one guy going to Garden Is. and other docks for small ships every day, doing refrig cabinet repairs and other basic HVAC stuff because it seems no one trains mechs on boats. Which is strange since they all have food storage fridges and freezers. He got the same HVAC training I did: Basic refrig theory + troubleshooting procedures. If you can't turn that into a productive career on the outside, then there's probably a reason the Navy didn't want to keep you, either. This is a common complaint with ex-military. "The [army/navy/air force/marines/coast guard/etc] didn't train me for this!" Agreed, they didn't give you a Personnel Qualification Standard for each specific task of your new job, but they taught you how to think on your feet and use basic systems knowledge to solve problems of a general sort. At some point, they also taught you how to shut up, stop whining, and just do the job. I've worked with Supply Clerks and office staff who've gotten their EPA cert for free using Tuition Assistance and used it to moonlight as HVAC techs on weekends for beer money. Their schools didn't even give them basic troubleshooting skills: just discipline and dedication.
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Apr 9, 2015 12:37
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MrYenko posted:My experience with recent USAF short-timers would like to argue this point. I know some retired career Air Force maintainers that were borderline-wizards, but some of the single-enlistment people I've worked with have been loving dangerously incompetent. Like, can't be trusted to perform simple tasks unsupervised, even after repeated instruction levels of bad. It doesn't mean their schools didn't teach it, just that it didn't stick. People get pushed through the class unless they are literally a nonstop danger to themselves and others. Unmitigated screwups? That's fine, as long as they're not DANGEROUS.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:11
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bewbies posted:A gun type system with guided rounds is a possible solution, but in testing for counter-RAM systems the guns that were looked at generally didn't perform very well for one main reason: bullets, once they are fired, are losing energy constantly (in contrast to rockets, whose motors provide energy for a while after they're fired). This makes maneuvering them, and predicting their manevuers, more difficult. When you add in factors like humidity/wind, etc it becomes even more difficult. Rockets are still affected by these of course but it is easier to predict impacts when you have a steady stream of energy for those first few critical seconds of flight. All I'm hearing here is "13mm gyrojet." Godholio posted:My immediate thought for a solution is a distributed network of DE defenses among multiple vehicles. Sort of along the lines of a centralized Aegis control system, decentralized launchers. Does this turn a tank column into a cruiser attack group analog? There are a few heavy combatants in the center and a ring of missile sponges with countermeasures around them? What would the sponges be? LAVs? APCs? IFVs? Or is the whole formation just MBTs with overlapping long-range countermeasures so one tank (hopefully) never has to use its close-in shotgun?
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May 7, 2015 12:48
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Alchenar posted:"The successful firing of the missiles served to verify the tube integrity and missile stack integration of the MML. The IFPC Inc 2-I program remains on schedule to conduct an engineering demonstration in March 2016." Yup. and "successfully launched and flew ballistic trajectories" is code for "this time the missiles didn't break up and explode in flight!"
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May 12, 2015 15:55
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Doctor Grape Ape posted:Meanwhile, in That's pretty clever. He's flying at highway speeds over a highway. Doppler radar is going to filter that guy right out. The only way to get hits on this guy is if the operators notice him flying over bridges and power lines, which is probably a pretty difficult trick.
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Aug 4, 2015 20:36
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OhYeah posted:The sound it makes is rather curious, like 10 billion angry wasps coming to get you. "manned drone" It's like people don't even know what words mean anymore.
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Sep 5, 2015 17:03
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bewbies posted:There's a pretty good swath of futures folks, probably including myself, who see the end of giant armored landships based on the fact that we're getting close to the maximum amount of armor we can reasonably cram onto a tactical vehicle. The evolution is kind of similar to what happened to the dreadnought battleships once anti-ship missiles really got going. They just couldn't add enough armor to passively defeat an ASM, which leaves only two real defeat options: active defense, or don't be seen in the first place. So the next main battle tank is just going to have 2x VLS launchers, 3x CIWS, and some middling-range autocannon? That'd actually be pretty cool. Is there a tank-sized VLS can for hellfires?
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Dec 23, 2015 03:03
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Hauldren Collider posted:I work at a bank and I think we still have AIX kicking around on one of our old mainframes, but everything is moving to RHEL on Intel (and is 99% already there). Though actually I had a contractor tell me he was shocked at how "liberal" we were, because we were a bank that was using Linux, as well as Tomcat/JBOSS instead of WebSphere or WebLogic. He said in his world (European banks), Solaris is considered a risky choice. That's kind of terrifying for me to contemplate. Industry sectors get weird with their hardware and software choices. "It's the way we've always done it" is a clear, imperitive, valid reason to buy hardware that was outdated 20 years ago. I work in the metal fabrication industry, and we can buy brand new 2016-manufacture presses that are running DOS3.11 and come with floppy drives. It's listed as a "feature" in the shiny catalog. "If it's not broke, don't fix it" and "even if it's broke, keep using it until it's nonfunctional" seem to be the mottoes of most of the fabrication industry. I was at a metal plating facility that does galvanizing/chromium coating/electroplating and their controllers are relay logic. Not PLCs, but banks of relay panels. The system was designed in the 40s, built in the 60s, and "modernized" in the 80s by replacing 60s-era relays with 80s-era relays and enclosing the panels and bus bars. The military is similar with their hardware and software choices, as is aviation.
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Dec 31, 2015 17:37
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PittTheElder posted:Interesting, gonna have to go give that article a read. I just assumed that they'd always be flying a minimum defensive patrol, barring a Suez transit or something. Fredrick posted:How fast is a carrier expected to be able to scramble CAP in the event of an unexpected and sudden situation that would merit one? Has there even been such an incident in recent years? I thought maybe one of the Gulf of Sidra incidents would have something to compare to, but both of those involved a lot of dickwaving before poo poo went down and there were lots of aircraft in the sky already. Both of these things is what AEGIS picket ships are for. Putting expendable VLS launchers with big radars and data links out on the horizon means you don't always have to be conducting flight ops. Also having reasonably good intelligence about threats that could in any way threaten your carrier in a way that having planes in the sky would mitigate.
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Jan 3, 2016 15:50
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Wingnut Ninja posted:Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't any useful avionics that are dense enough to provide the needed weight in that volume. Not to mention it's certainly cheaper to just bolt some (aviation grade) steel plates in there than to wire in a bunch of new stuff, unless the gun ran off a 1553 bus they can hook into. I just wanna insert some sperg into this discussion and say that the ballast itself isn't necessarily aviation-grade, but the bolts holding it to the plane are. I've seen ballast of all flavors, including ammo cans full of hardware welded shut. The weight just has to weigh a known amount, but the bolts making it part of the structure are the expensive bit.
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Feb 20, 2016 14:02
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FrozenVent posted:That reminds me, if anyone is looking a pretty good read on submarines transiting the Arctic, I read this a few years back and it's pretty good, about the Nautilus going up to the North Pole and back. Some may be interested in how marine gyros work. There's a normal free-spinning gyro in a cage and all, but it has two weights on it. One is on the side, and one is on the bottom. On startup, the bottom weight ensures that the spin axis points at the center of the earth. The gyro control circuitry then detects the precession of the gyro caused by the gyro's rigidity pointing at an arbitrary direction and the rotation of the earth, then amplifies difference until there's no signal. This means gyro will preferentially prececess until the "bottom" weight is pointed parallel to the earth's axis, with the "side" weight pointing at the north pole. This means it takes less time for a gyrocompass to align in (say) Jacksonville than it does in (say) Maine, since the error signal from that "side" weight is larger. It also means it's really hard for the gyrocompass (alone) to keep pointing at the north pole very close to the north pole.
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Mar 20, 2016 02:26
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, because both longitude and heading start to lose meaning... And marine gyros don't work great once you're too far from the equator. If I recall correctly they had a contractor from Sperry onboard the whole time to baby the gyros into not giving up around the pole.
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Dead Reckoning posted:Neat! That's different from how aircraft gyros (as explained to us) function. Of course, nearly everything has gone to solid state INUs for aircraft these days. The newest Sperry marine units use laser-ring gyros and will align to <.1 degree in 8 minutes, and <.1' (1/600 degree) in a day. They do this with the exact same math: they directly detect the rotation of the earth.
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Mar 21, 2016 11:34
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FrozenVent posted:The older ones that were the size of a washing machine plus, I was told, took about eight hours to spin up. The somewhat newer ones that are the size of a trash can (from the eighties, so no lasers) took... Heh about six hours before they were reliable? This is in Canadian latitudes. That's about right. If you want full navigational accuracy with no dependence on radar or GPS, then the old AN/WSN-2 (washing machine) would take about 3 days to fully lock on. If you just needed heading and rough pitch/roll, then you pushed the "fast erect" button and you could get underway in about eight hours. The AN/WSN-5 is the trash-can sized thing, and its fast-erect took about five minutes after the self-test. 8 hours to full INS status. I don't have a public domain source on the AN/WSN-7 or 9, so I can't comment on how fast laser-ring gyros take to align, but their commercial trifold glossy brochure counterparts are saying minutes (10 min <78 lat, 4min <45 lat, 30min @sea).
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Mar 22, 2016 01:44
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LostCosmonaut posted:
http://www.lanl.gov/science/NSS/issue1_2011/story4full.shtml Even though this is on a .gov site, the layout is hilariously bad. The second "Fig.2" is actually a NERVA motor being tested. Yup, an absolutely unshielded reactor producing thrust.
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Jun 16, 2016 03:02
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Craptacular posted:Where's the gantry then? It sure looks like someone photoshopped the shuttle onto a cloud bank. There's no gantry when it's on the crawler. When the clouds get that low, I think it's actually just called "fog." That seems like some very strange fog for eastern Florida, though.
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Jul 3, 2016 17:41
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Blistex posted:Should that situation occur, I think they could probably allocate an Aegis platform or two to hang around. Either an actual vessel, or one of those land based ones. Or, maybe, the ships in the yard. CIWS is a pretty independent system. If there were missiles flying, I'm sure there'd be boxes of 20mm on the pier in short order, and someone would figure a way to get power and cooling water to the mount. They might even be lucky enough to be the self-destructing 20mm so as not to bombard downtown Portsmouth with tungsten (not that that would be a bad thing, particularly).
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Mar 30, 2017 04:54
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Wingnut Ninja posted:The actual system would be very much at home in a Tom Clancy novel too. "Hey, ya know how we can put CIWS on a truck and just call it C-RAM? Why can't we do that with a system that typically requires a ship to be built around it?"
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Mar 31, 2017 02:46
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I am not opposed to this in any way. This anchor quote sums my thoughts up well. quote:"They are not going to win hand-to-hand combat, but most of the time we use guns and a lot of the time they shoot better than the guys." I am absolutely for gender equality in the armed services. I don't care what bathroom you use, what orifice you like to rub against whatever other orifice your significant other presents, just that you're willing and able to contribute to mission success and meet minimum standards. If the "up close killing people" specialties determine that their branch is better served by having different standards for males and females, so be it, but let it end there. If it turns out that "some girls can't hack it" at being SEALS or whatever, then that's fine, but if they CAN hack it, let them in. It turns out that the vast majority of applicants to these programs can't hack it, and currently they're all guys. Double the pool, double the success rate.
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Mar 31, 2017 06:28
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Dandywalken posted:Seems like a pretty informative and fair assessment to me. It just notes that the hypothetical ideal would probably be an SA-22. From what I can find out about the thing on Wikipedia, TLAM guidance is pretty slick. Block 1 Tomahawks used radar mapping to do the terrain recognition. As sensors and processors got smaller, less-observable means were used to prevent jamming. The tomahawk has an INS that it will use all the way to the target if all else fails. That gives it a CEP of something like .1m/nm of flight (about 100m at 1000nm flight). With the EO sensor, that drift is reset at every waypoint. With GPS on terminal, the guidance just uses the GPS fix for terminal guidance, giving a CEP of .1m. If the EO sensor is working, then it can use a direct picture to zoom down on the target and still have a CEP of <1m. It's a really nifty system overall. Short of changing the major geography of an area every couple of days, it's very difficult to disrupt that EO thing.
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Apr 23, 2017 19:02
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Craptacular posted:Belarussian MiG-29 pilot ejects. Yeah, weight-on-wheels switches. Also, making sure the gear lever is down until a positive rate-of-climb is established. One of these is far more reliable than the other.
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Jul 16, 2017 22:05
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ought ten posted:xposting from GiP Probably had to wait for the range to clear or something. Press the "go" button 10-30 seconds early, wait for it to erect, then hit the "launch" button at the correct time.
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Jul 18, 2017 23:52
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