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Mister Sinewave posted:I wasn't sure why ICBMs were such a huge game-changer, I tried to look it up and near as I can figure it's because they're dumb and they're cold which - unlike for example bombers - made them really hard to see before it was too late. In addition to the "less reaction time" problem you have the "if you want to shoot it down good luck hittin something going 4 km/second" and then you have MIRVs and MIRV decoys and all sorts of clever poo poo. It's the ultimate offensive/defensive weapon combo. The speed at which you can launch means that if deployed in any sort of quantity, you can't launch an effective first strike, and it also means that if you really want to you can destroy anything on earth in a half hour provided it can't shoot back with its own ICBMs.
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Dec 16, 2010 18:18
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You also have to wonder why they didn't rip all that poo poo out except maybe the tail gun, send six guys to the infantry, carry more bombs and fly higher and faster, especially once long-range escort fighters became common.
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Jun 17, 2011 02:05
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Acebuckeye13 posted:I've seen Red Storm Rising mentioned a couple times throughout this thread, and I have to ask: How accurate were the Cold-War era Clancy novels? Considering that Red Storm Rising doesn't go nuclear real fast and the NATO response would have been tactical nukes, it's sort of fundamentally flawed. That airmobile ICBM thing seems insane and also strangely logical, what got it shitcanned?
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Aug 23, 2011 04:06
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can we just buy rafales instead, they're ever so pretty
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Dec 14, 2011 13:36
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as has been posted, unmanned is the way to go if you want loiter time. and in fact payload isn't really as critically important with COIN in terms of "how much ordnance can i get in to the sky today" perspective. there aren't usually targets all over the place for COIN, it's far more important to have a platform in place to be able to take a single shot with a missile when the opportunity presents itself. edit: i get that everyone is saying "F35 will replace!!!" but let's be serious: for the foreseeable future, the share of ground support being flown by unmanned vehicles will increase at the expense of fixed wing aircraft
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Jan 31, 2012 04:30
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the seamaster was like not at all actually useful as well. rad as hell, but the boat feature adds complexity and cost without being an improvement. plus there were huge issues around water ingestion and they had to overbuild the hulls even more due to higher landing and takeoff speeds.
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Feb 4, 2012 14:47
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SyHopeful posted:Makes me wonder how Beriev has managed to carve themselves such a nice niche. The number of units they move is pretty small.
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Feb 6, 2012 16:49
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The Indians got smoked in the Sino-Indian war and it wasn't remotely close. The Chinese war plan was to kick some rear end, then unilaterally draw back and press for SQAB, which they did quite successfully. When you accomplish exactly what you're intending to accomplish in a limited war AND win the battles that's a W.
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Feb 18, 2012 04:24
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The Germans might not have been all that keen to throw down against Other Germans but who knows?
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Mar 1, 2012 19:43
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jwoven posted:In addition to the rear door fuel tanks, the BMP-1 and 2 also had an internal fuel tank. In the middle of the troop compartment. That the troops sat around. The doors weren't that much of an issue.
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Mar 29, 2012 18:26
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I wonder what the equivalency in inches of pykrete to inches of say, Chobham armor is.
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Apr 2, 2012 14:15
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Throatwarbler posted:What is more or less true? That they only ever fired down? Armies haven't replaced all their field guns with mortars, why would it be any different for a plane? This isn't typical practice for the gunships though - tight banked orbits are the norm, and anyway the accuracy of the 105 isn't that outstanding, especially when being fired from an aerial platform. Something like the AMOS has a maximum effective range of 6-10km so I don't see the lower weight and the higher amount of explosives delivered being worth a marginal degradation in range. Also, many armies are looking to replace a lot of their field guns with mortars, since the primary knock on mortars is no direct fire capability (antitank missiles and man-portable rockets take care of this) and accuracy (LASER GUIDANCE and spin stabilized shells take care of this), and in return you get extremely rapid rates of fire and improved mobility.
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Apr 7, 2012 19:39
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Snowdens Secret posted:I understand it was the first battle fought beyond line of sight, and this question is obvious nonsense along the lines of "who would win a fistfight between Napoleon and Hitler", but why would you say Midway was more significant than Salamis, Lepanto or Trafalgar? Lepanto was not all that significant in some ways because it did not fundamentally alter the balance of power in the Med. It prevented one immediate invasion, but Ottoman naval strength recovered in an incredibly short period of time.
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Jun 4, 2012 21:18
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SgtMongoose posted:My favorite is how the IJN thought ASW was just something those cowards and failures in England and the US did, and was totally unnecessary and beneath their brave samurai sailors. The US sucked at ASW initially as well, and in the face of much more effective opposition, so it's not like the IJN had a unique complex regarding ASW at least at the initial stages of the war. Note Adm. Ernest King. edit: LGD you mother fucker
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Jun 4, 2012 23:09
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Only useful for bombers information, but the sheer size of the warhead (relative to air-to-air conventional rockets, missiles or cannon) provided lots of advantages for hitting bombers in formation - you either scatter the formation very badly, or take out multiple attackers with one shot, or both!
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Jul 10, 2012 04:30
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grover posted:Yeah, that's not a navigational window, it's clearly designed to be optically non-distortive for a forward/down-looking bombsight. It doesn't make any sense to do a canopy like that unless the intention is to put a bombsight there. Not that decisions made in Soviet Russia necessarily make sense... The navigator's seat was most definitely in the front of the aircraft in the glazed nose. But it was just a carryover from the Tu-16 and I'm pretty sure they used it as nav aid in terms of "look at the ground and see where you're at"
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Dec 31, 2012 14:40
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BIG HEADLINE posted:That was back when Boeing built quality. I've noticed that the talk of a 787 Air Force One supplement has gotten really quiet ever since all the problems have started cropping up. Yeah, man, Boeing built quality back in the day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAir_Flight_427 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_585 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastwind_Airlines_Flight_517 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetroJet_Flight_2710
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Mar 28, 2014 02:06
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MrYenko posted:They haven't been replaced, because the VC-25 program was hideously, stupendously expensive, and every VC and VH program (I'm looking at you, VH-71 program) since has had similar problems. I can't wait to see a president try to justify a two or three billion dollar program to build him a personal jet fleet. I'd argue that the real value of the VC-25 is that you can actually get some poo poo done while you traipse around due to secure communications units and all the bells and whistles that are installed. Not that you couldn't do that anyway with a C-17, but then you're still talking about a specialized airframe dedicated for the purpose, and then why not just use a civilian airframe?
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Mar 28, 2014 19:52
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wdarkk posted:That's exactly what I'm loving worried about. The last thing we need to do is raise tensions in a way that doesn't benefit us at all. Buddy how are we gonna get more money appropriated for poo poo we use to hypothetically kill Russians if we don't escalate tensions for no good reason?
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Apr 18, 2014 19:41
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ArchangeI posted:I would assume the main issue is that they are doing air policing (i.e. making sure civilian airliners that stray off course aren't hijacked) with BVR missiles, which runs counter to strict air policing. I would assume 2x Aim 9 plus gun to be the normal air policing loadout. No need to drag heavy BVR missiles around and cut into your fuel supply. Yeah but the extra ordnance helps with the dick waving thing.
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May 2, 2014 01:30
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Generation Internet posted:I've never been supportive of higher military spending until the last few months. I've never really had to reconcile liberal idealism with cold hard pragmatism before. Now I find myself daydreaming about a world in which the US/NATO would actually put a stop to Russia's poo poo. I'm not sure the problem is a lack of funding. It's the cold hard reality of who the gently caress in the US wants to spend a tremendous amount of blood and treasure on Crimea and Eastern Ukraine? You could argue that if the US/NATO spent more on defense, that the Russians would be less likely to do poo poo, but I'm not sure that conventional deterrence is all that effective. There has to be the political willingness to execute on that threat. Even if the US had, say, height of cold war resources, is there the appetite to spend them in this way?
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Aug 29, 2014 15:38
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Nebakenezzer posted:Germany tried this in World War 2 and it didn't work so well. The carrier was sort of finished and functional, but it spent the war as a exotic lumber warehouse. At some point, "the proper amount" is defined by what you're trying to accomplish. If there isn't broad agreement about NATO's strategic objectives (which there isn't at least within the member states' polities) then who's to say what's the correct amount? NATO is also going through the classic issues of an organization that has outlived its rationale for existing, which creates other issues. But yes, that is beyond the scope of Cool Planes thread.
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Aug 30, 2014 02:04
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Throatwarbler posted:That sounds really bizzare because by the time of WW2 all of those diseases would have been easily treatable with modern medicine? How exactly were they planning to start a Cholera epidemic in San Francisco? California AFAIK isn't infested with tropical mosquitos, most Americans weren't sleeping in barns full of plague rats or drinking raw sewage water straight out of a latrine, so unsurprisingly despite the fact that Cholera, Bubonic plague and Dengue are still diseases that exist today they are not major public health issues in America?. There are rats everywhere in urban areas, and plague would cause a pretty serious public health problem, since streptomycin was not isolated until 1943 and was not widely available during the war. It might have only caused a few thousand cases but the resources diverted to treating those cases and then killing a gently caress load of rats would be significant.
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Dec 2, 2014 16:49
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I want to say that even Vlad's gang of thieves isn't stupid enough to trade Moscow for Los Angeles but who the gently caress knows at this point.
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Feb 6, 2015 16:30
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Hauldren Collider posted:You say they are still asleep from the Cold War. I'm sure that gives Ukraine lots of comfort. Why are we not sending them more equipment? If the Russian military is so bad, why are we that afraid of pissing them off and actually defending countries we have treaties with? (Don't tell me we didn't have a treaty with Ukraine...we absolutely did.) We ought to be willing to fight much harder to defend the system where territories are exchanged with treaties and not bombs. wanna frame this post
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Feb 6, 2015 22:50
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Thomamelas posted:Is there some reason perceived reason that the A-10 would better at CAS then an Apache? It just seems like an attack helicopter is a more natural fit for close in support then the A-10, and the discussions about the A-10 never seem to bring up attack helicopters in general. Helicopters are really god drat fragile.
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Mar 6, 2015 19:00
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INTJ Mastermind posted:Probably not very good. We've spent the last decade fighting a low intensity occupation / counter-insurgency against idiot children who can't hit back. Not sure if Ol' Vlad has enough armored divisions around to try and have a go at Western Europe but if he did we'd be sorely out of shape. lol The Russians struggle to project force in their own backyard and you expect to see T14s in Paris?
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Apr 9, 2015 23:38
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BIG HEADLINE posted:During the height of the Cold War it was theorized that with just the assets available in situ that we'd be able to conduct a purely conventional war with the Soviets for ~2-3 weeks, expandable depending on how many or 'x' percentage of convoys/reinforcements were able to get through. Don't you think that the ability of the Russians to conduct a conventional war may have ever so slightly fallen off since the height of the Cold War?
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Apr 10, 2015 00:30
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Glorgnole posted:My money's on the Kurds. The Kurdish national pasttime is getting loving smoked by everyone else so I don't think that's a good bet.
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Sep 12, 2015 00:37
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Godholio posted:Through the front armor and the crew got out. Wouldn't have expected that. Yeah I was pretty impressed. Poor bastard who went back probably shouldn't have made that call, though.
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Oct 9, 2015 15:01
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Are the Germans pathologically in to weird air defense solutions? Those things strike me as being vaguely related to the Me-163 conceptually.
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Apr 5, 2016 21:02
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Mr. Showtime posted:Less risky. Unlike every other category on that chart, up = bad. please tell me they didn't actually do that
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May 13, 2016 18:16
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Round trip in 2:08 
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Jun 7, 2016 13:38
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It was a bit, uh, creative that Donald said that Saddam killed a lot of terrorists when he actually was big in to compensating the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. I guess from a certain angle he was in fact killing terrorists that way.
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Jul 8, 2016 14:20
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Koesj posted:Aren't the KC-767s based on a different version of the airframe (or the wings, rather)? And those South American ones are Israeli conversions. The A330MRTT has done surprisingly well considering it is such a green offering, though it hasn't been without its problems. The KC-767 is pretty much entirely a 767-200ER. The KC-46 includes some updated avionics from the 400ER and the wing from the -300ERF.
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Aug 8, 2016 18:31
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MrYenko posted:They're not even particularly expensive, as airplanes go. For comparison, a brand new Cirrus SF50, a small, subsonic, seven-place single-engine jet, sells for around $2m a copy. The expensive part isn't the initial acquisition cost, though. edit: although it looks like the engines have anther 2700 hours before an overhaul so that's nice!
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Aug 9, 2016 18:46
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No love for the Fokker G.1, the granddaddy of all the twin engined heavy fighter designs? I've always wanted to build a model and paint it in the Spanish Republican debut colors.
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Aug 25, 2016 02:41
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It probably would have advanced Soviet turbine technology.
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Oct 12, 2016 20:16
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McNally posted:lol three flight decks nobody knew what the gently caress they were doing back then Three flight decks wasn't a sustainable idea but having a bunch more spotting and flying off surfaces was a decent idea especially when you had aircraft like the A2N that have a cruising speed of about 100mph so not requiring a lot of runway. Plus, simultaneous launch and recovery baby!!!
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Nov 14, 2016 00:01
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Murgos posted:There totally needs to be an alt history novel where a refurbished stealth Victory sails forth to protect England from a new Spanish Armada. I assume there's a novel where we have somehow invented advanced steel making techniques but not fossil fuel combustion engines so that we have a bunch of sail powered KCA battleships trying to gain the weather gauge for a 16,000 yard gunnery duel.
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Nov 18, 2016 16:45
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