Gray Stormy posted:

The only thing missing from these Canadian facts is the lady who smells burnt toast.

Armyman25 posted:

I met a woman in Rome and during our conversation this came up. She was pretty incredulous as the idea that the US just had random bomb shelters in all the cities. She thought I was making it up to and couldn't wrap her head around the idea that this was actually thought to be a good idea at some point.

SyHopeful posted:

seriously man, with all due respect i requested that he make this thread and i want to read what he has to say not your inane personal anecdotes

if i wanted WW2 trivia or details about you chasing korean tail I'd read, well, any other thread in TFR.

GreglFaggins posted:

I have a (relatively) insightful writeup about how the lessons learned during the run up to World War II were applied to the early Cold War, more specifically the Truman years, if anyone would care to read it. It would be a big, unbroken wall of text and there is nothing about air power, just early Cold War foreign policy, but if anyone wants I'll post it up.

baupdeth posted:

I might have this let me look around.

GreglFaggins posted:

Stabby_McBitchslap posted:

Which booklet was it? I have a copy of one called in time of EMERGENCY (Civil defense handbook H-14, published March 1968) that I stole from the Boy Scouts. The first half of it is about surviving a nuclear attack (Shelter plans, stock, first aid, etc) and the second half is for natural disasters.

NosmoKing posted:

I love "The Right Stuff" (book and film) and the section where the Mercury 7 are watching all the launch vehicles blow the gently caress up are all shots of real test footage from the USAF and NASA. In fact, if you read the Stine "ICBM" book I mentioned a bit ago, he details all the things that happened to each rocket as it had to be blown up.

SO, you're Alan Shepard and you've just watched 15-20 ICBM's blow the gently caress up in front of you, then they say "Guess what? You get to ride one of these things next week!"

How do you get through the spacecraft door with balls that huge?

NosmoKing posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA_SAUYV4so

Yeah, gonna orbit the earth alone atop a 90 foot tall stainless steel balloon jammed to the top with explosive propellants.

Be right back.

Sunday Punch posted:

One downside is it looks like the first stage has its head up the second stage's rear end.

Shnitzel posted:

Reading about Gagarin lead me to the sad story of his homeboy Komarov taking one for the team


Which in turn lead me to this site of questionable authenticity discussing "phantom cosmonauts", or failed/black project soviet missions and intercepted transmissions. I ask, how possible is something like this, and have any of you heard anything about this crazy poo poo?

Gray Stormy posted:

No poo poo. Actually, there would be poo poo everywhere. I can only imagine being the guy on the plane who was the last to know thats where they planned on landing.

Ygolonac posted:

At one point, my local library had a large-format paperbound book that had a lot of details about the missile fields, and maps of each silo/command capsule/site, for the entire SAC missile deployment (at least what was unclassified/known). Damned if I can remember the name of the thing, it's been at least 6-8 years since I saw it.

The strike-maps in the back of War Day (Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, 1984) show that my home town (Great Falls, MT) was a death zone. (Middle of the Minutemen fields, *and* Malmstrom AFB right outside town.) I always figured that it was a minimum 45 minutes or so (minimal traffic, decent weather) to get to a safe distance in case of sudden Commie Attack, so...

NosmoKing posted:

the Air Force's biggest "hold my beer and watch this" moment.

Insane Totoro posted:

Replying to an old post, but I am loving glad that someone appreciates the libraries these days.

(I work in ILL)

LP97S posted:

The main idea that "one plane can do everything" is pretty false if you ever look at anything ever done ever.

atomicthumbs posted:

automatic landing via electronic interpretation of pattern painted on the landing surface

iyaayas01 posted:

The C-5s in European 1 are so loving Cold War...hey, these are strategic airlifters, but what the hell, paint them in our tactical camouflage pattern too.


Any further details on this picture? In case the film doesn't date it enough, that is a pretty dated SCL...AIM-9s instead of AMRAAMs on the wingtip rails, no launcher installed on the outboard station (usually there would be some sort of AIM-9 there), and single (instead of a MER or TER) unguided Mk 82s with a mechanical M904 nose fuze. It carrying live munitions and being Dutch to boot, it has to be some sort of '80s era NATO exercise, because unless they were feeling seriously retro there's no way that loadout would've been used any time after the early '90s.

Naramyth posted:

These were posted by a colleague of mine on Facebook. He was .mil and is a bit older then me so I have no doubt that these were early 90s photos. I'll message him what you asked and get back to you.

my dude posted:

It's a Netherland F-16, I don't know when it was taken, but I think it was on my first TDY to Turkey, we were supporting the no-fly zone after the first Gulf War, so it was late 1991 time frame.

iyaayas01 posted:

Since this has turned into a -9X post, I'll link this video again. Pretty impressive compilation of what the -9X is capable of...the last Lufbery Circle shot is nuts. And thus we see why WVR fights where both sides have off-boresight missiles and helmet mounted sights rapidly devolve into a furball where everyone dies.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Link no worky, although I'm going to hazard a guess that it's about those weather balloons strapped to incendiary devices?

quote:

It’s not big in the history books and it doesn’t get talked about at gatherings of World War II veterans. But on a wintry day in the final year of the war, Imperial Japan attacked North Dakota.

The attack was from the air, an early strike by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), but it left no casualties and did no physical damage. Nor did the airstrikes — there were two — cause much alarm, thanks to a fairly tight news blackout, though a young Walsh County boy named Clarian Grabanski did tell authorities he fired six rifle shots at the craft that came down in a muddy field on his family’s farm near the Red and Forest rivers.

A balloon.

Specifically, a hydrogen-filled balloon — 30 feet in diameter — launched from more than 6,000 miles away and armed with bombs and incendiary devices.

“It came in from the west, and it was kind of spooky,” said Eugene Dauksavage, 78, who was a 10-year-old boy returning from a Lenten “stations of the cross” service at St. Stanislaus Catholic Church in Warsaw, N.D., with his family.

It was a blustery Friday evening, March 30, 1945.

“It was a pretty big balloon, gray, the size of those that people sit in there and fly with helium,” Dauksavage said. “There was kind of a basket underneath, and ropes coming down.

“It was maybe a couple hundred yards in the air and coming down, down, down. We lived about a quarter-mile from where it landed, and we walked out to the road to look at it. But we never did get to see it close because it was so muddy in the field.”

Several other people, on their way home from St. Stanislaus, watched the balloon come down, pulled on galoshes and hiked through the muddy field to check it out.

The FBI and the Army showed up the next day.

Goals: Panic, fires

Angered by the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942, which showed the Japanese that their home islands were not immune from attack, military strategists there began looking for new ways to strike at the United States.

After two years of design and production, thousands of high-altitude balloons armed with bombs and incendiary devices were launched from Nov. 3, 1944, to April 20, 1945. The newly discovered “river of wind” that was the jet stream would carry them in 50 to 60 days more than 6,000 miles to the West Coast of the United States and Canada.

Their objectives: cause massive fires in the western forests, divert manpower and resources from the war effort, and shake American morale.

“Floating Vengeance,” author and military historian Michael Unsworth called the project after researching it and its effects. In 1994, he came to Grand Forks for the dedication of a records archive at UND’s Chester Fritz Library, Department of Special Collections.

The archive includes U.S. investigators’ notes and accounts from Walsh County residents who saw the balloon float onto the Grabanski farm, leaving a trail of sand as it dropped its ballast sandbags. The documents had been stamped “confidential” until shortly before they were deposited at UND.

There were no contemporary newspaper accounts. Reporters from local and regional papers went to the scene but agreed not to publish the news. FBI agents and other authorities took possession of the balloon remnants — and photos shot by the Herald photographer — and urged people not to talk about the incident as that might cause panic. They also wanted to deny Japan intelligence on the effectiveness of the campaign.

It was not particularly effective. Of the 9,200 balloons launched, only about 300 made it to North America. Most fell into the ocean, as batteries regulating the dropping of sandbags froze in the high altitude.

Almost all of those that made it across the Pacific Ocean fell in unpopulated areas of the Northwest and did little or no damage, but bombs from one balloon killed six people in Bly, Ore., on May 5, 1945. Another could have caused big problems two months earlier when it struck power lines leading to a facility in Washington state that was processing material for the American atomic bomb project.

Taking souvenirs

The first of the two balloons to reach North Dakota came down near Ashley, southwest of Jamestown near the South Dakota border, on Feb. 22, 1945. Farmers estimated it was traveling about 50 feet off the ground at 15 miles an hour with its shroud lines just touching the ground. It came to a stop when one of the lines caught on a farmhouse radio antenna.

Gerald Rau, the 12-year-old grandson of the land’s owner, rode his pony over the snowy fields to inspect the balloon up close, then reported to his father, who with friends hauled the device to Ashley. It was displayed there in a vacant lot, where local boys took souvenirs: patches with Japanese writing.

They later became concerned after hearing that the balloon could have carried a biological weapon, but nobody ever got sick and the event faded into historical obscurity. (Unsworth wrote later that the Japanese military was capable of arming the balloons with biological weapons but apparently elected not to, fearing retaliation from the United States.)

The FBI sent an agent from Minneapolis to inspect the Ashley balloon. He photographed it, packed it in his car and later sent it to Washington, D.C.

Five weeks later, Clarian Grabanski personally opened a new front in the war, firing six .22 rounds into the gondola of the Walsh County balloon.

“Fortunately for him, he did his shooting from a distance and did not set off the self-destruct charge” that was built into each balloon, Unsworth wrote. It apparently had dropped its bombs already.

Locals eyed the balloon for a day, wondering at its skin of shellacked mulberry paper and speculating on its origins. Despite young Grabanski’s brave assault, most people thought it was a weather balloon or a U.S. military device. U.S. military authorities who arrived the next day tried to keep it that way.

Early UAVs?

Dauksavage said he doesn’t remember when he first suspected or learned that the balloon that drifted into his young life in 1945 had come all the way from Japan and had been outfitted with a deadly weapon.

“Once in a while it comes up in conversation,” he said. “But very few people are left who remember it now.

“I heard there were stories … people said they heard a couple men were seen jumping out when it came down.

“But where did they go then, in that mud?”

Smiling Jack posted:

All I know is that people who underline and/or take notes in library books should be shot.

Smiling Jack posted:

You still see these all over NYC.

Edit: took that picture today, in Brooklyn.

Davin Valkri posted:

The blobs on the east coast I can understand, but what's around the black blobs in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming/Nebraska/Colorado?

gfanikf posted:

Who would want to nuke Harrisburg? I mean some areas around it, yeah (a rather large depot is in the area), but otherwise I would think at the point where Harrisburg comes up you're pretty much flipping coins.

I wonder if the Russian's ever delisted Philly once the Navy Yard got closed?


Which ironically compromises the nations grain producing centers IIRC.

50 Foot Ant posted:

Cyrano4747 posted:

There there little librarian, it's OK. Books still matter.

_{Well they still matter to me}

StandardVC10 posted:

Instead of a name just paint two big hands giving the middle finger on the side of the boat. The U.S.S. Double-Eagle.

Iron Tusk posted:

Old engineers are the best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw

Q: So, what is the mission of the F35?

a: Well, the primary mission is to send money from Congress to Lockheed.

Breaky posted:

What are you talking about, Texas got pieces of one all over the state.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Pretty low. People tend to either want Flanker or beaver, not both.

what happened to him anyway? Or his brother for that matter? They've both effectively disappeared

Cat Mattress posted:

I saw an "article" about a USMC project to adopt the A-10 from the Air Force and adapt it for carrier operations and wanted to share the pics.




Yes, the very reliable source was dated from today, why do you ask?

Doctor Grape Ape posted:

If that grenade wasn't inside someone it wasn't kinky enough

VikingSkull posted:

I'm almost done with Command & Control, and they didn't do that stuff before 91 either lol

BIG HEADLINE posted:

Cheap land formerly owned by easily displaceable people who are given the choice of allowing the silos or getting paid a pittance to forcibly GTFO.

TasogareNoKagi posted:

They did that too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Missile_Museum

standard.deviant posted:

They are also near the geographic center of the North American air defense area. That gives you more reaction time for a launch-on-warning second strike capability.

Saint Celestine posted:

So if I understand this conversation correctly, besides Stingers at the very short ranges, the US has no ground based mobile air defence system, unless you count Patriot as 'mobile' ?

TCD posted:

We armed the 737 so I'm not sure that argument means much. Also, I'm not sure how easily 1990s radar could distinguish 747 vs other 4 engine large planes.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure there's no armed 777 but tell that to the people on MH17.